Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Yesterday, in conjunction with Hans Perk‘s posting of the drafts to Cinderella on his excellent site, A Film LA, I offered some stills from the live action reference material shot for the animators. Today, I have some stills shot for publicity of the crew working on the film, with Ilene Woods posing in all the departments of the animation studio.

I recognize very few of those posing. If you have any idea who any of the artists are, please don’t hesitate to chime in on the comments section.

Here are those stills:

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Milt Kahl is bottow row, far right, next to Ken O’Connor (far right).
Ham Luske is pointing. Anyone know anyone else?

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I think that’s Clyde Geronomi with Helene Stanley.

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Helene Stanley

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Mary Blair

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(L to R) John Hench, Mary Blair, Claude Coats and Walt.

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Mary Blair with John Hench
(Thanks to Rudy Agresta for the I.D.)

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Obviously Mary Blair was key to this film.
I think that’s Ken Anderson with her.

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Song writers: Al Hoffman(left),
Mack David (center), Jerry Livingston (far right)

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Ilene Woods recording a song.
(Not really; she’s posing. The mic is over her head.)

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Ilene Woods and Ted Sears
(Thanks to Mark Mayerson for the I.D.)

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Layout artist Ken O’Connor shows off a pumpkin coach model.
(Thanks to Dan Jeup for the I.D.)

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Ilene Woods with Marc Davis

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Ilene Woods and BG painter, Art Riley (I think?)

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Ilene tries to shoot the film, but her fingers are stuck under the platen.

- Hans Perk sparked my interest. He recently began posting the drafts to Disney’s Cinderella on his resourceful and brilliant site, A Film LA. I’ve had a love/like relationship with Cinderella since I was a kid. It’s a strong film with some solid story work, some magnificent character animation as well as some workmanlike animation. The design goes from beautiful to ordinary and back again.
(I know, I’m a harsh critic.)

To play along with Hans’ posts, I thought of doing a series of mosaics à la Mark Mayerson, but I’m looking for something else. I haven’t quite figured that out yet, but I thought I’d post some photos to celebrate getting my hands on those wonderful drafts.

The first group of photographs comes from the live action reference that was done. This filmed material wasn’t shot for the purposes of rotoscoping, but it was shot to give animators some reference on how the characters might move. Then, if they requested it, the animators would get registered print-outs of the images.

I’m currently reading Didier Ghez‘ first book of interviews with Disney artists. Walt’s People: vol. 1 is just one of 11 books of interviews available. I suggest you get these; there’s so much information in them. (And they’re absolutely addicitive reading.) In vol. 1 Marc Davis talks about this reference foto material:

“Since I was involved with the animation of so many humans there was generally some live-action footage to work from or some sort of footage you looked over.”

“Someone asked me just the other day, ‘Didn’t you fellows just rotoscope everything?’ and that’s a term I dislike immensely. When you just trace over film footage, everything has a tendency to become very broad. Every woman you drew would turn out looking like this Roseanne character on television. I see quite a lot of this thing on Saturday-morning cartoons where they’ve worked from live footage and it has a very traced look about it and it looks dead. Live action shows people doing things and it’s right on the nose. However, in animation, I try to stay two or three frames ahead of everything; action, then reaction. You’re talking about 24 frames per second that are going through the projector, so it’s a minute thing that you really can’t see. It’s highly synchronized.”

“Action that is difficult to do, such as a dancer, I would want to see a performer do it and then look at the film, not trace it. This is very true with my Cruella de Vil for 101 Dalmatians. We had a wonderful actress, Mary Wickes, who did some great live action. I used her suggestions and made them more so. If you looked at the footage of Mary and then the character, you would have a difficult time seeing the resemblance. It’s suggestion you need, and that’s why I dislike the term ‘rotoscope.’”

“Live action may be used as a blueprint, as a reference, but never traced. I see some of our films now and it’s easy to spot who was doing that sort of thing.”

Here are some of those Photo references:

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Helene Stanley
Obvously these are hair references.

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Helene Stanley
She almost doesn’t look real in this photo.

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Here’s director Wilfred Jackson with Stanley.

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What they didn’t use a real mice to model for Gus and Jacques?

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Helene Stanley with stand-in Bruno.

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I can imagine that reference helped with this balancing sequence.

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I didn’t realize they were still using the 5-hole paper this late in the ’40s.

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Down to 3-hole paper.

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Eleanor Audley, the voice of the Step-mother,
also acted the part for this reference material.

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Helene Stanley also acted as “Anastasia.”
Rhoda Williams played “Drizella.”

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I’m not sure who’s directing the actress. If any out there
can identify him, please leave a comment.

