Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Today I give you a stereo painting by Oskar Fischinger. Jeff Scher pointed it out to me, and I thought it too stunning an image to keep to myself.

Just place it in your stereoptican viewer and see it in 3D. Alternatively, hold it up to your nose, and slowly pull it away until the two images fuse into one. Or, as I prefer, just enjoy it as is.

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This image came from the Artscenecal site. To see another of Oskar Fischinger’s stereo paintings go here.

Stereoscopic imagery is quite an interesting offshoot in the art world. It’s fascinating that Fischinger would have been so involved in it. Salvador Dali was also interested. You can find a number of his images on line at 3D Gallery Anaglyph, however you’ll need your red and blue glasses to view them properly.

- With all the brouhaha over Oswald, maybe it’s time to give the original superstar some attention. Mickey has been left behind and ignored by the Disney studio, itself, for the past how-many-years showing up in a couple of distorted cgi abominations and otherwise used for nothing more than a theme park escort.

It’s very nice that Oswald is back in the fold, but when you have a licensed character – many licesnsed chararacters that have been so abused by the current owners, it’s hard to get excited for what we’ll see of Oswald in the future. I expect John Lasseter will only be able to do so much. The bigger guys (marketeers) still run the front office.

This box of Big-Little coloring cards was given to me as a gift many years ago. It’s fun every once in a while to flip through them.

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- The ASIFA Hollywood Archive’s site has a good overview of Art Babbitt’s career with a short bio of Babbit by Tom Sito and a good filmography.

- Here’s another grouping of three production charts from Pinocchio. These sheets take us from where we left off into the “Little”Wooden Head” musical number.

A wider variety of animators enter the picture. Art Babbitt’s involvment with Gepetto puts him front and center, and it looks like Don Towsley is leading with Jiminy.

My original posting of the sheets for the opening sequence received a strong and positive reaction. A lot of good questions were posted, and I think most of them were answered by some astute, knowledgeable readers. I got quite a bit out of it and hope others did as well. I have sheets up through the Blue Fairy sequence, so I’ll keep posting them till I run out.

For some reason, I get a thrill just going over these sheets. I guess I’m just a sucker for these early films, and these sheets give me the feeling that somehow I’m in on it. I often wonder if the films being made today have the same effect on younger people; I hope they do.

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– This is a camera layout for Gulliver’s Travels. It gives a good indication of how small the artwork was at times. The field guides look all off proportion. This layout was certainly just an indicator for the final layout, however it’s obvious that the guide they’re using is not the traditional Acme proportions but the ones Disney used at the time.
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(Hans perk on an earlier posting gave a field guide comparison chart – Acme to “Disney”. Check that out here.)

Also interesting is how thin the paper is: not the best quality and very transparent. The peg holes, of course, are those that were unique to the Fleischer studio.

It’s wonderful how things have grown with the internet age. Of course, there’s also more than a fair share of nonsense out there. Lots of misinformation, so one has to move cautiously in accepting much of it as gospel. Know your sources.

- Hans Perk has posted some excellent comments on my “Bookkeeping” page. He responds to a good question by Galen Fott about changes during the course of a production and the reflection of that on the charts. Hans also provides a link to a chart which calculates the variations from Acme to Disney field guides and back.
If you’re interested in the studio’s production charts I posted last week (with more to follow soon), I encourage you to read more.

-I also encourage you to go to Thad Komorowski’s website: Golden Age Cartoons. It’s a site I visit often; there’s plenty of history there.

- Here’s a reprint ripped (literally) from the pages of LIFE Magazine, circa 1943. It represents a few of the storyboard(?) panels from Chicken Little, the Disney propaganda film. No it’s not the one with aliens – at least not aliens from outer space.

It was a wartime short warning us of the evil of the Nazis or at least of reading Mein Kampf. I didn’t realize these films needed publicity, too.

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I noticed one of these production forms on Blackwing Diaries, and thought someone out there might not have seen any of those for any of the features. So, I’m posting the first couple of pages from Pinocchio, Jiminy opening the movie.

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It fascinates me to see the detail in the production that Disney had organized. It gives a glimpse into the structure within that studio, at least during the old days. The most recent sheets I have like this are for Robin Hood. The information doesn’t seem quite as picayune on those pages, but I suspect it still was as organized.

