Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- When I was a kid, there were few resources one could turn to for information about animation and the process of making these films. Before computers, information was somewhat more difficult to acquire.

I couldn’t afford many books on the subject. Of course, I owned the Preston Blair book and that other Walter T. Foster book about Making Animated Cartoons (the one that wasn’t drawn very well and included animation examples that just didn’t work.) My treasure was the 1958 Bob Thomas book, The Art of Animation, with its technicolor focus on Sleeping Beauty.

I also clipped every magazine/newspaper article or image I could find about cartoons and saved it in a homemade scrapbook. It would be years before I came upon Mike Barrier‘s Funnyworld Magazine or any other mag, for that matter, that focused exclusively on animation or cartooning.

There were other books, and I went to the library to check them out monthly. I treasured that library copy of Robert Field‘s The Art of Walt Disney that I read over and over again. I appreciated Nat Falk‘s How to Make Animated Cartoons.

There was one book The Complete Guide to Cartooning by Gene Byrnes that had a chapter on MGM cartoons. This book had some of the greatest photos in it. Animators, inkers, directors, cels and sound effects. The pictures were great in that forties kinda way that just had me drooling animation when I looked at it. (It was published in Jan, 1950.)

This came to me years ago when I found the animation section of this book on line. I haven’t been able to locate the site again; if I do, I’ll post the link or scan the section myself to post.
It came again recently when friend, Tom Hachtman, visited and brought a copy he owned to see if I knew about it. Of course, opening the whole book was like going home again after dozens of years. I knew every page intimately.

Two pages that stood out followed the MGM section and had the same effect within the book of seeing a Terrytoons cartoon after seeing one from MGM. Low rent. The pages look like left overs from Nat Falk’s book (and may, in fact, have been part of one of his books.)

However it amused me to look them over and actually run the peculiar walk cycle through AfterEffects to watch the motion. There are no registration marks, so I had to guess. (I didn’t take a lot of time with this, believe me.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Here’s the QT of the odd pupwalk:

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Pupwalk on two’s
I’m not sure who animated this – my guess Connie Rasinski
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Today, of course, is September 11th and certainly no New Yorker can get through the date without reminiscing about that horrible day back in 2001.

Tom Hachtman visited the studio yesterday and he and I went on a bit. He’d regularly submits pieces to the New Yorker magazine. He was on his way into the city to submit a cover that had the strange bit (the week before 9/11) where a parachuter landed on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. The twin towers were in the background. When he learned, coming into town, that the buildings had been struck, he didn’t even show his cover idea (a good and funny one, normally) but went home.

Everyone was affected from great to slight, and a very sad calm comes over when we give our minds to it.

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- Shane Acker‘s 9 opened in New York this past Wednesday and might have snuck in without notice if we weren’t looking for it. I have seen the ad for it several times on tv -all during Yankee games – (which is more than I can say for Ponyo.) All of the ads were action-adventure blow up kinda ads. None of them would get me near a theater.

I do have the memory of the short that was nominated for the Oscar. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I certainly remembered it. Mad Max meets Henry Selick meets student film. I couldn’t tell if it was puppet or cgi, though I suspected cgi. I now know it was. At least Shane Acker makes no bones about that being the look he was going for.

The film didn’t get a review in the NYDaily News until today – a short 2 star review; it earned 3 stars from the NYPost, and received a generally non-commital of a review from A.O.Scott in the NYTimes. (Since he’s now half of that new “Siskel/Ebert” clone of a show, it’ll be interesting to see what he says live on the upcoming program.)

The NYTimes does have a slide show of stills from the film.

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- Speaking of cgi looking like puppet films, here’s a cgi film that DOESN’T look like a Viewmaster clone. Un tour de manège They sought to imitate painting.
What do you know! Gobelins strikes again.

The film’s a bit romantic in tone, but the graphics are superbly done. It’s technically very sophisticated but quite simple in its look and execution. I appreciated the work that went into it and the final product.

