Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’m trying to coordinate with Hans Perk‘s posting of the drafts to Sleeping Beauty by offering as much material as I can locate on the film. It’s leading to some odd discoveries. (Just today, Hans offers the drafts to the cake baking sequence.)

Here’s one of those galleys given me many years ago by John Canemaker. It was a way of showing off material available. Perhaps some of it has been published in some book or other. I don’t think it all has gone out, though.

This is the development of the three fairies, Fauna, Flora and Merryweather. You’ll see they took some wacky turns on the way to the end. I believe these were drawn by Tom Oreb, Bill Peet, Ward kimball, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

This is the full photo which comes in at 24×40 inches.

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I believe this is by Kimball.

Probably Bill Peet’s storyboard characters.

No idea who did this.

This looks a bit like Frank Thomas’ line, though the characters don’t look like his.

An Ollie Johnston self-portrait?

Now they’re coming together.

Almost complete.

Frank Thomas animation.

More Thomas animation.

Some beautiful poses.

I have a couple of animation drawings from this film from the “Skumps” sequence. I’ll post those when Hans hits that part of the film with his drafts. This movie is a great one.

If you’re in LA, go see it in Technirama on July 16th. Academy Screening.

- The Alice In Wonderland dvd contains a storyboard sequence of Alice daydreaming in the park. This sequence didn’t make it to the film (for good reason), but they’ve re-assembled it for the dvd. I’ve taken some frame grabs to show off the drawings. They’re on screen for such a short time.

My favorite’s the last.

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- Hans Perk has chosen to post the drafts to Sleeping Beauty in response to the upcoming Academy screening (in LA) of the feature film which is in response to the reissue of the video with new special additions. I thought this a good excuse to bring back these older posts:

– I’ve enjoyed sharing some of the animation drawings I own via this site, and I hope to keep doing it. The drawings, to me, are so valuable in that they reveal the personality of the animators, even more than the finished films.

I have a bunch of copies of drawings by Frank Thomas from Sleeping Beauty. It’s the sequence in which the three fairies, within the hidden cabin in the forest, use magic to create a dress for Aurora.

Below, on the right, are some of the roughs from this scene. On the left are the final cleanups.
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- These are frame grabs from the very same scene in the cottage featuring the Frank Thomas drawings posted above.

Frank Thomas often complained about Eyvind Earle‘s color design. He disliked the fact that Merryweather had a black bodice. He was especially peeved over this sequence, and I heard him talk about it at least three times. He felt this anchored her too much to the ground and weighed her down. I’m not sure I agree with him; I think the character moves beautifully and retains the weightlessness he sought.

There rwas quite a bit of friction between Eyvind Earle, who seemed to be Disney’s star on that film, and the animators who felt ignored.

- Rico LeBrun, an established Italian artist, was employed at the Disney studio in the late ’30s to help teach the studio’s artists to learn how to draw animals. Bambi was in process, and Disney knew that he had to train his artists to reach to a new level.

In his preparation for the job, LeBrun created a book of some 50 or so pages of the skeletal system of deer for the artists to use as reference in learning to manipulate the animal characters. His art was copied onto animation paper with typed notes added.

Sky-David had contacted me after a recent item I had posted about the drawings on Bambi. Sky told me that he had a copy of all of the pages of LeBrun’s study. He shared it with me and I posted the first 18 pages several weeks back. (Here’s part 1.) This is a second installment, thanks to Sky’s generosity, for those who’d like to see them.

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I’ll post the remaining 16 drawings soon.

- Let’s imagine.

Mary Blair is the most brilliant of all the color stylists to have worked at the Disney studio during its heyday. Among the photographed storyboards loaned me by John Canemaker was this board of Mary Blair images. The only problem is that it’s B&W. So, we have to imagine the array of greens and blues and yellows the designer would have used for this very colorful sequence.

This is the board in it’s entirety. Now, to split it up so you can look at the images a bit more closely.

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Here’s an image from Canemaker’s book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. I just wanted to remind you of how these other images probably look in color.

- This is the third photo of the board for Alice In Wonderland. Once again, I think it was drawn by Joe Rinaldi. I have no evidence to prove otherwise, and that guess makes the most sense to me at the moment.

As with past posts, I show the storyboard photo as is, then reproduce it one section at a time so that I can enlarge it to the largest size.

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At the base of the storyboard are these two Mary Blair images. I did a bit of a search (and I do mean “a bit”), and I wasn’t able to find color reproductions of these two pictures. So I’m posting them as they appear in this photo. They’re a bit blown out in the photo in hand, so I did a little work in photoshop to pull out a bit more of the grays.

There is another photo which includes a bunch more of Mary Blair’s designs for Alice. I’ll post that soon (though I also have to search to see if any of those are printed in color elsewhere.)

- Let’s continue with some more Ollie Johnston animation from Bambi. These drawings were selected to illustrate one of the books by Johnston & Thomas. I’m not sure they were ever used, but here they are, just the same. The work’s too beautiful to ignore.

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There’s some real life in this character. This last part has smaller drawings, so I assume there’s a cut in there.

- Last week I posted part of a book of notes Dick Williams took while attending a lecture series Art Babbitt gave in Dick’s studio in 1973. That was obviously a forerunner of Dick’s book, The Animator’s Survival Kit which led to his newer set of DVD’s – the Masterclass Series.

Dick’s site is interesting in that it gives a full preview of these dvd’s, so I heartily suggest you take a look. If nothing else, Dick inspires while informing.

In that last post, I talked about a second series of notes Dick had. These were more formal and swiped a lot of information from everywhere and everyone – Disney lecture notes, Preston Blair – and also notes from some of the other masters that Dick had visiting his studio.

So here are a few pages from that oversized book. No pictures – all writing. Old xeroxes.

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Boy does this guy know the stuff of great animation.

Back to Bambi.

Here are some animation bits by Ollie Johnston. They were prepared, I believe, for a book. I don’t know if they made it. If they did, this is another variation.

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Ollie’s point in highlighting this bit is all about the staging of the action. But the action, itself, is pretty damn great.

What a film! You can’t study it enough.

- Last week I presented the first of three photographed storyboards from the Disney feature, Alice In Wonderland. This is a sequence where Alice meets up with the rabbit at his house, eats a cookie and grows larger than the house. It’s an excellent adaptation of the sequence from the original Carroll book, and gives that extraordinary image of the cottage with two enormous feet protruding.

There was a live-action star-studded Alice on tv this weekend which tried hard to create some magic. I watched this sequence from the story and found it quite lacking in comparison to what they did here. As might have been expected.

I offer the board in its full size. Then I edit the rows into sections so that I can post them as large as possible. Thanks to the loan from John Canemaker these boards are a treasure to view.

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