- I continue posting this storyboard from the 1949 Popeye cartoon, “Barking Dogs Don’t Fite.” This is part of the late Vince Cafarelli’s collection of animation artwork. He’d saved it from the different studios he worked at.
The storyboard was by Jack Mercer and Carl Meyer, and I’m not sure as to who drew what. There are definitely two different styles in there especially in the way Popeye and Olive are drawn. Bluto also has an original look here, but he seems to stay constant.
Each drawing is done on inexpensive 8½ x 11 paper. One wonders if they even made an animatic of the film. None of the board has any registration.
We pick up with the last drawing from last week’s post.
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Here’s the full short as seen on YouTube.
I still can’t get used to Popeye’s powder blue uniform.
I wish the look was a bit closer to the board, however some of
the layouts are improvements over the planning in the storyboard.
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- Back in 2006, I posted a couple of pages of this book and, having found the film now on line, I thought it time for a new look at this Paul Grimault classic from 1942.
- In 1942 Paul Grimault released an animated film entitled Les Passagers De “La Grande Ourse.” The film had actually been completed in 1939 and titled The Passengers of the Great Bear, but because of the outbreak of WWII the film suffered setbacks and was released in 1942 with the new title.
Several years ago, John Canemaker gave me a gem of an attractive little book that was illustrated with images from the film. Grimault was the father of French animation, and I’d always assumed that this film was a feature. In fact, it was a nine minute short, but it was important historically because it was the first big French animated production trying to out-Disney Disney.
The story is very unlike American films. There’s a fanciful sense of imagination that is true of many French cartoons. In summation the story is:
A little boy and his dog sneak into a shipyard and are grabbed by a crane which places them on a ship in dock, loading. This ship, “The Grand Ourse,” is an oddity in that it is fitted like a zeppelin with balloons to lift it into the air.
Boy and dog arrive in their compartment, accidentally, as the vessel starts to take-off into the sky. Adventures ensue with the boy and dog confronted by a restive eagle and a deaf and dumb robot
Here are some of the pages of the book:
A carbon copy of the credits for the film was enclosed within the book when I received it.
It was copied onto one of those pieces of paper that could only be European, sort of a tissue that seemed delicate.
That’s attached to the left.
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This past week I found a nice copy of the film posted on YouTube. You can watch it.below, and see how it compares to the published book.
Les Passagers de la Grande Ourse (Paul Grimault - 1941)
- The UPA Jolly Frolics DVD set includes a set of extras which showcases a good deal of artwork from the films. For the Fox & the Crow film, The Magic Fluke, there is a color continuity board by Herb Klynn which indicated how the art should be painted for the individual scenes.
This gave me the opportunity of putting the finished film side-by-side with the color continuity boad and find out where they diverge. (The numbered images with a letter attached {e.g. “2a”} are frame grabs from the movie.)
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The differences start with the titles, right from the get go.
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The color continuity board is much more creative.
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The final titles are a little dull. Fortunately, UPA’s films got
more creative with their titles once they really got going.
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The final BG has the same move and ends with a truck in . . .
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. . . ending on the diner.
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There’s no close up in there now.
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The audience pops from listeners to jazz dancers.
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There is a close up of the crow playing wildly.
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The impresario is no longer in the film.
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And he message comes from a taxicab, not a limo.
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The fox reads the telegram from the stage and hides it from the crow.
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The crow chases the fox out the door as he leaves in a cab.
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there’s no robbery in the film now. It just rains on a blue street.
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The crow ends up at the spark plug down and out.
He sees . . .
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. . . the Foxini ppremiere.
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The Fox gets out of the limo.
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The crow looks up at the backdoor alley.
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Foxini is greeted by his entourage, and he takes advantage of them.
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The back alley is about the same.
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As is the magician.
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We no longer see a pan of the inside of the theater.
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There is a pan up the concert hall.
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Crow arrives at the upper upper balcony . . .
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. . . and gets a last row seat.
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His view is an enormous one of the theater.
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Unfortunately, they only offered the color continuity board for the first half of the film,
and that’s as far as we could go.
- We’re coming down the home stretch for our Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a sampler of the work from POE, the animated feature I’m trying to put together. It’s going wonderfully, and I hope we’ll be able to raise the money in these next two weeks. This has all given me a new lease on life in the project, and I expect it’ll help kick things off. One positive thing has been my writing these Sunday pieces about Edgar. I enjoy doing it.
This week, I’d like to write about a little sidebar note from the ever-revising script. A letter from a Mrs. Gove Nichols, an acquaintance of the Poes, telling about her trip to their final home in the Bronx.
