Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– In honor of the Popeye dvd that was released on Tuesday, I’m posting this old article from Cartoonist Profiles.

In June 1977 a six-foot 900 lb. statue of Segar’s character was unveiled in Chester, Ill. At the ceremony, Segar’s widow, his son and daughter and Bud Sagendorf were in attendance. Sagendorf, of course, was Segar’s assistant for years prior to taking over the strip after Segar’s death in 1938.

The town raised $10,000 to construct the statue and commissioned Robert Walker, Chariman of Sculpture at John Burrough’s School in St. Louis to execute it.

The article gives some background information about Segar as well as the statue. Obviously, it still stands today as evidenced by the color photos I pulled off the web.

Here’s the article – 2 pages:

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– Well, last night I got to see The Simpson’s Movie. By the time I was in the theater, I was almost tired of it already. There’s been so much publicity about this it’s been hard to avoid. I watched Matt Groening and James Brooks on Charlie Rose this past Monday evening, and I have to say that I fell in love with Brooks but was really irritated by Groening. Perhaps Matt Groening hasn’t done many tv appearances, but he answered every question in a manner that sounded rehearsed and not at all from the heart. His ego seemed front and present, but maybe it was just my interpretation of something that wasn’t really there, and I respect his work enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. TV always seems to add a few pounds.

About the movie. $71 million over the weekend. What more need be said?
A lot, I guess. Ratatouille didn’t perform as well as this one will, but it was a very much better film. This cartoon is the TV show on ones. It’s a laugh riot as expected, but I saw no hint of real character animation. No personality other than what the great voice work gave it. Just a lot of smooth movement mixed with cg movement.

In a sense, like the TV show, you can only judge it by its script. As A.O. Scott, in the NYTimes, wrote, the movie doesn”t live up to its best TV episodes. “It’s no “22 Short Films About Springfield” or “Homer’s Enemy” or “Krusty Gets Busted” or “Lisa the Vegetarian” — and it doesn’t strain to be.”

In short, the film didn’t get under my skin, and I don’t think it wanted to.
It was just a humorous diversion passing through the summer.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut did dig deeper and was a much better film, completely separate from the cable TV show.

One comment Groening made on Charlie Rose got me, though. He said that when they started the series, after the short inserts they did for The Tracie Ullman Show, James Brooks told them that audiences had to get caught up in the emotions of the shows and forget they were watching animation. To me this is the start of where the show changed and got smaller.

On the Ullman Show, the characters were graphic creatures that existed both emotionally AND graphically. When Homer strangled Bart, both characters distorted out of their physical forms. It was brilliant, hilarious and completely worked. (The image on the far left comes close to depicting my point but it’s still not quite as far as they’d go in the early days. The other image isn’t even as tame as the stranglehoods done in the movie.)

Once the show was pulled from Klasky-Csupo and sent to Film Roman, the show’s look got slicker, and the artwork suffered. No hint of that graphic distortion appeared again. The Film Roman crew actually tried to reproduce that distorted strangle-hold, but they wimped out and completely lost anything that made me laugh.

The show was best rough around the edges with hints of anything that was great about Groening’s Life In Hell strips. It was able to work emotionally, remind the audience that they were watching graphic hand-drawn distortions, and keep you laughing. Of course, this is just my preference. I’m annoyed by the ones and the slickness and the big-dollar look that removes any hint of the little-cartoon-that-once-could.

The show’s been on forever, and the movie has already made a fortune hitting the $$$ jackpot last weekend. I wish them well, and hope it furthers the success of other animated features. I just wish I had come home with something more.

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– Let me call your attention to what I think is a stunning piece of animation done for Greenpeace. Japanese director, Koji Yamamura has a beautiful short piece on line.
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This artist just keeps doing one great piece of animation after another, and this delicate film is enormous to me. I think this animator is one of our best artists.
Go here to view it.

Yamamura’s most recent film, Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor was in Cannes, Annecy, Karlovy Vary and will screen in competition at the Ottawa Animation Festival in Sept.

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John Canemaker writes to tell me that the second part of his article on former Disney story artist & children’s book illustrator, J.P. Miller. The article will appear in the new issue of CARTOONS, the International Journal of Animation (Vo. 3, issue 1 Spring 2007), entitled “In Search of John Parr Miller.”

The article is beautifully illustrated with photographs and illustrations by Miller. Several of these images appear below.

J.P. (Jack) Miller ( far right) in 1941 in Mexico with
(l.to r.) Disney publicist Janet Martin, Lee Blair and Herb Ryman.
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J.P. Miller Golden Book illustration from “What If?” (1951)
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“Dr. Squash the Doll Doctor” (Golden Book, 1948)

- Here are two articles that appeared in a 1987 issue of Sightlines Magazine, which was a quarterly publication of the American Film & Video Assn. (formerly the Educational Film Library.)

