Animation Artifacts &Models 20 Apr 2009 07:39 am
Van Buren stills
A short while back I found a couple of Van Buren animation drawings for sale on Ebay. I bought them and have been waiting for the new DVD from Steve Stanchfield and Thunderbean Animation. Toddle Tales is a gem of a dvd, and I was able to locate my drawings in the cartoons available.
I already have several copies of The Sunshine Makers, which is probably the most famous of the Rainbow Parade cartoons. This was a film that was apparently done for Borden’s milk, and features one of the screwiest animation stories ever.
A bunch of little guys (named “Joy” on the model sheets) deliver bottled sunshine (which looks a lot like milk) somewhere. We never see who’s receiving the sunshine, but carts of these elves are delivering it.
Other little guys (named “Gloom”) don’t want the sunshine delivered. We see one of these top-hatted characters shoot an arrow at a Joy guy, and gloomy gus ends up getting bathed in sunshine.
My drawing reveals him taking off his outer clothes to bury them.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
Labelled by animator(?) Joy and Gloom Aug 3 1934
The other two drawings I bought were a mystery to me. However, I was easily able to find them in the cartoon A Little Bird Told Me.
Burt Gilette & JIM TYER directed the film, and the music is by Winston Sharples,
who scored most of the Paramount cartoons later in life.
This is an equally odd short. A live action (it looks like second-rate Our Gang of the early 30s) child gets caught eating jam. His sister wipes him clean. However the bird in the tree tells all about it.
Apparently, there’s a bird newspaper just out the kitchen window. Walter Finchell is assigned the story by his owl editor. Here’s where my drawings come in. The owl editor comes out to hand over the story.
One of the drawings is an exact match. The other is close.
Thunderbean also includes a few model sheets on the dvd. Here’s one of my editor owl.
on 20 Apr 2009 at 8:49 am 1.Jason said …
Great Ebay acquisitions. Jealous.
on 20 Apr 2009 at 9:03 am 2.joecab said …
Actually it’s not really an exact match: the first pencil drawing of the owl takes place a frame after the screen cap.
Man, Walter Winchell sure got around in cartoons of the day…
on 20 Apr 2009 at 9:21 am 3.R.Dress said …
Hi Michael,
Wow these are gems. I’m absolutely smitten by the shear simplicity and emotional readability of these characters! I wonder at what point in NY did timing charts start to show up on animation drawings.
Best,
R
on 20 Apr 2009 at 9:06 pm 4.Mark Newgarden said …
I have a pile of Van B drawings as well. There are still vintage goodies out there to be found.
on 20 Apr 2009 at 11:56 pm 5.Steve Stanchfield said …
Wow! I LOVE those drawings…. a while back I saw one from the same sequence of the editor owl for sale… and wished I had bought it! Putting together the DVD was a lot of fun… and hard to figood prints of all those things…. The coolest model sheets (Jerry Beck and Mark Kausler provide most of them) was a few from a cartoon that was never produced, featuring Punch and Judy….
on 21 Apr 2009 at 4:26 am 6.slowtiger said …
I’ve got the Sunshine Makers on VHS – a crappy tape of randomly chosen cartoons, packed in bad artwork and sold as children’s stuff for about 5€ each. This cartoon was special in its crazyness. Thx for all the information.
on 21 Apr 2009 at 6:32 am 7.Michael said …
I wondered about the “Punch & Judy” cartoon/model sheets. In some odd way they reminded me of “Parrotville”. There’s a cartoon someone should do. (Although Luzzati & Gianini did “Pulcinella” it wasn’t quite the same.)
on 16 Sep 2012 at 7:49 pm 8.Spurwing Plover said …
I guess the name WATER FINCHELL is a parady of WALTER WINCHELL