Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I should have started with this opening run of the broom which Mickey follows. So, this weeks entry has only a few drawings, but it’s an introduction to the broom that’ll be splinters in a few seconds.

The scene was animated by
Riley Thomson with an assist from Harvey Toombs.
The sequence was directed by Jim Algar.
This is production #2004- Seq. 7 – Scene 53. It runs 28 ft. 3 frs.

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
as well as the previous posts, Part 1 & Part 2, Part 3.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

- Yesterday, with a couple dozen other hearty souls, I sat through the screening of the animated shorts to narrow them down to a short list of about ten. The 44 films took ten hours to screen (including a 45 min. lunch break and three other 15 min. breaks.)

The first 1/2 to 1/3 of the program was brutal, and it looked like it was going to be the worst screening of films we’d ever attended. But then things got much better, and a lot of excellent films showed up in the mid third group. Then the end portion of the program turned up even a greater number of brilliant films. The end result was that it was one of the best screenings I’d seen (quality wise.) You can see the full list with some links on Cartoon Brew. The top ten should be a good group (given that a few of the choices usually turn out to be clunkers – there’s no accounting for taste.) I’m looking forward to hearing what will be on the short list.

I originally ran this piece in November 2006. I’ve made some slight adjustments to bring it up to date.

- Today is photo Sunday.
Having recently pored over some of the artwork from Raggedy Ann & Andy (the NY contingent of the 1977 feature film), I wondered if I had any photos that I could post. There weren’t many that I could find quickly, but the few I did find are here.

The first two stills were taken for the John Canemaker book, “The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.” I think only one of the two appears in the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Obviously, that’s Dick Williams with me looking over his shoulder. Oddly I remember being in this position often during the film. It’s probably the first image I have of the production when I look back on it. Dick and I had a lot of conversations (about the film) with him “going” and me listening.

When I did actually grab time to do some drawing, this is my desk. It sat in a corner of a room – across from Jim Logan and Judy Levitow. There were about ten other assistants in my room, and there were about seven rooms filled with assistants on the floor. I had to spend time going through all of them making sure everybody was happy.

This slightly out of focus picture shows Dick Williams (R) talking with Kevin Petrilak (L) and Tom Sito. That’s Lester Pegues Jr. in the background. Boy were we young then!

These guys were in the “taffy pit,” meaning they spent most of their time assisting Emery Hawkins who animated the bulk of the sequence. Toward the end of the film, lots of other animators got thrown into the nightmarish sequence to try to help finish it. Once Emery’s art finished, I think the heart swoops out of that section of the film.

This photo isn’t from Raggedy Ann & Andy, but it just might have been. That’s the brilliant checker, Judy Price showing me the mechanics that don’t work on a scene on R.O.Blechman‘s Simple Gifts. This is the one-hour PBS special that I supervised after my Raggedy years. However, Judy was a principal on Raggedy Ann, and we spent a lot of time together.

Ida Greenberg was the Supervisor of all of Raggedy Ann’s Ink & Paint and Checking. She and I worked together on quite a few productions. I pulled her onto any films I worked on after Raggedy Ann. She was a dynamo and a good person to have backing you up.

I’m sorry I don’t have a photo of her from that period.

This is one of my favorite photos. Me (L), Jim Logan, Tom Sito (R). Jim was the first assistant hired after me – I’m not sure I was an assistant animator when they hired me, but I was being geared for something. The two of us built the studio up from scratch. We figured out how to get the desks, build the dividers, set up the rooms and order the equipment.

To top it all, Jim kept me laughing for the entire time I was there. I can’t think of too many others I clicked with on an animation production as I did with him. He made me look forward to going into work every day.

We frequently had lunch out, he and I, and I think this is at one of those lunches when Tom joined us. It looks to me like the chinese restaurant next door to the building on 45th Street. Often enough, Jim and I would just go there for a happy hour cocktail before leaving for the night.

I should have realized how important that period was for me and have taken more pictures. Oh well.

- This is the third part of the famous scene from Fantasia wherein Mickey Mouse finally kills off the non-stop broom. He axes it into pieces. This post concludes all the drawings of Mickey; from here on out we have Mickey’s shadow doing the dirty work.

The scene was animated by
Riley Thomson with an assist from Harvey Toombs.
The sequence was directed by Jim Algar.
This is production #2004- Seq. 7 – Scene 53. It runs 28 ft. 3 frs.

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The following QT incorporates all the drawings from this post
as well as the previous posts, Part 1 & Part 2.

All drawings were exposed per the Exposure Sheets.

