Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Once again, John Canemaker offered, and I jumped.

From his collection we have some of the Leica reels for Fantasia. The Leica reel was virtually a slide show that timed out the drawings to the soundtrack. It gave an inexpensive indication of the film’s timings, and it could be easily adjusted for further screenings.
(To get a more complete explanation of Leica reel projections Hans Perk on his site, A Film LA, has an excellent post about this – here.)

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

There are quite a few pages of these, so it’ll take a couple of weeks before I’ll be able to post them all. (They also take a lot of time to scan and prepare for posting.) They’re all equally beautiful.

Many of the sections loaned me by John are from the Nutcracker section. However, I’m going to start with this section from the Pastoral symphony. The drawings are by James Bodrero. I start with this section because I wanted to give an indication of what the actual drawings look like, and John had this one from this sequence (not used in this version of the animatic), and I’m posting it to the left.

1A 1B

1C 1D

1E 1F

- I’ve long been a fan of T.Hee‘s work. I think I’ve said that before. When I saw some pages on ebay of the storyboard for The OomPahs, I had to buy them (at a not too expensive price.)

The short was a 1952 UPA film directed by Bobe Cannon. The film’s music score was by Ray Sherman who worked with Ben Pollack’s group, the “Pick-a-rib Boys.”
T. Hee shared the design of the film with Jules Engel who did color work, and the animation was by Roger Daley, Bill Melendez and Frank Smith.

The film is not one of my favorite UPA shorts. I find the style interesting but the story (which to me seems to be a variation of Warner’s I Love To Singa, which was a take on Jolson’s Jazz Singer) is a jazz vs classical music riff. The film seems to talk down to its audience a bit. This was a frequent problem with a number of the UPA films. I find Marvin Miller’s voiceover to be the biggest difficulty in this regard. The voiceover tracks rarely live up to the graphics – though I think the music choices are usually brilliant, despite the low budgets the composers had.

The pages I have obviously are not consecutive in number, but they’re a good sampling.
The first of the pages is a rough version of the second. It’s interesting to see how little varied they are. They are all drawn lightly (I had to darken the linework a slight bit in photoshop), but the rough is even lighter.

1 2
#1 is a rough version of #2. Both are page 13.

3 4
#3 is a final of pg. 19 & #4 is a final of page 20.

5
# is a final of pg. 23.

To see a couple of layout drawings for this short, from Hans Walther‘s collection, go to site here and here.

– Yesterday, I posted the first of some drawings that Bill Peet did in developing the “Wizard’s Duel” for the 1963 Disney feature, The Sword In The Stone. This section of the film, which was supervised by Milt Kahl, was considered one of the highlights of the feature. Kahl took pride in his work on “Mim;” he had good reason to do so.

Today, I’m posting the final part of this sketchbook.

I love how Peet drew all over the cover (to the left) making his notes and sketches, finally labelling the cover page. I think this is something we can all associate with, and it helps to make the art less “Art” and more working drawings to give the final film the life it has.

If I were more energetic, I’d put together a “Mosaic” a la Mark Mayerson‘s excellent handiwork. However, I do not have the drafts for the sequence, so it’d just be a frame-grab show-and-tell. Perhaps, another day.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- My intention was to post the bulk of the Bill Peet sketches for the Wizard’s Duel from Sword In The Stone. However, they take a while to scan and I’ll have to break them into two postings. So the first five pages come today (including the sketchbook cover with odd notes all over it.) Some of them have been in print before, but let’s keep them all together.

Thanks, again, to John Canemaker for the loan of this material. Peet’s a master animation storywriter, and those like me are thankful for any table scrapings we can get. John delivered a full meal.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

– John Canemaker dropped by yesterday with another little gem. Here is a preliminary storyboard done by Bill Peet of the Wizard’s Duel from Disney’s Sword In The Stone. The oddity of this board is that it’s dated April 1949. (The numbers at the bottom of the board clearly read “449.”) I didn’t have any clue that this film was in development that early. The book was published in 1938, so it’s quite feasible.

If that date is accurate, it’s amazing how close the characters stay to their final models. This could easily be explained with the heightened us of xerography in animation after 1958. Post 101 Dalmatians, this loose style was easy to translate into animation, and Ken Andersen was easily able to adapt to this style by Bill Peet that all of the animators in the studio loved.

A
Click on any image to enlarge

B
Note in row 2 how the spider turns into the tiger’s face; it’s a graphic turn. This never would have made it to the final in a Disney film, and it didn’t.

CD
I love how extra drawings which have been pulled make it to the bottom of the second board.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this post by putting up some rough drawings Peet did for this sequence as he developed it.

- Here are the remaining images I have of the storyboard from The Wind In The Willows. They come courtesy of John Canemaker and his extraordinary collection, and I have to thank him for sharing.

Though the images come from an early version of the feature that was truncated for the final Adventures of Mr. Toad, you can see that even at the start, Mr. Toad was the focus of the animated adaptation. It’s understandable considering how much of the action sits in Toad’s story. However, the charm and beauty of the brilliantly written book comes from other points, and it’s obvious that the Disney studio was always going to miss that.

There are some beautifully drawn images here, though, and I like how they lay out the action. Check out the drawings on the last board; beautiful poses throughout that sequence. There’s something that didn’t work quite as well in the final version done for the compilation film. That film has an overenergetic breathlessness that is so unlike the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Continuing with the posts of the storyboard for The Wind In The Willows, here are sequences 10 through 13. Once again, this board was probably used for the pose reel done in 1941 when the film was trying to be a feature film. (This is the reason no captions lie beneath the images.) Thanks again to John Canemaker for the loan of the board to post.