- The first article is by by Cecile Starr on women animators. Cecile has written extensively over a long period on experimental animation. (I have a fine book, co-authored by her and George Griffin, called Frames which gives images from many experimental short films of the 70′s & 80′s.)

This article talks about women in animation, though most of those discussed are more the Independent animator than the studio employee. It remains an interesting item.

- The second article by John Canemaker features Snow White at age 50. (The film is now 70!) John talks about the female character of Snow White, and it makes for a short interesting piece.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

– Dave Hilberman has died.

Karl Cohen of ASIFA San Francisco sent me a note to inform me that Hilberman had passed away. Along with his long time partner, Zach Schwartz, he was one of the key founders of UPA, and his death marks a dark moment ending an era. I’d like to lead you to another document I posted a while back;
it’s an interview by John Canemaker which was originally published in Caroonist Profiles. Please check it out. Here.
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– On the entertaining site, A Hole In The Head, Johnny C posts some drawings from an old 1947 Life Magazine article in which some well known cartoonists were asked to draw their cartoon characters blind folded. The results are published and they’re fascinating.

Equally fascinating is that many of these “famous” cartoons are probably not recognizable to a substantial part of the world today. Even the most famous, at the time, Dick Tracy isn’t published any more. Still out there is Gasoline Alley and Blondie, but their hold is a tenuous one.

At first I laughed at the drawings the blindfolded cartoonists had made, and then I got a bit sad at the fragility of fame.

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- We all know George Herriman’s incredible work on Krazy Kat, but Alan Holtz on his site Stripper’s Guide has been hosting completely different work by Herriman. Every Saturday there are several panels of early work by this inspiring artist.

Why do cartoons look so meagre these days in comparison?

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- Here’s the link to a Russian site which features reuse of animation in the Disney features. Apparently, they found another use for xerography in the era of the Nine Old Men. (I wonder if Don Bluth was there at the time.)

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Here’s a nice article about Pixar artist Jason Deamer. He talks about character design for Ratatouille and Cars and examples of his drawings are featured. As a matter of fact there’s a lot of material out there about this film. Lots of drawings and interviews. Just go to YouTube and type in Ratatouille.

- Grim Natwick wrote a number of articles for Cartoonist Profiles Magazine. The first of them was written for the fourth issue, November 1969.

This article is pretty much just a bio as written by Grim in a somewhat light style. At the end, he adds some opinions.

I’m posting this short, two page article. And I follow it with the same article as Grim handed it to the magazine. The first two pages were typed (Of course this is pre-computer, so the typing is hunt and peck.) Then he adds the last couple of paragraphs in a hand-written form. This is the most interesting part of the article and the most interesting in the docs posted here. I thought you’d like to see it all, so here it is.

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(Click images to enlarge.) The article as published, above. The original manuscript, below.

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– Years ago I had a copy of a lecture that Marc Davis had given in which he compared the differences and the similarities between two characters he animated, Cruella De Vil and Maleficent. He discussed their motivations and their style of exposition. It was quite an extraordinary commentary, I’d thought, but somehow I seem to have lost it.

It was a great acting lesson from a great animator, and it seemed to offer depth that I haven’t found elsewhere. I’ve found myself paraphrasing from the comments Davis had made and thought to search for the document.

I have found something with similar thoughts that were expressed in this interview that was conducted by A. Eisen for Crimmer’s: The Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction. The interview was published in 1975.

(I tried to locate A. Eisen but couldn’t find any other articles or information by anyone with that name. For that matter, I haven’t been able to locate any other editions of this publication. Burne Hogarth artwork is on the cover. Does anyone know of other issues?)

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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There are other interviews with Marc Davis on line. I like this one with John Province. That interview also appeared in Didier Ghez‘s book, Walt’s People Vol. 1.

Here’s an excellent article John Canemaker wrote back in 1980. It talks about Dave Hilberman’s involvment in the Disney Strike. Hilberman, of course, was one of the initial founders of UPA with Zach Schwartz. When John Hubley & Phil Eastman came to them with the completed storyboard and the contract for Hell Bent for Election, their studio took off. Eventually, they sold out to Steve Bosustow and opened their own commercial studio in NYC, Tempo.

Thanks to John Canemaker for permission to post this.

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– In 1991, I’d started a small xeroxed publication that I sent out to about a thousand people on my mailing list. Basically, we were promoting ourselves by giving brief interviews and articles about the people in animation who had touched our films in some way.

This first issue had as its focus the two half-hour films we’d done on poetry – Nonesense & Lullabyes: Nursery Rhymes and Nonesense & Lullabyes: Poems. These were two delightful films to work on, and I wanted to give them a bit of attention even though they were designed only for Home Video consumption. (We’re still trying to get back the rights from the now-defunct Live Entertainment to have them rereleased in dvd.)