Thanks to Ian Lumsden‘s great blog for pointing me in the right direction.

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- Too Art for TV4 is the title of the latest art exhibit of work by animation artists. The wrok will be displayed in Williamsburg at the art gallery, Erebuni. The opening reception is next Friday, September 18th, 6pm-9:30pm

The show, itself, will run from September 18th, through October 17th, 2009
at Erebuni, 158 Roebling St. Williamsburg, NY 11211.

I urge you to support your fellow artists and take a look.

Some of the artists exhibiting may be unfamiliar names; others may be friends. I suggest you check out the website and scroll down. Take the time to read some of the bios.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS include:

Liz Artinian ____ Amanda Baehr-Fuller____
Christopher Beaumont ____Andrew Bell
Robert Bohn ____Connie Li Chan
Devin Clark____ Eliot Cowan
Jared Deal____ Kelly Denato
Eric Dyer ____Maya Edelman
Jon Ehrenberg____ Christopher Fisher
Chris George ____Kenneth B Gore
Edmond Hawkins ____Jen Hill
Stephen Irwin____ Marta Maria Jonsdottir
kaNO ____Thomas Knowler
Eileen Kohlhepp ____Peter J. Lazarski
Eric Leiser____ Adam Levine
Dave Lipson____ Todd Kidwell Lown
Richard Mather Cynthea____ Satsuki Mazur
Margaret Meyer____ Jessica Milazzo
Nate Milton ____Michael Mucci
Deodato Pangandoyon____ Alex Smith
Zartosht Soltani____ Ryan Sovereign

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- I enjoyed Mark Mayerson‘s comments on Miyazaki‘s book Starting Point. I’ve been hot to get my hands on this one for some time now. I ordered it from Amazon and have been in limbo ever since.

I’ve just received a second notice (a month later) that the book has just been shipped. I’ll believe it when I have the book in my hands. It’s a bit frustrating. There are times when I wonder why I didn’t just go to the store and buy a copy! (Of course, laziness is the answer.)

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- As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, Walt and El Grupo opens today at the Quad Cinema on 13th Street. The reviews for the film have been good (only the NYPost offered their top reviewer), as expected. All of those I saw (about 6 of them) said the film was too reverential, a studio promoting its own history.

I thought it a good documentary with lots of sterling footage of the groups travels through Latin America. Jerry Beck’s one negative comment is the same for me – I wish the film had offered more of the animation from the films that came out of this trip. Of course, I’m one of those the movie was made for – an animation fan who went into it knowing who all the people on screen were.

I did appreciate a lot of the commentary about the strike, that all of these employees were part of – on Walt’s side of the fence. We learn in the doc that many of them were worried for those they’d left behind. We can easily imagine what a concern that would be. It’s a good film that you should see if you have any interest in Disney.

- On her blog, Moonflygirl, Tania Covo posted a few of the beautiful illustrations in the book Tales from the Arabian Nights – published by Hamlyn in 1960. The illustrations were by Jiri Trnka.

I was familiar with Tania’s excellent site covering the works of Errol Le Cain, so was pleased to see that she enjoyed Trnka’s work as well. However, I was delighted when she offered me scans of the remaining illustrations in this book.

A joy to offer them here:

(Click any image to enlarge.)

The book is a treasure.
Thank you Tania for your generous loan of these excellent illustrations.

- Herman Schultheis was an effects animator who worked on Fantasia. He kept a tight record of the effects they were creating from 1938-1941 and a photo display of how they were done. Schultheis disappeared in 1954 while trekking through Central America, and the notebook was forgotten until his wife’s death in the early 1990s, after which it was discovered by Howard Lowery behind the couple’s bedroom wall.

The book will be on display at the The Walt Disney Family Museum when it opens in October. It’s also been digitized so that visitors will be able to go through the book, enlarge photos and view it page by page.