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- One of the features of the film we’re doing about Edgar Allan Poe is that it provides us with the opportunity of including a number of letters from acquaintances of the little Poe family. One I particularly enjoy is this letter from Mrs. Gove Nichols. In it she tells of the arduous journey to reach the family in the Fordham section of the Bronx. It took several hours for the trip from midtown NY (and would take about 30 mins. today by subway.)
Here are several short excerpts from that letter:
We found him, and his wife, and his wife’s mother who was his aunt living in a little cottage at the top of a hill.
The house had three rooms - a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bed chamber over the sitting-room. There was a piazza in front of the house that was a lovely place to sit in the summer, with the shade of cherry-trees before it.
On the occasion of my first visit, the poet had somehow caught a full-grown bob-o-link. He had put him in a cage, which he had hung on a nail driven into the trunk of a cherry-tree….
The cottage had an air of gentility that must have been lent to it by the presence of its inmates. So neat, so poor, so unfurnished, and yet so charming a dwelling I never saw. The floor of the kitchen was white as wheaten flour. A table, a chair, and a little stove it contained seemed to furnish it completely.
Later it continues:
He was at this time greatly depressed. Their extreme poverty, the sickness of his wife, and his own inability to write sufficiently accounted for this. We spent half an hour in the house, when some more company came, which included ladies, and then we all went to walk.
. . . someone proposed a game at leaping. I think it must have been Poe, as he was expert in the exercise. Two or three gentlemen agreed to leap with him, and though one of them was tall and had been a hunter in times past, Poe still distanced them all. But alas! his gaiters, long worn and carefully kept, were both burst in the grand leap that made him victor. … I was certain he had no other shoes, boots, or gaiters. Who amongst us could offer him money to buy a new pair?
Eventually, Poe’s mother-in-law convinces one of the guests to buy a poem he’d written for publication. This gives them enough money to purchase a new pair of shoes for Poe.
There’s so much material in this man’s life, it’s almost hard to eliminate some of it without making too long a film. Of course with Poe’s name, you also have to keep the film thrilling. Hopefully, it’ll have all this.
- Howard Beckerman brought a DVD of his home movies of he ASIFA East Animation Festival of 1980. (Actually, I think there are two separate years on this video. People are wearing different clothes in the latter half. However, I can’t be sure.) These are the faces of the crowd who came to those wine and cheese gatherings before the awards. Now, you have sandwiches, wine, beer and soda AFTER the awards. It’s still the place to see a large group of the animation cognoscenti in NY.
I’ve tried to identify as many people as I can and have printed out some stills to do just that. Here are some people to look for.
(L) Candy Kugel / (R) John Canemaker
(L) Russell Calabrese / (R) George Griffin
(L) Carol Millican (center) / (R) John Gati
(L) Tissa David / (R) Sam Magdoff
(L) Nancy Beiman & Dean Yeagle / (R) me, Michael Sporn
(L) Iris Beckerman / (R) Iris Beckerman
(L) Lu Guarnier / (R) Harriette Rauh (right side)
(L) Charles Samu / (R) Will Friedwald & Jerry Beck
Here’s the silent video of the Festival celebrities.
See if you can identify any of those I missed
(and let us know in the comments.)
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- Jake Friedman has a blog that’s nothing short of sensational. His entire focus is on the history of Art Babbitt, making the blog’s title, The Art Babbitt Blog, quite appropriate. Having spent some time with Babbitt, it’s interesting to see the picture of the man on this blog.
The material is very meticulous, but there are some really precious pieces on display. I particularly like the drawings displayed from the silent Terry cartoon, “Scene 30″ of the Terrytoon short Chop Suey.
- Last week we saw the first half of Wallace Tripp’s book, Sir Toby Jingle’s Beastly Journey. Today we conclude our post of the book. Wallace Tripp is certainly an influence on many animator’s work. His fluid drawings look like animation work. Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for scanning the book and sending these pages on to us.
- Before going directly into the subject of today’s post, let me give a little twist toward our current on line promotion, Indiegogo.
As you may know, we sought funds on Kickstarter a few weeks back trying to raise some cash to create a terrific trailer for POE, the animated feature we’re seeking to produce. That fund raising scheme wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped; money offered was not collected, and we’re taking what we’d learned and moved to a different venue, Indiegogo. There, we’ve started from scratch.
POE is a film we’d like to produce and are hoping we’re not too far from the starting gate. SSince we’ve developed a script, drawn a storyboard, created about 20 minutes of animatic (story reel) from the few voices we’d recorded, the next and most likely step would be to animate some of it and get it to our sales group to help raise the necessary capital. That’s where we are. If you’ve already given your support to this project, I thank you sincerely. If you’re not aware of it, I encourage you to look at the website for POE, poestory.net, or the Facebook page, or Indiegogo where all the action is happening. Moral support is almost as good as financial. If you’d like to tell any of your friends about it. I’d appreciate that too. In all, I have to say Thank you for your help.
