Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Here’s a followup to yesterday’s Merryweather dance. These are the frame grabs from the scene in the cottage featuring the Frank Thomas drawings posted yesterday.

Frank Thomas often complained about Eyvind Earle’s color design. He disliked the fact that the fairies 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 them to much to the ground and weighed them down. I’m not sure I agree with him; I think the character moves beautifully and retains the weightlessness he sought.

– 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.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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- I came across a couple of articles I found in the NYTimes and was entertained by them.
The second one (posted & chronologically) was one Grim Natwick had saved and which ended up in my hands.

It’s entertaining in that it reveals an enormous number of feature projects that UPA had planned doing. John Hubley had obviously given an extensive interview in that article which was timed to try to draw as much publicity around the Oscar nomination of Rooty Toot Toot. Toward the end of the article he talks about possible features they were hoping to do. I think this was probably more Hubley’s plan than UPA’s.

A little more digging, and I found I’d had another less interesting article (#1) published a year earlier by the same writer.

#1 #2

– Moonbird is one of the seminal films of 20th Century animation.

After John Hubley left UPA, where he helped explore the use of 20th Century graphics in animation, he formed a commercial animation company in Los Angeles. Apparently, with this new entity, John did less drawing and more producing. Trying to correct this problem, he closed the LA office and set up in NYC with Faith.

The studio in New York did commercials on a smaller scale. With a Guggenheim Fellowship of $8000, the couple produced a short film, Adventures of an * in 1957 and committed to doing one film a year for themselves. With this film, Hubley picked up where he’d left off at UPA. Exploration of modern art now took on the wildly successful Abstract Expressionists and told a non-verbal story using expressionist art.

The film Tender Game, done in 1958, told another non-verbal story using the song “Tenderly” to illustrate a romance, again, in expressionist art. This film, in some ways, feels like an outgrowth of Hubley’s work on the feature, Finian’s Rainbow.

In 1959, Moonbird took a giant leap forward. The art style borrowed from the expressionists, but used a method of double exposures to layer the characters into the backgrounds. Each animation drawing was painted black outside the border of its lines. Moonbird, the character, was colored with clear wax crayon and painted with black ink. The black resisted where the wax stood and gave a loose scribbled coloring. All of these painted drawings were photographed as double exposures, shot at less than 100%, to combine characters with Bgs.

The soundtrack involved an improvised track of two children, Mark and Ray Hubley, playing. These were recorded in sessions within a recording studio and massively edited down to create the final tracks.

Bobe Cannon animated the film with Ed Smith assisting. Ed inbetweened Bobe’s scenes and animated many others.

A variation of this became the Hubley method. There was usually someone working in the studio who did all inbetweens and animated some lesser scenes. A great way to break into the medium in a big way.

Some extremes by Bobe Cannon are posted below.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

Amid Amidi has posted a link to a YouTube version of the film. It looks good.

– Recently there’s been some attention given to an exhibition catalog from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Art of Disney. This catalog is a sizeable 242 pages and has been featured on a number of sites: Cartoon Brew, Mark Kennedy. It appears to have a number of pages taken from the 1958 Bob Thomas book, The Art of Animation.

Back in the good old days of the late 60′s – early 70′s, in New York, there were a number of appearances in which a group of Disney animation people would talk about the art. At Lincoln Center (discussed in a separate posting) Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Ken Anderson appeared. At MOMA to honor The Jungle Book, Gilda Radner introduced Eric Larsen and Ken Anderson. At SVA, John Lahr introduced Milt Kahl. There were others. To accompany these talks, there were often handouts.

At Lincoln Center, they gave us copies of a slick, stapled brochure sized truncation of the Bob Thomas book, The Art of Animation. His name as nowhere to be found on that booklet, but the stills and layout was the same as his tome. As a matter of fact, no names could be found in that booklet. Interestingly, that’s where they began selling the Christopher Finch book, The Art of Walt Disney.

It was nice to get something for free, though. It was colorful and attractive. Since I’d memorized the Thomas book, for some reason, I felt no need really to even look carefully through this item.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

– In 1942 Paul Grimault released an animated film entitled Les Passagers De “La Grande Ourse.” The film had actually been completed in 1939 and titled Gô in the Birds, but because of the outbreak of WWII the film suffered setbacks and was released in 1942 with the new title.

Several years ago, John Canemaker gave me a gem of an attractive little book that was illustrated with images from the film. Grimault was the father of French animation, and I’d always assumed that this film was a feature. In fact, it was a nine min. short, but it was important historically because it was the first big French animated production trying to out-Disney Disney.

The story is very unlike American films. There’s a fanciful sense of imagination that is true of many French cartoons. In summation the story is:

A little boy and his dog sneak into a shipyard and are grabbed by a crane which places them on a ship in dock, loading. This ship, “The Grand Ourse,” is an oddity in that it is fitted like a zeppelin with balloons to lift it into the air.

Boy and dog arrive in their compartment, accidentally, as the vessel starts to take-off into the sky. Adventures ensue with the boy and dog confronted by a restive eagle and a deaf and dumb robot

Here are some of the pages of the book:

A carbon copy of the credits for the film was enclosed within the book when I received it.

It was copied onto one of those pieces of paper that could only be European, sort of a tissue that seemed delicate.

That’s attached to the left.

(Like all images on the page, just click any of them to enlarge to a legible size.)

– Located on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive are some drawings from the Ray Patin Studio commercials.

I noticed one which matches the color model I have for the very same setup. So you can look at the 3-cel model setup here and then procede to their site if you want to see the drawing.

