Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’ve long been a fan of T.Hee‘s work. I think I’ve said that before. When I saw some pages on ebay of the storyboard for The OomPahs, I had to buy them (at a not too expensive price.)

The short was a 1952 UPA film directed by Bobe Cannon. The film’s music score was by Ray Sherman who worked with Ben Pollack’s group, the “Pick-a-rib Boys.”
T. Hee shared the design of the film with Jules Engel who did color work, and the animation was by Roger Daley, Bill Melendez and Frank Smith.

The film is not one of my favorite UPA shorts. I find the style interesting but the story (which to me seems to be a variation of Warner’s I Love To Singa, which was a take on Jolson’s Jazz Singer) is a jazz vs classical music riff. The film seems to talk down to its audience a bit. This was a frequent problem with a number of the UPA films. I find Marvin Miller’s voiceover to be the biggest difficulty in this regard. The voiceover tracks rarely live up to the graphics – though I think the music choices are usually brilliant, despite the low budgets the composers had.

The pages I have obviously are not consecutive in number, but they’re a good sampling.
The first of the pages is a rough version of the second. It’s interesting to see how little varied they are. They are all drawn lightly (I had to darken the linework a slight bit in photoshop), but the rough is even lighter.

1 2
#1 is a rough version of #2. Both are page 13.

3 4
#3 is a final of pg. 19 & #4 is a final of page 20.

5
# is a final of pg. 23.

To see a couple of layout drawings for this short, from Hans Walther‘s collection, go to site here and here.

- Last Monday, May 21st, was John Hubley‘s birthday, so it seems appropriate to focus on one of his excellent films. Continuing yesterday’s posting of Tissa David artwork from Of Men and Demons, I have more of the layouts she did for this opening sequence of the film. As I mentioned, Art Babbitt did the opening scenes and Tissa then was hired to revise these scenes and go on from there.

This is the BG Layout for the first scene with the farmer.

These character positions go with the opening scenes that Art Babbitt animated
and Tissa revised. These are Tissa’s drawings.

This is the BG Layout for the scenes Tissa started animating.

These two rough drawings indicate overall poses for the scene wherein
the two characters begin sharing their lives.

The drawing above and the following drawings represent the poses
Tissa prepared for her animation of the scene.

Finally, here are frame grabs from the scene
so you can see how it all came together:

– Since first seeing the Hubley short, Of Men & Demons, back in 1967, I’ve been a fan. The artwork was stunningly different and original. It had a rich tone to it and some beautiful artwork. The music by Quincy Jones was as original as the film, itself.

The short was actually an industrial film done for IBM to explain the binary code to its employees. The Hubleys, however, built on that story to make something of a personal film that received an Oscar nomination.
(Click any image on the page to enlarge.)

Art Babbitt was one of the first animators hired. At some point, Tissa David was brought on to rework some of Babbitt’s beautiful animation. Unfortunately, it was on about a fourteen levels and had to be combined and reconstructed and shortened. (Today, of course, there are no limits to levels, but in the days of the camera you kept things to 4 cel levels, as a rule, and never more than 5.) It was complicated by the fact that John Hubley had decised to shorten the piece, and Quincy Jones’ score was shorter than Babbitt’s animation. This chore took some effort and involved dissolve animation. Tissa then continued on the sequence animating the little protaganist and his female companion through the remainder of the film.

About 25 years ago, Tissa David gave me an envelope full of art from this film, and going through a lot of my old material recently, I came upon that envelope. I’m going to post a few of these drawings in the next day or two.

1 2

3 4
These are storyboard drawings for a short sequence. Tissa got these drawings and prepared LayOuts for the sequence. You can see how much is actually in John’s drawings so it’s easy to build on what he’s given you.

1
The following are key drawings Tissa prepared for the sequence in laying it out.

3

4

5

6

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- My Popeye posting yesterday remided me of a storyboard drawing I.Klein gave me that
I haven’t posted. It’s a nice drawing from a post-War short, and I thought it worth sharing.
I believe the drawing comes from Hot Air Aces (1949) and was directed by Izzy Sparber.

In today’s NY Times, there’s an article about the future of cinema and the inevitablitiy of 3D. Much is made of the recent announcement that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would be making a realistic trilogy of 3D films starring Tin Tin. Motion Capture takes them into this realistic/cartoon world.

Unfortunately, real cinema is no longer real, and cartoon cinema is no longer cartoon.

– Of course we all are waiting for the Popeye dvd’s to hit the market. This promises to be the ulltimate collection for many of the Paramount shorts. However, Popeye’s been on the home entertainment market for quite some time.

Back in the old days – before Blu Ray, before dvd, before vhs – there was 8mm. No, I’m not even talking about Super 8mm; I mean 8mm. This was the home movie for the masses.