Prior to the discovery of the book we were able to figure out a few of the effects. One Disneyland show, in fact, recreated the bubbling lava scene from the Rite of Spring sequence.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Josh Meador recreated the slow motion shoot of the
boiling concoction used to develop the bubbling lava.

However, the book revealed so much more than we’d understood
about how the superb effects had been crafted.

Herman Schultheis created the book of charts and photos
which gives us a link to the many creative effects in the film.

Using a vat of water, they were able to
drop ink into the liquid and film it in slow motion.

A photo of the ink spilling into the water behind built-in mattes.

Taking the shot of the ink, they then turned it upside-down.

They then superimpose the “smoke” (or ink) over the volcanoes.
This same effect was used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind
to create clouds when the alien ships were moving in on the
farmhouse where the boy and mother lived.

The orchestra was shot on a set with strong, planned shadows.

All these shots were orchestrated and planned for color effects.

They were also catalogued by Schultheis who kept close
track of the music, as well, in his book. You can see a
page by page breakdown of the score at the top of the page.

You can see the highly polished sheet of metal (middle left) which reflected
and distorted the animation drawings. This is what the camera photographed
in some of the scenes during the Night on Bald Mountain sequence.
It was also used for the fire in Bambi.

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This scene’s ghosts were shot using that distorted metal reflection.

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The ghosts also used a form of cross dissolve.
John Hubley explained to me how that was done.

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They shot the entire scene at 50% exposure. Then they went back
to the beginning and reshot the entire scene again at 50% exposure.

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However on the second shoot, they started by shooting a black frame.
This made #1 fall where #2 should have been, #2 for #3 etc.
This creates a ghostly dissolve effect.

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All of the drawings labelled with an “a” are the double exposures:
2a, 4a, 6a

A make-shift circular multiplane camera was built.

Created out of wooden sheets with holes cut out,
placed so they could shift angles, they were designed to
allow revolving artwork in the circular cut outs.

This allowed shooting scenes such as this shot of
a spider web as the camera turned around it while
dew glistened off it.

The spinning snowflakes are well explained in Schultheis’ book.

The snowflakes had a detailed construction.

The path of action was intricately defined.

The snowflakes were shot against a sheet of black velvet
hiding the wire guides.

They were shot in tight closeup. From below you can
see the turning gears they were constructed on.

Each snowflake was built on a turning gear
so that they could revolve in their path of action.

Burn these snowflakes over the multiplane background
and add matching 2D animated fairies within each snowflake,
and you have the finished scene.

- And speaking of the Nutcracker sequence from Fantasia, here are some models from Bill Peckmann‘s extraordinary collection of that sequece. This is probably my favorite of the sections of that feature. There’s some beautiful character animation within it, excellent effects and conceptually the images and music match.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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As this last model shows, the original plan for this sequence included a bug orchestra playing the score – whether part or all of it is questionable – there are a lot of models, drawings and watercolors left behind.

These can be found dominating the book that was released in 1940. There were books for each of the segments of Fantasia, and The Nutcracker Suite is one of them. Oddly, only few of the illustrations are frame grabs from the film, others feature fairies or few of the other characters who made the sequence. Most of the illustrations are these bug characters that don’t appear in the film.

So, to accompany the beautiful models above, I’ve decided to include the bug illustrations from this book – featured below.

1B&W

2B&W

3B&W

1c

2c

3c

4c

5c

6c

7c

8c

9c

10c

For more Fantasia items of interest, Bob Cowan is currently showcasing a number of his beautiful pieces on his website.

- Labor Day is one of those holidays you show off your flag, if you have one. In the past, it was expected that the flag might be an American flag, but times they are a changing.
My friend, Steve Fisher, found some other flags flying in Middle Village, Queens.
These are they:

Aside from the Welcome flag, there’s one for the Mets.
Queens, home of the Mets, is where many of their fans reside.

It’s doubtful the flag will help their season.

Just in time for Obama’s speech to the school children.

Just decorative. Very positive.

A little too positive.

