Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- In 1959 Delco Remy batteries featured a spokesman of a character who was everywhere, that year. William Steig designed the tough-kid for the campaign, and he did ads for all the magazines – Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post. This was an obvious offshoot of Steig’s very successful book of cartoons, Small Fry, which was originally published in 1944 but had had quite a bit of success for the cartoonist.

This was years before Steig would write and illustrate his first children’s book.

Naturally enough, there were animated ads done as well.

Here’s a model sheet made for a Delco battery spot for the Bill Sturm studio in 1959. Sturm was an ex-Fleischer animator who moved into the Fletcher-Smith studio and advertising animation in 1947. He had his onw studio as early as 1956.

This model sheet was created, as many feature models are made, by taking clippings of some completed animation. The character was by William Steig, and I’m not sure who did the animation, but Jim Logan did the assisting.

(Click any image to enlarge,)

Too large to take in all at once, let’s break the animation down to its parts:

“Freshie” leans on the battery talking.

Then he starts to push the battery (which is on its own level.)

The skip is broken into levels with the upper half on one . . .

. . . and the lower half on another.

Here’s a scene of dialogue using heads only.

Finally here’s “Freshie”‘s tag line for the spot.

I’m not sure what this chart was used for, unless this was a series of spots, and the art from the first was what they were shooting for in subsequent spots.

Regardless, a lot of work went into this one minute spot. I’m not sure how much Steig gave them to match his models, but I would assume it was substantial (based on other spots he’d done.)

Johnny (Gentilella) Gent had the hardest time on the Letterman series done for the original Electric Company. He could never get the characters and kept trying to add 3D form to the 2D characters that John Hubley had created.

It was my first job, and I was in awe of every animator that walked through ________A very early John Hubley model of Spellbinder.
the door. We had 2½ months to do
all the artwork on the 20 spots that were 2½ mins each. A total of 50 mins in 10 weeks. (That’s about right these days for a 30 second spot!)

I did all the assisting, inking and inbetweening and had to do it quickly. (I estimated about 18 secs. per drawing. The game I played with myself to keep up was to keep one eye on the drawing and another on the clock.)

As I said, it was my first animation job. What did I know! I had to take Johnny’s drawings and reshape them into Hubley’s characters, and I had to do it in ink. No pencil tests. Just do it. Whatever came out, was the final artwork (and I use that word loosely.) I felt, even while I was doing it, that I was killing Johnny’s work, and I ultimately apologized for it. No one else complained, so it went as it did.

Here’s a cycle of Johnny Gent’s Spellbinder rowing a boat.

1
(If you click on any drawing it’ll show you the full animation page.

3

4

5

7

Johnny Gent’s Spellbinder rows a boat
on two’s per drawing indicated
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

This note arrived from Borge Ring after my first post Bill Tytla’s scene featuring Stromboli’s mood swing:

The Arch devotees of Milt Kahl have tearfull misgivings about Wladimir Tytla’s magnificent language of distortions. ‘”Yes, he IS good. But he has made SO many ugly drawings”

Musicologists will know that Beethoven abhorred the music of Johan Sebastian Bach.

yukyuk
Børge

My first post spoke a bit about the distortion Tytla would use to his advantage to get an emotional gesture across. It’s part of the “animating forces instead of forms” method that Tytla used. This is found in Stromboli’s face in the first post. In this one look for this arm in drawing #50. It barely registers but gives strength to the arm move before it as his blouse follows through in extreme.

There’s also some beautiful and simple drawing throughout this piece. Stromboli is, basically, a cartoon character that caricatures reality beautifully. A predecessor to Cruella de Vil. In drawings 76 to 80 there’s a simple turn of the hand that is nicely done by some assistant. A little thing among so much bravura animation.

Many people don’t like the exaggerated motion of Stromboli. However, I think it’s perfectly right for the character. He’s Italian – prone to big movements. He’s a performer who, like many actors in real life, goes for the big gesture. In short his character is all there – garlic breath and all. It’s not cliched and it’s well felt and thought out. Think of the Devil in “Night on Bald Mountain” that would follow, then the simply wonderful and understated Dumbo who would follow that. Tytla was a versatile master.

Here’s part 2 of the scene:

4849
(Click any image to enlarge.)

