Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Today, I’m heading north to attend a memorial for Jack Zander. Presumably, I’ll be filled with something to tell about tomorrow.
For today’s post, I was asked yesterday if I had any other Mickey models. So I thought I’d post a few. I also have a couple of the Kimball models, but they’re faded xeroxes, and it’d take a bit of time to pull out the images. I’ll save that chore for some future time. As for those below, my favorite is the first. I think it must have been some kind of lobby card. It’s a Hi glossy image.

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This is my favorite color Mickey. It’s probably also my favorite animation of him. Need I say the film is a gem?

I don’t know what this model was for; I assume publicity. It includes parts of many other models.

- Earlier this week, I posted John Canemaker ‘s loan of a couple of storyboards by Bill Peet from Bill Cottrell’s script for The Little House. This was adapted from the children’s book by Virgina Lee Burton.

Today I’ve got a fifth board. I’m not sure it’s storyboard; the images look a bit more like background layouts. Perhaps it’s something in between the two. I’m not even sure the drawings are by Bill Peet.

This is the actual board. However, I’m posting it as I did the others in pieces so that it can best be enlarged for good viewing.

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- Mary Blair was the dominating design force on this film, and her work stands out vigorously.

John’s exceptional book, The Art and Flair of Mary Blair includes a number of key pieces of art for this short. I think it might be remiss for me not to post them alongside these storyboards to see how Peet and Blair worked together. With thanks and apologies to John and his excellent book, here are the color scans.
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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Thanks to Jonathan Annand for pointing me to the upcoming Heritage auction which features a number of oversized animation drawings to the film, Forbidden Planet. This is the 1956 Sci Fi film that featured some magnificent animated effects by Joshua Meador.

Meador was loaned to MGM by Walt Disney to supervise the animated effects. The Id Monster he created is made of shimmering blades of fire. When the film was first distributed to television, they thought the creature was too frightening for children and cut out a lot of the animated scenes. Of course, they eventually replaced them.

The movie is an original take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest although it significantly alters the plot points. The music for the film, created by the married team of Louis and Bebe Barron, is a groundbreaking electronic score – more effect sounds than music. It’s somewhat similar in ways to what Bernard Herrmann did for Hitchcock’s The Birds.

This film runs every so often on Turner Classic Movies, and if you’re not familiar with it, you should be. The next showing will be Feb 2nd at 9:15am.

(Click any image to enlarge.

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Josh Meador was an effects animator at Disney’s. He joined the studio in the 1930′s and quickly rose through the ranks moving to the effects animation department and ultimately supervising the effects on Pinocchio and Fantasia. He shared an Oscar for his effects work on the big Disney feature 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

He lived in La Crescenta, California for years and was an inveterate painter, an artist represented by numerous galleries.

The Disneyland show, “Tricks of the Trade,” gave me Josh Meador’s name back in the 50′s, and I searched it out ever after. I wrote a piece about sending a letter to him in another post.

While in the Navy, I was stationed in Monterey, California. There was a gallery in Carmel that had a one man show of his artwork. I made numerous trips to the gallery, hoping that he might be there one of those trips. No such luck. And I was too shy to try to seek him out on my own.

He died in 1965 of a congenital heart defect.

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These images were taken from the Disenyland TV show “Tricks of the Trade”. Meador reenacts the study of boiling bubbles for Fantasia’s Rite of Spring segment.
As a teenager, for an early 8mm film of my own, I shot in super-slow motion boiling gravy my mother was cooking. The lens fogged through much of it creating an eerie mist. It ended up being very interesting footage I used for one of my early films.

Here’s Meador flanked by Jack Boyd, on the left, and Dan McManus, on the right.
They were other leading effects animators at the studio.

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- Getting a bit more current, Brad Bird appeared yesterday as a guest on NPR’s news game quiz show, Wait, Wait. Don’t Tell Me !.

You can hear his segment here on the NPR site.

- Here’s the second of five storyboard pages loaned me by John Canemaker. The boards were drawn by the brilliant Bill Peet.

The Little House was a short, and is part of the Disney Rarities dvd still available. The image to the right comes from that dvd’s extras.

Mary Blair was the key designer of the film. Her color work is exceptional, and I’ll try to give some examples of her art in future posts.

All of these boards are small photos that I’m blowing up large, so you’ll be able to see them. It involves heavy scanning of oversize work, then cutting them up and reconstructing them so that they’re in order. Sorry that I have to take a few posts to make them all available. They’re worth the trouble.______________ (Click images to enlarge them.)

Here’s the second page of this board.

This is the full second board as it looks before I cut it apart. You can see that the image is small and I had to cut it up so you can enlarge it enough to make it visible.
The blue nunbers below the panels represent the row of images displayed.

Page 2 – 1a

Page 2 – 1b

Page 2 – 2a

Page 2 – 2b

Page 2 – 3a

Page 2 – 3b

Page 2 -4a

Page 2 – 4b

Page 2 – 5a

Page 2 – 5b

Page 2 – 6a

Page 2 – 6b

Page 2 – 7a

Page 2 – 7b

Page 2 – 8a

Page 2 – 8b

- John Canemaker loaned me these boards by Bill Peet for the short, The Little House.

These storyboards are five dense pages.
The photo images on them are small, so I had to break them apart and reassemble them so that you’d be able to enlarge them enough to study.

They’re an excellent example of an extraordinary story artist developing a pre-existing story, the children’s book by Virginia Lee Burton (who also wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steamshovel.)

This is the first of these five pages. It’ll take a few posts to get them all in.