Here come the Italians. Prouder of their heritage
than they are of their country – I guess.

A lot of flags but nothing in stars and stripes.

If you look in the background, you’ll find
some itsy bitsy American flags for the holiday.

I had to post this brilliant shot by Steve
from a past post. How could I not
end with the real McCoy?

Happy Labor Day, everyone.
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Many thanks to Steve Fisher.

Dormitorium: an Exhibition of Film Decors by the Quay Bros

The Brothers Quay have an exhibition on display at Parsons School of Design, 2 West 13th Street on the ground level. It’s on exhibit from now through October 4, 2009.

Stephen and Timothy Quay claim writers Franz Kafka and Robert Walser, animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Richard Teschner, and composers Leoš Janácek, Zdenek Liška, and Leszek Jankowski among their influences. All of these artists can be felt with each of the constructions on display.

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On entering you see a darkened room with boxes about
the size of your torso – maybe 3′ x 4′ – on display.

Of to the side there’s a theater with constantly running films
showing Quay brother works. One of every kind of chair.

Within the boxes there are whole worlds.
Magnificent detail upon detail.

To the next box for a wholly different world.

Again the amazing detail is brought to the enclosure.

A couple of the boxes are seen through a prism.
The interior is magnified.

You have to get close to it to get real clarity.
You virtually enter these little rooms.

Some of these worlds seem enormous.

There are many closeups one could take given all there is to see.

This little scene is in the upper left box of the full view above.

The central character on the main stage.

You can get an idea of the cases and the display.
All contain their own little worlds.

Another magnifying glass focuses on a feather.

Just beyond the feathered quill there’s the writer.

The last box near the exit has a label within.

Many of the cases can be viewed
from three different perspectives.

- Last week I posted an article about women in animation which originally appeared in Sightlines Summer/Fall 1987 issue. I’d also mentioned that the very same issue had an article by John Canemaker about Snow White’s 50th Anniversary. Naturally, I have to post that article as well. It ties in with the recent issue of D23 wherein John has an article about Snow White celebrating a new remastering of the film and the ways it continues to inspire new animation artists. This is its 72nd anniversary.

Here’s the article:

SNOW WHITE IS FIFTY

This year, Walt Disney’s first animated feature, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, celebrates its golden anniversary with its re-release in some 2,000 theatres in North America and in venues in 60 countries overseas. The blitz of media events and publicity has encompassed proclamations, parades, and public appearances; soft-drink, clothing, and book tie-ins; a TV special; and, according to Jon Lang, Disney’s director of film licensing, “More merchandising for this movie than any other, including STAR WARS.” Even a Snow White rose has been created, with 100 bushes shipped to mayors in 40 major cities.

To date, the half-century-old SNOW WHITE has worldwide grosses totalling more than $330 million, making it one of the most popular motion pictures of all time and the movie that saved the Disney studio from financial disaster. “You should have heard the howls of warning when we started making a full-length cartoon,” recalled Walt Disney years later. Hollywood pundits called it “Disney’s Folly,” and predicted no one would sit through a seven-reel cartoon.

One of Disney’s reasons for producing SNOW WHITE as a full-length, animated cartoon was financial: The introduction of double-features during the 1930′s bumped Disney’s one-reelers—his cartoon “fillers”—off the screen. The other reason was an artistic one: A bold visionary and innovator, Walt Disney wanted to make full use of his staff’s extraordinary skills, which were developed during the making of his short films. Starting with Mickey Mouse’s debut in 1928, the Disney studio artists made remarkable and steady progress in expanding the stylistic and narrative parameters of the animated cartoon.

Disney’s introduction of certain technological elements-sound and color—forced animation to change. Soundtracks dimensionalized a character’s personality and toned down the over-exaggerated pantomime favored by the silent cartoons. In 1932′s FLOWERS AND TREES, one of Disney’s experimental Silly Symphonies (a series of shorts begun in 1929), Disney utilized a three-toned Technicolor process that allowed for a full range of hues. Old graphic formulas for characters and forces of nature were gradually redesigned to convey the illusion of reality and sincerity that Walt saw in his mind’s eye. The plots of the shorts came to be based on the personalities of the characters, rather than on mere action or gags. Thus, the emotional possibilities for animation were extended as never before.

