Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I came across a couple of articles I found in the NYTimes and was entertained by them.
The second one (posted & chronologically) was one Grim Natwick had saved and which ended up in my hands.

It’s entertaining in that it reveals an enormous number of feature projects that UPA had planned doing. John Hubley had obviously given an extensive interview in that article which was timed to try to draw as much publicity around the Oscar nomination of Rooty Toot Toot. Toward the end of the article he talks about possible features they were hoping to do. I think this was probably more Hubley’s plan than UPA’s.

A little more digging, and I found I’d had another less interesting article (#1) published a year earlier by the same writer.

#1 #2

– This will be my last post until I return from Ottawa on Sunday. I look forward to meeting a lot of new folks there and seeing some great films.

This has been a difficult week, and I’ll be glad to get away for a few days. Hopefully, the Yankees will clinch the pennant while I’m gone. I’ll miss the champagne celebration.

While I’m gone, I’ve decided to be emotional and let my Claude have the spotlight.

Today, was his Dancing Day. He died in my arms this morning.

- In 1976 the first edition of the Ottawa Animation Festival was held. I attended with a contingent of people who were working on Raggedy Ann & Andy, and we were there to be inspired, see a lot of great films and have a good time. One of those times when you felt connected to everyone there.

Bruno Bozzetto‘s , Allegro Non Troppo was a special midnight screening on the program. A surprise screening; a feature none of us had heard about.
(Click to enlarge.)

Of course, we all knew the work of Bruno Bozzetto. He was undoubtedly a master of comic animation. His films had won enormous prizes everywhere, and his output was large. There’d been many screenings of his films through ASIFA-East, and they were always popular.

The screening was one of the brightest I’ve ever sat through. It was hilarious, beautifully animated, and intelligent. The audience came out excited about animation, alive, and encouraged to party. It was a memorable night and it helped make that festival one of the stand-out Festivals I’d ever attended. I’m sure many there would say the same.

Now the question I have is whether the films of that 1976 festival were as great as I remember or that specific Festival so great? Or was it both? Caroline Leaf‘s masterpiece, The Street, won the grand prize and most of the films were brilliant (including Caroline’s other film The Owl Who Married a Goose.
Allegro Non Troppo just served as the enormous cherry on top of the cake. It was a grand festival and I always hope that others I attend will reach that level.

I look forward to the coming Ottawa Animation Festival starting Wednesday, Sept. 20th. Bruno Bozzetto is both a judge and the recipient of a retrospective of his work. Maybe this will be the one that will match the first.

Tonight ASIFA-East will present a screening of Allegro Non Troppo.
I was scheduled to moderate a Q&A with Bruno Bozzetto, but due to some personal problems of mine Candy Kugel will host it. She’s graciously stepped in to help me out at the last moment, and I have to thank her enormously.
At 6:30 pm – The School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, 3rd floor amphitheatre. Admission is FREE.

– In 1988 the Festival Int’l Del Cartone Animato in Treviso, Italy sponsored a retrospective of a number of my films. (Many were dubbed into Italian; it was hilarious watching Dr. DeSoto with a Mickey Mouse sound-a-like for his Italian voice.) There was a very full audience.

My film, Abel’s Island was almost complete, and I was showing a rough cut with a separate soundtrack. The obvious happened; the film was projected out of sync. It was maybe ten frames out. I knew the film was mostly VO narration and sync wouldn’t be too critical once lip sync stopped. I was prepared to accept the inevitable.

However, five mins. into the film, in the dark, Bruno Bozzetto whispered loudly to me that we had to fix it. Together we ran out of the theater – film still playing.

Bruno led me up two flights of stairs – running all the way – to the projection booth. He loudly and excitedly made the projectionist understand. The film slowed down to a stop when the projectionist shut the film off. Together we worked and reworked and reworked – as quickly as we could – getting the two separate soundtracks into sync with the third reel, the picture. The projector was turned on again, and Bruno and I ran back to our seats.

