Michael Sporn Animation - Splog

The Fantastic Mr. Fox - Did I tell you often enough that I really like this movie? One director - one voice. Independent spirit. Relatively low budget - $40 million. See it for fun.

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- There’s a solid interview with Wes Anderson on the always enjoyable Onion’s AV CLub. His comments are worth reading, expecially if you’ve seen the film.

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- Rotten Tomatoes, on the arrival of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, has created a listing of Disney animated features and organized them into a list of titles. The order of the list is determined by some shaky criteria. Per Rotten Tomatoes: We used a weighted formula that takes into account the Tomatometer, number of reviews, and release year of every film included. We excluded all Disney subsidiaries and companies through which Disney has distribution deals hence, no films from Pixar, Studio Ghibli, or DisneyToon Studios are on the list.

Here’s their listing. Each title is followed by the Tomatometer rating:

1. Pinocchio 100%
2. Snow White 98%
3. Fantasia (1940) 98%
4. 101 Dalmatians 97%
5. Dumbo 97%
6. Beauty & the Beast 93%
7. Lion King 92%
8. Aladdin 92%
9. Cinderella 92%
10. Sleeping Beauty 91%
11. The Little Mermaid 90%
12. Bambi 89%
13. The Jungle Book 89%
14. Bolt 88%
15. Tarzan 88%
16. Lady and the Tramp 87%
17. Mulan 86%
18. Emperor’s New Groove 85%
19. Lilo and Stitch 85%
20. The Rescuers 84%
21. Fantasia 2000 82%
22. Hercules 83%
23. Peter Pan 83%
24. Alice In Wonderland 81%
25. The Hunchback of Notre Dame 72%
26. The Sword in the Stone 73%
27. Treasure Planet 70%
28. Meet the Robinsons 66%
29. Dinosaur 65%
30. The Aristocats 65%
31. The 3 Caballeros 87%
32. The Fox and the Hound 71%
33. Pocahontas 56%
34. Home on the Range 55%
35. Robin Hood. 55%
36. The Black Cauldron 58%
37. Atlantis: the Lost Continent 46%
38. Oliver and Company 44%
39. The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad 89%
40. The Rescuers Down Under 60%
41. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh 91%
42. The Great Mouse Detective 79%
43. Brother Bear 38%
44. Chciken Little 36%
45. Saludos Amigos 70%
46. Melody Time 88%
47. Make Mine Music 67%
48. Fun and Fancy Free 67%

Just to amuse myself, I sought out all the Don Bluth films and compared their Tomatometer ratings to see which would be hightest. No surprises, except maybe that American Tale was rated so low. These aren’t graded the same way the Disney films were, above. Some of Bluth’s films weren’t rated:

The Secret of NIMH 94%
Anastasia 85%
An American Tale 63%
Titan AE 51%
All Dogs Go to Heaven 44%
The Pebble and the Penguin 36%
Thumbelina 25%
Rock-A-Doodle 20%

Continuing the process let’s look at Ralph Bakshi’s films. He didn’t fare as well as Bluth; some of Bakshi’s films weren’t reviewed either:

Heavy Traffic 88%
American Pop 56%
Fritz the Cat 53%
Wizards 53%
The Lord of the Rings 47%
Cool World 6%

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- After posting Tom Hachtman’s Renaissance Masters the past four weeks, I’m sort of out of sorts to not have any more of it. Let me post a couple of Gertrude & Alice cartoons to fill the void:

This one could be a comment on the “Twilight” experience.

This week I heard about the after-show auction going on
at A Steady Rain’s Broadway performances. Hugh Jackman &
Daniel Craig are raising cash for Broadway Cares by having
after-show auctions of their “sweaty” T-shirts.

Gert & Alice can do it for the environment.

And while I’m at it, let me post one of my favorite strips (which I’d posted once before.)

(Click any image to enlarge.)

Is there a more powerful god than the cartoonist?

The Renaissance Masters - 4 will conclude tomorrow, Sunday.

- There have been a number of newspaper articles about the released short list of Academy Award entrees for Best Documentary. Many of the more popular films - such as Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a love story and The September Issue - have been left off the list. This has caused some feedback for the Academy.

The short list of entrees for the Best Animated Feature film has also gotten a lot of attention in newpapers and on blogs. A record 20 films have been entered and are probably eligible - meaning there may be as many as 5 nominees this year.

The Academy has never previously released the short list of the nominees for the Best Animated Short.

Until today.

These are the ten films vying for the Oscar nomination for that award. They’re listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their director and production company:

The Cat Piano
Eddie White and Ari Gibson, directors (The People’s Republic of Animation)

French Roast
Fabrice O. Joubert, director (Pumpkin Factory/Bibo Films)

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
Nicky Phelan, director, and Darragh O’Connell, producer (Brown Bag Films)

The Kinematograph
Tomek Baginski, director-producer (Platige Image)

The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)
Javier Recio Gracia, director (Kandor Graphics and Green Moon)

Logorama
Nicolas Schmerkin, producer (Autour de Minuit)

A Matter of Loaf and Death
Nick Park, director (Aardman Animations Ltd.)

Partly Cloudy
Peter Sohn, director (Pixar Animation Studios)

Runaway
Cordell Barker, director (National Film Board of Canada)

Varieté
Roelof van den Bergh, director (il Luster Productions)

The following were all of the films that were eligible and competed for the short list. Congratulations to all for having produced films of such high calibre.

