Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Do you know who Christo and Jeanne-Claude are?
They are the artists who have made their reputation by covering sculptures, fountains, buildings and shorelines with drapes. Their silk has covered buildings all over Europe and the United States.

The work of the companions has evolved over the years so that they no longer seem to be covering things. Their “Gates” sculpture seemed to have taken New York by storm a couple of years ago. They set up hundreds of flag-like orange gates throughout Central Park, and everyone went. The park became a free and open exhibition.

However, though they may have abandoned covering buildings, I think the idea has caught on in New York City.
I’m here to present evidence that there are many a draped building in NY.
Art has overtaken the City.

(click any image to enlarge.)

I came to realize this while taking my daily walk from home to studio.
I walked past what is becoming my favorite building in the City – the Flatiron Building.

The building, from a bit of a distance, looks flat, but when you come right up on it you realize that it’s a triangular shaped building that angles off as it reaches the cross streets of Broadway/5th Ave and 23rd Street.

As you look down the building, coming to its base, you notice the scaffold.
Scaffolds are everywhere in the City. They’re built to allow building owners to repair, clean or alter the edifice of their building. This way if anything falls off the buildings they won’t be sued.
(I remember a friend who had just bought a cherry-red sports car. His first drive into Manhattan, he parked in front of my old alma-mater, NY Institute of Technology. Their ornate building had an Egyptian-esque decor. When the friend returned to his car, there was a gargoyle looking up from his trunk. It had fallen off the building, smashed through the trunk and smiled up through the bright red metal.)

These scaffolds are everywhere. Across 5th Ave from the Flatiron Building, Bank America is covered in wood and steel.

To the casual pedestrian, these coverings can protect you from rain, but they also block out the sun. However, it isn’t just the scaffolding. As you look up from the scaffolding, you’ll see that the building has been wrapped – à la Christo.

The scaffolds are a mesh of piping. They contain infrequent openings to get in and out of the structures, and they often block up pedestrian traffic.
Stores have to create new signs for themselves so that people can locate the stores buried under the scaffolds.

Naturally, this makes for some wacky signage that seems incongruous with the new ediface over the building’s ediface.

Nothing seems “Juicy” anymore, It’s more like “cagey.”

The wraps come in different colors, designed to beautify the ugly buildings underneath, no doubt. Here’s a blue cover.

This one is white.

Some scaffolds have to be long to cover the extremely wide sidewalks at some points. However, since this building isn’t very wide, the wide scaffold is narrow from the front.

The monument in Washington Square Park was covered in mesh last summer as workers cleaned it. (I don’t have a photo of that, but here’s what it looks without the wrap.)

A block away from my studio is the little but attractive Italian church, Our Lady of Pompeii. They have been wrapped for the past few months. It’s not a high water mark for the church.

However, better for them to be covered than MY building. I get shivers just thinking about that idea.

With all these impersonators, it’s no wonder that Christo and Jeanne-Claude have moved from “wrapping” buildings to “gates.”

By the way, all of the images in this post (up to the Washington Square monument & Our Lady of Pompeii Church) were taken between 23rd and 19th Street on fancy Fifth Avenue. However, this is indicative of the City as a whole, not just that area.

Meet The Robinsons opened yesterday to largely negative reviews in NYC. The NYTimes critic, A.O.Scott, started his review with these two paragraphs:

At the end of “Meet the Robinsons,” a new 3-D computer-animated Disney film (loosely based on a popular children’s book by William Joyce), the screen is filled with an inspiring quotation from Walt Disney himself. The gist of it is that “around here” — meaning at Disney’s entertainment workshop — not a lot of time is spent looking backward. Instead, the motto is, as it is for some of the characters in the film, “Keep moving forward.”

In other words, learn from your mistakes. And it seems appropriate that this great man’s words appear at the end of this movie, since they implicitly invite you to forget what you have just seen and may even serve as a sort of apology. Whether or not it counts as a mistake — movies tend to be made on purpose — “Meet the Robinsons” is surely one of the worst theatrically released animated features issued under the Disney label in quite some time.

Most of the reviewers I’ve read came to the same conclusion about that bit of text at the end of the film. I wonder if anyone out there knows the story as to why the decision was made to place this quote at the tail of the movie. If you do, I’d appreciate hearing it.

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– Of course, there’s nothing like an old master to bring us back to the basics.