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- Stephen Worth at Animation Resources recently posted anew his copy of Nat Falk’s How To Make Animated Cartoons. When I was a kid I cherished my copy of this book - actually it was a library booik, but I was the only one who ever checked it out of my local library, and I basically had it out permanently. There was something about those clumsy looking Terrytoon drawings that I absolutely enjoyed. (Don’t forget that the Mighty Mouse Show was one of the very first Saturday morning TV shows, and every kid my age was affected by it.)
Aside from all the information about studios and drawing characters etc., there were the pages where you could see the animation drawings all lined up, just as in the Preston Blair book. It was something I didn’t take lightly. I always was curious how those cycles pictured moved. The one, above, was one that stood out in my memory. I always thought it eccentric and was curious to see it in action.
Well, now I can do it given the simple technology at hand. So I put the page through Photoshop and layered the drawings, then dragged it past AfterEffects, and behold a QT movie. Here’s the results, pictured below:
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And here’s the QT movie of the cycle.
It’s on two’s, and
it’s not a pretty picture.
I think Carlo Vinci may have animated it.
I did a similar thing, in a different post, using another walk cycle from this book. That was done in 2009. A cycle of “Puddy the Pup.” That worked a little better but not by much.
- Last week I introduced you to the late Vince Cafarelli’s collection of animation artwork. This is a collection of artwork he had saved from the different studios he worked at. A solid part of the collection is this storyboard from the 1949 Popeye cartoon, “Barking Dogs Don’t Fite.”
The story and storyboard was done by Jack Mercer and Carl Meyer. I’m sure you recognize Jack Mercer’s name as the voice of Popeye, but he was also the voice of Swat the Fly in Hoppity Goes To Town. Carl Meyer voiced his partner, Smack the Mosquito. I love the drawing style of one of them (I don’t know who did which); it’s reminiscent of some early twenties comic strip art. The two artists draw Olive very differently. One draws a circle for a head; the other gives her a bubble cheek, and this is the one I favor. I also love his Popeye. It’s too bad the film looks so mediocre in its final incarnation. For some reason, they’ve given Popeye a powder blue uniform. I don’t think the Navy actually had such a uniform.
There are a lot of drawings to this, so I’m forced to break it into three parts.
I’ve also posted the YouTube version of the short at the end of this post.
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I love this drawing!
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Olive gets breasts, at least, for one drawing.
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There is no number 18. 17 dissolves to 19.
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What an hilarious Popeye!
Right out of the Toonerville Trolley.
.- John Halas was certainly a great promoter of animation. And while doing this he also promoted himself. A very prolific writer in a time when animation was rarely mentoned, even in film magazines.
Chris Rushworth, whose site built around his collection of art from the Halas & Batchelor feature, Animal Farm, has sent me this article from Films In Review, 1969. (I used to buy this magazine, loyally, as a child for the reviews and articles about soundtrack music.)
Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to post the old article (which is obviously, pre-computer. As a matter of fact, pre video.)
- Well, I’m following my fancy. I’m into Paul Julian’s beautiful painting style, and have found a treasure trove in the UPA collection DVD, Jolly Frolics. Here I have one of the better UPA films, Georgie and the Dragon. It’s a rather simple story, beautifully directed by Bobe Cannon and animated by Rudy Larriva, Bill Melendez, Grim Natwick and Frank Smith. The exceptional script is written by three strong, animation pillars: John Hubley, Bill Scott and Phil Eastman. Paul Julian and Jules Engel seem to have done the backgrounds together.
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The tartan BG with the yellow type sets up
the Scottish location for the film.
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For the second card they reverse the scheme:
yellow BG with a tartan filled type.
The credits dissolve as the BG pans
and the camera slowly moves in.
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I think you can distinguish between the Paul Julian Bgs
and the Jules Engel bgs. Julian was more apt to use
drybrush in his work, and it gives it a singular look.
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Just look at these wild poses even though
the characters are at rest.
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UPA didn’t just introduce a new kind of design,
it brought a new style of animation that made
that design work.
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Bobe Cannon was the perfect animator to direct
the animators in this new looseness and sense of
graphic movement in animation.
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As evidenced in many of these wild poses.
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Go here to see the comic book adaptation of the cartoon.
I found the following model sheets on Stephen Worth’s excellent site, AnimationResources.
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