1. GETTING OVER HIM IN 8 SONGS OR LESS - 28mins - Debra Solomon
2. KANIZSA HILL - 8min - Evelyn Lee
3. ALICE’S ATTIC - 3mins - Robyn Yannoukos
4. HE’S BARACK OBAMA - 2mins - JibJab
5. SEBASTIAN’S VOODOO - 4mins - Joaquin Baldwin
6. THE KINEMATOGRAPH - 12ins - Tomek Bagiński
7. HORN DOG - 5mins - Bill Plympton
8. VARIETÉ - 5mins - Roelof van den Bergh
9. ALMA - 6mins - Rodrigo Blaas
10. BIRTH - 12mins - Signe Bauman
11. CAGES - 10mins - Juan Jose Medina
12. CHROMA CHAMELEON - 5mins - Marc F. Adler & Warren Grubb
13. ClKORJA AN’ KAFE (Chicory ‘n Coffee) - 8mins - Dusan Kastelic
14. ESTERHAZY - 23min - Izabela Plucinska
15. JACINTA - 9mins - Karla Castañeda
16. LA INCREJBLE HISTORIA DEL HOMBRE SIN SOMBRA - 9mins - José Esteban Alenda
17. LEONARDO -10mins - Jim Capobianco
18. LIVE MUSIC - 6mins - Hugh Hart
19. LOGORAMA - 17mins - H5, a French design collective,
20. A MATTER OF LOAF AN DEATH - 29mins - Nick Park
21. PARTLY CLOUDY - 6mins - Peter Sohn
22. PATIENCE OF THE MEMORY - 7mins - Vuk Jevremovic
23. PIGEON: IMPOSSIBLE - 6mins - Lucas Martell
24. RINKY DINK - 5mins - John Dilworth
26. RUNAWAY - 9mins - Cordell Barker
26. SLAVES - AN ANIMATED DOCUMENTARY - 15mins - David Aronowitsch & Hanna Heilborn
27. THE SPINE - 11mins - Chris Landreth
28. TABLE FELLOWSHIP - 2mins - Robert Colon
29. VALISE - 7mins - Isabelle Favez
30. VIVE LA ROSE -5mins - Bruce Alcock
31. WHEN APPLES ROLL -7mins - Reinis Kalnaellis
32, YOU’RE OUTA HERE - 3mins - George Griffin
33. THE BIRTHDAY GIFT - 8mins -
34. THE CAT PIANO - 8mins - Eddie White & Ari Gibson
35. FRENCH ROAST - 8mins - Fabrice O. Joubert
36. THE LADY AND THE REAPER (La Dama y La Muerte) - 8mins - Javier Recio
37. GRANNY O’GRIMM’S SLEEPING BEAUTY - 6 mins - Nicky Phelan

Short Films and Feature Animation Branch members will now select the five nominees from among the 10 titles on the shortlist. Branch screenings will be held in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco in January 2010. The 82nd Academy Awards nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2, 2010, at 8:30 a.m. EST in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater.

Thanks to Karl Cohen for the information.

- The news that a McDonalds will be built within the Louvre is something of a shock to the system. For some reason, I would’ve thought this had happened years ago. Doing it now is somhow passé.

Last year we did a little short from the feature storyboard done a million years ago, based on Tom Hachtman’s comic strip Gertrude’s Follies. The segment involves Gertrude and Alice introducing Pabs (Picasso) to his first hamburger. Since our story takes place in Paris, they’re at a MacDonald’s within shooting distance of the Eiffel Tower. Had I known there would be a Mickey Dee in the Louvre, it would have been more appropriate to put it there.

Maybe we should redo the short.

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- Last week Amid Amidi started several threads of a conversation about te economics of posting films on line. This was followed up by Mark Mayerson on his blog, going into contracts with some depth.

This all followed some thoughts I’d been having about a short film we did in this studio last year. I entered it into one Festival and was soon rejected. Since then I’ve been sitting on it, debating how to exploit it.

It’s the film, discussed above, the pilot for the Gerturde’s Follies film. It was just a kick making it in the studio in between a couple of paying jobs. I wouldn’t mind doing more of them and might actually go ahead with that idea. But for now, I’m making the rash decision to post the film here and now. I’m only going to keep it up for a week or so, and then I’ll replace it with some stills. But for now I’ll forego Frederator’s $50 or Cartoon Brew’s $200.

An image from the cover of Tom’s book
collecting some of the Gertrude Strips. ________________
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- On the NYTimes website John Lasseter talks about the “digital archeology” behind adapting Toy Story and Toy Story 2 into 3D movies. He doesn’t really say much, but you can hear his voice saying it while looking at stills from both films. (For actual information, read the accompanying article.) Lasseter sounds tired and listless, as if he were in the middle of a junket and had repeated this material a hundred times that day.

This slide-show feature on the NYTimes site often has some interesting bits to show or explain. The slide sow for Shane Acker’s 9 offered some details about the production design for the film. Similarly, for Coraline, Henry Selick takes us on a tour of shooting 3D with puppet animation. He details the differences between the real and the “other” worlds of Coraline. Lots of stills of drawings, puppets, people in process and screen shots illustrate the excellent narrative. For Pixar’s Up, Pete Doctor takes us on a backstage tour of the character development behind the film. There are lots of models and early stills of artwork as they get to the characters. Each character also has its own sound cue. This is a sophisticated talk from Pixar, one wonders why so shoddy for the 3d re-releases.

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Daniel Thomas MacInnes writes on his The Ghibli Blog that Miyazaki is working on not one but two features: one for 2011, the other for 2013. Daniel doesn’t have titles or news about what the films are about, baut he does investigate the idea that two films would be so closely produced, back-to-back. Interesting if you’re a Miyazaki fan. ________________ .
The Shadows Dream is the latest Op Ed animation offered via the NY Times by Jeff Scher.

The intro on the Times site reads:
“Fall’s later sunrises bring longer shadows to the morning rush hour. On any particularly sunny morning, the shadows of people in the city seem to constitute a fleeting parallel universe at our feet.”

Jeff is really on to something with this piece, and I can imagine it going a lot further than it does here. I hope he continues with these experiments. Again, Shay Lynch’s music is exceptional. (I’m curious to hear the score he wrote for Paul Fierlinger’s feature.)

