Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Today’s NY Times features a Blog/Article that analyzes all of the Star Wars movies. The author, Chris Suellentrop, says the new video game is “small consolation for the realization that the franchise that dominated their lives for 30 years has ceased to matter.”

Lucas’ Cloned Wars received one star from all of the NY papers, including the NY Daily News. JOE NEUMAIER says of the film, it’s “chock-full of video game-style action scenes and drawn to resemble the puppets in the 1960s British TV show “Thunderbirds,” is just as wooden as the last few live-action movies…”

NATHAN LEE in the NY Times says: “it isn’t the most painful movie of the year!”
The NY Times also has a slide show feature of “concept art” from the film (five images.) That’s where I pulled the image to the left.

Newsday‘s RAFER GUZMÁN (AP) says: “the film feels like an unauthorized knock-off, one of those “tribute” shorts that pop up on fan Web sites.”

Apparently this is the pilot for a new series coming to Cartoon Network. It’s obviously part of their push to get more 14 year old boys to watch. I guess it’s a positive that it’s not a live action series for CN. I wonder how long it will be before Lukas clones “Indiana Jones”?

– Mark Mayerson, as you probably know, still continues to post his wonderful Mosaics on 101 Dalmatians and gives the excellent commentary with it. I write this only to remind you to keep up. Mark’s work is an enormous resource that can be too easily taken for granted. I wish he were able to print these up in book form. Perhaps, some day Disney books will realize there’s an excellent publication for grab here. “?

- Robert Cowan‘s art collection includes a cel set-up (above left) that seems to jump right off Mark’s mosaic. How interesting that Mark chose that particular set-up. How great the Cowan collection is; take a look at the site if you’re not familiar with it or if you haven’t been there in a while. You should also look at his Comic Art collection. There, you’ll find everything from Burne Hogarth to George MacManus to Winsor McCay.

- On the Animation Archive site, I found these Bg. plans for 101 Dalmatians. It really defines the layout of the house. In case you don’t know this site, they have dozens of model sheets for viewing. Some are brilliant, some are bad copies, all are worth checking out.

- I received an interesting art link yesterday which displays accredited art colleges to create a comprehensive directory for potential students to browse. Since I’m sure a lot of students check out this blog, I thought it might be a useful link for some readers out there. It’s called FindYourArtSchool.com.

For those considering an education in fields relevant to animation, this may be helpful.

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- On Wednesday, I’d posted some wonderful drawings and an excellent piece by Paul Spector about his father, Irv Spector, in the Signal Corps. There are many more cartoons and caricatures Paul has to share, so here’s a follow up to that post.

On Cartoon Brew, Amid Amidi had this response to one of those commenting regarding the cartoons, and I think it worth adding here:
Gag drawings done at animation studios are very ephemeral. It’s hard to know fifty years later what the situation was that prompted this drawing by Cobean. Then again, these drawings were never intended to be viewed decades later or seen by people outside of the studio.

Irv Spector – “God – but”

Lars Calonius

(Click any image to enlarge.)

In the past two days I found myself the subject of a couple of animation sites. This is, no doubt, due to my two new dvd releases. Both have received a lot of attention on review sites and have been favorably reviewed, but these animation sites deserve to be mentioned.

- Last week, I’d received an email from Mike Barrier with a letter he’d received from “anonymous.” The letter was a not-very-positive comment about Mike’s positive reviews of my film, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. So I wrote a slightly annoyed response which Mike posted. I think if “anonymous” had had the courage to stand behind the letter by using his(her) name, I would have been more patient with it. Just the same, it all makes for a peculiar read. I can’t say I mind it, in the end. Take a look, here. ____________________ An image drawn by me that duplicates one in the book.

– Mike Dobbs, the estimable animation historian and former editor of Animato and Animation Planet, has posted an interview with me on his site, Animation Review.

By the way, Mike Dobbs has two other sites:
_____ Made of Pen & Ink is his book on the Fleischer
_______studios which is posted on line as he writes it.
_____ Out of the Inkwell is Mike’s general blog.

- Finally, David Nethery has posted a recommendation for my two new dvd’s on his site, Academy of Art Animation. Thank you, David. It’s much appreciated.