Interesting how detailed the drawing is in comparison to how they finally ended up coloring the spot.

(Above: from ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive)

(Click on image to enlarge.)

- Speaking of this incredible site, the ASIFA-Hollywood Archive has more of Mark Kausler’s fabulous Milt Gross collection. This guy was the real deal; one of the greatest cartoonists of the Twentieth Century.

– Yesterday, I posted a couple of links to images of imagined animation skeletons. I completed with the build-it-yourself armatures of Monterey Motion Puppets.

I feel as though this is a subject that deserves a bit more attention. Armatures.
There’s quite a bit of information on line, and I want to call attention to a couple of links.

At Stop-Motion Express, more armature building instructions as well as a lot of advice on puppet animation is available. You can also buy one through their store.

If you’re not handy and cannot build an armature yourself, you can buy one on ebay express. The Armaverse Armature sells for $149 – preconstructed and ready to be altered to your character’s needs. Or another smaller one for $139.

There are a number of articles about Aardman and their armatures. One from the BBC features a couple of small pictures.
Vince Backeberg has a site that features methods of armatures for all “Claymation” puppets. (I’m not sure he realizes that “claymation” was a copytighted term for Will Vinton’s animation process.)
AnimateClay is a webpage devoted to – guess. It features methods and devices needed.

Getting Started in Animation is a great Q&A article with 3Bears Animation a site where all the ins and outs of puppet animation are discussed, including armatures.

This article is part of exposure.co.uk, a site for advice on low budget film making.

Not to completely ignore the skeletons of cgi, Blender3d.org has posted a detailed article on How Armatures Work. Obviously, they’re talking about cgi armatures.

Two of the images posted here are from magazines. The top image comes from an article on Lou Bunin and shows a 1939 armature he had built when he was just starting out. The image to the right is part of a French magazine-sized publication from Folimage about Jiri Trnka. Pictured here is one of about five clustered together which can be viewed in total by clicking that image. The middle image is of Wallace as armature without his head.

The other day I wrote about bar sheets and posted some examples from Halas’ Technique of Film Animation and Eli Levitan’s Animation Art in the Commercial Film. I realized that that may be a book that’s unfamiliar to most people and would like to give it some attention here.

– When I was a kid, I was determined to work in animation. By the time I was 12 and had saved enough to buy an 8mm camera (these are the prehistoric days before the invention of video tape – nevermind dvd’s), I had already animated some films and had a gang of characters. I’d learned everything I knew about animation from books, really.

There was the Disneyland show every couple of weeks about animation, and they gave you some information about how the work was done. In fact, though, that was more entertainment than informational. The same was true of the Walter Lantz segments on the Woody Woodpecker show.

So, it was books. I went to the library a dozen times a week to read through the books I couldn’t take out, and I memorized the books I could bring home. The Halas book, Techniques of Film Animation, was the real deal. Heavy information (some of it I still don’t understand – all those equations in the back of the book). A Christmas Present brought Bob Thomas’ The Art of Animation, which focussed on Sleeping Beauty‘s production. This started my book collection.

There were only a couple of others at the library. I knew all the titles by heart in that small section. There weren’t a lot of animation books back in the late fifties. Animation Art in the Commercial Film (1960) was an oddity that showed up one visit. It was by a NY cameraman/producer, Eli Levitan and highlighted the technical parts of animation. It used a GE commercial for all of its illustrations. The technical aspects of the book were good, but anything to do with drawing or animation, itself, seemed forced. Unfortunately, it didn’t name- drop animators from Disney – or even NY – as the Thomas or Halas books did. It didn’t even name the people who posed in the photographs printed. This is something I religiously sought in my books. I wanted to know who those people were.

Of course, in time, I memorized this book as well. There was a lot in it for someone who understand most of the mechanical aspects of the medium and was interested in learning more.

Levitan had at least two more books about animation: A Handbook of Animation Techniques (1979) and Electronic Imaging Techniques: A Handbook of Conventional and Computer-Controlled Animation, Optical, and Editing Processes (1977)

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- I’m saddened to learn of Ed Benedict‘s death. Cartoon Brew gives a number of resources to view some of the man’s work and learn about some of his accomplishments. It’s worth a visit to get a sample of his accomplishments. Though I didn’t know him, I’ve been enormously affected by his work.

– Last week I made reference to Aurelius Battaglia’s UPA short, The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy. The film was produced in 1955 and celebrates the life and art of Raoul Dufy.
It was part of the first season of The Gerald McBoing Boing Show, a short lived series on CBS, Sundays at 5:30. This show featured three short films (most done especially for the TV show) with a wrap-around bit featuring Gerald. The Invisible Moustache of Raoul Dufy was one of these shorts.
(Click to enlarge any image.)

Walking in Paris, about 20 years ago, I stumbled upon Dufy’s immense mural La fée électricité, which was commissioned by the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Electricité. It was in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Only on seeing this enormous work was I able to really grasp the notion of the film, which I’d seen as a child. I was taken with the technical expertise Dufy utilized to paint the work so quickly. He used a special painting medium created by a chemist and a projection system that allowed him to paint directly over images of his sketches. For the viewer, it’s the immense size of the piece that is so monumental. The colors literally glow around you in the somewhat darkened room.

The film, on the otherhand, seems to exist only in grayed colors. I have a 16mm print which came new, and the colors seemed faded. The vhs copy I have is no better. The delicate script is still quite lovely, but one is always wishing Dufy’s colors could come through.

I’ve posted a number of frame grabs to give an indication of the film, but I urge you to view the reconstructed mural the next time you’re in Paris. (Perhaps a side-trip from Annecy.)