I’m surprised. I can’t get Teddy Kennedy out of my head today.
I don’t know how the Senate goes on without him.____________________________

- Suzan Pitt’s World - As part of the celebration for the 30 Years of First Run Features at Lincoln Center there will be a program of the collected works of Suzan Pitt. Three of her finest shorts will be screened: Asparagus (1979), Joy Street (1995) and El doctor (2006). This is a pretty strong program which shows a unique vision in the world of animation, and I encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with her work to take the time to see these films on a big screen. (Everyone who is familiar with her work will probably want to return for another look.)

Asparagus was a natural for those late night screenings in the late 70’s early 80’s - at least across New York’s cinemas. It was as much a part of the scene as David Lynch’s Eraserhead or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo at midnight showings.

Performances will take place: Sun Aug 30: 1pm and Wed Sep 2: 2:50pm.

Also included in this retrospective is Jan Svankmajer’s Alice. This, of course, is the inventive stop-motion animator’s unsettling version of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. (You can watch a clip from this film here.)
Screening times are: Sat Aug 29: 1pm & Wed Sep 2: 9pm.

You might also want to look over the list of other films in the series of First Run Features. They’re my DVD distributor for a good reason (and it isn’t money); they have enormous respect for the Independent film maker and take great care with the films they distribute. Likewise I’m a fan of many of the filmmakers they do handle. Ross McElwee’s work is enormously important to me. His Sherman’s March (Thu Aug 27: 4pm & Sat Aug 29: 8:30pm) and Bright Leaves (Tue Sep 1: 4:15pm & 8:45pm) are both part of this mini-retrospective.
Many of the films’ directors will be present for Q&As.

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- This a reminder that there’s a screening of the documentary, Walt and El Grupo, tomorrow night at BAM. The screening is for MOCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and it features a Q&A with writer/director Ted Thomas and producer Kuniko Okubo, moderated by John Canemaker.

Again, this will take place on tomorrow, Thursday, August 27th, 7:30 PM at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, BAM Cinema 4, (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, NY).

Admission is free for Members of MoCCA. To rsvp, call (212) 254-3511.

The film will open theatrically in NY & LA on Sept. 11th.

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Marco de Blois has created a new blog. In response to the stir over Theodore Ushev’s poster for the 09 Ottawa Animation Festival, he’s posting any Animation Festival poster he can locate. The new blog is already overrun with a wide variety of posters.

- As a young boy growing up in the far upper reaches of Manhattan I lived for animation. I watched the limited fare offered on television (usually B&W Warner Bros cartoons, the Disneyland TV show on Wednesday nights, early Saturday morning cartoons - Mighty Mouse show being the best of the lot) or I went to the library and to borrow any book I could locate that mentioned the medium.

There were half a dozen books back then, and I probably memorized the lot of them in short time. (I suspect I was the only one borrowing those treasured books.) I remember when I came across a book of collected essays by the film critic, Gilbert Seldes. In this book, The 7 Lively Arts, there was a chapter on Walt Disney. I read and reread it carefully and thoroughly, and I enjoyed it immensely. I’ve recently run into it again (in a different form - he reworked it for the book since that version covers quite a bit more than the very earliest years) in the New Yorker Magazine’s archives. Not bad reading on this rainy day in New York, so I thought I’d share it.

Remember this was written in 1931 when the studio really was just in its earliest phases. Mickey Mouse was barely two years old.

From the Dec. 19, 1931 issue of the magazine:

- IN the current American mythology, Mickey Mouse is the imp, the benevolent dwarf of older fables, and like them lie is far more popular than the important gods, heroes, and ogres. Over a hundred prints of each of his adventures are made, and of the fifteen thousand movie houses wired for sound in America, twelve thousand show his pictures. So far he has been deathless, as the demand for the early Mickey Mouses continues although they are nearly four years old; they are used at children’s matinees, for request programs, and as acceptable fillers in programs of short subjects. It is estimated that over a million separate audiences see him every year.

Thirteen Mickey Mouses are made each year. Tin- same workmen produce also thirteen pictures in another series, the Silly Symphonies, so that exactly fourteen days is the working time for each of these masterpieces which Serge Eisenstein, the great Russian director, called, with professional extravagance, America’s most original contribution to culture. The creative, power behind them is a single individual, Walt Disney, who happens to be such a mediocre draughtsman, in comparison with the artists he employs, that he never actually draws Mickey Mouse. He has, however, a drop personal relation to the creature: the speaking voice of Mickey Mouse is the voice of Walt Disney.

HE is a slender, sharp-faced, quietly happy, frequently smiling young man, thirty this month. He is married to Lillian Marie Hounds, whom he met in Hollywood, where she was probably unique, as she had nothing to do with pictures. She has enough to do with them now, because she is the first receiver of her husband’s ideas. Mickey Mouse pictures are talked into being before they are drawn, talked and cackled and groaned and boomed and squeaked and roared and barked and meowed, with ever}- variation of animal sound, with appropriate gesture, and with music. If strange outcries anil queer noises waken Mrs. Disney at night, it is only Walt working on a new story. He never stops; he swims and rides and lie plays baseball with his stall, but all the time he is inventing. He is one of the lucky ones who can make a fortune out of the work the) love and he does not love Mickey for his wealth alone. He was just as keen when exhibitors refused to look at the Mouse, and just as keen over earlier efforts which were, as he now says, “pretty awful.”

He is fortunate also in having as his chief co-worker his elder brother, who is the businessman of the firm. Roy Disney and five assistants attend to finance; Walt and about a hundred others—a quarter of them are artists, the rest are gagmen, story-men, and technical experts— make the picture’. ‘The distribution and sales are in other hands.
When a Mouse or a Silly Symphony is finished, the business side and most of the artists watch it carefully for commercial value, for those mysterious qualities which they think, or guess, will make it popular. They find their congratulations to Walt Disney accepted without enthusiasm. He is not putting on artistic side; he is not indifferent to profits. What he is frequently doing is referring each finished picture back to the clear idea with which it started, the thing he saw and heard in his mind before it ever came to India ink and sound tracks. In the process of making the picture, something often escapes, and Disney wanders moodily away from the projection-room grumbling: “Where did it go to?” and often will begin outlining the original idea again, with gestures and sound effects, to prove that he is right.

