Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- John Canemaker has a new article about Milt Gross for his monthly piece at Print Magazine‘s website. Essentially, it’s a loving piece reviewing the new collection of The Complete Milt Gross which was edited by Craig Yoe.

I’ve long loved Milt Gross’ work and have closely studied the MGM shorts he did. They don’t quite capture the zaniness of the comic strip work, but he was obviously an inspiration for so much of the animation that was done in Hollywood back then.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if some people found inspiration in his work today and applied it to their animation artwork. Something other than the endlessly angular characters that we’re force-fed these days!

- Speaking of John Canemaker, he’s just loaned me a Ward Kimball scene from Peter and the Wolf. It’s about 500 drawings long, and will take me forever, but I’m going to start posting it next week. The walk cycle of all walk cycles. Something to look forward to (endless scanning and downloading), a great piece of animation to study.

The image above is a good sample.

Mars: SXSW will be playing tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Cinemafest in NYC at 9:30 PM. There will be one show only. Filmmaker, Geoff Marslett will be there along with several cast and crew!

The film is a completely rotoscoped space adventure done by the guy who gave us Monkey vs. Robot and Bubblecraft.

For a trailer go here.

- Recently, I posted a calendar by Wallace Tripp, and the response was strong. So, Bill Peckmann sent me his collection of greeting cards by Tripp, the earliest of which goes back to 1973, and I’m posting those here. (I’ll also have another calendar of his to post later in the week.)

Each and every card is a gem. I still say it’s a wonder that he didn’t work for an animation company designing characters. The guy was a brilliant draftsman, watercolorist and illustrator.

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This is the oldest of the cards.

By the way, take a look at the Tripp Family Archives site.

Hans Perk is posting a series of lectures on Layout. In August 2006 I posted the notes for the Disney afterhours lectures. To coincide with Hans, I’m recapping those notes.

- As noted yesterday, I am missing the notes to Lecture #2 of this Layout Course. - Hans Perk on his site, A Film LA, has posted the Ken Andersen LayOut Training Course from the Disney studio Nov, 1936.

Here’s the a fourth lecture that Phil Dike gave on May, 1936; it was called a “General Discussion”. Unfortunately, two of its pages were copied off kilter, pgs. 8 & 9. The copies here come courtesy of Hans Perk.

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- Bill Peckmann has sent me an incredible cache of photostats. These are watercolor paintings Rowland B. Wilson did while working for Disney. There are two groups of paintings: one for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one for Hercules.

These were all inspirational sketches, and they’re all extremely long. Consequently, I’m posting them in batches. The first comes from Hunchback, and I’ll post the full sized image, then break each down into a couple of parts so that you can appreciate the incredible detail Rowland did in these things.

I hope you enjoy them.

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More of the Hunchback paintings to come next week.

Many many thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing these glorious images.

Quay Brothers Commissioned to Create Film about Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum

Stephen ’69 (Film) and Timothy ’69 (Illustration) Quay – the internationally recognized Quay Brothers - have been commissioned by Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum to create a film about its collection of anatomical and pathological specimens, medical instruments and apparatus, and memorabilia of famous scientists and physicians.

Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery Exhibition coordinator Edward Waisnis, through his Pro Bono Films production company, will produce the film. University Liberal Arts Master Lecturer David Spolum is co-writing the script and conducting related research. Filming begins this summer and the premiere is slated for next spring.

Project funding has been provided by the Pew Charitable Trusts, administered through the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Thanks for the tip to Tom Hachtman

Stephen Hartley Blog

- A new blog hit the jet stream today. The very young, Stephen Hartley has fashioned a new blog so he can comment on animation history. Called blabbing on arts and culture, (a big title) it begins today with some thoughts on Tom and Jerry. Worth seeing what comes of it given some of the comments Stephen has made on my site as well as others like Mark Mayerson’s and Hans Perk’s.

George Griffin of View at Biennial

- George Griffin has been featured in the Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial Exhibition with a piece called Viewmaster. It can be viewed here.

Viewmaster was a film George made in 1978. It features a wild series of art/cartoon characters chasing each other as the camera pans slowly past them all. When it returns back to the first on screen runner, it cuts back to the full view of the “Viewmaster”-like mutoscope with all of the characters running around the border. It doesn’t sound it, but the film is powerful. I think this is George’s work at its peak. As a matter of fact, after seeing the film back in ’78, I bought a 16mm print from George. (This was before the VHS/DVD days.) I had to own a copy.