5052

5456

58

6062

6364

6566

6768

6970

7172

7374

75

½76

½77

½78

79

8081

8283

8485

The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Every once in a while, there’s a screening that you happen to attend that turns out to be monumental and stays in your memory the rest of your life. The Ottawa Animation Festival in 1978 had such a screening. It was a midnight premiere of Bruno Bozzetto’s new feature, Allegro Non Troppo. Everyone who was anyone attending the particular festival had to attend that screening.

The film screened to lots of laughs, rapt attention, and spontaneous bursts of applause. It ended with an overwhelming ovation that told Bruno he had created a gem.

The movie was a parody of Disney’s Fantasia. There was some innocuous live action holding animated segments together. The animation was closely tied to classical music pieces. The highlight of that film was the Bolero sequence.

Here is the first of a couple of posts that give you frame grabs from Bolero. It all starts with a discarded Coke bottle in outer space.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

2 3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

1112

13

14

16

18

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

34

36

38

40

42

44

46

48

50

The first time I met Bruno was in New York, about six months after that showing. We had lunch, and he gave me a souvenir cel. One from this sequence.

- Bill Tytla‘s work has to be studied and studied and studied for any student of animation. He was the best, and it’s pretty doubtful his work will be superceded. He brought beautiful distortion to many of the drawings he did, using it as a way to hammer home some of the emotions in the elasticity he was creating. Yet, the casual observer watching this sequence in motion doesn’t ever notice that distortion yet can feel it in the strength of the motion.

Stromboli offers everything for that study. I have some old copies of a scene too large (a couple hundred drawings) to post in one shot.

Four drawings (#1, 11, 22, & 48) that shift so enormously but call no attention to itself.
Brilliant draftsmanship and use of the forms.

Here we have the beginning: drawings 1-48. More will come in the future.

1
(Click any image to enlarge.)

35

79

1112

1314

1618

2022

2425

2628

3032

3334

36

3738

3940

4142

4445

4647

48

The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

– I’ve been something of a fan of the films of Luzzati and Gianini. I’d met Emanuelle Luzzati at a function thrown at the Italian Embassy in New York, years ago. I bought a book by him, and the artist drew a beautiful pen and ink drawing in the frontispiece of the book.

In 1988, I met Giulio Gianini in Italy during a stay of a couple of pleasant days with an assistant of his at the festival in Treviso, Italy.

Mr. Gianini died this past Saturday, and I wanted to offer a bit of a memorial. Emanuelle Luzzati died January, 2007 and to memorialize that I posted some illustrations and information about the duo with a lot of frame grabs from a number of the Luzzati/Gianini films. It took a few posts, and I left off without wanting to overplay all of the art at my availability.
Luzzati & friend

The Thieving Magpie was the first of their films to receive an Oscar nomination, and it was the first of the frame-grab posts I showcased. I’d like to post it again in honor of Mr. Gianini. He was sick for several years and in particularly bad condition. His death wasn’t a surprise, but it is still an enormous loss.

1 2
(Click any image to enlarge.)

La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is a Rossini opera about a young maidservant who, accused of stealing a silver spoon, is sentenced to death for her crime.
At the eleventh hour, the real culprit is found to be a magpie.
A cartoon, if ever there was one. With great music!

The film tells a tale wherein a king and his hunters, on a bird hunt, are beaten
by a magpie who steals their gems and ultimately destroys their village.

4 5
Luzzati who spent many years designing operas and ballets,
brought his knowledge to animation as the pair adapted several operas often utilizing the overtures of the operas they were adapting.

6 7 The film was nominated in 1964 along with
Clay, and the Origin of the Species by Eliot Noyes
and the winner, Chuck Jones’ Dot and the Line.
The Sound of Music won the Best Picture Oscar, that year.

8 9 The use of cut-out animation wasn’t mainstream at the time.
This is years before Terry Gilliam made it somewhat fashionable. All of the
Luzzati-Gianini films were totally inventive and creative within the form they established.
Gianini’s animation was as dreamlike as Luzzati’s exciting designs. The films
look to be designed somewhere between Chagall, Kirchner and
stained-glass windows; the sensibilities are all Luzzati and Gianini.