THE mechanics of creating Mickey Mouse are complicated and, to the workers, tedious. Six or seven drawings are required for every movement, and the first and last, the position of thr Mouse at the beginning and at the end of any motion, are drawn by the principal artists, or “animators.” After them, the “in-betweeners” fill the intervening space, with minute changes in the figure. The final step in preparing for tin camera is the photographic transfer of these drawings to celluloid. As the background changes less frequently, dozens of celluloid drawings ma)’ be placed over a single background scene.

The drawings are now ready for the camera, which photographs each separately. The tracing of the moving figure is placed on its background, the photograph is taken, and the next drawing is moved into position. About eight hundred photographs can can be taken in one day —- some fifty feet of film.

The sound track is made after the picture has been completed. A short section of the film is projected; the music, which has been selected in advance, is rehearsed by musicians, who watch the screen as they play; and when the timing has been perfected, the music is recorded.

The two advantages of the animated cartoon over the feature picture are only implied in the above description: there are no stars and only *as much film is taken as will be used, A few feet arc allowed for adjustments, but the filming of a hundred and fifty thousand feet for a six-thousand-foot picture does not occur.

WALT DISNEY is, as I have said, thirty, and that means that he is too young to have had a history, too young to have developed oddities and idiosyncrasies. He is a simple person in the sense that everything about him harmonizes with everything else; his work reflects the way he lives, and vice versa. Mickey Mouse appears on the screen with features and Super-specials, but Mickey Mouse is far removed from the usual Hollywood product, with its sex appeal, current interests, personalities, studio intrigue, and the like. And Disney, living” in Hollywood, shares hardly at all in Hollywood’s life. He has not only made a lot of money (between forty and fifty per cent of the return on each film is net profit) better than that, his potential income is enormous: he has the surest bet in filmdom; experts think that he is only at the beginning of his great success. In these circumstances, Hollywood builds itself a palace and a pool; Disney lives in the house he built five years ago when he and his brother were too poor to buy a lot for each, and combined on a corner that both the houses they built would have, sufficient light and air. His house is a six-room bungalow, the commmoner type of middle-class construction in Hollywood; the car he drives is a medium-priced domestic one; his clothes are ordinary. He goes to pictures, but rarely to the flash openings; he neither gives nor attends great parties. Outside of the people who work with him, he has few friends in the industry. The only large sum of money he ever spent was one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars; it was the cost of his new studio. Everything he earns and everything his brother earns, on the fifty-fifty basis they established years ago, is reinvested in the business.

Walt Disney’s life before he went into movie-making divides into two almost equal and almost entirely un-distinguished section. He was born in Chicago In 1901, his father .was an Irish-Catholic builder and. contractor, his mother a German-American. He went to the Chicago Public. schools and studied drawing for a few months at the Art Institute. Arguing, perhaps, from his present enthusiasms, friends of the Chicago days now say that he was exceptionally fond going to the Zoo. The second period a little shorter in time, is more varied. The family moved to Kansas City; from there Disney, too young for service in the trenches went to the war with a Red Cross unit; fo Kansas City he returned and. tried to become a newspaper cartoonist. He found no job. He went to work as a commercial artist and saved up enough money to make his first animated cartoons.

There were animations of well known fairy tales and children’s classics. In competition with the highly developed product of the experts, they were crude and uninteresting, and they failed. Disney felt that if he wanted to make pictures, he would have to go where pictures were made and, in 1923, departed for Hollywood. His brother, who had come out of the war in shattered health, expected to live only a short time, and thought that California would be an agreeable place for his few remaining months of life. Walt had forty dollars when he arrived in Los Angeles Roy contributed about two hundred and fifty; they borrowed enough to make: a total of five hundred dollars and made their first picture. It was done in a bastard medium, using human beings and drawn figures simultaneously, ordinary movie photography and pen and ink; the inspiration comes from “‘Alice m Wonderland” and the series was called after the heroine which is interesting because - since the success of Mickey Mouse, Disney is continually receiving requests to make the original Alice in his own medium.

The first picture brought in fifteen hundred dollars; half of this was profit, if you figure that the brothers were not entitled to salary. During the making of the picture they had lived skimpily, on one full (cafeteria) meal a day, Roy ordering: the most filling vegetable, Walt the most filling meat, and then sharing, as they shared everything in those days, including their bank account. The lean time was soon over; the pictures were moderately successful, and after about four years, Disney went, in 1927 to Universal, where he created Oswald the Rabbit, the true forerunner of Mickey Mouse. Oswald was left behind when, in the middle of 1928, the Disneys, with fifteen thousand dollars saved, started out again on their own.

Sound was just coming in and Disney’s still-silent cartoons were unacceptable. Instantly he adapted his idea to the new medium. Unlike the producers of feature pictures he had nothing to scrap, no equipment to save, and hardly any public to worry about. He made a drawn comic and took it to New York for synchronisation, When he was finished he took it to the great producers and distributors — the men who had a few months earlier turned down the whole talking mechanism and were now furiously witnessing the success of the Vitaphone, Unanimously they informed Disney that no one would care for animated cartoons with sound. After several weeks, he found an independent backer, and on the nineteenth of September, 1928, the audience at the Colony Theatre in New York was “panicked” by “Steamboat Willie,” the first adventure of Mickey Mouse. A few days later Mickey was the hit at Roxy’s. Almost at once England all-hoiled him. The rest has been roses, roses all the way.

