Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

Howard Beckerman sent me this great photo and a short letter attached to it. I can’t help but post both:

___________________________________________(Click any image to enlarge.)
Hi Michael,
Someone suggested that I send you this photo of Ollie signing my review copy of Disney Animation The Illusion of Life. It was taken in 1982 at the publisher’s office. Frank and Ollie were there with their wives. I was doing an interview to accompany a review of the book.

Howard

- Mike Dobbs has a blog called Made of Pen & Ink. He was once the editor of Animato! and Animation Planet, two fanzines for animation fans.

This blog is designed for Mike to post chapters of a book he’s writing about the Fleischer brothers entitled: Made of Pen and Ink: The Fleischer Studio and Cartoons.
It’s been a long time between chapters, and he’s just posted the third on this blog. It’s about Betty Boop and her history at the studio. If you haven’t kept up with it, this is a chance to read some heavy duty writing about Max & Dave.
____________An illustration by Michael Paulus.

Mike also has an animation blog wherein he reviews animated films and dvds. This, too, is worth checking out. Animation Review.

With all the nopstalgia in this post, I probably shouldn’t be adding a comment here, but it’s on my mind. I saw a few minutes of Johnny Bravo last night on cable tv. I never did warm up to this show, though I have to admit that watching it last night it looked a bit more golden.

Compared to all the monstrously poor animation seen in the Flash shows, Johnny Bravo, as limited as it was, seemed richer and fuller. When a head turned it didn’t just pop from one side to another, it turned. When an arm had to move up, it didn’t just pop, it animated.

Have we reached the point where I miss even limited animation?

- With this post, I’m completing the remainder of the storyboard material loaned to me by John Canemaker. This takes us through the birth of the puppies and the reemergence of Cruella De Ville in her attempt to buy them. The introductions are done, and the story is about to turn to action.

______(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here’s a breakdown of the board, posted slightly larger and mor legible. This final board also featured (albeit in B&W) some cel setups from the film. They’re posted larger, as well.

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I’ve broken it down by line of drawings and split that into two.

(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

______________________________________To continue with the next board tomorrow.

- Back in July 2006 I wrote about the art exhibit of celebrity caricature which came from the Library of Congress and was seen in the NY Public Library at 42nd Street. This show still stands out in my mind.

-I’m currently researching the art of Covarrubias. An exhibit at New York’s Public Library at 42nd Street in 1998 was one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was a program of “Celebrity Caricature” mostly from the 20′s & 30′s. Covarrubias, the developing Hirschfield, and a number of other brilliant artists were all represented well. In among the art was a small section on animated caricature. Drawings by Tee Hee and Joe Grant were on display with a couple of cel set-ups. There were also a couple of WB model sheets (without artist names.)

From the book of that exhibit I’m posting some of the animation art represented. Again no animators’ names are given. I remember well
_____(cel – Charlie McCarthy & W.C. Fields in________some beautiful caricatures by Joe
_____“Mother Goose Goes Hollywood”)_____________Grant who came to Disney’s studio to _____________________________________________work on this film.

_______________Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye from “Autograph Hound”

____(Click on any image to enlarge)

Garbo & Mickey – animation drawing for Mickey’s Gala Premiere

Greta Garbo model sheet for Warner Bros.

A small sampling of this show can be found on the National Portrait Gallery website. Non-animation caricatures are on view there, and the beautiful book/catalogue can be purchased there.
Credits for the above stills goes to:
1. “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood” from the collection of Jeff & Therese Lotman
2-5. “Autograph Hound” National Portrait Gallery, Wash.D.C.
6. “Mickey’s Gala Premiere” WDFeature Animation Research Library
7. The Steve Schneider Collection

Larry T. on his blog, Random Semiconscious Musings, has a great post on Mother Goose Goes Hollywood wherein he identifies all of the caricatures with matching photographs. It’s great to see the likes of Ned Sparks (pictured), George Arliss and Joe Penner.

- Continuing with the yesterday’s post of the storyboard from 101 Dalmatians, we pick up with Cruella de Ville meeting Pongo in the film’s opening.

