Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Recently my friend Lou Scarborough was in New York. We spent about a half dozen lunches together while he was here and had a lot of laughs talking about the past and some not so happy moments, as well, talking about the present. Our last lunch, before he had to leave town had to be cancelled and we missed it. I was glad to have been able to bring him to an Academy screening where we got to share some thoughts about Blue Sky’s Epic. We also saw Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill one afternoon at the IFC theater. I’m glad we got to see one film we both enjoyed, somewhat.

Now I’ve received a letter from Jerry Beck with some sad information about our friend. Jerry writes:

Lou came down sick last Wednesday and his friend and roomate, Marc Schirmeister, took him to the hospital. He was operated on last Sunday for an obstruction in his digestive tract – that’s when they discovered the cancer. Lou has cancer of the prostate, colon and liver. He is at the UCLA Olive View Hospital in Sylmar, California.

Lou’s brother Cecil is arriving at LAX this afternoon, and will battle the rush hour traffic to get to the hospital.

Lou is stable but unconscious (they are keeping him sleeping because of the pain). He’s in intensive care in room 5B North in bed #9. The Nurse is Nurse Jerman. It doesn’t look good. (If you need any of the phone numbers, I can probably get them to you.

Lou did, at one time, have a blog where he left a lot of pencil art. If you’re up to reminiscing over Lou’s distinctive style of cartooning you can go to Scarboropolis.

- Speaking of Jerry Beck, he will soon be in New York and is planning a number of screenings, which as always will be interesting. One, scheduled for July 28th will be held at the BAMcinematek in Brooklyn, NY. This is dome under the auspices of the MP Academy and will include some rarely screened films:
Munro Dir. Gene Deitch (1960)
Ersatz Dir. Dusan Vucotic (1961)
The Hole Dir. John Hubley (1962)
The Pink Phink Dir. Friz Freleng & Hawley Pratt (1964)
Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass Double Feature Dir. John Hubley (1966)
The Box Dir. Fred Wolf (1967)

I am scheduled to be on a panel at 7pm that includes Jerry Beck, Emily Hubley and J.J. Sedelmaier. Presumably we’re there to talk about the films.

I’ve recently been the victim of the big corporation, Verizon, doing all sorts of play with my telephone and internet service. My poor wife, Heidi, can’t believe how horrendous this 3 week period was for me. It was debilitating, to say the least, but none of my films are damaged in the process. I can’t even imagine that . . . well, maybe I can.

Signe Baumane has heart-stopping, thrilling stories about her attempts to bring her feature film, Rocks in my Pockets, to completion. The film is about depression, can you imagine the making of the film about depression being the cause of the depression itself? She talks about the computers poor animators have to work with (not large corporations but those used by the likes of many of us) have to work with in making these films, and I can imagine worse than she’s been through, but thrilled to know she’s nearing the end without any large organizations tearing into her movie – yet. Take the few minutes to read her recent blog post about her film. It’s a good piece of writing with lots of clear warnings for all of us “small timers” who are still making films one frame at a time.

This is a subject that hasn’t come up in discussions with other independent animators doing their own feature films on home equipment. I’ll look forward to anything from Bill Plympton or Elliot Cowan on their films.

Read Computers on the Dots about her film, Rocks In My Pockets.

- Last week I was actually looking forward to The Lone Ranger and very disappointed when it was played more for gags than seriousness. Gore Verbinski was going more for Pirates of the Caribbean than Rango. He should stick to the animation. I liked Johnny Depp in his part as Tonto and the way he represents his half of the partnership. But for the “Masked Man” they played for gags making him the comedy star of the story. Surely there was a good partnership film in there. Instead of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon we could have easily had the Masked Man and Tonto. What’s the point? Why talk more about another failed film?

- This week, I saw three films; two were live action and adult, one was childish and for the most part animated by cgi EFFX people starring cartoon humans. Two were good.

Fruitvale Station was a first film by director/writer Ryan Coogler. It was about a young black man trying hard to change his life and live properly in America. Of course, it ended with his being killed in Oakland. He’s tried to raise his daughter well; he’s tried to go the straight and narrow by discarding the drugs he’s expected to sell (even though that sale would have been very easy and profitable), and he’s tried to be a good boyfriend to his potential mate and his mother. The story works hard not to make his a symbol but the real story they’re telling pushes hard to do the obvious. The director does a good job with a small cast of excellent actors led by the young star Michael B. Jordan. It’s an excellent and gripping film that deserves your attention.

The director, and two of its young stars answered questions for the NY Academy’s members. It was an excellent evening built around a fine film.

The well-known Danish director Thomas Vinterberg builds a quiet and subtle movie about a young teacher who has been trying to develop a good life in the small Danish community where he lives. He is named a child predator by his best friend’s daughter. The girl talks about images she’s seen on her brother’s friend’s laptop computer. Too quickly the staff at the school accept the girl’s words as truth and make it almost impossible for her to retract her confused accusations. The girl barely knows what she’s talking about, yet the entire community comes out against the innocent teacher. It’s a haunting film very well played and done in a low key manner. Whereas the story would probably most easily be played out through anger, Vinterberg merely has his teacher try hard to defend himself against the obviously non-true attack. When all seems to die down and settle in the teacher’s favor at the film’s end, it becomes clear that the story will never come clear. There will always be finger-pointing and hostilities for the rest of the lives in this small village.

It’s a very charged film, and was pleasantly covered by a short Q&A after the movie. A good experience for the best film of the week.