Roses and children. Leaving the distribution of the films to others, the Walt Disney Corporation concentrates commercially on the creation of movie audiences. Disney’s own connection with the vast enterprise which now enrolls three-quarters of a million children in Mickey Mouse clubs is not close. The clubs are the invention of an enterprising member of the business staff, and Disney’s only interest in them is as a source of knowledge; he learns from them what children like. The club members attend morning or early-afternoon performances at movie houses, led by a Chief Mickey Mouse and Chief Minnie Mouse; they have a club yell, and official greeting, a theme song, and a creed. As I find myself a little unsympathetic to this actiity, I sall limit myself to an exact quotation of the creed:

“I will be a square-shooter in my home, in school, on the playground, wherever I may be. I will be truthful and honorable and strive always to make myself a better and more useful little citizen. I will respect my elders and help the aged, the helpless, and children smaller than myself. In short, I will be a good American.”

For the good Americans there are commercial tie-ups with local businessmen, such as druggists who may feature a Mickey Mouse sundae, florists with Mickey Mouse bouquets, and so on; Parent-Teacher Associations are enlisted; the films at the matinees are swift-moving Westerns and other clean films, with a rather elaborate ritual of patriotism and good-fellowhip before and after.

It was reported that at the great Leipzig Trade Fair this year, forty percent of all the novelties offered were inspired by Mickey Mouse. One American company lists a velvet doll, a wood-jointed figure, a mechanical drummer, a metal sparkler, and half-a-dozen oter toys; there is a “Mickey Mouse Coloring Book” and another book of the adventures of Mickey Mouse; you can have Mickey Mouse on your writing paper; you can have him as a radiator cap. He appears in a comic strip in twenty-seven languages. From all of these exploitations, the originators receive royalties, since the own both the name and the design of the figure. (Infringements have been successfully prosecuted.) On the screen, Mickey Mouse appears in every country to which equipment for projecting sound films has penetrated. His name in Japan is Miki Kuchi.

Neither at homr nor abroad has Mickey’s career been without accidents. In Germany the appearance of an army of animals in Uhlan helmets was considered an affront, and the film was censored. In more dainty Ohio a cartoon was barred because a cow was discovered reading “Three Weeks.” Cows seem to have given more offence than any other beast in the Disney jungle, for many State Boards of Censorship protested against the grotesque and emotionally expressive udders which Nature and Disney gave them, and hereafter udders are to be at least partially concealed under a small provocative skirt. Disney himself is amused by the fuss; quite justifiably he takes it as a tribute to the remarkable reality of his totally unreal figure.

The process of creating this unreality begins in Disney’s mind. By this time it is only necessary for him to think of Mickey running to a fire, or Mickey skating; the rest is worked out in discussions with the artists and the gagmen. The automatic thing, the formula of the present, is the creative work of years ago, when Disney saw a series of pictures, saw moving forms across landscapes, rhythmic dances, compositions in black and white. These are still the essence of his pictures; his imagination is still largely visual. Only now that his assistants know the kind of picture he wants, his work has to he selecting the general idea, thinking out the tiny plot (even if it be only a modern version of “Little Red Riding Hood’* or a burlesque of some popular feature film), leaving the rest to experts.

I HAVE kept Mickey Mouse in the foreground because in general it is with Mickey that Disney is identified; but I belong to the heretical sect which considers the Silly Symphonies by far the greater of Disney’s products. Although there is a theme in each one, DISNEY’S IMAGINATION is freer to roam than it is in the more formal Mouse series. The Symphonies, moreover, are true sound pictures, without dialogue; the Mouse series has a tendency, lately, to run to verbal fun which is a little out of place.

Unlike the Mouse pictures, the Symphonies have no central character and no clearly defined plot. In them the animals and vegetation, purely incidental to Mickey Mouse, are brought into the foreground, and go through a wide range of activity — dances, skating contests, and so on — to the accompaniment of a reiterated musical theme.

The Symphonies reinforce what the Mouse tells us about Disney’s character: his delight in quick surprises, his uncomplicated sense of fun, his keen observation (Mickey Mouse has, correctly, four fingers, (not five). In addition they suggest his passion for all animals—he dropped his work and ran all over the vacant lot near his studio when he heard that a gopher snake had been seen there; he watched some sparrows for hours while they bent off a hawk and set up their nest. And he likes enormously the kind of laughter he himself creates; laughter at absurdities and impossibilities. Out of these natural, simple interests, backed by enormous files of pictures, cross-sections, and data on every animal extant, he creates the Silly Symphonies.

Like the first Mouse, the first Silly Symphony was long rejected by exhibitors; once shown, it ran six weeks at one house, an exceptional occurrence for a short subject. It was the Skeleton Dance, a theme naturally macabre, but treated with such humor and fantasy that no child has ever been frightened by it. Soon after followed a masterly series on the four seasons.

In one of these occurs a moment typical of Disney’s method. A frog dances on a log, its shadow following in the pool below. Presntly the frog moves to the opposite end of the picture, the shadow stays where it is, but continues to reflect the dance; then it joins its owner. Perhaps fifteen seconds cover the incident; it is a gracenote of wit over the broad humorous symphony of the whole picture.

With a picture to make every two weeks, both Disney and his associates have to use certain formulas, like the dancing of animals and chairs, chases and the sudden elongations of necks and legs. But the freshness of picture after picture proves that the creative force behind the formula is still powerful, and the combination of ingenuity and innocence (which was typical of prewar America) can still give pleasure. At the end of three and a half years, Disney’s ingenuity seems more fertile than ever. And his innocence is attested by the fact that he can think of nothing better to do with his time, his talent, and the five thousand a week (or thereabouts) which he earns, tan to put all of them back into the work he enjoys.

- Gilbert Seldes

- There’s an extensive review of the music for the Disney animated features, from Dumbo on up through the Fifties. The article was written by Ross Care who is a composer and a film music historian specializing in animation. This was originally written for Cinemascore and can be found on their site - here.

