Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Continuing my post of the Song of the South boards by Bill Peet, I find I have just two pages left. John Canemaker loaned these to me for this site. There’s a bit of an overlap between the two pages of storyboard.

The first is a bit overexposed, so some of the detail couldn’t come across, although I tried pushing it a bit in photoshop.
The second board has a bit more meat in it, and comes across nicely even though it is large.

(Click images to enlarge.)

I also recommend you go to Hans Bacher‘s Animation Treasures 2 to see backgrounds he’s reconstructed from this film.

- I’ve been an enormous fan of Bill Peet‘s work. Thanks to John Canemaker I have this storyboard from Song of the South. It’s the Tar Baby sequence.
One page is reworked; the others develop beautifully.

I’ve split the sequence I have into two posts. It takes a while to scan and reconstruct these very large stats in photoshop. I’ll post the remainder of the sequence I have on Monday.

(Click images to enlarge so that you can read them.)

Here we have a reworking of the second board – or, at least, a repositioning and editing of some of the drawings. Unfortunately, the original stat here is blown out a bit (making some of the writing invisible) and smaller (meaning I blew it up a bit larger.) However, you can see the drawings better in in the first board.

- Continuing my posting of the art in the 1940 book, published by Simon & Schuster, Deems Taylor’s Fantasia, I focus on the Rite of Spring segment from the film. There are some fine images here, and I’m pleased to post them.

If anyone has any idea of who drew any of these stills, I’ll be glad to give appropriate credit to the artists. I know that
_______ William Martin,
_______ Leo Thiele,
_______ Robert Sterner and
_______ John Fraser McLeish were credited for Story Development Research,
and
_______ McLaren Stewart,
_______ Dick Kelsey and
_______ John Hubley were the segment’s Art Directors.

Here, then, are the stills. A number of them are beauties.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- This article came into my hands, and, unfortunately, I have no way of knowing where it was published. It apparently was published in the 50′s or early 60′s (the clue is the drawing on the last page of Mickey through the ages.)

At any rate I thought it was worth sharing. Interesting that it talks, predominantly, about Mickey in the 30′s.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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– Since there was such popularity with the post I had put up earlier this week about The Jungle Book, and since the new DVD is being celebrated everywhere, I thought I’d post some more bits I have from that film.

These are some of the drawings by Milt Kahl from a sequence featuring King Louie doing a dance. It’s interesting that I think immediately of Shere Kahn as Milt Kahl’s work, and I don’t think of Louie. Yet I’ve had these copies for the past 25 years.

Somewhere – I have to find it – I remember Walt Disney being quoted as having said the one thing you should never animate is a monkey. They’re funny enough in real life; animation can’t improve on them. I remember thinking of that quote the day I first saw this film. I also wondered how Louis Prima felt knowing that they were representing him as an orangutan. I suppose that’s not a monkey.

The copies of these drawings I have are xeroxes. I’m posting them for the magnificent drawing alone; I don’t have timing sheets to be able to work out the movement. Honestly, with Milt Kahl’s work, looking at the images alone should be enough. I apologize if these are at all fuzzy or grey; that’s the quality of the images I have. They’re also not full sheets of animation paper. I copied only the peg holes and drawings.

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

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Talk about breaking of joints,
_______________this scene couldn’t be a greater lesson in animation for you.

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I know I don’t have to say, but I will; these drawings are extraordinary.
#100, here on the left, is a masterpiece in weight, balance, forshortening and sheer brilliance. And it’s only one frame from a scene.

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By the way, Michael Barrier is back (Oct.11th), and he opens with some comments about The Jungle Book as well as a reprint of his 1978 Funnyworld review.

- Tissa David did some of her most elaborate and fluid animation in Raggedy Ann and Andy. Her first scene to animate (after the pilot) was the introduction to her song number. This scene was a whopping long one and was particularly elaborate. It was also the first whole scene put into production.

The cameraman Al Rezek constructed a makeshift multiplane setup for it. This was a bit difficult to do in Panavision, but he did it. There had to be an ominous shadow of a bush overlapping the pair of dolls as they entered the deep dark woods. The scene must have been shot a dozen or more times until we were happy with it.

I have all the drawings to this scene, rough and clean up. There are a lot of them. I’ll post a couple of Tissa’s roughs here to give you an idea of the scene. Dick Williams cleaned it up, himself, and it took him a while. In a future posting, when I have more energy I’ll post more of the roughs against Dick’s clean ups.

I’m also posting some frame grabs from a bad pirated dvd version I have of the film.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- With the release of The Jungle Book dvd, I thought I’d post something for it.

To me this film represents the first in the big decline of Disney Animation. The reliance on star voices started here, and the result was not good. They got good voices, but they relied on the voices for the animated character, and too few characters had original animated styling to overcome the actors that did them.

The singers killed it. By that I mean, the character of Baloo became more Phil Harris and less Baloo the bear. Louie Prima‘s King Louie was more Louis Prima than anything you’d find in the African setting. George Sanders was more of an actor than a personality, and he offered Shere Khan a character that Milt Kahl was able to build on. Sterling Holloway as Kaa was also more an actor than a personality, and he played what was asked of him. Ollie Johston was able to develop on it.