Unprecedented Problems

The problems encountered in the making of SNOW WHITE were unprecedented. More than 750 artists worked on the film for three years, creating at least two million drawings (of which 250,000 made it into the film).

One of the most formidable problems was the animation of the human figures. The Princess, the Queen, the Prince, and the Huntsman had to be convincing for the melodrama to work. Indeed, the audience had to truly believe that two cartoon characters were going to murder another cartoon character. Previous unsuccessful attempts to portray human motion included the 1934 Silly Symphony, THE GODDESS OF SPRING. To overcome the drawing problems and stiff animation of that experiment, Disney established art classes on the studio lot. All staff artists were obliged to attend in order to study films frame-by-frame and to draw from a nude model. In addition, live models were filmed for the animators to study; interestingly, the model for Snow White was a young dancer who later became famous as Marge Champion.

The animation of the human characters works, for the most part, but is spotty. Snow White has a unique, sweet charm, but the poor Prince is never more than a cardboard symbol of a romantic hero. In contrast, the seven dwarfs are superbly realized. “These inspired gnomes,” wrote New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, “with their geometrical noses, flexible cheeks, linear mouths and eyes, highly stylized beards and costumes . . . lend themselves to articulation because of the tremendous magic of well-directed lines. But the characters Snow White, Prince Charming, and the Queen are badly drawn attempts at realism. … To imitate an animated photograph, except as satire, is in poor taste.”

For SNOW WHITE’S feature-length format, the violent, fast action and bright colors used in Disney’s earlier short films had to be softened and paced to sustain audience interest. Muted earth tones of green and brown predominate, and the extensive use of shadows enhances cool forest scenes, as well as bright meadows and moonlit castles. Snow White’s nightmarish escape through the forest is a scene full of rapid cuts and violent movement. It is followed by the sequence in which the forest animals discover Snow White, which is gentler and slower-paced than the one that precedes it.

The score, eight songs by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey (including “Whistle While You Work,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and “Heigh-Ho”), advances the plot and adds to our knowledge of the characters and their motivations, desires, and inner thoughts. The integration of songs with the plot precedes Broadway’s Oklahoma by six years.

Disney’s greatest personal input was in the development of the script and the personalities of the characters. The final scenario is admirably lean, clocking in at 83-action-packed minutes. While the story is succinctly told, it is also filled with details, the result of three years of intensive story conferences and ruthless storyboard critiques by Walt and his creative staff. Six months of work on the film was scrapped by Disney, and he ordered entire scenes redrawn. Three sequences in story-board or rough animation were cut from the film, not because they were bad, but because they impeded the flow of the story. At a recent press conference at the new Disney animation studio in Glendale, California, drawings and test footage from those “lost” sequences were shown. It was apparent that those sequences—which feature the dwarfs’ bed-building routine, soup-eating song, and a dream ballet with Snow White and the Prince—would have been as charming and entertaining as anything that remains in the film.

Disney’s perfectionism drove up the cost of the movie, produced during the Depression years of 1934-37, to astronomical heights, from an initial $150,000 to $1.5 million. “As the budget climbed higher and higher,” said Walt, “I began to have some doubts, too, wondering if we could ever get our investment back.” There was a cliff-hanging deal with a bank to borrow more money; but as the world knows, SNOW WHITE finally proved a great success. The film made its world premiere on December 21, 1937, and reviews were glowing. SNOW WHITE initially earned $8.5 million at the box-office, an enormous sum for the time, especially since children’s movie tickets cost 10 cents.