The article gives reports on the music of composers Oliver Wallace, Paul Smith, Ed Plumb and Charles Wolcott. It talks about Dumbo and the post Dumbo features: Victory Through Air Power, Saludos Amigos, and The Three Caballeros. Make Mine Music, Melody Time, Song Of The South, So Dear To My Heart, Fun And Fancy Free, Ichabod And Mr. Toad as well as Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

If you have any interest in the history of film music, particularly applicable to the Disney films, this is worth reading.

______________________

- Here’s a review of the film music of UPA written back in the Fifties for Films In Review magazine. I don’t have the exact date of this article I’d saved for the past thirty years.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)

- The news screamed out this week that The Secret of Nimh (otherwise known at Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) would be redone by Paramount. Obviously, this wasn’t the film that would save animation, and the new version won’t help much either. It’ll end up a cg/Live Action combination equal to that Guinea Pig
movie that just opened to big box
The old fashioned Secret of NIMH from Don Bluthoffice success.

We’ll have cgi rats and mice running around a live action farm environment chatting away. The film will be written and directed by Neil Burger who did that smash success, The Illusionist, a couple of years back.

One wonders how Don Bluth feels about this. We’ve already had The Chipmunks reanimated in some horrible incarnation of the original Format Films’ animated characters, and we’ve seen Scooby Doo, Garfield and Rocky & Bullwinkle turned into cgi clones of the definitely 2D characters. All terrible movies.

Now we get to witness serious feature animated films reworked into cg monstrosities. Perhaps Disney will take the cue and do a cg/Live Action version of Lady and the Tramp or Snow White or, dare we hope, Fantasia.

I read today about that the “auteur” Zhang Yimou is reamking the Coen Bros. film, Blood Simple. I wonder if any purists would complain if they decided to turn some Live Action gems into cg films. How about Citizen Kane? or Gone With the Wind? The Wizard of Oz is just waiting for the call. After all Tim Burton is doing Alice in Wonderland, and Zemeckis is
crowing about The Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey doing 10 different roles. (Is there any film that Jim Carrey can’t do?)

Word has also come that Universal is about to make Dr. Seuss’ book The Lorax into a 3-D CG animated feature. After the modest financial success of the Blue Sky feature, Horton Hears a Who, why shouldn’t Universal jump into the ring? It has to be better than DePatie-Freleng’s version. At least it’ll stretch the delightful book even longer.
The Lorax

Are there ANY original ideas out there? Has the entire Hollywood world gone so vapid that they can’t come up with anything original?

But then this isn’t just the case with Hollywood features; Broadway is going down the same road. There are dozens of shows coming to Broadway that are reworked movie scripts. Everything from 9 To 5 to Cry-Baby have come and gone on the once great thoroughfare (now parking mall, courtesy of Mayor Bloomberg) Broadway. Disney has Cry-Baby the movie
paved the way for many others; The Little Mermaid
is about to close.

Word that 101 Dalmatians, the Musical has been touring everywhere. It’s not a Disney show, but they’re trying to play off the Disney cache. But then, it’s not a Broadway show either, even though “Broadway” is mentioned numerous times on their website. 15 live dalmatians on a theatrical stage; imagine the fun.

It’s obvious that animated films are the last place to find any original thought. Up and Wall-E from Pixar, Shrek and Kung Fu Panda from Dreamworks, Ice Age and The Fantastic Mr. Fox from Blue Sky.

Then the Studios can make live action/animated versions of these films, then Broadway can do their shows. Oh, wait. Shrek is already failing on Broadway. There’s always room for those Madagascar penguins.

Hopefully, Independent animated features will get into the act: the musical Triplettes of Belleville is perfect for Broadway, and I can already see the musical version of Waltz with Bashir and Bill Plympton can try to compete with Mamet with Idiots and Angels.

After writing this, I caught the Cartoon Brew feature about this very thing. I guess it’s enough to catch your breath if you love animation.

- The internet has been overrun with images from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, now in production. Lots of Victorian inspired, detailed photos of stars dressed like characters from the film. I’ve pulled a few of them and am posting them here.

Alice has been a problem project which so many studios, artists and filmmakers have attempted to tackle. None have been very successful. The 1933 Norman McLeod version was one of the first and one of the better versions. Edward Everett Horton, Sterling Holloway and Richard Arlen give Charlotte Henry enormous support in this interesting albeit very stagey version.

Disney’s animated feature is probably one of the best known of the films. It’s good in its own rite, but hardly captures the imagination of the Lewis Carroll book or the Tenniel illustrations.

Lou Bunin’s version is very studied and lacking in much of the drama and whimsy of the story. As a matter of fact, that’s the problem with most of the versions. The story is somewhat like Candide in that it is picaresque in its adventures and becomes hard to dramatize. Burton’s an accomplished filmmaker, but his recent films have begun to look alike. Sweeney Todd doesn’t have the depth that it might have. A lot went into trying to captures Sondheim’s brilliant score, but that came at the expense of the story, itself, which became too much of a surface event.

Regardless, the pictures have had their effect in that it’s made me curious to see what he’ll do with the book.

Here’s a short commentary by Wolcott Gibbs I found in the July 16, 1938 issue of The New Yorker magazine:

We are one Walt Disney’s warmest admirers, but we can’t approve of his notion of making an animated cartoon out of “Alice in Wonderland,” Mr. Disney says that if he ever does make the picture, he proposes to follow the Tenniel illustrations, at least in spirit.

We don’t think this is going to work. Tenniel drew with a fine line, in enormous detail; the movies call for simple, conventionalized figures. The result would be that; Alice would look like Snow White (and probably talk like an elocution school) and a lot of nice, middle-aged people would get apoplexy.

Even harder than reconciling the styles of drawing, we think, would be the problem of adjusting Lewis Carroll’s humor to an audience of a hundred million people, many of whom consider Joe E. Brown the nation’s foremost comic. We don’t like to think of the things that would have to be done to make Alice a box-office success. We don’t want to see the Frog-Footman swallow a cake of soap and hiccough bubbles, or to hear “Jabberwocky” set to swing.