- And now for something completely different – let’s go back to Sleeping Beauty and Eyvind Earle. Bob Cowan responded to my posts of the art direction for that film by sending me some beautiful color pieces Earle did for the film. He’s given me permission to post them here. They’ve all been posted on Mr. Cowan’s site. There’s a lot of amazing artwork there – if you haven’t been following it, go. These five paintings are beauties.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

– Not too long ago, Paul Spector and I had an email conversation about his father, Irv Spector.

Irv was an animator that I knew periferally in New York during my first days in animation. We saw each otherat Union Meetings and some animation events in New York, but I didn’t really know about his start and key days in the business.

I jumped at the chance to ask Paul to share anything, anytime with this blog, and I’m pleased and excited to post this first entry from him.
__(Click any image to enlarge it.)

In 1941, during WWII, my father was an animator at Flesicher Studios in Miami, FL. At the the time, many cartoonists were being drafted into, or enlisting in, the miltary. Knowing he would soon be one of them he left Florida and drove across the country back to Los Angeles — where he was already registered for the draft — to push up his induction. (He began his career in LA at Mintz and Schlesinger, before taking a job with Fleischer when they were still located in New York).

Like a lot of other cartoonists my dad was assigned to the animation unit of the Signal Corp, making training films and other industrials; in his case back at the east coast unit.

In this photograph, my father is second from the right.

While many of these films incorporated animation as well as live action and photography it was not just those in the animation field who worked in the Corp. Although those of us with an interest in the animation field tend to focus in on that aspect, the Corp also produced pamphlets and manuals, etc. One of these non-animation inductees was Sam Cobean whose illustrations appear in many of the images below. Some of the most striking are done by him. A quick note about Cobean: during the war he was taken under the wing of The New Yorker magazine cartoonist-extradinaire Charles Addams, who introduced him to the editors at the magazine. Cobean soon began publishing there, and his star rose quickly through the post-war years until he was tragically killed in an automobile accident in 1951. The majority of those below came out of a manila envelope with “Sam Cobean, Bob Perry, Others” written on it. Several others were from untitled envelopes. Very few are signed by the artists, although you’ll notice several that are, especially two straighter drawings by the magnificient Lars Colonius. However, the vast remainder are pretty much gags and caricatures. Mostly funny, ludicrous, or just really nice to look at.

Some poke fun at army life, but most of all they lampoon my dad, who appears in almost all of them along with a cast of other cartoonists in the unit. (But whose else would I have? Naturally, about 98% of what I have is his work. This is the other 2%). The joke in some of these is that my father began to lift weights in the army, hence the drawings where he is muscled, or the mention of “Spector’s Health Roof”, or referred to as Simian(!) Here is are some real photographs of my dad in those years, so you can get a fix of what he really looked like then. Make sure you scroll down, and maybe someone out there can identify the three other gents in the image of them sitting along a wall (my father is second from right, with his eyes closed.)

Irv Spector

I’ll leave it up to all of you to try and identify anyone depicted throughout. One who is obvious to me is animator Herman Cohen, a longtime friend of my dad’s and our family in general. Here are some photographs on him — that’s his wife Juliet sitting on his lap.

An anecdote about Herm: In the mid-late 1960s, Herm and one of his sons, and my dad and myself, were shooting pool at our house. On one of Herm’s turns, we watched him take his cue stick and line it up by the 1-ball, sizing up angles. However, when it was time to take the shot, he actually hit the 1-ball with his cue — as if it were the cueball — to sink another ball. A moment later my dad says, “Hey, I forgot all about it. Herman is color blind!” Yep, Herm mistook the solid yellow 1-ball as the cueball. Just goes to show there’s hope that you too can have a lifetime career as a respected animator without being able to identify colors.

(Here are a few more of Irv’s caricatures of the period.
None of them have any background info on them.
If you can ID any of the people, please feel free to comment. MS)

Health Roof

(R) Veronica Spector – (L) Edmond Kohn

For the historians out there: There seems to be a dearth of information on the internet regarding the Signal Corp Animation Unit, east coast and west. If it helps, I’ve pieced together some of my father’s own moving around — date-wise, using some of the mail he received during this time. Maybe this info can be extrapolated…I dunno, but perhaps it can help.