Today we have Flash animation which does just about the same thing as cut-out animation, but the form used today is flat and vulgar and cartoony. It might be useful for practitioners of Flash to take a good look at what these two brilliant designer/animators did with a similar form under more complex and arduous methods. Ulltimately, it’s all related.

You can get a bit more information about Gianini and Luzzati from the website of the Luzzati Museum in Genova.

- Every once in a while it pays for me to go back to 1976 and look at Corny Cole‘s magnificent work on Raggedy Ann & Andy.

Here’s one of the scenes I have – or at least the first half of the scene – in which Corny animated Andy standing and saluting. Ann and the Camel with the wrinkled knees sort of mull about in the background.

The drawings are incredibly light. I darkened them a bit in photoshop so that they’d be legible. They’re also done in a number of colored pencils. To top that off the paper is oversized (20×10.5) and difficult to flip. Since the art’s all the way to one side, I eliminated some of the blank side in the scans,

But the drawings are beautiful. Too bad the film, which was shot in Scope with Panavision lenses, was put on video in a cropped TV format with no regard to what was being cut off on the edges. (Not even pan & scan.) There’s been no DVD release of the film.

Here are most of the extremes all done by Corny Cole.

1
(Click any drawing to enlarge it to the original size.)

2

3

5

8

10

12

14

15

16

18

20

28

30

33

34

43

48

53
Corny Cole is certainly a one-of-a-kind in the animation community.

It was my pure good fortune to have worked with him this once.
Perhaps next time, I’ll put up some of his elaborate drawings.

Corny Cole / Raggedy Andy Salutes
On twos at 24FPS
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Since I posted a piece about Jack Kinney yesterday, I thought I’d add this to the mix. In an early version of his book, Walt Disney and Other Characters, Jack Kinney wrote this:

The little gentleman, Freddie Moore, also took a poke at Roy during a friendly game of volley ball. Fred was a very co-ordinated guy. He drew as easily as breathing, and as the saying goes “He could draw his ass”. A very high compliment.

I saved a few of his originals:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Fred and Fergie did all of the animation on the “THREE LITTLE PIGS”. Fred did the three pigs and Fergie drew the big bad wolf.
It was a sensation and introduced “Whose Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” written by Ted Sears and Frank Churchill,
It was the song hit of the Depression. Burt Gillett directed.

Art Babbitt, among others, might have argued with Jack Kinney’s allotment of all the animation to Fred Moore & Norm Ferguson.

By the way, these pages are xeroxes of xeroxes. Excuse the quality but enjoy the drawing.

- In the past, I’ve posted some of John Hubley and Tissa David‘s preliminary drawings for the picture, Eggs. I’ve got plenty of this artwork and I love it, so here’s some more.

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.

Past posts of my can be seen here, and here.

There’s currently a copy of this short on YouTube.

These three drawings are character Layouts by John Hubley.

(Click any image to enlarge to animation-sized artwork.

This is a BG Layout John gave Tissa.

This drawing and all the remaining are Tissa David’s drawings.

She would block out her own rough Layout
before jumping in in to animate.

It gave her the chance to thoroughly think out what
little information John had given her. Usually just a
conversation with some very rough sketches.

This is Tissa’s Bg Layout for this scene.

- I’ve been posting frame grabs from the recent DVD of Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, they give these in such a small form that it’s hard to view them on the tv screen. Hopefully, this will give a better opportunity of seeing some of this artwork.

I have a couple of other small comments about these DVD’s in release today. Aside from the annoyance of these gallery drawings being offered at such a diminished size so that you can’t really study any of them, there’s also the problem that the artwork is not labelled in any way. God forbid they should promote the name of anyone who painted these images.

There’s also no commentary track anymore. If you go back to the not-very-special version of Dumbo, there’s one of the all-time-great commentary tracks. John Canemaker did it by himself, and by the time you get well into the film, you realize the depth of information you’re getting from John even though his relaxed and natural voice charms you. I have to say I’ve listened to this commentary four or five times.

There are plenty of other problems I have with these new “Special” productions that I won’t get into; regardless, here are the images I could get.

I’d say that you could enlarge the images if you clicked on them,
but unfortunately I’m even enlarging some of them with these thumbnails.

They’re such beautiful drawings/paintings to produce at so small a size.

.