As a matter of fact, we never want to see Alice move or talk at all, and we don’t really believe that Mr. Disney, a modest man, wants to make her, either.

- Back in the late ’70s, there was a local newspaper that competed with the Village Voice for the alternative audience. The Soho News was smaller and thinner, but had its own treasures. Some good writing and listings, and many excellent alternative comic strips. (Bill Plympton had a weekly strip in this paper before he started animating.)

I fell in love with one comic strip called Gertrude’s Follies to the point where I waited each week for the new issue and the new strip to hit to market. It was about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and all the crazies that came into their lives - particularly Picasso, Hemingway and other iconic art types. It didn’t matter that Matisse and Capote didn’t meet; they were both available for the strip - as was everyone else.

Finally, after enjoying it for so long, I decided to locate the cartoonist behind it, and see whether he was interested in developing a storyboard and script for a feature. Maybe we could get some low-budget financing.

Tom Hachtman was the cartoonist, and he was a brilliant artist. His wife, Joey Epstein, was another fine artist. The two entered my life at this point, and some interesting things developed.

Gertrude’s Follies was an ongoing project. Tom worked with Maxine Fisher, who has been my writing partner through all the years of my studio. The two of them developed a couple of themes from the mass of strips that had been done and started to weave a storyboard. Tom left 4 or 5 panels of each 6 panel page empty, and I constructed and reconstructed story around them. Sometimes I would draw more material, sometimes I would take some away. It was real fun.

The Soho News folded, and no one really picked up the strip. It ran for a short time in The Advocate. Tom was able to publish a collected book (see the cover above.) You can still locate a rare copy on line.

Some newer, color copies of the strip can be found on line here.
Tom also does some political cartoons for the site here.

The movie never went into production. I couldn’t raise the funds - my inexperience. We did make one short segment - a two minute piece that was the most hilarious strip. Sheldon Cohen, an animator I met at the Ottawa 76 festival, came to NY when I offered him a job on Raggedy Ann. Sheldon, ultimately, did a number of films for the National Film Board which you can watch on-line if you click on his name.

Sheldon animated this particularly funny strip. It took a while for him to animate it, and by the time he was finished, the feature had died and I had lost some interest. Years later I inked and painted it and had it shot. The short piece was never finished, though I still think about doing that.

Aside from Gertrude, both Tom & Joey worked on a number of my films and still infrequently do. The two have painted many murals on the Jersey Coast, where they currently live. Tom has been a political cartoonist for the NY Daily News, has done lots of airbrush work for Bob Blechman when the Ink Tank was in operation. He also has done quite a few cartoons for The New Yorker magazine.

Here are a few of the strips to give you the flavor. Perhaps next week I’ll give a sample of our storyboard, comparing it with some of the actual strips. Enjoy.

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(Click on any image to enlarge so that you can read the strips.)

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5 6

___________________

We worked up a storyboard and script for a feature. It was a bit of a rush since I found the distributor of a low budget comedy film who asked for something similar in animation. I thought we could get him interested. I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. The guy didn’t get it, thought it wasn’t funny, didn’t even understand it. His company folded six months later. A one hit wonder.

We tried to stay close to many of the strips and found a direction.
Here are two weeklies from the strip.

(Click on any image to enlarge.)

The equivalent part of the storyboard follows. To give a short syopsis of the story thus far:

Trying to be somewhat current, we built the story around an upcoming, all-encompassing exhibit Picasso was going to have at the Museum of Modern Art. At the same time, Gertrude had just sent off a big book to her agent in NY. A party was in order, and we join them in this section of the storyboard as they prepare for the party. There’s a guided tour going on at the house as they prepare, and Hemingway arrives early.
(This is about 20 mins into the film.)

- Last week, I posted a short piece on British animation in 1957. This came from a Journal that was released (in the days before ASIFA) on the International state of the animated film.

The Journal coincided with the “first International animated film festival in Britain” at the National Film Theatre during February and March 1957.
They screened some 150 films, including 12 of the 31 features produced to that time.

The hope for the festival was to encourage theatres to include animated shorts on their programs again. The art form was dwindling. At that time, no one saw television as the panacea it would become.

This document gathered seven different writers and filmmakers to write about the state of animation in the respective countries.

AT THE Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1956 I overheard a ticket taker remark to a puzzled tourist who evidently had tried unsuccessfully to get into the premiere of one of the full length feature presentations, “II y a aussi des petites dessins-animes.” Judging from the tone in which he spoke, half condescending, half affectionate, his words seemed to imply “tough luck, but as a consolation there are some little cartoons to be seen if you care to have a look.” He was referring to the International Festival of Animated Films which was taking place at the same time in another part of the cinema Palais. His attitude was similar to that of the general run of movie-goer everywhere. The cartoon is usually considered a
pleasing little hors d’oeuvre to be enjoyed along with more substantial fare. That this hors d’oeuvre is welcome is apparent in the little murmurs of anticipated delight which still run through most audiences when the faces of Pluto, Mickey Mouse or Mr. Magoo come on to the screen. It is as though the audience realizes that for a few minutes they will be spared the sensational horrors which so often appear in the newsreel, or the tired cliches of a third rate travelogue. With the cartoon the audience can enter into a realm of pure fantasy, in which the laws of gravity are nonexistent, where pain is not pain and where characters become symbols or stereotypes, not to be taken very seriously.