Feminist Reassessment

Although SNOW WHITE is undeniably a masterpiece of American cinema and a classic of character animation technique, the film has recently become the focus of feminist reassessment and anger. Feminists argue that Snow White is a symbol of female passivity, as she waits to be rescued by an active male, who will give her life purpose and meaning. Film historian Sally Fiske suggests that in order to “comprehend the statement SNOW WHITE makes, imagine reversing it. Try to imagine that the dwarfs were seven little women and the title character was a young prince. The story becomes utterly inconceivable—which is a very telling comment about how we perceive women.”

Charles Solomon, writing in The Los Angeles Times about this subject, interviewed Karen Rowe, an associate professor of English at UCLA specializing in fairy tales and folklore. “While children need a sense that a young figure can confront problems and surmount them, heroes tend to overcome problems in more active ways,” claims Rowe. “What I think is problematic for the 20th century reader of popular tales-including the Disney versions— is that no provision is made for activity on the part of the heroine. It’s all rescue, all passivity. What that communicates to a female child is that it’s never by your own will or action that you overcome a problem. It’s through intervention on your behalf by some other figure. That undercuts any sense of growth and leads to a cultural emphasis on female dependency, which I think is very destructive.”

When SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS was made in the 1930′s, issues concerning women’s rights, feminism, and role models were not part of the social consciousness of the time. Our approach to viewing SNOW WHITE today should be the same as the one we bring to viewing other film classics, such as THE BIRTH OF A NATION, whose ideology is out of step with current important social issues. Parents should discuss such anachronistic screen images with their children, placing the characters within the context of the period in which they were created and supplementing them with alternative stories and female characters who are, as Professor Rowe says, “more affirmative of a young girl’s ability to act.”

John Canemaker, a contributing editor to Sightlines, ;s the author of Winsor McCay—His Life and Art, recently published by Abbeville Press.

If you want to see more pictures from Snow White, I posted a bunch of model sheets last Monday. Go here.

– Yesterday I began the display of models by Rowland B. Wilson done for SullivanBluth’s 1994 feature, Thumbelina. I have another large stack of them – all xeroxed copies, and I’ll try to get them all in today.

This film is far from the best of Don Bluth, but it goes to show how much solid work is done for any feature film. There’s also quite a bit to be learned from any feature. Many of these models didn’t end up in the film (take a look at Thumbelina herself in yesterday’s post) but the drive was a forward one.

Off to the modelshow:

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Another color one copied in B&W

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Some notes

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Finally, here are two color photos Rowland took of his presentation art.

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- In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen a large group of Disney model sheets from some of the early shorts and features. I thought it’d be a good time to look at something more recent. Thanks to Bill Peckmann‘s extraordinary collection of design material, I have access to quite a few model sheets by Rowland B. Wilson.

His models for Don Bluth‘s feature, Thumbelina, fill a binder. I’m gong to have to break it up into two posts.

In this first one I’ll reproduce the article Rowland had written for the in-house organ “Studio News.” This follows with models for some of the lead character models.

These models were done in pencil and ink, sometimes in color. Unfortunately, all of these are 8½ x 11 xerox copies. Blacks wash out and washes blacken. Regardless, they all come across fine enough to get the idea.

Any feature takes a lot of work. You can understand that just in the large number of model sheets that grace the production. When you have a talented artist such as Rowland Wilson doing that modelling for you, your art is off to a good start.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Here we have the model that Rowland drew for Thumbelina.
This is definitely not the rotoscoped princess that we saw in the film.

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Here we have a lot of different costumes Thumbelina
will wear as she travels on her expeditions.

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An original idea – a character who wears
more than one costume in a film!

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Jacquimo Swallow

In color but copied in B&W.

Jacquimo 1

Jacquimo 2

Jacquimo 3

Jacquimo 4

Jacquimo 5

Jacquimo 6

Some other birds in the course of the film.

Plenty of other models to follow tomorrow. Again, thanks to Bill Peckmann for the loan. It’s always great to showcase Rowland Wilson’s work.