News was revealed this last week that Miyazaki is at work on his next feature film, Ponyo On a Cliff. This is the story of a five year old boy, Soskue, and the goldfish princess, Ponyo. The film is set for a Summer 2008 release in Japan. Miyazaki is doing the storyboard with watercolors and pastels. I wouldn’t mind if they released the animatic version of his films. His storyboards are the heart of the movies. A Variety article had this to report:

Instead of incorporating ever more CG cuts into 2-D animation, as Studio Ghibli has done in recent pics, Miyazaki intends to make “Ponyo” with a pastel watercolor, hand-painted look.

Miyazaki will “go back to his origins and use not any CG,” Studio Ghibli prexy Toshio Suzuki told reporters at Monday’s press conference announcing the toon. “Instead he will use simple, childlike drawings. He intends to make something different from his previous films.”

Daniel Thomas MacInnes, naturally, posts one of the best pieces about this film on his site, Conversations on Ghibli.

Not far from the same subject, there’s an interesting post at AniPages Daily. It places the focus squarely on the female animators working at Ghibli. It’s nice to see some bios of these lesser known Japanese animators, and I thank Ben Ettinger for the post.

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- Just in case you missed it, Cory Doctorow brought to the attention of Boing Boing an article in Popular Mechanix on the making of Snow White. It’s worth a look; some of the graphics are beautiful. the article is five pages long.
The illustrations for the article (e.g. the one on the left) seem to use early production art. There isn’t much resembling the final film, despite the magazine’s 1938 publication date.

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- A couple of sites have appeared on my horizon that I’d like to point out to you:

Mike Matei has a site, Classic Animation, which features a lot of animated shorts of the YouTube style. However, many of them are hard to see Van Buren films. It’s good to see a lot of the B&W Tom and Jerry cartoons (the Mutt & Jeff impersonators not the cat and mouse). It’s a good way to spend some time if you have it.

I found this site through Tom Stathes‘ Cartoons on Film blog. This site pays a lot of attention to the silent and early sound cartoons. Many of them can be bought on dvd through there.

A post about the two Amos and Andy animated shorts brought Mike Matei to comment with posted versions of both shorts. I last saw these in silent 8mm versions I’d owned (I bought them for $.99 way back when), so it was interesting seeing them again.

- Infrequently, there are cartoons which sometimes make a difference as to how you see a particular character, or studio, or sometimes even the world. One of these I recently thought of was Tup Tup by Nedeljko Dragic in 1972. It was nominated for the Oscar and lost to Richard Williams’ Christmas Carol.

I had seen a lot of films from Zagreb and had heard a lot about how great they were. They were even Oscar winners for Ersatz in 1962. Yet, I wasn’t a fan. I didn’t understand the acclaim the films were getting, yet kept it to myself. It was obvious that I was the alone in my opinion, and it confused me.

So along comes Dragic‘s film, Tup Tup. At first the film was annoying, but then it got under my skin and stayed with me. The cartoon had an insidious insanity which overwhelmed and haunted me.

I started looking at Zagreb shorts a little differently, but, I’m sad to say, my opinion didn’t change much. Many of the films just seemed like a new-found freedom in an iron curtain country, but it didn’t make the films great to me. I was a very big fan of UPA and Hubley at the time, and Zagreb didn’t come close.

(Some frame grabs from The Four Poster. Go here to see some great stills of artwork.)

I’d even heard about the effect The Four Poster had had on the Zagreb founders. Apparently, when this live action/animation feature made it to Yugoslavia, they hijacked the print and studied it for two weeks prior to returning it. Their admiration for Hubley‘s work in the Stanley Kramer produced feature film caused them to develop their own studio and style. A new animation studio was born. By the time I’d seen Tup Tup, I’d already seen The Four Poster on television (in the early sixties) and knew everyting about Hubley. Nothing I’d seen from Zagreb even compared to what I’d seen from UPA, never mind Hubley. It was all so cold and unemotional, to me, although it did try for some blaring stylization.

(More frame grabs from a bad dvd copy of The Four Poster.)

But there was Tup Tup. it stayed with me. The style of the film didn’t overwhelm the story, and I was into it.