April 1942: Bob Givens (also in the service) writes him at Ft. Monmouth, NY (from Ohio).
August 1942: Givens writes him c/o of the Signal Corp Animation Unit at Long Island City, NY (no return address).
September 1942: Jack Rabin (just about to be inducted) writes to him at the Training Publications Dept. of the Anti Aircraft School, Camera Crew Unit #1, at Camp Davis, NC.
July 1943: Written to at the Signal Corp Photographic Center on E.32nd St., NYC, NY.
Jan/Feb, 1944: Carmen Eletto writes to him, again at the Signal Corp Photographic Center on E.32nd St., NYC, NY.

Here’s an undated item from the TAG blog. Givens is in it, at Ft. Monmouth. So, pre-April ’42 maybe? Before he was shipped out to Ohio, of all places.

More images will follow on Friday.

– We started slowly on Everybody Rides the Carousel. There was a six month schedule for about 72 mins of animation. Three half-hour original tv shows for CBS about 24 mins each. They’d air in the late summer of 1975 just prior to the start of the new tv season. Each show would air a day apart from the others – three nights in a row.

John and Faith spent a lot of time – a lot of time – at RCA studios on 45th Street. (It’s
____ The carousel was bottom lit & became soft focus.____-_ now an IRS office.) They recorded many of voices playing the numerous parts in their show. I tried to time meeting them there a couple of times hoping to meet some of the actors (I particularly wanted to see Jack Gilford in action. He was doing an hilarious part with his wife, playing a couple of cranky old people in a diner.) It didn’t work out that way, but I did see the facility and heard parts in process.

The key staff working IN the studio (not counting animators who would, for the most part, work freelance) included Ida Greenberg. Ida was a brilliant checker/coordinator who’d started back in the Florida days of the Fleischer studio. (She told me a few great stories about Gulliver’s Travels.) Ida was a great woman, with the thickest New Yowk accent, who never seemed to buckle under pressure. I grew very close to her. I tried after that to have Ida everywhere I worked. She led Raggedy Ann’s I&Pt and R.O.Blechman’s special._____________ Art Babbitt animated some of the mimes.

Kate Wodell was a student of the Hubleys at Yale. She was a talented artist who’d moved into production during the making of Cockaboody and continued on staff there. Sometimes she colored, sometimes she animated, sometimes she did whatever was necessary. This was exactly how I moved into the studio and loved the experience. She worked with Faith for many years after John died.

Earl James was an animator who’d worked in the backroom of many NY studios from Paramount to Terrytoons to NY Institute of Technology. He also had done some comic strip work.

Earl was given the carousel to animate. This came from a couple of elaborate drawings John did. Earl worked 16 fld. using a 96 drawing cycle. It gave us a lot of opportunity to move in tight or stay wide. However, it was a nightmare that took forever. Joe Gray was hired to assist Earl. (Joe started during the Terrytoons strike and never left. He was a lifetime assistant like a handful of other noted names in NY.)

This scene moved so slowly through production that I kept jumping in to assist as well. I was a fast assistant, but that carousel slowed even me down. 8 horses moved in perspective in a circle; you got to see 96 different rotating views of all the horses. I’d guess the scene took about 10 weeks to complete.

I was also doing layout and animation of a lot of connecting scenes throughout the production. These were scenes that would have to blend from one animator to another, or John had decided to go in tight for a closeup. In one case with Art Babbitt’s mime character, I was asked to change it from two’s to four’s with a dissolve technique John taught me (he said they’d used it on Fantasia.)

There were four people in my room, Earl, Joe, me and Mark Hubley. He worked alongside me for most of the film. He colored artwork given him by Ida, who was working in the larger room next door. Mark and I had a good releationship going back the many years I worked there. He joined the studio once he completed college. Emily Hubley worked alongside Kate and Ida.

Two younger, more experimental animators were brought in by John. Adam Beckett had made a name for himself with the films he was doing at CalArts.
Fred Burns was doing some incredible work at UCLA. They both were very different and added their unique touch.

___________ Adam Beckett’s scenes included these two surreal images.

Adam did a scene a couple of scenes wherein office furniture floated about in a very complicated surreal cycle. Fred did this amazing scene of a roller coaster from the POV of the rider. He and I worked together a number of times after that, and we’ve stayed friends.