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This is Ilene Woods, the voice of “Cinderella” but
Verna Felton was the voice of the Fairy Godmother;
Claire Du Brey performed the part for the reference material.

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Anyone know who the man in plaid is?

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Eleanor Audley, again.

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Trying on the shoe.

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- Here are the remainder of the drawings from Hicks Lokey‘s Seq 10.4 Scene 26 from Fantasia. It represents the meeting between alligator and hippo from the Dance of the Hours section of the film. Jim Will did the effects animation in the scene.

Steven Hartley is posting a mosaic of this film on his blog, Blabbing On Arts and Culture!

As usual, I start Part 2 with the last drawing posted last week in Part 1:

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The following is a QT of the entire scene with all the drawings (Parts 1 & 2) included.

- Energetically Yours was a film produced for the Standard Oil Company and directed by UPA co-founder Dave Hilberman. Animation production was supervised at both Playhouse Pictures (suprvised by Bill Melendez) and Quartet Films (supervised by Art Babbitt).

The film was designed by Ronald Searle and is, as expected, quite creative. Unfortunately, the copies of the film floating about today are all color deteriorated – everything has turned to a muddy reddish hue. In fact, the artwork for the film was very colorful. Matt Jones’
blog Perpetua (a tribute blog to Ronald Searle) has an excellent piece about Searle and this film. It includes numerous still photos of Searle and Hilberman and gives an idea of the full production.

I’d recently been contacted by David Hilberman’s son, Dan Hilberman. He had a collection of about 50 cells from the film that had been preserved by Mary Cain in a scrapbook. She’s backed each cell with a flat colored piece of paper. _______________Mary Cain’s scrapbook
Dan has sent me scans of these cells, and
I’m going to post them here.

I did some slight adjustments in photoshop. The BG colors often had some cel flash on them or reflections. Some parts of the BG papers also had color deterioration. I replaced all with a flat color and in a couple of cases made a tighter composition. My whole purpose was to focus in on the cel colors. (I made no adjustments to any of the characters or outlines.)

I’d urge you to take a quick look at the cells, read Matt Jones’ blog and watch the pinkish film on YouTube. Then return to see what the colors actually looked like.

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A sample of the color deterioration on YouTube

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Many thanks to Mary Cain for preserving these cells, and to Dan Hilberman for sharing them.

- Last week we had Milt Kahl‘s hilarious Llama. So this week, keeping up the comedy, here’s part 1 (of 2) of Hicks Lokey‘s hippopotamus & alligator from Fantasia. (Jim Will is also credited for doing the effects animation in this scene.) This is actually the last half of the scene. It starts with the hippo on the couch with the alligator making a dive for her. She runs far into the bg, then leaps forward where the alligator catches her at the start of our drawings. It’s all about weight.

The practical problem for me came down to registration. There are no registration marks or punched holes evident on these xeroxed copies. It’s like a big flipbook (14×17) that I had to try to register. There’s also the problem that at lest 1/3 of the drawings have no numbers. This made it hard to guess how long the drawings would stay on screen (since I obviously also didn’t have exposure sheets).

Nevertheless, it seems to work as is, here. I also had a lot of cleaning up to do. The drawings had a lot of xerox markings on the pages. Hence, although there are about 60 drawings, I had to break it into two. The second half will follow next week. The QT movie, below, includes all drawings for the entire scene.

The real fun here is in looking at the individual drawings. They’re all a great laugh.

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The following is a QT of the entire scene with all the drawings (Parts 1 & 2) included.

- Here’s a curiosity that may interest some of you.

Jack Kinney’s entertaining account of the early years at Disney’s, Walt Disney and Assorted Other Characters, contains a lot of drawings and information by Jack. Originally, in its manuscript form, the book had a lot more of a scrapbook feel. Documents and papers were included, and the book might have ended up being 500 pages long if some editor hadn’t cut it short.

I thought I’d post something from that original manuscript. It’s Jack’s very first contract on entering the studio in 1931. You can see that the Disney contracts haven’t gotten much more complex than they originally were. Let’s start with a page from the final book:

It was Monday morning, 8:00 A.M., February 9, 1931, at Disney Studios, 2719 Hyperion Avenue, Esat Hollywood. There were four of us waiting to be interviewed: me, Frank Powers, Don Smith and Ralph Wolf. Caroline Shafer said, “Walt will see you soon. . .”

An soon, the man said, “The job pays $20 a week. Not good, not bad. I can give you a job for $20 a week, but it’s liable to be only temporary – not steady!”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Here’s the contract. The original is often cut off slightly on the top and the bottom, so try to read beyond those first and last missing lines:

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Click any image to enlarge.