The storyboard sections were loaned to me by John Canemaker. Like past boards, they’re quite long, oversized photographs which would enlarge too small and illegible even if I worked at the max size. However, by my splitting each row in half, I can post them to be large enough for reading. This means I have to deconstruct the boards and put them together again. Below is the board for this sequence, and you can get an idea of its size.

_________________(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here is the sequence reconstructed. It’s one of my favorites in this film, and I very much like the entire film. I do like seeing the song in storyboard form.

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The real companions to this board are on two other sites:
___Hans Perk is posting the studio Drafts for this film on his site, and
___Mark Mayerson is posting Mosaics and comments on his site.

- The four artists pictured above were shot during a boisterous story meeting. Or more probably it’s a posed photo. It’s interesting that they pose a picture where the irrascible Bill Peet seems to be taking on the designer and directors of the film.

Left to right, that’s Woolie Reitherman, Bill Peet, Ken Andersen and Ham Luske.

This is the first of the storyboards loaned to me by John Canemaker. It’s the second sequence in 101 Dalmatians. The sequence starts with the wedding of Roger and Anita, Pongo and Perdita and takes us through the introduction of Cruella de Ville to pregnant Perdita worrying about the fate of her pups in the kitchen.

This board takes us more than half way through the sequence. The second board, which I’ll post tomorrow or Wednesday (it takes a while to scan and post these), takes us through the end of the sequence.

Hans Perk is posting the complete production drafts of this film, and Mark Mayerson has started creating a mosaic from the drafts Hans is posting. The information they’re both offering is invaluable.

As with past boards, I’ve split them up so that I can post the largest possible image. Otherwise they’d be the size of the full board, above.
Here we go:

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__________(Click any image to enlarge so that you can read it.)

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to be continued.

- Excellent news. Now that Hans Perk has been posting the animator drafts of 101 Dalmatians and, as a result of that, Mark Mayerson is putting together one of his fine Mosaics for the film, I’m able to contribute a small bit toward the study of this film. It all coincides nicely with the relatively new dvd package that Disney has released.

Starting Monday, thanks again to the generosity of John Canemaker, I’ll be posting a nice chunk of the storyboard for this film. It starts just after the wedding at the film’s opening and continues on. It’s Bill Peet’s original board, and I’m excited to put it up.

To celebrate, I’ve taken a few frame grabs off the dvd which showcases some of the opening storyboard drawings. Unfortunately, the images aren’t as large as I’d like on the dvd, but they’ll have to do. This is one of my favorite Disney features, and it really pleases me to see all this material come out. Thanks to Hans Perk for starting it all.

(Click any image to enlarge a bit.)________________

- Here’s an interesting short cycle that Tissa David animated for Letterman. Letterman, himself, plays with a football.

Tissa often animated on more limited shows this way. The drawings B1-B6 can work as a short cycle; drawings B1-D25 work as another cycle. She’ll move out of this and come back to it again later. It hides the cycles yet allows you to reuse drawings cleverly. It’s not just a constantly repeating 1-25 as appears here.

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____________(Cick any image to enlarge to see full frame drawing.)

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Letterman flips the ball on threes.

In celebration of the new season of baseball I have a couple of model sheets from a Paramount cartoon.

A story writer, Larry Riley, gave me these drawings back in 1972, but he never told me the film’s title.

Thanks to Thad Komorowski and Bob Jaques, who left comments on the original post, we know the drawings come from Heap Hep Injuns (1950).

___________(Click images to enlarge.)

Larry Riley was a wild guy. On my first commercial job at Phil Kimmelman & Ass. he and I were the inbetweeners working side-by-side on some of the Multiplication Rock series. Larry had had a long and busy career in animation.

He had been an asst. animator at Fleischer‘s, a story writer at Paramount, an animator at many studios. Like many other older animators, he ended up doing anything – including inbetweening at Kimmelman’s for the salary and the union benefits.

The stories Larry told me kept me laughing from start to finish. There was no doubt he had been a writer for years. In a not very exciting job, it made it a pure pleasure for me to go to work every day to hear those hilarious stories. I can’t see Lucky 7 without thinking of laughing. It wasn’t the stories per se that were funny, it was his take on it.

