Michael Sporn Animation - Splog

- Here’s a scene all of 29 drawings in length, but if you check it out in the film it’s enormous. Everything’s moving - the wago they’re standing in, the pots & pans, things on the table and most definitely Stromboli who in one enormous drawing changes the scene, Pinocchio’s world and the mood in the audience. “Quiet!” is all the dialogue shouted in the scene. It’’s frightening.

(Make sure you click to enlarge every drawing here.)

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Closed position starting to open his body - legs first.

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Pulling it all into a ball,
he shouts, “QUIET” - the dialogue for the scene

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Couldn’t open up more than this.
Just look at the distortion in this drawing. Magnificent.
Open, loud, ready to burst. One frame only.

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Next frame he’s landed and gathered himself.
Only the secondary action - vest, pants, beard -
echo the outburst.

Quickly he starts to turn.

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His clothes lag behind in pulling themselves together.

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He’s set to give the demand and end the scene.

The following QT movie represents the entire scene from Pinocchio.

Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

Here are frames from the actual scene:

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What a difference the shake of the coach and the
bounce of the hanging utensils make to the scene.

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There’s danger everywhere, here.
It’s scary.

Many thanks to my friend, Lou Scarborough, for the loan of this scene.

- Here are a couple of Pinocchio storyboard sequences from the collection of Bill Peckmann. The boards are stated in a relatively small format. I’ve scanned them in at a high res and am placing them here in smaller sections so that they’re legible - at least in the blown-up versions.

Pinocchio is duped by some cads. These are the three full sized boards which take us through the nose-grows sequence (minus Stromboli).

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Now here are those same three boards broken into sections.

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Of course, if we’re talking about studying Pinoochio, I have to direct you back
to the drafts on Hans Perk’s great site and
the mosaics on Mark Mayerson’s equally excellent blog.

- This is Part 4 of this large scene by Bill Tytla of Stromboli.

Part 1 saw a frenetic anger from Stromboli;
Part 2 he caught himself to get a hold on his emotions.
Part 3 he slowed down and prepared for the kiss (a break)
and the bow featured in Part 4.
This final part is on twos, as he slowly slowly moves across in the bow and gets up to salute.

It’s obviously beautiful work and a gem of scene.
There’s no doubt the key Assistant had a lot to do with the final scene as displayed here. Tytla had enormous respect for his clean up assistants and gave such credit. (You can read it in the Action Analysis class, posted on Hans Perk’s A Film LA site.)

“The first assistant must know as much as possible about animation. I think first assistant’s experience is the most practical way to get animation - you have everything that the animator has been working on - his exposure sheets, drawings, etc., and you know what he is trying to do.”

David Nethery has added the soundtrack from the final film and synced it up to this Pencil Test here.

We pick up the rest of the scene with the very next drawing.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

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Here’s the final QT of it all together:

Stromboli
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- This is Part 4 of this large scene by Bill Tytla of Stromboli.

Part 1 saw a frenetic anger from Stromboli; Part 2 he caught himself to get a hold on his emotions. Part 3 he slowed down and prepared for the kiss (a break) and the bow upcoming in this, Part 4. Much of this part is on twos, as opposed to part 3 all on ones.

This is animation tour de force and there’s one part left to go next week.

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The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- This is part 3 of this large scene by Bill Tytla of Stromboli. The scene started in Part 1 with thoroughly frenetic anger from Stromboli. In Part 2 he tries to catch himself and get a grip on his emotions. Here in Part 3 he moves slowly and takes a 180° turn from where he started. The line against the curve. All this while playing out the lines from the scene. The drawing is stunning, the motion is brilliant, and the acting is the best animation has to offer. Those hands are just great; look at 126.

I pick up with the last drawing from Part 2.

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Tytla made sure he firmly planted Stromboli’s feet (in part 2)
before he attempted this firm bow.

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He’s made a solid line of the back, the strength of this move,
by using the left arm held firmly in place.

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This is the bottom of the bow, now he goes back up.

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All of the shapes change naturally in the bow, though it looks
as if it remains a solid. No noticeable change. Solid weight.

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Watch the timing on the hand from here to #128
as Stromboli blows a kiss.
Many an animator today would pop it and call it animation.