To be honest, there were other films by Mr. Dragic that I found just as compelling. Diary is another excellent film which is literally an animated diary of his animation festival going. It’s not as persistent as Tup Tup, but it’s as gripping. I think ultimately, it’s a matter of the artist rather than the studio, and I suppose the same is true of any grouping of artists. The National Film Board has produced an inordinate number of brilliant films, but there are a few clunkers in there. The same is, I guess, true of Zagreb; I’ve only seen a couple dozen of their films, so I wouldn’t make a blanket statement.

Actually, the low budget films they produced, in retrospect, however small, are significantly better than 99% of what’s produced today. The difference is an intelligence behind the films. That’s conspicuously missing from most of the shorts we see today. Americans are generally trying to make stupidly funny shorts and aren’t concerned with articulating any statement about life or society. It’s sad, really. I wonder that I can make such negative comments about a studio like Zagreb when we’re living through such a fallow period.

There are a couple of dvds available of Zagreb films, but far too few. I don’t think Tup Tup is among those on dvd; at least I haven’t found it.

Tup Tup
1972 10min.,
Script, Director, Drawings, Animation, Backgrounds: Nedeljko Dragic
Music: Tomica Simovic

- The next section of the storyboard I have available to post, shows Gepetto in the belly of the whale and his reunion with Pinocchio.

Unfortunately, here, the type is almost illegible on the originals. I’ve tried to goose it a bit in Photoshop, but I don’t think I had much success, unless I want to destroy the images.

There are actually three pages here. Two worked lateral to each other, so I’ve attached them so that you can view it more easily. Boards I’ve marked 5b and 5c are longer than the past boards (and look smaller as thumbnails.) I hope they don’t take too long for you to enlarge and download.

5a
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

5b5c

Thanks, again, to John Canemaker for lending the boards to me for posting; thanks to Borge Ring for giving them to John, and Dave Hand for giving them to Borge.

I guess the big news today comes from a report in Variety that Chris Sanders who left (or was ousted) at Disney, a couple of months ago, has arrived at Dreamworks to direct “Crood Awakenings.” (You can’t invent a title like that, can you?) It’s a caveman story that was being developed with Aardman in mind – before Aardman broke with Dreamworks.
It’s all too incestuous. He’s directed one solid movie but makes the lead on the front page of Variety. Slow story day.
Let’s hope a good film develops out of it, but the title doesn’t give me a lot of hope. Check out the Reuters headline: “Lilo” director shooting “Crood” cartoon.

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– Here’s an I. Klein article published in the Dec. 73 issue of Cartoonist Profiles. Ostensibly, it tells how Izzy klein created Mighty Mouse without getting credit for it. However, more pertinent and interesting to me, and the reason I’m posting it, is that the article details how the Terry story team worked. (Not together, is the answer to that one.) It’s a wonder that their stories are so good.

Without the bangup sound effects their films just wouldn’t have been as good.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

I find it interesting that this story by Klein details how he created a super bug which Terry pushed to become a super mouse. It obviously took Terry a bit of time to mull the idea over before putting it into action.
Of course, the way Klein tells it there seems to be no doubt that he came up with the core idea, but he had no hand in developing it – even beyond its origin as a bug. He says that in this article.

Yet, if you look anywhere on the interenet, it’s Klein that gets all credit for the creation of Mighty Mouse. We talked once before about sloppy and slippery history appearing on the internet, and this seems to be another good case of it. Klein was a true talent whose work I respected enormously and who, as a person, was very genial and warm.
I also take on face value this story he tells. To be honest, I don’t much care who created Mighty Mouse (though I loved that character as a kid and still have a fondness for the shorts), but I find the heart of this article by Klein to be about the workings of the Terry story department, such that it was. It’s an interesting article that has a lot more than meets-the-eye within it.

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To continue this theme to a more modern era, check out today’s ASIFA Hollywood Animation Blog. Stephen Worth has posted a Yogi Bear storyboard by Warren Foster, the former Warner Bros. story writer.

– USA Today has an article about Song of the South and the difficulties they seem to be having in releasing a dvd of the film. Isn’t it a little pathetic that the Disney execs have to squirm this much over the release of this film? Yes, we appreciate the political-correctness scares them, but is this film any worse than Gone With the Wind?

Isn’t it time the Disney folk gave James Baskett his due? He was the first African-American male to be given an Oscar (albeit a special award; he wasn’t put in competition). Baskett and Ethel Waters (who won Best Supporting Actress for Pinky that year) didn’t sit among the other stars, but were placed to the rear during the ceremony. Isn’t that the same thing Disney is doing, now using their fear of political correctness?