- Finally last night the overblown loud crash from the theater’s screen gave us the latest tiresome film from Guillermo del Toro. It’s hard to know who’s on the good or the bad side and if there is one. The film just didn’t stop coming at you. After 140 minutes, I’d had enough and left the theater. There was nothing more to learn. This is everything I find wrong with movies, and the deadening computer has put us at the center of the problem. After seeing Pan’s Labyrinth I came back to give Del Toro a second and third chance of entertaining me, but he never quite led up to his part of the deal. The Hellboy films left me flat, and the endless monsters and loud soundtracks left me cold.

Ken Hultgren was an animator who worked for Disney during the height of the animal artistry that went on in the studio through the making of Bambi. Ken was a brilliant draftsman whose work was turned into a couple of beautiful drawing books after the finish of Bambi. It’s certaily worth pursuing the couple of books he produced. They all vary enormously and show off his flagrant abilities as an anmal artist.

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Good News!

Until I get my service back from Verizon, I won’t be having much of a blog, so I’m sorry that it’ll be down for a while. They keep telling me, day to day, that it’ll be resolved today. But that hasn’t been happening in the past three weeks, and I’m still without my internet.

All I can ask is that you have a bit of patience; it’s taking all the patience I have to deal with it. That’s about all I know.

After posting the book, Piccoli, a week or so ago, I’ve grown more interest in Paul Julian‘s work. He’s known predominantly for the Bgs he did at Warner Bros and the art direction he did on The Tell Tale Heart. However, there’s more film work he did independently.

The Hangman was a short film he did with co-director Les Goldman. Maurice Ogden’s poem is read by Herschel Bernardi in a very earnest tone. The artwork by Julian absolutely saves this film which was nominated for the Oscar.

Roger Corman also used Paul Julian for a number of opening title sequences for the low budget films he did in the 60s. I’m going to try pulling some frame grabs from a number of these title sequences so that I can place some focus on Julian’s work in these forgotten films.

I start here with The Terror a film Starring Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson. Julian uses a couple of pieces of artwork that he works over the course of the sequence with lots of lateral camera moves. Quite expressive work, though certainly not on a par with Tell Tale Heart.

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Starts at the bottom and pans up.

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Monte Hellman directed Two Lane Blacktop.

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You can watch a grayed-out version of this video on YouTube. The credits come on about a minute into it.

Swamp Women’s title sequence will follow soon.

– Somehow always touching in the back corners of the recesses of my mind is the work of Jim Tyer. He’s possibly the most well-known animator in the medium’s short history. The guy has done such eccentric work that it’s impossible to find someone comparable. Even to those who don’t realize they’re mimicking his work, they would be surprised to learn that they’re doing Jim Tyre and not Tex Avery or Bob Clampett and Rod Scribner.

A number of things have been written about Jim Tyer. Interestingly, it’s predominantly the same few people that seem to be writing and usually the same bits are repeated.

Chief among sites that offers bits and comics among their offerings, is Kevin Langley‘s Cartoons Comics and Model Sheets. This blog first caught my attention with plenty of Mr. Tyer’s imaginative drawing. Not quite rough, not quite gesture drawing, and certainly not rendering. The best one could say was Wacko.

You see I’d been an ardent enthusiast of Mr. Tyer’s work for years, and here they were – stills. Plenty of them. So there were lots and lots of links. You can’t really write lots of words when processing Jim Tyer’s material. As a matter of fact, I can only think of one pwerson who did that job and did an impeccable turn of it. Mark Mayerson.

As a matter of fact, you might want to stop reading here and go to Mark’s comments, now. He had two key things to say and no one else has had much more to say to me. It’s a paper he wrote in 1990 and with it he had more to say about Jim Tyer‘s work than had anyone else to that date.

I meant for this piece to be much more exhaustive, but the problems I’m having with my internet are annoying. Unfinished pieces have been thrown up as complete. This is one of them, the Provenson piece (though that’s much more finished) made it to post, and others as well. I may quit writing at all until Verizon finally comes to my door to correct my phone service. (I still don’t have an operating phone number after three weeks and my internet is intermittently up and down based on its own whim.)

I apologize for the sloppiness of the whole thing.

Bill Peckmann sent scans of this glorious and beautiful children’s book by Martin Provenson. There really, as far as I’m concerned, is no reason necessary. The illustrations are just beautiful, and I find myself staring at them for long periods of time. It’s a great book.

Bill writes the accompanying note:

The reason I have this book is because when George Cannata Jr. was our Animation Design teacher at Visual Arts in 1960, he recommended that his students buy it because it was known as the “animation designers bible” in those days.

The oversized book cover

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This post will stay up Saturday as well – until Verizon gets its stuff together.

- John Canemaker contributed a two part article on J.P. Miller to Cartoons, the International Journal of Animation published by ASIFA Int’l. The two part article appeared in the Winter 2006 and Spring 2007 issues.

John Parr Miller was a designer who worked at the Disney studio from 1934 to 1942 as part of Joe Grant’s elite Character Model Department. After his service in WWII, he became a children’s book designer and author remaining in that field for the remainder of his life.

J.P. Miller’s career at Disney’s is not something we often hear about, and I think the information in John’s extended article is so valuable that it has to get out there even further and be shared more openly. Consequently, with John’s permission, I’m posting both parts.

This is part 1:

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- Last week I posted the first part of a two-part article written by John Canemaker for the magazine, Cartoons, the International Journal of Animation published by ASIFA Int’l. The two part article appeared in the Winter 2006 and Spring 2007 issues. (See Part 1 here.)

John Parr Miller worked at the Disney studio from 1934 to 1942 as part of the Character Model Department run by Joe Grant. After Miller’s service in WWII, he designed and illustrated many children’s books and he continued in that field for the remainder of his life.

This is an extraordinarily well-researched article by John Canemaker, and I’m pleased to post it here for all those who don’t have access to the magazine, Cartoons. Thanks go to John for his permission to post both parts of the article.

With more of a focus on his children’s books, this is part 2:

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