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The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

This note arrived from Borge Ring after my first post Bill Tytla’s scene featuring Stromboli’s mood swing:

The Arch devotees of Milt Kahl have tearfull misgivings about Wladimir Tytla’s magnificent language of distortions. ‘”Yes, he IS good. But he has made SO many ugly drawings”

Musicologists will know that Beethoven abhorred the music of Johan Sebastian Bach.

yukyuk
Børge

My first post spoke a bit about the distortion Tytla would use to his advantage to get an emotional gesture across. It’s part of the “animating forces instead of forms” method that Tytla used. This is found in Stromboli’s face in the first post. In this one look for this arm in drawing #50. It barely registers but gives strength to the arm move before it as his blouse follows through in extreme.

There’s also some beautiful and simple drawing throughout this piece. Stromboli is, basically, a cartoon character that caricatures reality beautifully. A predecessor to Cruella de Vil. In drawings 76 to 80 there’s a simple turn of the hand that is nicely done by some assistant. A little thing among so much bravura animation.

Many people don’t like the exaggerated motion of Stromboli. However, I think it’s perfectly right for the character. He’s Italian - prone to big movements. He’s a performer who, like many actors in real life, goes for the big gesture. In short his character is all there - garlic breath and all. It’s not cliched and it’s well felt and thought out. Think of the Devil in “Night on Bald Mountain” that would follow, then the simply wonderful and understated Dumbo who would follow that. Tytla was a versatile master.

Here’s part 2 of the scene:

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The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- Bill Tytla’s work has to be studied and studied and studied for any student of animation. He was the best, and it’s pretty doubtful his work will be superceded. He brought beautiful distortion to many of the drawings he did, using it as a way to hammer home some of the emotions in the elasticity he was creating. Yet, the casual observer watching this sequence in motion doesn’t ever notice that distortion yet can feel it in the strength of the motion.

Stromboli offers everything for that study. I have some old copies of a scene too large (a couple hundred drawings) to post in one shot.

Four drawings (#1, 11, 22, & 48) that shift so enormously but call no attention to itself.
Brilliant draftsmanship and use of the forms.

Here we have the beginning: drawings 1-48. More will come in the future.

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The full scene with all drawings.
Click left side of the black bar to play.
Right side to watch single frame.

- For New Year’s Day, I’m going to go back to the beginning. My beginning - or at least the day I think I truly came to understand what animation involved and how much I really loved it.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

I was 12 and had saved my entire summer savings working as a delivery boy for a pharmacist not far from my home. All I made was tips, and the summer had brought me a full $30.

I wanted a projector to watch films. If I was going to make cartoons, I had to have a projector. (Who thought about having a camera to watch them!)

My mother sat down with me - we lived in the Inwood section of far upper Manhattan. She gave me a home-drawn map of the city and told me how I could get there by train. On my own, I took a subway trip to 42nd Street and headed for Peerless Cameras. This was a camera store near Grand Central which would later merge with Willoughby to become Peerless-Willoughby.

They had used 8mm projectors (before the invention of super 8 ), and I intended to go home with one. I did - $25.

Of course, I needed something to project, and Peerless had a VERY LARGE section of entertainment films - 8mm & 16mm. Castle Films distributed many of the Ub Iwerks shorts (most were B&W prints.) They were cut down a bit from the full film, and title cards were edited into them. Obviously, the 8mm projectors and films were silent back then (we’re talking about 1959.)

I’d known the name of Ub Iwerks since I was 8. He was as close to an animation hero as I could muster at that young age. I’d read all about him and knew of the period when he’d had his own studio. There, in Peerless, was Jack and the Beanstalk, and this was the first film I bought.

I felt absolute delight watching that film an endless number of times. The film was, as I said, in B&W, but this actually enhanced some problems old Ub had faced when he started out.

The color paints, for example, weren’t so smooth to lay down. The hand of the bean-seller streaked like crazy and was more obvious in the B&W version. The same was true of the giant’s hand later in the film. Obviously, any time they mixed white into their colors, they couldn’t get it consistent. Terrytoons had this problem well into the 40’s.

It was fun noticing the many elements that made up the film. There were special effects in the film. I’d known that Iwerks was involved in “Special Processes” at the studio (whatever that was - it had to be effects), so you could look at what he did in his own studio. The dark house in the rain storm, illuminated by the lightning was impressive.