The field guides indicated on these sheets are different than the field guides which we have today. Each field was indicated by 35mm not inches. Each field represented 35mm in height & width. Hence, it seems like they have all small fields indicated, but they’re not.

Today with computer animation, I’m not sure of the organization of the studios like Pixar or Dreamworks – or, for that matter, Disney. I suspect there has to be something similar, though I would expect it to be all computerized.

– This is a storyboard drawing/layout I. Klein gave me back in 1980 (that’s when he signed it). Klein was a good solid animator through a very long and ripe career.

He started in animation in NY, moved on to Disney where he was a journeyman animator in a world of stars. (He never worked on a feature while the “A” team did.) He eventually came back to NY to be a star, himself.
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His best work, for me, was the animation he did on a couple of the Disney shorts in the late thirties. He was a principal animator on the Silly Symphony, The Moth and The Flame.

Izzy liked to take credit for creating Casper the Ghost, as did many people, and was certainly part of the team that did the first work on Casper. He was a very nice guy, and it was a pleasure to have met him the few times I did.

My nightmare when I was a kid was that I would end up drawing Popeye or Casper for the rest of my life. No wonder I fell in love with Hubley’s work when I came upon it at the ripe old age of 15. That’s when I made it my goal to seek them out and work for them – damn the torpedoes.

- Happy Birthday, George Washington. Time to check Tom Sito‘s blog to see what he has to say about it. As I expected, there’s a lot of entertaining reading about it.

- Yesterday I came across a chat room discussion about the original Bambi (as opposed to the newer one about to be released). Once I hit this sentence, I had to stop reading: “But the new Bambi sequel is much easier on the eyes than the old Bambi, and from what I saw from that 10 minute clip, I think I’m going to enjoy the sequel a lot more.”

It depressed me too much to continue reading, and I was reminded why I should stay away from animation forums and chat rooms.

To that writer, I devote this posting of some bits and pieces of a Life Magazine article published at the time of Bambi’s original release.

(Click on any of the above images to enlarge to a readable size.)

This material was originally given to me by Jim Logan. I owe the memory of him a long column or twenty, and I will post it eventually.

- Marc Hairston has an interesting posting about Miyazaki, the Oscars and Howl’s Moving Castle at FPS.

- Newsday has an entertaining interview with Tim Burton regarding his Oscar nomination for The Corpse Bride.

As promised yesterday, here are the covers and first pages of the book, Mr. Bug Goes To Town. There’s something I love about these illustrations. Not quite like a Golden Book, but it has that New York grit in the illustrations.

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– For some reason, over the years I’ve had a fascination with the the Fleischer film, Hoppity Goes To Town.

I’d seen the movie when I was young, and I guess it’s stuck with me. I found it interesting that it was an original story for an animated feature. All of the Disney pieces (with the exception of Lady and The Tramp) were adaptations of books and tales.

I found it exciting that two great song writers, Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, would be writing for an animated film. They wrote three songs for the film: We’re The Couple In The Castle, Katy-did Katy-didn’t and I’ll Dance At Your Wedding Honey Dear. Loesser wrote Boy Oh Boy! with Sammy Timberg.
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As it turns out they didn’t get nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song. Gulliver’s Travels had been nominated for song (Faithful Forever) and scoring. It lost both to The Wizard of Oz. They did sell a lot of records and sheet music to Mr. Bug Goes To Town.

I have a children’s book with attractive illustrations inspired from the Fleischer film. Starting tomorrow I’ll post a couple of these pictures regularly until the book is completely posted.

- Jenny Lerew has a superb posting up today about Lady and The Tramp‘s story line. It’s well worth reading – with an excellent illustration from the storyboard. Go there –
Blackwing Diaries.

- I found it entertaining to see how many people commented on the Jeopardy question I posted two days ago.

Many people felt that the answer should have been Ub Iwerks, but let’s use logic. The general public doesn’t have a clue as to who Ub Iwerks was. Nor did Iwerks invent the Multiplane Camera for Disney. He developed it for himself, and Disney engineers built one simultaneously. (Sure, they probably stole the idea, but they didn’t make Snow White with Iwerks’ camera stand! Nor did the Disney studio ever give Iwerks credit for inventing it.)

I was curious to see how long it would take before someone posted the exact question that I couldn’t locate at the time I wrote my piece. “T” was the one who sent it in and wins a zoetrope as a prize. All he has to do is send me an address, and I’ll send him/her the unannounced reward.