This is the full first board as it looks before I cut it apart. The image is small and I cut it up and reassembled it. The blue nunbers below the panels represent the row of images displayed.

Page 1 – 1a____ You’ll have to click images to enlarge them enough to view them properly.

Page 1 – 1b

Page 1 – 2a

Page 1 – 2b

Page 1 – 3a

Page 1 – 3b

Page 1 -4a

Page 1 – 4b

Page 1 – 5a

Page 1 – 5b

Page 1 – 6a

Page 1 – 6b

Page 1 – 7a

Page 1 – 7b

Page 1 – 8a

Page 1 – 8b

The following are three images from the dvd extas to give an indication of color.

- I continue, here, my posting of the two boards filled with artwork from Dumbo’s Pink Elephants sequence, there’s a lot of delightful artwork.

Again, the photos I have, graciously loaned to me by John Canemaker, are smaller than I’d like. (You can get an idea, by clicking on the image to the right, as to how dense the boards are.)

I’ve scanned them at a decent resolution and have broken them up into smaller panels so that you can enlarge them to a viewable size. I’ve had to piece the photos together to keep them in order, so it’s been a bit time consuming. However, I think the boards are worth it. Again, I’ve interspersed some frame grabs from the final film to show how it ended up in color.

The following images were in the gallery part of the dvd. These are the color versions of some of the images above.

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– Happy New Year from the Museum of Modern Art.
They’ll be screening the three color Popeye shorts from the Fleischers today, next Wednesday and next Thursday.

Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor 1936 17 min.
Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves 1937 17 min.
Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp 1939 22 min.

The program will be screened as follows: Tuesday, January 1, 2:00; Wednesday, January 9, 1:30; Thursday, January 10, 1:30

Here are some frame grabs from the first third of Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp to help celebrate the occasion. Despite the lack of use of their 3D camera, in this film, I love the backgrounds here. There’s no credit given, but I’m guessing that Bob Little was in charge here. The beautiful art looks similar to what they were doing on Gulliver’s Travels. I think it’s wonderful work.

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- What better way to issue in the New Year than with models/sketches and drawings from the Pink Elephants on Parade section of Dumbo. Once again, thanks to John Canemaker, I have several photo images to display.

These are rather small images, so by cutting up the large boards and reassembling them I can post them at a higher resolution, making them better seen when clicking each image. It’ll take two days to post them all, so this will be continued later this week.

I’ve interspersed some frame grabs fromt the sequence to give an idea of the coloring.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- Today I complete the collection of frame grabs I’ve pulled from UPA’s The Tell Tale Heart. If you don’t have the film on dvd, watch it on YouTube. This film is included among the films preserved in the U S National Film Registry.

However, to quote John Kricfalusi, “‘Masterpiece’?? It’s a total boring slow eyesore.” By that, I assume he means the film doesn’t scream at you; it tells a story, and I guess that makes it boring. The fact that the cartoon lifted the Production Designer to the height of this storytelling process is irrelevant. Perhaps, today’s audiences are too impatient. (I once had an intern tell me that she couldn’t watch Citizen Kane because it was too boring. It was in Black and White.)

Regardless, I have to step off of my soapbox; here are the remainder of these beautiful images. I hope they inspire someone the way they once did me when I first saw the film. I offer these up to Paul Julian, who did such brilliant work of design.

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Then it was over.

I was free.
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But there was still work to be done.

“You’re up very early.”
“The dream I spoke of. It awakened me.”

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Tw . . . two weeks.”

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“Perhaps longer.”
“Nothing out of place, here.”
“There is his bed, his cupboard. All in order?”
“Quite in order.”
“All quite in order.”
“Nothing amiss. You understand that when a complaint is made we have no choice but . . .”

“. . .conceals from their eyes. But not yours, to be sure.”
CRASH !
“What? What did you say good sir?

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Then I heard it. It might have been a hand. A clock.
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But no, louder. Still louder. They must hear it.

________________________________________STOP IT ! Stop it, you devils !

YES ! I did it. It’s there under the floor. OH, STOP IT !
It is the beating of his hideous heart !

_____________True, I am nervous. Very, very dreadfully nervous.

_____________________________________But why will you say that I am mad?

- Recently, there have been a number of attacks on the classic
UPA film, The Tell Tale Heart.
A number of voices – all on blogs
and internet chatter – have called the animation for this film poor. Even recently, in a letter to Michael Barrier, Tee Bosustow writes “about the bad animation in Tell Tale Heart.”

Pat Matthews was the film’s sole credited animator, and he was good, having worked at Fleischer’s and Lantz’ studios before arriving at UPA. His work in this film is exactly what was required of him. Rather, The Tell Tale Heart is a tour de force of production design. It is probably one of the first non-war/propaganda animated films, since Baby Weems, to so feature this element of production over everything else – except story. Paul Julian‘s brilliant artwork oozes from the pores of every frame of this film. Together with James Mason‘s narration and Boris Kremenliev‘s strong musical score, the film evocatively tells the strong Edgar Allan Poe story. This tale has not been told on film any better since it was made in 1953. Ted Parmalee directed the film with authority.

It’s odd how I feel as though I have to defend this movie. I think it a brilliant film and have to remind myself that I’m not alone in believing this. It was nominated for the Oscar and for good reason (it lost to Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom. Ah, the irony!)

Here’s the first of two posts, using frame grabs to feature all of the scenes of the film.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

True I’m nervous. Very very dreadfully nervous.

Then it was over.
______________________________________________ To be concluded tomorrow.