______________ Fred did this very elaborate sexual roller coaster.

I decided, last week, that I had a lot to say about this feature film. Hence, you’ll have to excuse me for reminiscing over the series of pieces I’m going to write. I also have some artwork – other than frame grabs – that I’ll try to share in future pieces.

- Last week we left off Part I of this storyboard sequence 19 with Phillip cutting his way through the forest of thorns trying to make his way into the castle. Maleficent watches from a distance and is getting more and more angry.

This is Ken Anderson’s storyboard presentation. The photographs of the board were loaned to me by John Canemaker, and I am indebted to him for it.

This is this photo of the board as is:

(Click any image to enlarge.)____________

Here are the rows of the board broken into two so that I can post them a bit larger.

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The conclusion of this sequence remains.

If only he knew what he’s to face next.

- Continuing the post of last Monday, here’s the storyboard to seq 19 of Sleeping Beauty. It’s the beginning of the dragon fight, the climax of the film. It’s on loan from John Canemaker‘s collection, many thanks to John for sharing.

Here’s the full page as is:

(Click any image on the page to enlarge.)

Here’s the board broken up into segments, half a row at a time.

More of this sequence next Monday.____

– John Canemaker has loaned me a couple of books to be scanned for posting. These are all storybooks for young children, and they’re all adaptations of Silly Symphonies.

These books are some of the first bits of merchandising to piggy back some of the more popular short films. Aside from the “Mickey” craze, there was a demand for Silly Symphony merchandise. The biggest book featured the original Three Little Pigs, which I posted back in Feb. 2007.

There’s no doubt that The Country Cousin was one of their more popular shorts. It’s been called one of the great advances in character animation – specifically the drinking scene animated by Art Babbitt. This all led up to the film’s Oscar win.
_______(Click any image to enlarge.)
___________________________________________I’m amazed that this book has such
thick paper with very crisp colors. It’s held up well all these years later. The book is slightly larger than posted; I cut some of the extra white space around the images.

These are the two inner cover pages. (The pages are much larger,
but I just took the drawings.)
_______

The title page
_______

- This will be the last Sleeping Beauty post of the week. (Having lately seen a number of negative posts about this film, I’m sure some of you will be glad about that.) I promised to post a couple of drawings I have for the “Skumps” sequence once Hans Perk had completed posting the drafts for this sequence so that I could I.D. the animators. (I have to say I guessed correctly in three out of four shots, so I’m pleased with myself.)

I’m posting closeups of the drawings. By clicking on any of them you’ll see the full sized animation paper. I’m also posting frame grabs beneath the drawings so you can see how they looked in the film.

This is a Milt Kahl scene, seq 13 sc 8. This drawing is undoubtedly a clean up,
so it’s not one of Kahl’s drawings – just his pose. It’s an extreme.

It is interesting that Kahl animated both characters.

This is a John Sibley ruff. Seq 13 sc 17.

It’s a very odd, uncoordinated dance number by the drunk lackey.

This is my favorite of these four. It’s a John Lounsbery ruff of King Stefan.
Another extreme from seq 13 sc 26.

I like this character.

This is also another beautiful ruff by John Lounsbery. It’s King Hubert in the
very last scene of seq 13, sc 57.

it comes just prior to Hubert’s turning and sitting on the palace steps.
___________________

And now for something completely different:

Bruce Knapp, who has worked with many of us in the New York industry, has a film competing in WNET/ch 13′s On Air competition. Every Saturday night they air two features and a short film. However, the public selects the short films from three on line contestants.

Bruce’s film Keep This Coupon, which won an ASIFA East award last year, is in the running for an airing this coming Saturday. Can I urge you all to go on line and vote for his film (prior to Thursday at 5pm)? Let’s get an animated film in the mix. Go here to vote, and/or see the films and VOTE.
Thanks to Masako Kanayama for letting me know about this.

- To continue my attempt to keep up with the invaluable drafts that Hans Perk has been posting on his blog, I have some more storyboards to offer. John Canemaker has loaned me the final sequences of the film detailing the dragon fight and climax of the film. It’ll take a couple of weeks to post them all, so let’s get started.

We’re not sure exactly who did the artwork, but there’s a good chance it’s Ken Anderson‘s work. As with past boards, I’ll post the whole photograph as is, then take it apart row by row so that you can enlarge them as much as possible. Here’s the storyboard sequence #18 from Sleeping Beauty.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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