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- Last of the llamas. This is the end of the scene animated by Milt Kahl for Saludos Amigos. It’s hilarious, beautiful, flowing and funny animation. The beat moves on and on despite the fact that there is no soundtrack on this QT movie.

Next week a scene by Hicks Lokey from Fantasia. Hippo and alligator. Another very funny scene.

As with all of these continued posts, we start with the last drawing from last week’s scene.

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The following is a QT of this part of the scene with all the drawings posted to date.

Past posts can be found here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of the scene to post.

- Back in 1972 there was a celebration of Disney at Lincoln Center. As an offshoot of the main program, there was a series of lectures given by Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman and Ken Anderson. For most of those days they talked about Robin Hood, which had just been released, as well as The Rescuers. In the last day, we heard about what was coming up. Anderson suddenly had a fire in his eyes when he talked about Catfish Bend. This was, apparently, going to be a melding of four of the books in the series by Ben Lucien Burman. (You can read a bit about it from Steve Hulett’s POV, here.) Anderson showed some of the drawings (via slide projection) he had done for the film. They were all pen, ink and wash drawings he was doing, similar to ones we’d seen from him on The Jungle Book, done with the Mont Blanc pen he liked using.

The drawings didn’t excite me very much, but I was curious. They did remind me of The Rescuers sketches he had shown. I suppose the fact that both are set in the Florida Everglades helped the similarities. I bought a copy of the initial book, “The Strange Invasion of Catfish Bend”, and read it. The book contained some charming and tiny illustrations by Alice Caddy throughout its 150 pages. I’ve decided to post some of those here, so you can see the originals that got Ken Anderson excited.

Here are a few of Anderson’s sketches for The Jungle Book:

And these are a couple of Anderson’s sketches for Catfish Bend:

These are the illustrations by Alice Caddy from “The Strange Invasion of Catfish Bend.” 1

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- Here is the next installment of the epic scene by Milt Kahl from Saludos Amigos. The dancing Llama obviously was fun for Kahl to animate, in the same vein as the wonderful work he did for Song of the South. The rhythm just sings out through the animation, even without the music track.

There are still another hundred drawings to go, so it’ll probably be broken into two more parts.
We start this post with the last drawing from last week’s entry.

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The following is a QT of this part of the scene with all the drawings posted to date.

Past posts can be found here:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Thanks to John Canemaker for the loan of the scene to post.

- I feel very fortunate. Jason Hand, following my posts on Bill Peet’s great book illustrations, has sent me the illustrations to the book, Goliath II. This book grew out of the Disney featurette. Peet, in his autobiography, says he pulled the story from one he had written to be made into a book. When he was in the doghouse at Disney, sentenced to working on commercials for the likes of Peter Pan Peanut Butter, he stopped Walt in the hallway and showed him the story outline. Disney put it into production immediately.

It was an important film in that it was the first to use Xerography to copy the animators’ lines onto the cels. This was an extremely important step before they moved onto 101 Dalmatians.

I thought this was a great invitation for me to add some frame grabs from the film which match the illustrations of the book, to see how closely the two matched. After looking at the book, one can see that the film is very two dimensional. Every action happens east – west. None of the action moves in perspective (toward or away from you). This, of course, is a product of the limited budget. The film is also all closeups. Little of the action takes place in Long Shot (the better to keep the budget down.) The film, naturally, is a disappointment when compared to Peet’s illustrations.

Here are the illustrations followed by the correlative frame grabs:

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A delicate drawing of something that doesn’t appear in the film.

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The closest thing to floating dandelions is Goliath watching
a couple of fireflies toward the last half of the film.

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This scene isn’t played well in the film.
It’s perfectly clear in the book.

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They couldn’t handle this scene in a single shot.
They broke it into two closeups. TV direction.

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Shades of Dumbo.

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This is about as close as I can come to a match.
Peet’s drawing is so full of life.

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This scene actually comes later in the film.
There was no bathing scene early on.

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No relation to this scene is in the film.

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There’s no real correlative to this illustration in the film.
The closest appears toward the beginning.

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More John Lounsbery than Bill Peet.

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Mama throws the tiger.

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A very different approach in the film.

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The elephant pile up illustrated by Bill Peet has to be broken
into a number of short scenes cutting back past the elephants.

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This makes animation easier to do and, consequently, fewer drawings.

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The elephants end up in water, but they jump in
one at a time. Better for the reuse of animation.

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The mouse enters the story.

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The mouse throws Goliath in a very different way.

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Unfortunately they’ve plotted the entire move
with an overlay that cuts up part of the action.

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