Larry told me of his years at Fleischer’s in Florida where he was an assistant. He and Ellsworth Barthen shared a room, and, according to Larry, had lined one of the walls of their room with empty vodka bottles. Now, I’ve heard of frats doing this with beer cans, but doing it with vodka bottles requires some serious drinking. One of the many times I got to work with Ellsworth, I asked him about the story, and he reluctantly backed it up telling me what a wild guy Larry was.

________Forgive the racist pictures, but I guess they’re a product of their times.

Larry also told of a 3D process he’d developed for Paramount in the 50′s when the movies were all going 3D. I believe there were two Paramount shorts done in this process: Popeye: The Ace of Space and Casper: Boo Man. Larry offered to give me the camera on which he shot these films – he had it stored in his basement. He was afraid it would get thrown out when he died. I didn’t have room for it.

My regret; I still hear the sadness in Larry’s voice.
(When I originally posted this in 2006, Larry’s grandson, John, wrote to tell me that another collector took possession of the camera and kept it from destruction.)

The animator who drew these is Tom Johnson (he signs the second one), and they were approved by the director Isadore (Izzy) Sparber per the first one.
The drawings are deteriorating, obviously. The pan above uses a lot of glue to hold it together, and that’s eating away at the paper.)

– This is the final model I have from Heap Hep Injuns a 1950 Paramount cartoon. Tom Johnson drew this image, prior to animating it, and Izzy Sparber directed the film. I’d heard some stories about I. Klein regarding this film, though he’s not credited, so I suspect he may have had something to do with model approvals, as well. Actually, he may have been the “Izzy” referred to on the pan posted yesterday.

(click on image to enlarge.)

I was never a big fan of the Paramount cartoons. Growing up in New York, we’d always get Paramount or Terrytoons shorts playing with features in the theaters. Only rarely did a Warners cartoon or a Disney short show up. (I don’t think I saw a Tom & Jerry cartoon until I was 17 when they started jamming the local TV kidshows with them.)

Saturdays there was always the placard outside the theater advertising “Ten Color Cartoons”. A haughty child, I naturally wanted to know why they didn’t show B&W cartoons – that’s what we saw on television, and I usually liked them more. I must have been insufferable for my siblings to put up with me.

The starburst at the beginning of the Mighty Mouse cartoons always got an enormous cheer in the local theaters. I don’t remember ever hearing that for Popeye or Harveytoons.

– One of my most treasured gift/memories was receiving a Christmas present of the newly published book, The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas. This came to me in 1958. Prior to receiving it, I had to scour my local public library, as a child, to read about animation. Here was this book that came awfully close to inventing the coffee table book for animated cartoons – which generally meant Disney in those days. Lots of beautifully colored photos of animation artists at work and plenty of Disney cartoon images. It even a filmography for about 100 people who’d worked at the studio, or at least a Disneyography for those people.

Don Graham was an art instructor at Chouinard (which eventually became CalArts) when Walt Disney brought him in to supervise night classes for his animators. He was enormously successful and a strong influence on all the young animators, and he continued at the studio until WWII broke out. Disney brought him back to the studio in 1950, and he did research for a film on Art. This research was to be a book called “The Art of Animation,” but it never quite gelled to Disney’s satisfaction. (I have a xerox copy in storage and someday I’ll post a bit of it.) He also wrote a book entitled Composing Pictures which instructs in methods of composition.

When Sleeping Beauty neared its release, Bob Thomas was brought in to write a book about animation that would also focus on Sleeping Beauty. Thomas used some of Graham’s notes for the book he’d been preparing for Disney.
This is the book that was published in 1958.

I suspect that my receiving the book at such a young age made it all the more precious to me, and to this day it gives me positive feelings whenever I hit on certain pages and pictures in it. There’s a photo of Eyvind Earle holding up a cel of one of the three faeries that ALWAYS sends a chill up my back. It strikes to the heart of something I love about animation, and it inspires me like little else can. I can’t say what it is about this picture, but it speaks to me.

I thought it might be entertaining to post a couple of pages from the book. The opening chapter on “Story” seems pertinent since so many of our recent posts have been Bill Peet storyboards. Here’s a bit of his board for Sleeping Beauty.

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________(Click any image to enlarge so you can read it.)

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