Michael Sporn Animation – Splog » Babbitt’s Carousel Mime

Babbitt’s Carousel Mime – 1

- John Hubley‘s feature film, Everybody Rides the Carousel, was adapted from Erik Eriksons’ Eight Stages of Man, a Psychosocial Theory of Human Development.

The Hubleys designed the feature (which started out as three half hours for CBS and then was rushed to fill it to 90 min feature length in the final 3 months of production) around a carousel. 8 horsees represented different stages of life. The narrator was a mime we see throughout at the carousel. Art Babbitt was hired to animate him, and things got bad pretty quickly and he left after animating a couple of early scenes. Barrie Nelson completed the character in the show.

John took one look at the pencil test of this scene on a movieola and proclaimed it the greatest animation he had ever seen. It wasn’t long that he took the scene – basically exposed on twos throughout – and asked me to change it exposing it on four frame dissolves throughout. This would extend the scenes and the character and would milk the scenes for everything possible. Art Babbitt was furious and never spoke to John again. For the full story go to this past post.

The scene is about 200 drawings long. I’ll break it into parts and post each part here in about 4 or 5 segments. Here’s the first part. As you can see there are a lot of Â½ drawings. Animation extender – it’s a very slow moving character. A lot of poetry.

The QT will be done using Art’s exposure on twos.