To this day his is still probably the best performance by an actor working with animated characters. There were significantly more restrictions on the actors then than there were at the time of Roger Rabbit, or anything more current (and controlled by computer aids.) It was all in his acting. The focus in his eyes tells you this man sees those characters, and they became real for us. Check out the Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah segment and look at his eyes. It’s outstanding.

Read the Drafts for the film’s animation on Michael Barrier‘s site.

See some Mary Blair paintings done for this film on Amid Amidi‘s Cartoon Modern.

There’s a highly stylized Nash auto ad from the ’50′s on YouTube (in case you haven’t seen it) starring the three main characters from Song of the South.

Watch the Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah segment courtesy of Thad Komorowski.

The Asifa-Hollywood Animation Archive has some nice illustrations by Al Dempster and Bill Justice for a Little Golden Book version of the film.

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– Tom Sito had a nice little note on his blog today:
1952-U.P.A.’s cartoon Rooty-Toot-Toot premiered. Its music score was by jazzman Phil Moore, the first African American to receive a screen credit for scoring a movie.

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Congratulations to SVA school grad, Dony Permedi for having won YouTube’s first ever award for the “Most Adorable” piece on the internet. His Kiwi was a Master’s thesis at SVA and has received over 6.5 million hits on the site. If you haven’t seen the Maya created video, check it out.

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Stop Mo Expo – On Sunday, April 21st ASIFA Hollywood is presenting a day of celebration of 3D puppet animation. There will be all day seminars and conferences (from 9am to 5pm), as well as a number of screenings (from 6pm to 10pm). Filmmakers represented include: Will Vinton, the Chiodo brothers, Mark Caballero, Corky Quackenbush, and Seamus Walsh among others.

It will take place at Woodbury University, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd. Burbank, CA.

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Vintage ToonCast is an entertaining site that includes a lot of public domain animated shorts such as Mel-O-Toons, Fleischer Superman,k Betty Boop and Popeye shorts, Daffy and the Dinosaur, A is for Atom (the John Sutherland film not the Disney “Our Friend the Atom”) and a lot more.

- The pieces of the Pinocchio storyboard I’ve been presenting are missing whole chunks of the film. We jump to the underwater scene where Monstro wakes up.

4a
4b
(Click any image to enlarge.)

5a
5b
Unlike the earlier posted segments, these are pinned to the board, and the drawings are done on the large animation paper used at Disney in the late 30′s. Each image would be about 12½ x 15½ on five hole paper. That’s a big board.

Just a reminder. Mark Mayerson continues to do a bangup job of posting his “Mosaic” of the entire film of Pinocchio, based on Hans Perk‘s posted Drafts. Mark’s comments are at least as valuable as the “Mosaics”. Visit his site if you haven’t yet and love Pinocchio.

- So let’s talk about something boring. What I do everyday is walk to and from work. That’s about a two mile stretch from 30th Street on the East side of NY to the West Village. (And back.) Everytime I walk it I see a lot of the same things, but those things are always varied and interesting.

I see a lot of taxis. Taxis used to come in two forms:

the normal kind of everyday-looking-car type; and the Checker Cab.

These cabs were vehicles that could seat six people comfortably, or if there were just one or two of you, it left a lot of leg room. Somehow even the look of the bubbled Checker Cab was pleasant, and it was specific to NYC.

However, for some reason a couple of years back, the wise NYC officials decided to outlaw the Checker Cab. I suppose it was time for them (in their minds) to modernize the look of the NYC taxicab. So an institution left our city streets and was replaced by these:

This is all an attempt to turn New York City into the largest suburban shopping mall in the world. It’s working.

However, there is something else that is specific to New York (and probably Los Angeles).

Everyday – I mean it every single day – I come upon a block (always a different one on that two mile walk) that is “coned off,” meaning you’re not allowed to park there. Sometimes they even block off access to pedestrians. This can only mean one thing:

They’re shooting a movie.

There are always signs telling you what film or commercial they’re shooting and there are always bits of movie paraphernalia being set up.

Usually it stretches around a couple of blocks as guys unload trucks of equipment.

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This is New York, so you expect to see a lot of signage. I don’t mind that; I’ve always found it entertaining.