I took a look at this sequence in the film that stands, and it’s wholly different. They’ve really compacted the scene in a clever way, but something of the character development is also shortchanged.

I’m posting frame grabs underneath the boards.

10

. .

11

. .

13

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– Speaking of John Canemaker, he had a great event last night with a screening of his movie, The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation,
at the Beekman Theater followed by the opening of a showing of art from his film at Manhattan Marymount College.

The last time I saw a program of animation at the Beekman Theater it was the screening of John & Faith Hubley‘s Of Stars And Men back in 1964. As with that opening (I was there back then to see my first Hubley films), there weren’t many from the animation community in attendance. Tissa David came out to support John and was shy when John introduced her.
I was at the gallery opening and loved it. There was a large group, and the art was sensational (as was the wine and hors d’oeuvres.)

Kudos and congratulations to John Canemaker and his companion, Joe Kennedy.

You can still catch the art trip at the Hewitt Gallery of Art at
. . . . . . . . . . . . . Marymount Manhattan College, located at 221 East 71st Street.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . ____________________. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now through May 23rd.

Go.

- I had been planning to photograph the final sculpture of the trees, posted yesterday, to show the end results with vehicles gone and park cleaned up. However, the deluge that hit the city, yesterday was the 2nd worst in history. 7.5 inches fell within 12 hours. There was no way I’d have been able to photograph anything in the sheets of rain that was falling. Nor did I want to. I was just as surprised to find that the sandbags worked for my studio. Mine is the only lower level (basement) space in the area that wasn’t flooded. Hallelujah! I don’t have to mop for 8 hours. More rain today.

Now for comedy. Today we have the third part of John Canemaker’s storyboard for The Wind In The Willows. It seems to be not far from the Mr. Toad film, and it’s certainly mopre of an acting board than was the Pinocchio board I’d posted.

7
(Click any image, of course, to enlarge.)

8
(Click any image, of course, to enlarge.)

9

- Before going directly into The second installment of The Wind In The Willows storyboard, I’d like to say a couple of words about the passing of Kurt Vonnegut. It was a bit of a surprise.

My lawyer was the representative of Mr. Vonnegut and I heard that he was a collector of owl drawings. I had illustrated a book by John Gardner, Gudgekin the Thistle Girl, and the fairy tale featured a witch who changed into an owl. I was asked to trade the original illustration for a signed copy of one of Mr. Vonnegut’s books. Needless to say, I jumped at it. His autographed copy was a cartoon for me in the frontispiece of the book. Unfortunately, the book is in storage or I’d post the image.

I met Kurt Vonnegut a couple of years later and we had a very nice conversation. I’m sad to hear of his accident and the complications that ensued, and I’m even sadder to hear of his death. My condolences to his family and friends and to the world who is now deprived of his intellignece.

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- Here are the next three pages of The Wind In The Willows board. As suggested by Michael Barrier in the comment section of part 1. this board was probably assembled to produce a preliminary Leika reel. The giveaway is the lack of dialogue and commentary underneath the drawings. The assembly was made to be photographed.

Fortunate for us it worked its way out of Disney, past many years and many owners into the hands of John Canemaker, who has loaned them to me. There’s some great drawing here.

4
(Click any image to enlarge for viewing.)

5

6

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Speaking of Mike Barrier he has some excellent commentary on “Who Killed Cock Robin?” the Silly Symphony short. Mike suggests, appropriately that all the divers elements floating out there – storyboards, drafts, production charts, etc. – can give us a view of a film’s making only when they’re culled together and viewed as a whole. This is what he’s trying to do with the one short. Lots of scouting is necessary to get a bigger picture, otherwise they’re just drawings that don’t tell the larger story.

– Probably my favorite children’s book is The Wind In The Willows. There have been many animated adaptations of this book since it became a public domain item, but for years there was only one version, Disney’s Mr Toad half of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The loudest most raucous parts of Kenneth Grahame’s delicate novel, blared their way onto this animated compilation feature.

We all know that the book was planned as a feature way back when Disney, in the late 30s, was buying up titles of famous children’s books to prevent other competing studios from turning them into animated features. Work began on adapting the book. They never quite broke it as they hoped, and it ultimately became a featurette with its primary focus on the loose cannon, Mr. Toad.
. . . .The film, as it exists now, has some positive elements and some fun animation, but the story was always a bit too quiet and British to successfully survive a proper adaptation in the Disney canon.

When John Canemaker loaned me his copy of the Pinocchio boards, he also brought The Wind In The Willows (not titled Mr. Toad). There are few captions here, but this obviously is designed for a full-out feature not an abbreviated featurette. The images on his original stats are small, so I’ve blown them up a bit and tried to marginally clean them up. It’ll take a little time to scan and post all 17 pages, but here we begin:

1
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2a2b

3b

Disney’s Mr. Toad first aired on the Disneyland television program on February 2, 1955. You can buy the dvd of Ichabod and Mr. Toad on Amazon among other places.

If you’re interested you can read the entire book of Kenneth Grahame’s work (minus the beautiful Shepherd illustrations) here.

You can buy the book here.

Dave Unwin‘s version is my favorite adaptation in that it retains some of the flavor of the original book and isn’t afraid of being quiet at times.