Michael Sporn Animation - Splog

- John Canemaker let me know last night about the death of Ollie Johnston, and it saddened me to hear the news. I met him a number of times in the 70’s and 80’s. I remember visiting the South Street Seaport and noticing that he and Frank Thomas were at a small gallery, there, signing books. It was a surprise to me, so I went in to say hello. The bigger surprise came when they remembered who I was and gave me a big greeting. Very few people were there, and we got to talk for a longer than usual amount of time. The moment stands out for me.

It’s been years since I’ve seen him, but I will remember him and cherish him through his animation. It’s nice to see him all over the blogs today.

Ralph Bakshi will be making a number of personal appearances signing his book, Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi , for those interested. His schedule includes the following:

Animazing Gallery - April 17, Thurs 6pm
461 Broom St (Between Greene and Mercer)

School of Visual Arts - April 18, Fri 3pm
209 East 23rd Street
(Bet. 2nd & 3rd Ave)
3rd Floor Amphitheater

Jacob K. Javits Conv Center - April 18 , Fri 6:30pm
IGN Theater
655 West 34th St

Anthology Film Archives - Apr 19, Sat 7pm
32 Second Avenue

Bakshi, of course, is a seminal figure in the history of modern feature film animation. His animated writing and directing credits include: American Pop,
Coonskin, J.R.R. Tolkien’s: The Lord of the Rings, Wizards, Fritz the
Cat, Spicy City, Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, and many more.

He will be signing his new book UNFILTERED: THE COMPLETE RALPH BAKSHI.
The book will be available for purchase at a discount.

- In case you’re wondering what direction Disney will be turning in their next big Broadway musical, perhaps there’s a good hint in what opened this past week on a Disney cruise ship out of Orlando.

Toy Story the Musical opened to a positive review in the Orlando Sentinal. You can watch a short video blurb here.

The musical features Randy Newman’s Oscar-nominated song, “You’ve Got a Friend,” which was heard in the film, as well as seven new songs penned by GrooveLily’s Valerie Vigoda and Brendan Milburn. Little Women’s Mindi Dickstein penned the book.

The production utilizes “larger-than-life props [that] help transform the 977-seat Walt Disney Theatre into a toy-sized world of fun and adventure. A rear projection screen aids the transformation between human-sized and toy-sized scenes and takes the show from the comfort of Andy’s room — to the frenzied world of Pizza Planet — to the frightening room of Andy’s neighbor, Sid.”

In a statement Anne Hamburger, executive vice president of Disney Imagineering Creative Entertainment, said, “When we first thought of bringing ‘Toy Story’ to the stage, there was a great deal of excitement about the project. Everyone on our team could immediately see how the heart and comedy of these characters could come alive in a memorable way that is unique to musical theatre.”

I’ve broken it down by line of drawings and split that into two.

(Click any image you’d like to enlarge.)

______________________________________To continue with the next board tomorrow.

Ugly
- A year ago I posted some photos of cranes working on buildings in the area not far from my apartment in Manhattan. The one pictured below to the left was there for half a year. The building it was raising is near completion, and I’ve pictured it below, to the right. It’s one of these monsters that goes up to a seeming infiinity and successfully blocks the view of the Empire State Building, a couple of blocks behind it.

___

Not Ugly
A small grouping of older buildings sits six blocks south of the monster above. These I find interesting and attractive. Starting to the right, (note that I’ve lightened the building farthest right to highlight the four in the center) there’s an interesting building which has, to its left, a smaller building. Then a smaller building, and a smaller one yet. I suspect it’d be interesing to have an apartment in one of these which sit across from the Flatiron building at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway. At one time, these buildings probably housed photographers’ studios - this had once been the neghborhood for that field.

Finally, I couldn’t resist pointing out these carolers who remain on the
ediface of the building above, farthest left.
They probably went up one christmas and have stayed there
singing ever on.

Below is another shot of the same buildings from 23rd Street.
The arrow points to the carolers.

- Go immediately to Floyd Norman’s blog and read his Friday rant.

__________No kidding, Floyd, Barack Obama is our only hope now.

- Congratulations to Bill Plympton and Nina Paley for getting their features in the Tribeca Film Festival.

Plympton’s Idiots and Angels and Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues will be playing in New York a number of times, and we have to make sure that the animation community supports these two films.
__________

The schedules for the two films are as follows:

Bill Plympton’s Idiots and Angels

Saturday, April 26, 5:30 pm, AMC 19th Street East
Sunday, April 27, 9:30 pm, Village East Cinemas
Wednesday, April 30, 11:00 pm, AMC Village VII
Saturday, May 3, 8:00 pm, Village East Cinemas

Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues

Friday, April 25, 8:15 pm, AMC Village VII
Sunday, April 27, 3:45 pm, AMC 19th Street East
Monday, April 28, 10:45 pm, AMC Village VII
Thursday, May 1, 1:45 pm, Village East Cinemas
Friday, May 2, 3:00 pm, AMC 19th Street East

AMC Village VII______________AMC 19th Street East__________Village East Cinemas
66 Third Ave (11th St)______.__890 Broadway (19th St)________181 Second Ave (12th St)

Go here to buy tickets in advance.