I owned a couple of cameras and projectors by the time I was 16. I bought all of them myself with my own money earned from part time jobs. You could buy used models downtown (an hour subway ride for me) at a camera store called Peerless-Willoughby.
(A variant of this store still exists called Willoughby.) Within the store, they had an enormous department of 8mm and 16mm films to buy or rent. I spent a lot of time thumbing through those 8mm films and bought a few. I had rigged my projector to screen the films frame by frame so I could study some of the animation.

When Super 8mm came in, sound was added (although it had to be dubbed after the film was shot.) 8mm was threatened and they came up with a couple of schemes to add sound. My friend, Stephen MacQuignon, shares this Popeye cartoon. This is one such scheme a small distributor tried. Oddly, it’s not too different from the first sound films back in 1928. You play the soundtrack off a record. Appropriately, the cartoon with this record is one of the King Features shorts which was dependent on dialogue.

Things change but not always in great leaps.

The 8mm reel came in the attached box pasted to the front of the record package.

This is the back of the package so you can see other titles that were
available from “Americom” including a number of the King Features shorts.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a projector anymore, and I’m having trouble
getting the record transferred to dvd. I will though.

– Yesterday, I posted the first of some drawings that Bill Peet did in developing the “Wizard’s Duel” for the 1963 Disney feature, The Sword In The Stone. This section of the film, which was supervised by Milt Kahl, was considered one of the highlights of the feature. Kahl took pride in his work on “Mim;” he had good reason to do so.

Today, I’m posting the final part of this sketchbook.

I love how Peet drew all over the cover (to the left) making his notes and sketches, finally labelling the cover page. I think this is something we can all associate with, and it helps to make the art less “Art” and more working drawings to give the final film the life it has.

If I were more energetic, I’d put together a “Mosaic” a la Mark Mayerson‘s excellent handiwork. However, I do not have the drafts for the sequence, so it’d just be a frame-grab show-and-tell. Perhaps, another day.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

- My intention was to post the bulk of the Bill Peet sketches for the Wizard’s Duel from Sword In The Stone. However, they take a while to scan and I’ll have to break them into two postings. So the first five pages come today (including the sketchbook cover with odd notes all over it.) Some of them have been in print before, but let’s keep them all together.

Thanks, again, to John Canemaker for the loan of this material. Peet’s a master animation storywriter, and those like me are thankful for any table scrapings we can get. John delivered a full meal.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

– John Canemaker dropped by yesterday with another little gem. Here is a preliminary storyboard done by Bill Peet of the Wizard’s Duel from Disney’s Sword In The Stone. The oddity of this board is that it’s dated April 1949. (The numbers at the bottom of the board clearly read “449.”) I didn’t have any clue that this film was in development that early. The book was published in 1938, so it’s quite feasible.

If that date is accurate, it’s amazing how close the characters stay to their final models. This could easily be explained with the heightened us of xerography in animation after 1958. Post 101 Dalmatians, this loose style was easy to translate into animation, and Ken Andersen was easily able to adapt to this style by Bill Peet that all of the animators in the studio loved.

A
Click on any image to enlarge

B
Note in row 2 how the spider turns into the tiger’s face; it’s a graphic turn. This never would have made it to the final in a Disney film, and it didn’t.

CD
I love how extra drawings which have been pulled make it to the bottom of the second board.

Tomorrow, I’ll continue this post by putting up some rough drawings Peet did for this sequence as he developed it.

- Here are the remaining images I have of the storyboard from The Wind In The Willows. They come courtesy of John Canemaker and his extraordinary collection, and I have to thank him for sharing.

Though the images come from an early version of the feature that was truncated for the final Adventures of Mr. Toad, you can see that even at the start, Mr. Toad was the focus of the animated adaptation. It’s understandable considering how much of the action sits in Toad’s story. However, the charm and beauty of the brilliantly written book comes from other points, and it’s obvious that the Disney studio was always going to miss that.

There are some beautifully drawn images here, though, and I like how they lay out the action. Check out the drawings on the last board; beautiful poses throughout that sequence. There’s something that didn’t work quite as well in the final version done for the compilation film. That film has an overenergetic breathlessness that is so unlike the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Today, I’m posting a cel Tissa David gave as a gift to Heidi for her birthday in February. It’s time for Taurus, and it’s an appropriate day to post this beautiful cel setup from UPA.

Tissa said she was given the cel shortly after arriving at UPA New York in 1956. Obviously, the image comes from a film done prior to 1956.

Obviously, I don’t have a clue as to what film it’s from. I thought that it, perhaps, came from one of the shorts done for the McBoing Boing show, but I haven’t been able to locate it. I also thought that perhaps it was done for a commercial.

If anyone out there knows, please check in with me. The first person who comes up with the correct answer will receive a gift from me.

I’m honored to have made Tom Sito‘s memorial blog roll today. What a guy, what a memory!