The audience which strayed in to see the animated films at Cannes (the tickets were free) bore little resemblance to the self-conscious, publicity hungry international set which attended the gala openings of the longer features. The cartoons were attended by the producers themselves, a motley crew from every corner of the earth, and casual spectators from the streets, curious and unprejudiced. It was interesting to watch the reaction of this audience to films which ranged all the way from animated folk tales of Texas to heavy political propaganda from both sides of the iron curtain. The actor who drew the most spontaneous outburst of laughter was that ageless veteran whose career has remained unchanged throughout the years, Mr. Donald Duck. His frustration in the film which so delighted the audience was caused by his ineffectual efforts to fall asleep in spite of a relentless neon light which kept flashing off and on, and the insistent sound of dripping water from a tap which gradually increased in his imagination until each drop seemed a bomb visibly shaking the whole earth with rhythmic concussions. Donald’s frustration, seemed on that afternoon in Cannes to be such a note of understanding which reached across the
To Your Health, Tom & Jerry________barriers of language and nationality. This particular
Balentine Beer commercial,_________film was, as always with Disney, elaborately anima-
Winston Cigarette commercial_______ted, no economy tricks employed, no corners cut.
_______________________________The sound track with its metamorphosis of dripping water to world-shaking “booms” was imaginative and appropriate to the medium. Also, like most of Disney’s films, it was a sample of the usual over-cute style with background drawings similar to the easiest kind of commercial advertising.

It is impossible to consider the animated film in the United States without thinking first of Disney. After 30 years his name is still synonymous with the short cartoon in the minds of most of the American movie-audience. Sometimes during the long period since his first exciting Silly Symphonies appeared, the work from his large organisation in California seemed to have sunk into the doldrums. Formula replaced invention. The medium lost its initial public appeal. Disney’s excursions into the field of “live action” have been sometimes rewarding, sometimes disappointing. Some of the wild life films have recaptured the excitement of his early cartoons, while the romantic historic costume pieces have often seemed banal. Always a clever showman, he has recently built a large fun fair, or amusement park in California which serves also as a setting for television programme material. When, from time to time, a new feature length cartoon appears, such as Lady and The Tramp, in which the chief characters are dogs, one is amazed at the technical slickness of the animation and annoyed by the weak story line, which seems to be influenced by the wish to include every sure-fire box-office trick. This approach does not lead to any fresh experiments within the medium.

It was the short film Gerald McBoing-Boing which first brought a radical change of style to the attention of the public in America and soon after to the cinema-goers in Europe. This highly original short film, produced by U.P.A. Pictures, with finely integrated music by Gail Kubik and with sophisticated visual elements, seemed to satisfy a public at that time weary of the Disney formula. The talented minds which produced “Gerald” had made previous cartoons in which visual wit and economical animation had replaced the elaborately evolved techniques established by the larger studios, but these films had never been seen in the theatres. Some of the U.P.A. men had worked previously in the Disney Studios. The organisation under the leadership of Stephen Busustow has now expanded into the field of television. Robert Cannon, one of the most brilliant U.P.A. directors, brings a fertile imagination and fresh approach to each new film he creates. Another director, Pete Burness, who has been with the U.P.A. since its early days, has created a now popular cartoon character, Mr. Magoo, whose blithe innocence and near-sightedness leads him unscathed and unconcerned through the violence of the modern world. Mr. Magoo, like Donald Duck, has become a beloved international personality.

The U.P.A. style, according to their own spokesmen, derives from “modern” art. It is uncluttered, flat and often linear. The characters do not seem bound by any natural physical laws of movement. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions of the U.P.A. is that they have shown the public that the less realistic a movement is, the more creditable it becomes optically. Disney sometimes bases the movement of his characters on live action models, as with Alice in Alice in Wonderland. The greater the effort to imitate realistic movement, the more apt one is to be aware of the stroboscopic nature of the medium, the more jittery the result. If legs are used to express the symbol of walking, rather than the imitation of walking, the illusion of movement is more acceptable, a paradox which indicates the validity of the “modern” art approach. Like any device this simplification can be carried too far. If the human figure becomes too abstract it may lose all its expressive power. Usually the U.P.A. figures, moving flatly on a flat screen are consistent, humorous and convincing.

Magoo Beats the Heat , Madeline

Less effective have been certain of the U.P.A. attempts to animate the drawings of “big name” illustrators, such as Thurber and Bemelmans. The Unicorn in the Garden and Madeline are examples. Since the quality of both Thurber’s and Bemelmans’ drawings depends on a subtlety and unevenness of line which is impossible to use in the animation technique, where every celleloid must have an almost mechanical similarity, the flavour of the original is lost and the result is far less successful than the work of lesser known artists, whose training within the film medium has taught them its restrictions.

Nevertheless, the U.P.A. has been a healthy influence in the United States. The proof that a new style has had its effect on Disney and his imitators is seen in their efforts to modernise their own productions. Disney has released a short history of music called Whistle, Toot, Plunk and Boom, which seemed to imply that if his studios wished, they too could work in the “modern” style. The popular M.G.M. films, with incredibly fast pacing and surrealist gags, seem also to have cancer research or democracy. Which does not mean that good films cannot be made on these themes. But there is little chance for the individual to produce a genuinely experimental film on his own subject.

It is difficult to say what the future of this medium in the U.S. will be. At present animation is still popular in the entertainment fields and in commercial television. Some of the most imaginative uses of animation at present are in one-minute TV commercials. Animation is in demand in those sponsored industrial films where a mechanical concept can be shown more clearly than it can in live-action. Animation is also useful in industrial films which try to express abstract ideas or fantasy.

Donald Duck, in his better movements, still communicates to an international audience. It would be interesting to speculate, however, as to what animation might have been if Disney had not had his enormous influence. In the first place, animation might not necessarily have been only cartoon. The simplest visual element, a dot, or a line, can become a dancing symbol and convey an idea, an association. These ideas could be developed with other means than by conventional story telling. The film need not always be based on a literary concept. It could be, for the spectator, an experience like seeing dancing, or hearing music. Within the medium not only new forms, but new ways of expression could be evolved. The animated film need not always be a pastische, a sequence of gags or a fairy tale. It could be a powerful medium. It is condensed and potent. Like most potent things, it is better in small doses. But in a brief time it can pack a terrific punch. In the end its possibilities are limited only by the imagination of the filmmaker.