These two films are also in competition at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival. Congratulations to both. Job well done!

_
Daniel Thomas MacInnes is posting some of the great experimental animated shorts via YouTube and his site.

Stan Vanderbeek, Oskar Fishchinger, and plenty of John & James Whitney films (scroll down) appear on this excellent site which is devoted to Ghibli films. While there, if you have the time, take a look at some of the Ghibli rarities.

- Back in July 2006 I wrote about the art exhibit of celebrity caricature which came from the Library of Congress and was seen in the NY Public Library at 42nd Street. This show still stands out in my mind.

-I’m currently researching the art of Covarrubias. An exhibit at New York’s Public Library at 42nd Street in 1998 was one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was a program of “Celebrity Caricature” mostly from the 20’s & 30’s. Covarrubias, the developing Hirschfield, and a number of other brilliant artists were all represented well. In among the art was a small section on animated caricature. Drawings by Tee Hee and Joe Grant were on display with a couple of cel set-ups. There were also a couple of WB model sheets (without artist names.)

From the book of that exhibit I’m posting some of the animation art represented. Again no animators’ names are given. I remember well
_____(cel - Charlie McCarthy & W.C. Fields in________some beautiful caricatures by Joe
_____“Mother Goose Goes Hollywood”)_____________Grant who came to Disney’s studio to _____________________________________________work on this film.

_______________Joe E. Brown and Martha Raye from “Autograph Hound”

____(Click on any image to enlarge)

Garbo & Mickey - animation drawing for Mickey’s Gala Premiere

Greta Garbo model sheet for Warner Bros.

A small sampling of this show can be found on the National Portrait Gallery website. Non-animation caricatures are on view there, and the beautiful book/catalogue can be purchased there.
Credits for the above stills goes to:
1. “Mother Goose Goes Hollywood” from the collection of Jeff & Therese Lotman
2-5. “Autograph Hound” National Portrait Gallery, Wash.D.C.
6. “Mickey’s Gala Premiere” WDFeature Animation Research Library
7. The Steve Schneider Collection

Larry T. on his blog, Random Semiconscious Musings, has a great post on Mother Goose Goes Hollywood wherein he identifies all of the caricatures with matching photographs. It’s great to see the likes of Ned Sparks (pictured), George Arliss and Joe Penner.

On March 6th, I posted a piece on the UPA short, The King and Joe. This film was done for television as part of the Gerald McBoing Boing show. I wrote a very brief piece about it and conjectured that the art was inspired by Paul Klee. (I had - and still have - a specific painting in mind which almost exactly matches a pan from the film. However, I haven’t been able to find a copy of that painting.) Boy, was I wrong.

I received this note from Shirley Silvey, one of the designers of the film, and I’d like to post it. I hope that meets her approval.

A color still from Amid Amidi’s great book, Cartoon Modern.
He credits director: unknown. Now, we know the director’s name.

My name is Shirley Silvey and I worked on “The King and Joe”. In 1956, near the end of the Gerald McBoing Boing Show, UPA hired Ed Levitt, a well known director/storyboard/layout and design artist to do some shorts. Ed wanted me to work with him, so I was hired as well. While Ed was a veteran in animation, I was a novice. With the two of us and two animators together in the same room, we started on the first short entitled “The King and Joe”.

Regards,
Shirley Silvey

(I’d also written a snide comment in my original post saying that the film has haunted me for years and hoped writing extensively about it would “exorcize the film from my brain.” That’s her reference, and I deserved it.) The film was more than a “little cartoon” but still survives and compares well to most of the mediocre material done today.

There’s an excellent interview with Shirley Silvey at the Toonarific Cartoons. The focus of the interview seems to be her work at Jay Ward’s studio, Bullwinkle and Hoppity Hooper, but there’s quite a bit more about work with Abe Levitow and UPA.

Several of her BG layouts appear on the new Abe Levitow site. One of these appears to the right.
See Magoo’s Christmas Carol and 1001 Arabian Nights.
__________________________________BG Layout - Shirley Silvey / Painting - Bob Inman.

- I’ve taken the dvd and made a high def high res QT and put it through AfterEffects. I was able to pull every frame. The 3:2 pull down gave every fifth frame as a dupe of frame 5. This allowed the piece to expand to 30fps.

Here then is what the cycle should look like:

1 2

3 4

5 6

7 8

910

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1920

- Let’s talk a little about the problems of trying to study animation from a dvd. You can get a screen grab easily from the free media that comes with your computer. If you move ahead “1″ frame at a time and grab each image, you can study the animation. The only problem is it doesn’t really work.

