Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– After posting the fine drawings by Bill Tytla, and following with the “Washing sequence” board drawings it’s on appropriate to offer one of the Action Analysis classes Tytla gave at the Disney studio, after hours. This one took place on December 10th, 1936 – 72 years ago today.

Tytla and Fred Moore were the leadaing animators of the seven dwarfs – supervising and handling seven wholly different personalities each with relatively little screen time to relay their individual traits.

This article is chiefly concerned with the sequence of the dwarfs gathered around the wash tub cleaning themselves for dinner.
__Click image to enlarge to see full dwg._._Grumpy, of course, sits out the experience.
____________________________________They sing the washing song, “blblblbl.”

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(Click any image to read.)

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- Bill Tytla‘s animation of the devil from Night on Bald Mountain, featured yesterday, couldn’t be further away from the dwarfs he animated in Snow White. (Fred Moore was his partner in the task of supervising the dwarfs.) In this film, he had seven characters to animate, seven characters to give real characterization in somewhat short screen time. All seven had to have personalities that could be recognized within moments. It helped, of course, that they were defined by their names, but getting that across without cliché was no mean feat.

Here are some storyboard drawings, art direction sketches which would have helped lead through the washing song sequence.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
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I featured Tytla’s animation for this sequence in another post – here.
A couple of drawings shown below.

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Doc kisses Grumpy. How the times have changed.

This one looks like it might be a Tytla rough.

Soup’s on!

This is a bar of soap that occupies a fly.

This is the washtub.

This is the exterior background where the setpiece takes place.

- Another marked day. Today, of course, is Walt’s birthday. As a result, I’m posting one of my favorite, treasured drawings. It’s an Ub Iwerks drawing from Plane Crazy. I know it’s Ub’s drawing since he drew every frame of that film – chained to his desk in a locked room, so that no one would know what was going on. I bought the drawing during Raggedy Ann. Animator – soon to become special effects wizard, John Bruno offered to sell it to me when he learned how interested I was. I jumped, I love it.

(Click image to see the full drawing.)

Wouldn’t it be nice if, somehow, the Disney company actually commented on their founder’s anniversary? Won’t happen.

- It’s also the anniversary of this blog. We’re into our third year. It feels like five. This blog has become part of my life, and I enjoy it. It’s borne me above and through some low animation points in those past coupla years. A voice allowed me to get it out of my system.

- Today’s also the date the judge promised to sentence OJ Simpson. I suppose we’ll be hearing about that later today. A diversion, just in time for the weekend.

- Lately, I find myself unable to get enough Bambi.

I’ve gone back through all the deer skeletal drawings by Rico Le Brun which were sent to me by Sky David. Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

I look and look again at the wonderful posts on Hans Bacher‘s site. To see some of these go: here, here, here, here and here.

The more I look, the more I want to see. So I went to the recent dvd release and found the following sketches and BG paintings among the Extras. I post them in no particular order, but they should be seen.

(Click any image to enlarge slightly.)

It’s just stunning. What else can I say?

- Recently, I saw a small part of Aladdin on television. A large part of the Genie’s song reminded me of Pink Elephants from Dumbo. I thought then, that I should post anew the models/sketches and drawings from that sequence. It originally was broken in two parts when it saw daylight here in 2007. I’ve combined there into one.

Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display. Some frame grabs accompany the piece.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image. It’ll take two days to post them all, so this will be continued later this week.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs fromt the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

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- Continuing with the enormous group of color stats of art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom, I have two more posts to offer. Today’s group gets a little more into true storyboard form. Amid Amidi has identified many of the B&W sketches as the work of Tom Oreb, and they show off his vibrant lines and strong sense of design.

As with other posts, I’ve added frame grabs for comparison.

All of these are from the collection of John Canemaker to whom I’m enormously grateful, just for seeing them nevermind posting them.

Here we go:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

One more post will follow, next week.

- Last week, I posted the first installment of this series of storyboard art from Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. Here’s the second installment of these photostats loaned to me by John Canemaker.

I might also note that a number of these were posted by Amid Amidi on his site, Cartoon Modern back in Jan, 2007. Those are worth posting again, and others haven’t been posted before.

When some of the images are close, I’ve tried to give frame grabs that match. Ward Jenkins has many frame grabs from the entire film on his site.

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To me, this frame grab captures the spirit but loses some of the art.

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This is a very interesting choice. The original is beautiful, and this is too.

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Owl plays all of the instruments at the film’s start.
This is a good representation.

The remainder of these images will be posted next week.

- This is a later storyboard for Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. Last week I posted an earlier board (pt 1 & pt 2), and the focus, here, is a bit different. This is called “Meet the Instruments” for a reason.

There’s not much indication of the film that will actually grow out of this and is closer to the story artwork I started posting last week and will continue with plenty more later this week.

This comes from the collection of John Canemaker, many thanks to him.

Here’s the entire board (it’s considerably shorter) in three stats:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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And here’s the board broken down to allow for enlarging it:

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- This week we’ve seen the first draft of a storyboard for the Disney short, Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. I’ll follow it up with the second version of the board (next Monday), however that doesn’t reveal the film that finally ends up on the screen.

These are some story sketches that were done for the final version of the film. I have enough of them that it’ll make at least two – possibly three – posts to get them all in. I’m also attaching some frame grabs designed specifically to show how some of the art ended up as it appears in the film.

This material is on loan from John Canemaker‘s collection, and I couldn’t be more grateful, certainly in light of the interest I have in this 1953 film.

Needless to say, the film was directed by Ward Kimball.
I’m not sure who did these drawings, but the Art Director was Ken O’Connor, Assistant Art Director was Victor Haroush, the Character Styling was by Tom Oreb, and the Color Styling was by Eyvind Earle.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The board art calls for a number of different shots/cuts;

whereas the film has few cuts within this sequence.

Obviously this was done because of Cinemascope. Kimball understood
that overactive cutting in Scope created a different effect than desired.

This drawing and the one below were combined into one scene.

however, the payoff for the gag was different as . . .

. . . the Pharoah bops the caveman’s head with the Egyptian horn.

“Bach” and “Bop” are labeled in the story sketches.

The film just plays their scenes.

Cinemascope allowed Kimball to combine scenes that would have
been separate had they been in a traditional film.

I’m not sure if the art was placed in any particular order.
The order has no relation to where it actually ended up in the film.

And yet the film feels so finely tuned and well constructed.

The Scope format allowed for a lot of play in composition,
and Kimball took advantage of it.

Needless to say, there’s more to come.

- Here is the second installment of the first, preliminary storyboard for what would become Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. You can see how little of the magic was in this board, yet it obviously inspired others to keep it alive and make it work. Ward Kimball has to get most of the credit, though designs by Tom Oreb, Ken O’Connor, Eyvind Earle and Victor Haboush sure brought it to life.

John Canemaker deserves all the kudos he gets for lending this material to me as well as plenty more.

Here are the three remaining boards as they appeared on the stats:

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Now here’s the breakdown of the boards. Each row of images is split in two and labelled accordingly. #31a means Board 3 row 1 part a.

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Finally, something familiar.

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I’ll have a later, more relevant board up next week. As well as plenty of color artwork later this week.

Ward Jenkins has posted some beautiful frame grabs from the completed film. Go here.

See this short on YouTube here.