The issue included a short interview with Tissa David who responded to questions by Esther McGowan, who edited the publication at the time. A non-animator asking curious questions.
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The late Caleb Sampson wrote a short piece about writing film music for animation. Caleb did music for about 20 of my films.
Greg Perler gives a brief response to the differences of working at Disney’s studio as opposed to MSA. He had just moved to work on Beauty and the Beast as an Assistant Editor. (Greg recently is editing Disney’s Enchanted, due out later this year.)

The Tissa David interview:
pg 2 pg 3

The Caleb Sampson article on music:
pg 4 pg 5

pg 15 pg 12

Stephen MacQuignon on Color Styling:
pg 13 pg 14

Greg Perler on editing here & there:
pgs 8 & 9

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This issue was mailed with a cel from the half-hour shows, Nonesense & Lullabyes, and the response was a negative. Though there was no charge for the publication OR the cel, yet I received a letter back saying that the cels weren’t done with cel-vinyl, so they weren’t valuable! Oh, well. Sorry! I didn’t do that again.

Issue #4 previously appeared on this “Splog,” read it here if you’re interested.

– The Sunshine Makers seems to be the Van Buren short to outlive others.

Here’s an article by Izzy Klein from Cartoonist Profiles, Dec. 1976. The focus is on Burt Gilette, the director of The Three Little Pigs (among other Disney classic shorts), after his return to Van Buren.

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In all its Cinecolor glory (scratches and all) here’s The Sunshine Makers in frame grabs:

Meet The Robinsons opened yesterday to largely negative reviews in NYC. The NYTimes critic, A.O.Scott, started his review with these two paragraphs:

At the end of “Meet the Robinsons,” a new 3-D computer-animated Disney film (loosely based on a popular children’s book by William Joyce), the screen is filled with an inspiring quotation from Walt Disney himself. The gist of it is that “around here” — meaning at Disney’s entertainment workshop — not a lot of time is spent looking backward. Instead, the motto is, as it is for some of the characters in the film, “Keep moving forward.”

In other words, learn from your mistakes. And it seems appropriate that this great man’s words appear at the end of this movie, since they implicitly invite you to forget what you have just seen and may even serve as a sort of apology. Whether or not it counts as a mistake — movies tend to be made on purpose — “Meet the Robinsons” is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.

Most of the reviewers I’ve read came to the same conclusion about that bit of text at the end of the film. I wonder if anyone out there knows the story as to why the decision was made to place this quote at the tail of the movie. If you do, I’d appreciate hearing it.

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– Of course, there’s nothing like an old master to bring us back to the basics.

News was revealed this last week that Miyazaki is at work on his next feature film, Ponyo On a Cliff. This is the story of a five year old boy, Soskue, and the goldfish princess, Ponyo. The film is set for a Summer 2008 release in Japan. Miyazaki is doing the storyboard with watercolors and pastels. I wouldn’t mind if they released the animatic version of his films. His storyboards are the heart of the movies. A Variety article had this to report:

Instead of incorporating ever more CG cuts into 2-D animation, as Studio Ghibli has done in recent pics, Miyazaki intends to make “Ponyo” with a pastel watercolor, hand-painted look.

Miyazaki will “go back to his origins and use not any CG,” Studio Ghibli prexy Toshio Suzuki told reporters at Monday’s press conference announcing the toon. “Instead he will use simple, childlike drawings. He intends to make something different from his previous films.”

Daniel Thomas MacInnes, naturally, posts one of the best pieces about this film on his site, Conversations on Ghibli.

Not far from the same subject, there’s an interesting post at AniPages Daily. It places the focus squarely on the female animators working at Ghibli. It’s nice to see some bios of these lesser known Japanese animators, and I thank Ben Ettinger for the post.

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- Just in case you missed it, Cory Doctorow brought to the attention of Boing Boing an article in Popular Mechanix on the making of Snow White. It’s worth a look; some of the graphics are beautiful. the article is five pages long.
The illustrations for the article (e.g. the one on the left) seem to use early production art. There isn’t much resembling the final film, despite the magazine’s 1938 publication date.

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- A couple of sites have appeared on my horizon that I’d like to point out to you:

Mike Matei has a site, Classic Animation, which features a lot of animated shorts of the YouTube style. However, many of them are hard to see Van Buren films. It’s good to see a lot of the B&W Tom and Jerry cartoons (the Mutt & Jeff impersonators not the cat and mouse). It’s a good way to spend some time if you have it.

I found this site through Tom Stathes‘ Cartoons on Film blog. This site pays a lot of attention to the silent and early sound cartoons. Many of them can be bought on dvd through there.

A post about the two Amos and Andy animated shorts brought Mike Matei to comment with posted versions of both shorts. I last saw these in silent 8mm versions I’d owned (I bought them for $.99 way back when), so it was interesting seeing them again.