The end result was that I had a memorable screening. Bruno Bozzetto, after all, was concerned and took it on himself to correct the projection. A great adventure – during the screening. What a blast!
(The photo comes from Bruno’s website. He’s obviously in Disneyland.)
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- As of September 15, a two-part exhibition, presented simultaneousely at The Jewish Museum and The Newark Museum. This is being billed as “the first major museum examination of one of America’s most popular art forms.”

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Hundreds of originals created by some of America’s most influential comics artists will be on display.

The Newark Museum will show comic strips from the first half of the 20th century through the work of such artists as Winsor McCay, Chester Gould and Charles M. Schulz. The museum also has a schedule of guest artists including Jules Feiffer, Patrick McDonnell, Jerry Robinson, Pete Hamill, and Steven Guarnaccia who will talk. For schedule.

The Jewish Museum will display comic books from the 1950s onward including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, R. Crumb, Chris Ware and more.
The Jewish Museum also has the exhibition Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics with over 70 works from the golden age of comic books focusing on superheroes and super villains such as Superman, Batman and the Joker.

There are two separate books on sale at each museum.

The Jewish Museum 1109 Fifth Avenue (92nd Street), NY, NY
The Newark Museum 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ

– Cartoon Brew has posted a couple of images from the next feature film from Blue Sky, an adaptation of Horton Hears a Who.
(Images via USA Today and Comingsoon.net.)

I have to admit how pleasantly surprised I am with these stills. The images do look a bit like those old viewmaster slides. This was a problem many of the cgi films had. However, they broke away from that look, and it wasn’t for the better. Everything got pastel-ey with a look of little plastic dolls – see Everybody’s Hero.

It might be a good time to take a look at George Pal’s version of Dr. Seuss, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. This puppet film was nominated for the Oscar in 1944, yet the film seems to be hidden (it’s not on dvd) and stills seem to be a little harder to locate.
The original Horton

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of a cgi adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ illustration style. Having already adapted two of his books for television, I can relate to the problems inherent. These images are a plus. Let’s hope the script will be strong and the animation will be able to take advantage of the whimsical style of the book. This could be the next decent cgi feature. Undoubtedly, Blue Sky has been doing the second best cgi work out there – behind Pixar, of course. So there’s good reason to have hope. More power to them.

– Speaking of pastel/doll cgi features, Everyone’s Hero quietly moved into theaters yesterday. A review without anything positive to say appeared in the NYTimes; a *** positive one appeared in the NYDaily News and a ** mixed review appeared in Newsday.

The Christopher Reeve connection is an interesting one, and I’d like to know more about it. I understand that he lived through much of the storyboarding process, but I wonder how much more involved he was.

– On Tuesday evening ASIFA-East will be celebrating the work of Bruno Bozzetto, Italy’s Master of Animation, with the screening of his film, Allegro Non Troppo, the animated parody of Fantasia.
I’ll be hosting a Q&A afterward, and we hope there’ll be a good turnout for this film.

Mr. Bozzetto is on his way to Ottawa as a judge. They’ll also be hosting a more extensive retrospective of his enormous output. Any of you heading to Ottawa should attend as many of these screenings as you can. His work is brilliant.

The ASIFA-East screening will be held at: The School of Visual Arts, 209 East 23rd Street, 3rd floor amphitheatre on Tues, Sept. 19. Admission is FREE.

(pictured: The cover to a small booklet I own written in 1972 by Giannalberto Bendazzi, entitled: Bruno Bozzetto, Animation as a First Love.

Go to the Bruno Bozzetto website and explore the flash films. They’re great.

– Moonbird is one of the seminal films of 20th Century animation.

After John Hubley left UPA, where he helped explore the use of 20th Century graphics in animation, he formed a commercial animation company in Los Angeles. Apparently, with this new entity, John did less drawing and more producing. Trying to correct this problem, he closed the LA office and set up in NYC with Faith.

The studio in New York did commercials on a smaller scale. With a Guggenheim Fellowship of $8000, the couple produced a short film, Adventures of an * in 1957 and committed to doing one film a year for themselves. With this film, Hubley picked up where he’d left off at UPA. Exploration of modern art now took on the wildly successful Abstract Expressionists and told a non-verbal story using expressionist art.