- I’ve got a very long scene to share with you, and I’m busy. There are over 500 drawings involved – many are the shadows of Mickey’s chopping of the brooms. So this scene is going to go up in many parts. I also have the exposure sheets (which are complicated) and I’ll post those when I reach a good breaking point.

The scene is beautifully animated by Riley Thompson with assistant animation from Harvey Toombs. Here’s Mickey entering the scene and skidding to a stop outside the door.

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The following QT utilizes all the drawings displayed above.
as exposed on the X-sheets. Most are on ones. Moving
into and out of short holds drawings are on twos.

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- Vinnie Cafarelli of Buzzco gave me these drawings by Lu Guarnier from an animated Alpha-bits commercial that Lu animated. Vince said that Lu gave him that scene to clean up and inbetween late one Friday afternoon and needed it for Monday. The spot features a caricature of comedian, Jack E. Leonard, who did the voice, and some of the actions were part of Leonard’s shtick in his comedy routine. They ran a number of these ads in the ’60s with the same two characters.

Lu always worked on the rough side, but his animation was usually dependably good. He started with Warner Bros in the 30s as an inbetweener, then assistant to Bob Clampett. After the Signal Corps, where he was stationed in NY at the Astoria Studios, he moved permanently to NY and became a solid part of the commercial scene. He was a mainstay at the UPA studio in NY, the only one to have a cubicle with a window. As a result, there were many in-house gags done about him. In the past, I’ve drawings from his work on Sendak‘s Really Rosie.

When I knew him, Lu made his living as a freelance animator with no permanent roots at any one studio. He would go from job to job, and many of them were from studios in LA. He had his contacts well honed. This was what most animators in NY did back then. Lu did quite a bit of work at the Hubley Studio, while I was there, and I assisted most all of his scenes during that period (1972-1977.)

This scene was scanned by Rick Broas at Buzzco. Unfortunately, the pegs were dropped so that the drawings could be scanned in registration. Many thanks to Candy Kugel for shepherding the art and scans to me and to Vinnie Cafarelli for the gift. Lu Guarnier worked on top pegs most of the time. Here he used Oxberry pegs. This is the scene from his Alpha-bits job:

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The following QT utilizes all the drawings displayed above.
On ones, except where there’s a missing drawing -
this is made up by adding one frame to the preceding drawing.

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You can see another spot with these same characters
in the following commercial for Alpha-bits.

- 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 the two posts 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.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs from 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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Having revisited a number of Hubley films recently, I’ve grown more attached to some of the Tissa David works, and having spent a few hours with Tissa recently, I thought I should look again at her work on The Midsummer Night’s Dream, a film which has rarely been seen but is worth looking at.

- I’ve posted a number of pieces about Tissa David‘s work on The Midsummer Night’s Dream. (see them here.) This was a film she directed and animated with three other people: Kalman Kozelka photographed, xeroxed the cels and coordinated it, Ida Kozelka-Mocsary color styled it and did most of the painting, and Richard Fehsl did the Bg designs and animated many of those Bgs.

The film aired on the BBC in 1983 and was released on VHS by Goodtimes Video

I’d previously posted a couple of the cels from a scene, and here I’m posting all the drawings. I do think the film looks better in pencil test, but then I’m partial to Tissa’s beautiful drawing style. Here, again, are those cels:

And Here are those drawings:

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Titania Dances with Bottom

I took a guess at the timing of this putting the
action on three’s and adding two short holds.
All drawings from this scene (both posts) are included in the QT.

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- John Hubley appreciated great animation, and consequently hired only the best of animators to work for him. During his commercial heyday in the ’50s Emery Hawkins, Art Babbitt and Bobe Cannon were regulars animating his spots. When he moved to the short subjects, Bill Littlejohn, Babbitt, Tissa David, Bobe Cannon, Barrie Nelson and Phil Duncan did a lot of the work with others such as Ed Smith and Gary Mooney filling the bills.

On Everybody Rides the Carousel, Art Babbitt animated the introductory scene and was displeased with what happened to the very long scene. He left the film and Barrie Nelson took over the character he was animating, the Mime/Narrator of the film.

In five past posts (Sept. 2010) I put up all the drawings of the scene and added a QT movie. Rather than post all those drawings again, I offer the first and the fifth parts of the piece and give you links to the other three if you want to study the drawings more closely.

- John Hubley‘s feature film, Everybody Rides the Carousel, was adapted from Erik Eriksons’ Eight Stages of Man, a Psychosocial Theory of Human Development.