That same full screen “Viewmaster” is on display animated at the site of the Biennial exhibition. You can also view many other pieces by artists such as William Kentridge, Robert Breer, Cindy Sherman, and Dziga Vertov.
Congratulations to George for being in such esteemed company.

View it.

Hans Perk is posting a series of lectures on Layout. In August 2006 I posted the notes for the Disney afterhours lectures. To coincide with Hans, I’m recapping those notes.

- The following is the Disney Layout Training Course’s 3rd meeting. Charles Philippi gave the lecture, and it’s a good one. It’s all about pans. (I posted the first lecture and don’t have the second. One is missing.)

There was a time when I was working for John Hubley on Everybody Rides The Carousel where he had asked me to design a background and setup for a package to be sent out, that day, to Bill Littlejohn for animation. Fortunately, I had just read these notes the day before, and I used what I’d learned. Hubley gave me a nice compliment, and I gave it all to Charles Philippi.

Littlejohn, by the way, did one of my favorite scenes of the entire time I was at that studio. I have the large number of drawings and will someday post some of them. Beautiful animation.

This Layout course is some 18 pages long. Since that’s a job to post all 18, I’m going to break it up into two days. Tomorrow the last half will be posted.

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- Wallace Tripp‘s illustrations have gotten a bit of attention here, so Bill Peckmann followed up his other pieces with a row of book covers that Tripp illustrated between 1972 and 1999. (There are many other books not included here, but these are plenty to give an idea of the man’s scope and range.)

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for putting these all together.

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Front cover

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Front cover

Back cover

The guy sitting at the dest at the top of this page of
Marguerite is a self-caricature of Wallace Tripp.

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Hans Perk is posting a series of rare lectures on Layout. In August 2006 I posted the notes for the Disney afterhours lectures. To coincide with Hans, I’m recapping those notes.

- Yhe Disney Layout Course was held after hours at the studio in 1936. The first lecture was given by Tom Codrick on May 6, 1936. I have the first lecture, the third lecture by Charles Philippi and an earlier one held by Phil Dike (though this last seems to be missing two pages.)

I hope it’ll be useful. I’ll post the next in a few days.

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- Last week I posted the first half of this book by Edward Lear of his Nonsense poems which was illustrated by Keith Ward. There’s not a lot known about Ward, however I did receive a nice email from Wilbert Plijnaar
which gave me a couple of links and some info. I’ll post that letter at the bottom of the post.

Here’s the rest of the book thanks to the gracious generosity of Bill Peckmann.

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The back inner illustration

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The book’s back cover.

Here’s that email, from Wilbert Plijnaar:

A few years back fellow story board artist Harry Sabin allowed me
to make copies of a book he had (then) recently purchased ,
illustrated by Keith Ward : “Reynard the Fox”

I was so impressed by the Disneyesq / Walt Kelly- ish, style I found it impossible to believe the artist wasn’t more well known in animation circles.
I showed copies on the Cartoon Retro – and Dutch comic maker blog (both gone) for more information. We found there are many illustrators named Keith Ward , who all have different styles.
Through intensive mouse clicking I was led to some advertising illustrations that looked to be from the same artist ( see below) , learned Ward was amongst other , responsible for the “Dick and Jane ” and “Black Stallion” Illustrations and died in Florida on March 23, 2000 .

Dutch/French comic artist Evert Geradts pointed out that the signature of a landscape painter with the same name was identical to the Keith Ward from Reynard the Fox.
http://www.stewartgalleries.com/paintings.htm
(In the mean time the gallery seems to have taken the paintings offline but maybe they still have an archive?)

Some of the Reynard scans I put on Imageshack still survive, as does one of the commercial illustrations:

If you would like to see the 4 or 5 missing illustrations I will gladly scan them again for you.

Doing a renewed Google search after reading your blog, led me to a Leif Peng’s blog post from 2007 and a more recent one, with many examples and info about Ward.
http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/2007/10/keith-ward-1906-2000.html
and
http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/2009/06/keith-wards-texaco-fire-chief-pups.html

other links:
http://www.askart.com/askart/w/keith_ward/keith_ward.aspx
http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-elsie-the-cow-cook-book-1952-ill-by-keith

Thanks to Wilbert.

- John Canemaker‘s beautiful book, Treasures of Disney Animation Art, includes six animation cleanups of a scene by Hicks Lokey from the Pink Elephants sequence of Dumbo. Having recapped that sequence in yesterday’s post, I thought I’d show off these animation drawings.

Looking at the drawings alone you realize how much detail went into this sequence and how the animation pulses with the dominating tempo.

Take a look:

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