Also, the characters were so wacky, you couldn’t help but be entertained by them. The drawing shifted all over the place, but despite the fact that I noticed this - at the age of 12 - I also knew I didn’t mind. You always knew who the characters were even if they went wildly off model.

Every once in a while, there was a hint of a “multiplane-like” effect. When Jack stepped off the beanstalk and onto the clouds, the cel levels move into a position so that the illusion of depth is attempted. It’s handled nicely, I have to say.

Of course, it was a bit of a surprise to find that I couldn’t stop the projector one frame at a time. I wanted to do more than watch the film over and over and over and over and over (which I did.) Eventually, I got tired of this and started tinkering with the machine. I had to be cautious so as not to jar the bulb which could easily burn out and cost me another five bucks.

There was a framing device on the projector. Sometimes the frame line was in the picture and you had to turn this knob to properly frame the picture. By turning this an ungodly number of times, you could actually advance the frames, but you couldn’t see more than about four frames at a time.

That wasn’t quite good enough, so I ultimately started taking the projector apart. I was able to rework the framing mechanism so it could keep going. I was able to watch the film one frame at a time and truly study the animation.

I can’t tell you how many hours I pored over this film.

There was a scene where the giant watches money falling out of the hen’s golden eggs. His one eye follows the coins down (and later follows the rotten egg leaking into the money bag.)

I remembered this scene well when studying some drawings Tytla had done of Stromboli counting his coins. His eyes are similarly loose as they follow the coins to the table, and I wondered if he had known about this giant animation.

Back then, I wasn’t aware that Iwerks hadn’t drawn the entire film by himself. I eventually came to learn that Grim Natwick pretty much ran the studio for quite some time and was replaced, after he’d left for Disney, by Shamus Culhane.

Years later, when I first met up with Grim Natwick, I told him that this film was the very first animated film I’d studied and studied in my goal of becoming an animator. He didn’t offer much of a reaction.

It was a real treat taking this film apart. I started out knowing nothing and soon learned that animation had many decisions and choices behind it. Even today I get a twinge of excitement when I first look at this short - I’m sure it’s as much nostalgia as anything.

In short, it’s all so much easier today. Get a dvd through the mail, look at it on YouTube. Get an animation program like Flash and wallah you’re an animator. There’s no effort. Maybe there was an advantage to having to make an effort.

Here’s the link to the YouTube version of the Jack & the Beanstalk.
And here’s the link to vol 1 of The Cartoons That Time Forgot.

Happy New Year

Bill Tytla was an amazing character in animation history. I think, far and away, he was onto something that few other animators ever tried to face. He used the drawing, including all aspects: volume, dynamic tension, weight and graphic distortion, at the service of the character’s acting.

I intend, in another post, to draw a comparison with him to Jim Tyer and Rod Scribner.

For the moment, let me show off these great drawings lifted from John Canemaker’s wonderful book, The Treasures of Disney Animation Art.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Look at the distortion in these two drawings - 2 & 3
Talk about breaking of joints, talk about stretch and squash,
talk about every possible animation rule and see those rules
stretched to the brink in these great drawings.

This guy was the master of all masters.
Tytla not only knew the rules but used them to create an acting style
that was on a par with the best of the Method actors of his day.
His kind was never equalled, and I don’t expect to see
anything comparable in cgi. I suppose I can hope.

What a treasure.

Of course, this is Stromboli’s wagon interior. It’s a beauty.
What a magnificent film!

- Mark Mayerson has just completed his final mosaic of Pinocchio. This has been an extraordinary effort on his part, and I can’t say how much I’ve enjoyed it. This film was possibly the pinnacle of traditional animation, and we can’t study it or honor it enough. Mark’s efforts have only elucidated this point more than ever. There’s so much there; the film is an animation treasure.

One of the gems of the film was Bill Tytla’s animation of Stromboli. A minor character takes on an enormous personality and a major threat to Pinocchio under Tytla’s hands.

The Frank Thomas/Ollie Johnston book, The Illusion of Life, contains a flip book in the upper corner - a short bit of Stromboli flying off the handle. The images are quite small and it’s hard to really see them. I have a slightly larger version of them, so thought I post them as my small tribute to the film.

A model sheet of Stromboli.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)