I’ve made a few posts where I’ve pulled every frame and separated the character (via photoshop) from the background, then put it through Aftereffects to create a walk cycle. You can see this with Betty Boop or Popeye or, now, from 101 Dalmatians a walk cycle of the Art Student.

The only problem is it’s a fake.

I’ve captured EVERY FRAME of those cycles, and I’ve meticulously assembled them up to Aftereffects. Hypothetically, the images should be posted on “ones” to make it work, but it doesn’t The timing is different - too fast. With each one of those three cycles, I’ve had to put the images I’ve captured on “threes” to get close to the timing of the original.

This would certainly have not made sense with a walk cycle from 101 Dalmatians. It most certainly is on “ones” in the actual film, yet the timing as captured is off. This can only mean that the compression on dvds is not allowing the images captured on a “frame by frame” basis to be all the images on the disk. I have to compensate. So far this compensation has worked.

______________(Click any image to enlarge.)

But now I’ll show you one that doesn’t work. It has to be viewed on “ones”, and you have to see all the images to get it to work. This is the second walk cycle from 101 Dalmatians. The “Buxom girl and bulldog” walk comes close, but no cigar. There are only two positions for the little dog - expanded legs and crossing position. On “ones” this might look ok for a rapid walk, but to get the timing for this walk cycle - as it appears in the film - you actually have to put these frame grabs on something between “threes” and “fours”. It absolutely does not work.

So I give you a failed attept at showcasing another brilliant walk cycle from this excellent film. Here’s the “Buxom girl and bulldog” seq. 001, scene 21 from 101 Dalmatians. Blaine Gibson animated it.

1 2

3 4

56

7 8

910

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Again, note that Hans Perk is posting the studio Drafts for this film on his site, and Mark Mayerson is posting Mosaics and comments on his site.

- Continuing with the yesterday’s post of the storyboard from 101 Dalmatians, we pick up with Cruella de Ville meeting Pongo in the film’s opening.

The storyboard sections were loaned to me by John Canemaker. Like past boards, they’re quite long, oversized photographs which would enlarge too small and illegible even if I worked at the max size. However, by my splitting each row in half, I can post them to be large enough for reading. This means I have to deconstruct the boards and put them together again. Below is the board for this sequence, and you can get an idea of its size.

_________________(Click any image to enlarge.)

Here is the sequence reconstructed. It’s one of my favorites in this film, and I very much like the entire film. I do like seeing the song in storyboard form.

1a

1b

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

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5a

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7

The real companions to this board are on two other sites:
___Hans Perk is posting the studio Drafts for this film on his site, and
___Mark Mayerson is posting Mosaics and comments on his site.

- The four artists pictured above were shot during a boisterous story meeting. Or more probably it’s a posed photo. It’s interesting that they pose a picture where the irrascible Bill Peet seems to be taking on the designer and directors of the film.

Left to right, that’s Woolie Reitherman, Bill Peet, Ken Andersen and Ham Luske.

This is the first of the storyboards loaned to me by John Canemaker. It’s the second sequence in 101 Dalmatians. The sequence starts with the wedding of Roger and Anita, Pongo and Perdita and takes us through the introduction of Cruella de Ville to pregnant Perdita worrying about the fate of her pups in the kitchen.

This board takes us more than half way through the sequence. The second board, which I’ll post tomorrow or Wednesday (it takes a while to scan and post these), takes us through the end of the sequence.

Hans Perk is posting the complete production drafts of this film, and Mark Mayerson has started creating a mosaic from the drafts Hans is posting. The information they’re both offering is invaluable.

As with past boards, I’ve split them up so that I can post the largest possible image. Otherwise they’d be the size of the full board, above.
Here we go:

1a
__________(Click any image to enlarge so that you can read it.)

1b

2a

2b

3a

3b

4a

4b

5a

5b

6a

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7b

to be continued.

I’m currently preparing two dvd’s for release this coming June. They’re some of my favorite titles. One will feature The Marzipan Pig and Jazztime Tale. The second will feature Abel’s Island and The Story of the Dancing Frog.

Among these extras will be animatics for both dvds as well as storyboards to view. I’m currently working on Abel’s Island, and since I’ve been scanning that storyboard, I thought it worthwhile to post a bit of it.

The story:
Abel, a mouse, has just been washed onto an island far from his new wife. A gentleman, he doesn’t know how to survive, and he just wants to escape across the river to get home. This is where we pick him up as he slowly, very slowly learns to come to grips with living alone on an island.

The board was done by Bridget Thorne and me. We seem to have done about every other drawing together. I don’t remember working on it at all. It was done in 1987.

_________(Click any image to enlarge.