The Hubleys designed the feature (which started out as three half hours for CBS and then was rushed to fill it to 90 min feature length in the final 3 months of production) around a carousel. 8 horsees represented different stages of life. The narrator was a mime we see throughout at the carousel. Art Babbitt was hired to animate him, and things got bad pretty quickly and he left after animating a couple of early scenes. Barrie Nelson completed the character in the show.

John took one look at the pencil test of this scene on a movieola and proclaimed it to me as the greatest animation he had ever seen. It wasn’t long that he took the scene – basically exposed on twos throughout – and asked me to change it exposing it on four frame dissolves throughout. This would extend the scenes and the character and would milk the scenes for everything possible. Art Babbitt was furious and never spoke to John again. For the full story go to this past post.

The scene is about 200 drawings long. I’ll break it into parts and post each part here in about 4 or 5 segments. Here’s the first part. As you can see there are a lot of ½ drawings. Animation extender – it’s a very slow moving character. A lot of poetry.

The QT will be done using Art’s exposure on twos.

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(Click any image to enlarge.

E1E5
There are five pair of eyes; I give you the first and last.

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Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5 follows:

- The Hubley feature film, Everybody Rides the Carousel, was adapted from Erik Erikson‘s Eight Stages of Man, a Psychosocial Theory of Human Development.

The Hubley conceit was to make the 8 stages of life as a carousel with 8 horses representing those different stages. The narrator was a mime and was animated, at first, by Art Babbitt, with Dave Palmer as his personal assistant. After animating a couple of early scenes, Babbitt left annoyed. Barrie Nelson completed the character in the show.

For the full story behind the rift between Hubley and Babbitt go to this past post.

The scene is 152 drawings long. This is the final section as the mime comes to rest. It’s a very slow moving character with short quick spurts of movement.

We begin with the last drawing from last week, #123.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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The following QT movie represents all of the drawings in the scene
exposed as Babbitt wanted them, on twos.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

You can watch this scene from the final film here.

- Tissa David did a lot of animation for the Hubleys from about 1958 through 1977. She did whole films on her own and EGGS is one of them. I posted this cycle a few years back and to tie it in with my piece on Monday and leading up to the Hubley retrospective, I’m posting it again, today. I think it’s wonderful.

Eggs

-Tissa David animated the entire film for John & Faith Hubley. This short, as I said in previous posts, was done for PBS’ Great American Dream Machine for producer, Elinor Bunin. As Bob Blechman verified, they were given very little money and time to do an 8 min. short. The Hubleys gave life to the short by putting it on the theatrical and festival circuit.

Here’s a rough run cycle Tissa did for the Goddess of Fertility, who goes about inseminating the world with her seed. Tissa adds to its eccentricity with having the low point in the cycle the passing drawing. She comes up as each leg hits the ground.

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a “Goddess” run cycle from Eggs
On threes at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

Leading up to the Hubley show next Monday at AMPAS in NY, I’ve said I’ll be posting a lot of Hubley artwork. Today and Wednesday I have a couple of pieces from EGGS.

- I have a lot of artwork from the Hubley short, EGGS, which was wholly animated by Tissa David.

One of the two characters starring in the short is a skeleton, symbolic of death and destruction. The other is a nymph, who represents fertility. The show is basically about the complications overpopulation has presented to the world.

I thought it appropriate for today to post some of the drawings and models for the death character. The images displayed are cropped from the full animation sheets; when you click these displayed it’ll enlarge to the full page. Here they are.

The first model of the character came close to the final.
This is a drawing by John Hubley.

He soon solidified in this model by Hubley.

Tissa David finally worked out some of the problems for herself
and created this working model sheet.

Here’s a beautiful working drawing by Tissa as
she started to pose out the scenes.

Tissa’s roughs are deceptively simple but convey so much. These drawings
are for her eyes only, usually, she’ll clean it up somewhat for animation.

Unfortunately the dvd is a bit soft partially because of the nature of the
underlit final artwork. Perhaps someday there’ll be a better digital transfer.

Fertility is oozing sexuality in every drawing. This is part of the
same scene as she converses with death about the human race.

Eggs was a short film which was rushed out at a low budget for a PBS show called The Great American Dream Machine, which was produced by designer, Elinor Bunin.

The film follows the political thoughts of John and Faith; they were concerned about overpopulation (there are at least four shorts they made about the subject) and were able to blatantly make a political short for this TV series.

These three drawings are character Layouts by John Hubley.

Here’s a YouTube interview with John & Faith Hubley done in 1973. They discuss Eggs and Voyage to Next.
The video of EGGS starts at 4:50.