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

Animated features try to continue in the same vein. Voices like Robin Williams or David Spade or Eva Gabor are not going to make the animated character better. It’d be more interesting to have unknown voices that are well cast. Peter Pan, Snow White, Bambi and Cinderella. Lady & The Tramp, Alice, Pinocchio are all brilliantly cast features.

The Jungle Book, to me, gets incredibly dull. I’ve sat through projections of it at least a dozen times, and each and every time was exhausting. Lots of set pieces, but I don’t think it really adds up to a whole. Except for the Shere Khan scenes, there’s virtually no conflict and even less tension. Sorry to say anything bad, but it’s hard for me not to.

The material I have here came from stats that were prepared to make Thomas & Johnston’s The Illusion of Life. The little attachments became the captions for that book where the images were printed small.

These images are pretty light, so I had to soup them up a bit so that you can read the lines.

- The Bum Bandit was a FLeischer cartoon starring Bimbo produced in 1931. It marks the fourth appearance of Betty Boop – who doesn’t get billing in the credits. As a matter of fact, she introduces herself with a different name during her song in the film, “I’m Dangerous Nan, the sister of Dan McGrew.” She’s so tough she spits bullets through a cactus.

(Click image to enlarge.)

Grim Natwick did the drawing, posted here. It’s dated 1931, the year of the film. The drawn Betty looks better than the film’s Betty. A lot was lost in the inking – including her scarf and guns. (I wonder if it was cleaned up for our delicate times?)

I like seeing the peg holes which are certainly more sophisticated than the two round holes used in other studios at the time.

You can watch this film in an OK version on YouTube
(for however long they allow it to continue there.)

- As I mentioned a few weeks back, ASIFA/Hollywood is planning a reunion of the crew of Raggedy Ann to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of that film’s production. This ASIFA event will be at the American Film Institute in Hollywood on November 17th. It’s hoped that a simultaneous reunion can happen in New York City, but I still wonder about that coming together.

Regardless, this is good reason to post art from the film and keep posting it until the event.
Sooooooo . . .

Here are some animation drawings/ roughs by Corny Cole. His artwork is close to Johnny Gruelle’s originals. He, of course, was the film’s origninal designer, though I’m not sure how his designs related to the final screen picture.

Corny did every drawing (partial inbetweens) though I’m only posting extremes. All this art was done on paper 19″ x 10.5″ for Panavision proportions. (And this was the small paper we used.) Of course, there’s an animated zoom in the scene. It wouldn’t be a Corny Cole scene without it. Here are Corny’s extremes:

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- I’m continuing a small series of lifts from a catalogue I have which features master French animation pioneers. It was a souvenir of a 1981 Parisian exhibition on the history of French animation.

My focus here is one of the greatest stop motion animators in history, Ladislas Starévitch. I’m offering, here, a loose translation of the catalogue entry (with a couple of additions I’ve chosen to add.)

Ladislas Starévitch (1882-1965)

- Born to a Polish family living in Moscow a century ago, Starévitch was an entomologist. When the idea occurred to him to use the technique of frame by frame animation to reconstruct aninsect battle which he’d witnessed, animation entered his life. The film was titled Lucanus Cervus (1910).

So attracted to this conceit of animating his bugs, in the next few years, he made several other stop-motion films before actually beginning a full-time career in animation. This included one of his most famous films, The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman in 1912. The Russian Revolution led to his emigration to France in 1919; this put a temporary halt to his filmmaking. However, a new career began in France when he started to make fiction films exclusively. Assisted by his daughter, Irene, he grew dedicated to 3D puppet filmmaking for the rest of his life.

The Voice of the Nightingale (1923)

Poet and craftsman, as inventive as he was clever, Starévitch created new films including In the Spider’s Grip (1920), The Voice of the Nightingale (1923), and The Eyes of the Dragon (1925), etc. Many technical innovations came from his fertile imagination and resulted in a high level of animation.

Starévitch completed a full-length film (65 mins) entitled The Story of Fox (1930) which found distribution years later (1941) after adding sound to the feature. He lzo created a series with the dog “Fétiche” (1934) as his principal protagonist.

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_To the left, an early Starévitch armature from the MOMA collection.
_To the right, a scene from The Story of Fox.

When I was young I had a 16mm print of The Revenge of the Kinematographic Cameraman, and I think I must have watched that print a couple of hundred times. I was absolutely intrigued with the accomplishment he had done in 1912 and felt, then, that it was on the same level as Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur.

I’ve seen a number of his films at the Museum of Modern Art and was completely taken with his technique and craft in the film, The Magical Clock (1928) (aka The Little Girl Who Wanted to Be a Princess). The film includes some amazing combinations of Live Action with stop motion animation.

It’d be lovely if some of these films were collected for dvd release in a good quality version. Because many of these films are in public domain, there are a lot of bad, unwatchable copies out there. The official website for Starévitch includes links to some copies of films from Doriane Films including The World of Magic of Starevitch and The Story of Fox. Presumably these might be the best available.