As a matter of fact, I’ve sometimes played a game (with myself) incorporating words in my sightline into conversations I’m having with people. I try to get away without their knowing it. As you may imagine this annoys some of those who know what nonsense I’m up to.

However, on their own, signs are interesting. They reveal a bit about the person who created them.

Many are unwittingly entertaining, others are tittering jokes.

Still others are just downright intellectually amusing. The book store, of course, pulls me in every time (it’s a great shop for remaindered books). Eisenberg’s Sandwiches makes me smile. Without my presence would Heisenberg’s Principle even exist?

As I get through Washington Square Park, my walk starts winding down. I’m getting closer to my studio.

Oh look, the storefront gypsy palmreader above me has gotten a cat. He’s a couple of years old. He reminds me a bit of Alex, my new boy, who’s almost a year old.

Enough with the photos; I’m at the studio. Oh, yeah, all of the pictures enlarge by clicking them.

– Having finished a bunch of work for Between The Lions, the PBS show out of WGBH (a greater client can’t be found), we’ve met with a quiet period.
To keep busy we’ve started production on a short segment of the Gertrude’s Follies storyboard feature done years ago.

To see the history of this project go here and here.

What this has done is forced me to push cartoonist Tom Hachtman back to work on the strip. I need some new dialogue written between Gertrude and Alice, and I’d like him to do the backgrounds (only a couple are needed.) He’s a great watercolorist and airbrush artist – the real thing, not computer.
Of course, I prefer the watercolor painting, but I’ll take whatever he’d like to do. It’s his strip and his characters; that’s his decision.
Anyway, I got this card (to the left) from Tom. It thanks me for getting him back to Gertrude. (It’s my treat; the characters are so much fun drawing.)

Matthew Clinton has finished his first draft of animating the piece that’s about 2 minutes in length. Paul Carrillo has already edited up a hilarious first cut soundtrack of effects and music. All we need is the finishing parts.

It’s funny. That’s what counts.

I’m reluctant to post the strip it’s based on
(I don’t want to give up the joke, though it really doesn’t matter). It’s about Pabs eating his first hamburger – just in case any of you have seen it. (I just had a flash thinking how horrible this would have looked if we’d done it in Flash. Sends a chill through me.)
(Click images to enlarge.)

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I just received in the mail a copy of the program from the Seattle Children’s Film Festival that was held in January of this year. They’d done a two program retrospective of some of our films. It was a kick having someone ask for the program; it was fun knowing that our films stay alive.

The program was enough of a success that the curator of that festival has just sent an email sayng that she is curating . . .

“. . . the second annual REDCAT International Children’s Film Festival at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theatre) in Los Angeles. The festival will be comprised of a selection of the best of Cinema K: Children’s Film Festival Seattle and additional new programs.

I would like to include one of the retrospective programs we showed at Northwest Film Forum: Dr. DeSoto, The Red Shoes, Abel’s Island, and The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.”

Of course, this will be an honor, so our program will be presented at that festival in June. When I have the dates, I’ll pass them along.

All these retrospectives popping up! (There was one in Philadelphia recently, another in North Carolina, and a very big one which will be in NYC this Fall – we’ll talk about it when it gets closer.) I’m starting to feel old, but I’m loving it. (The Seattle program
from last January.)

- Well, we’re going to skip a couple of sequences for the next storyboard segment I have available from Pinocchio. The first is the Lobster Inn where we meet the coachman as he conspires with Foulfellow the Fox and Gideon the cat. They plot on kidnapping little children for a coach ride to Pleasure Island.

The boards seem to be missing all of Stromboli and Pleasure Island. I’ll post what I have.

Again, I’m splitting these boards in two laterally for the largest size resolution.
Thanks, once more, to John Canemaker; Borge Ring for giving them to John, and Dave Hand for giving them to Borge.

1a1b There’s a nice flow to some of this page and some decent reaction shots which we hadn’t seen in any other of this board.

2a2b
This page seems a bit different than others. The images are a bit more detailed and are spread out. I’m still not sure what purpose these boards served. Interesting that the images are taped and not pinned up. They’re obviously storyboard images regathered for some purpose, possibly a publication.

MONSTRO on Monday.

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ASIFA-East President, David Levy, will be on radio today. The show NON FICTION is hosted by Harry Allen. Tune into WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM at 2:05 PM. The segment is scheduled to last 20 minutes.

Listen on line here.