Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– My favorite site in the last week has definitely been Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern. He has been posting a lot of models from Rooty Toot Toot which are just amazing.

Then to break from that film, he gave us Eyvind Earle Bg models for Sleeping Beauty. The artwork posted has been beyond inspirational, and the comments given to Amid are also strong. I hadn’t realized how many people didn’t like Sleeping Beauty. I’d always thought Earle’s Bg styling and Tom Oreb’s angular characters were a perfect match. Since half of the design of tv animation and movies like Pocahontas have ripped into Eyvind Earle’s work, it interests me to see how many people blame him for the film’s failure – if there is one.

The site has provoked argument and information. It’s extraordinary always to see how other people think and feel about these classic films. I love reading it all, and the artwork is sensational. Kudos Amid. This site has become a must visit, daily.

Richard Linklater will be back this year with another animated film. Animators, at least the ones I spoke to, seemed to take offense at his last effort, Waking Life. (Somehow, I was told this was not an animated film – rotoscope. I was surprised when it wasn’t nominated for the Oscar over Jimmy Neutron!!! How embarassing.) I thought it quite an interesting effort. This, to me, is no less animation than Peter Jackson’s King Kong or 2/3 of the other cgi efforts being released with cartoony characters and motion captured animation. What was different for the animated Waking Life, was that it was somewhat intelligent and spoke on an adult level. We have to believe, given Linklater’s work, A Scanner Darkly will be more in that direction.

There are some interesting articles about this film, the problems and the history of its making.

Wired Magazine has the most up-to-date and extensive of these and makes for the best read.

The Austin Chronicle had a good article in January.

There are a couple of mixed pre-reviews on Ain’t It Cool News.

Personally, seeing an animated Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder is all I’ll need to get me to plunk down $12 when it opens on July 7th.

~

- There’s an A P story in the NY Post detailing the Simpons trailer running with Ice Age 2 which announces the Simpsons feature for July 27, 2007.

~

- The Drawing Center at 35 Wooster St. in NYC has an exhibition called Analog Animations running through April 15. It includes a number of animated pieces done by 18 emerging artists who animate their drawings largely with “old-fashioned,” hand-drawn animation techniques rather than digital media.

Analog Animation artists include: Heather Boaz, Brett Budde, Deborah Davidovits, Almut Determeyer, John Dooley, Magdalena Fernandez, Mark Fox, Eunjung Hwang, Shin il Kim, Anna Kiraly, Kakyoung Lee, Jennifer Macdonald, Liza McConnell, Oscar Munoz, Serge Onnen, Hans Op de Beeck, Linda Pella, and David Virgien

Gallery hours:
Tuesday–Friday, 10:00 A.M.–6:00 P.M.
Saturday 11:00 A.M.–6:00 P.M.

Tel: 212-219-2166

– We’ve finally finished the “artwork” on Reading To Your Bunny (not my idea of a title), and I ‘m pleased – sort of.

The film is based on an idea of Rosemary Wells‘ loosely presented in one of her books, “Read To Your Bunny.” She’s done a script, reworking the material, and we did a film. It uses an amalgam of her style of characters culled from a number of books.

The principal idea behind the story is to teach parents to read to their children. By reading aloud to their children, the kid will then get the impulse to read to themselves. It’s been proven and has been recommended by child psychologists for years. It’s just that people don’t realize the facts behind it. We did a film for UNICEF years ago which revealed the same information in a more straightforward way. It’s even been found that reading to a child in the womb has cognitive effects on the child. There’s quite a bit of research to back it up.

Anyway, this film is done – or at least the artwork is done. We’ll have it edited, locked and ready to go to mix by Tuesday. However, the music won’t come in till Wednesday, so we’re certainly on a schedule – of sorts. Not a moment too soon.

The film is scheduled to appear at the Tribeca Film Festival in a couple of weeks. (See the Mar. 26 posting.) It’s also already being sold to schools and libraries, and they have to be shipped by the end of the month.

When I finish a film like this, there’s some relief that it’s done and out of my hands, but there’s also disappointment that I’m not still in the thick of it. Even though it’s obviously not a career highlight, it’s a project that I’ve put a lot of care into, and got some satisfaction in the work, itself. The characters usually, in an odd way, grow on you.

We don’t have another job backing into it, so I’m going back to the POE film and will work on one of the stories. Perhaps we’ll do that as a short and put it out before the whole film is complete.