The film Tender Game, done in 1958, told another non-verbal story using the song “Tenderly” to illustrate a romance, again, in expressionist art. This film, in some ways, feels like an outgrowth of Hubley’s work on the feature, Finian’s Rainbow.

In 1959, Moonbird took a giant leap forward. The art style borrowed from the expressionists, but used a method of double exposures to layer the characters into the backgrounds. Each animation drawing was painted black outside the border of its lines. Moonbird, the character, was colored with clear wax crayon and painted with black ink. The black resisted where the wax stood and gave a loose scribbled coloring. All of these painted drawings were photographed as double exposures, shot at less than 100%, to combine characters with Bgs.

The soundtrack involved an improvised track of two children, Mark and Ray Hubley, playing. These were recorded in sessions within a recording studio and massively edited down to create the final tracks.

Bobe Cannon animated the film with Ed Smith assisting. Ed inbetweened Bobe’s scenes and animated many others.

A variation of this became the Hubley method. There was usually someone working in the studio who did all inbetweens and animated some lesser scenes. A great way to break into the medium in a big way.

Some extremes by Bobe Cannon are posted below.

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Amid Amidi has posted a link to a YouTube version of the film. It looks good.

– At first I noticed the number of images of the Brooklyn Bridge that appeared in the work of some artists that I respected enormously:
Georgia O’Keefe, Joseph Stella, John Marin, and Albert Gleizes among others.

It tooktime for me to realize that this was part of a competition held to honor the bridge, and the images that were created as a result were extraordinary.
Nocturne 1913 – a photo by the extraordinary Karl Struss)

I have always been fascinated with the futurist artists, and, as a result, was attracted to Joseph Stella‘s work. He, among other artists, is most closely associated with the Brooklyn Bridge. There are quite a few paintings and drawings and preparatory sketches he’d created of the bridge. They dominate the one book on his work & life that I own.

In fact there is one interesting bit of writing he’d done to describe the experience of painting right on the bridge. The piece is, itself, almost futurist:

To realize this towering imperative vision in all its integral possibilities [he wrote] I lived days of anxiety, torture, and delight alike, trembling all over with emotion as those railing[s] in the midst of the bridge vibrating at the continuous passage of the trains. I appealed for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman and to the fiery Poe’s plasticity. Upon the swarming darkness of the night, I rung all the bells of alarm with the blaze of electricity scattered in lightnings down the oblique cables, the dynamic pillars of my composition, and to render more pungent the mystery of the metallic apparition, through the green and red glare of the signals I excavated here and there caves as subterranean passages to infernal recesses.

A bit emotional, perhaps, but he tries desperately to describe his emotions which are articulated so well in the paintings.

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– Recently there’s been some attention given to an exhibition catalog from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Art of Disney. This catalog is a sizeable 242 pages and has been featured on a number of sites: Cartoon Brew, Mark Kennedy. It appears to have a number of pages taken from the 1958 Bob Thomas book, The Art of Animation.

Back in the good old days of the late 60′s – early 70′s, in New York, there were a number of appearances in which a group of Disney animation people would talk about the art. At Lincoln Center (discussed in a separate posting) Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Woolie Reitherman, Ken Anderson appeared. At MOMA to honor The Jungle Book, Gilda Radner introduced Eric Larsen and Ken Anderson. At SVA, John Lahr introduced Milt Kahl. There were others. To accompany these talks, there were often handouts.

At Lincoln Center, they gave us copies of a slick, stapled brochure sized truncation of the Bob Thomas book, The Art of Animation. His name as nowhere to be found on that booklet, but the stills and layout was the same as his tome. As a matter of fact, no names could be found in that booklet. Interestingly, that’s where they began selling the Christopher Finch book, The Art of Walt Disney.

It was nice to get something for free, though. It was colorful and attractive. Since I’d memorized the Thomas book, for some reason, I felt no need really to even look carefully through this item.

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