Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The BAFTA short list released on Thursday includes five nominees for Best Animated Film (meaning feature – they haven’t released the names of the Animated Short nominees, as yet.) The five features are:
CORALINE, Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, UP, and ICE AGE 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Interesting their choices of popular films over quality in a couple of the titles. Missing, of course, are PONYO and THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG.

The Producers’ Guild chose as their five nominees:
9, CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, and UP.

Of course, the one that stands out is “9″. No other awards group has chosen that film among their nominees.

The Golden Globes have chosen CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX, THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG, UP and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS.

How populist of them!

Who knows what the Oscars will choose. Perhaps TINKER BELL AND THE LOST TREASURE has a chance.

- I thought I’d point out the most popular post I’ve put up in the past four years of this website. The piece features the book by Frank Webb, How To Make Faces – Part 2.
It and the original post, Part 1, on this book continue to generate comments every week or two. It certainly wasn’t planned on my part, back in Aug. 2007 and Mar. 2008, but apparently Frank Webb had a large extended family and a lot of friends.

Even this last week two people added comments (unfortunately, you have to go back to those original posts to read the comments.) Often enough, the contributors are writing to each other rather than to the rest of us. This was, for me, a little annoying at first. But then I came to realize that they were using these pages as a way of gathering. The Frank Webb lovers meeting place. How could I be bothered with that?

Check out the whole book by following the links above.

- Signe Baumane writes to tell us of a screening this coming Wednesday, Jan 13th. (The 13th already! My how the year is whizzing by.)

She writes:

Woodstock Film Festival that normally takes place in mountainy Woodstock, 384 miles, or $26.50 by bus from NYC is coming to the City That Never Sleeps to present an animated film program curated by Bill Plympton and me.

There are 13 films to watch. Six very special animators will attend the screening to answer your burning questions about meaning of life, if eating fish is healthy and why animation.

Festival’s director Meira Blaustein and Festival’s adviser as well NYC liaison Sabine Hoffman are going to be there for you to make the connection with the Festival directly.
At $12 it’s a steal. Or magic, depends how you look at it.

92YTribeca Screening Room is at 200 Hudson Street, 1 block south of Canal.

Detailed info about the films and how to get the tickets is here.

Bring your money pot – filmmakers are going to sell DVDs of their work at special Woodstock prices.

- Last week I posted the first half of the book How To Make Faces by Frank Webb. This was a book on “how to draw faces” published in 1940.

I initially posted part of this book in August 2006. Its popularity inspired me to repost it with the remainder of the book added.

The first half takes the alphabet and builds up from there. This part takes simple shapes and does much the same.

When I initially posted the book I received an interesting letter worth posting again:

Hi,
Frank Webb was my great uncle, and I am very pleased to have found someone who still knows of him. I have a bunch of his stuff, and know a bit about his history, including him publicly proclaiming Walt Disney a crook! One of Franks drawings ended up in a sale to Disney, and renamed (from “Dippy Dog”) to Goofy. Thank you for including him here.

Darren Reese

Here’s the second half of the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)_______

As I mentioned, every other page is a “Practice Page” where you’re supposed to try to draw the characters. For the first half of the book, these practice pages are blank (except for the type “Practice Page”), however in this second half some of the pages have an exercise at the bottom. These pages look like the one to the bottom left.
I’ve taken all of the remaining exercises and have ganged them up onto the image to the lower right.

__

- Back in August 2006, I posted one of my most popular posts. Since then, (even as late as this past weekend) there have been many comments by people remembering and speaking positively about this featured book.

Since I’d only posted half a dozen pages, I thought I’d yield to the many requests to see more. Consequently, I’ll post the entire book in two parts. (Mind you every other page is a blank “Practice Page.” I didn’t scan any of those. If you want to practice, you’ll have to get your own paper.)

These pages are taken from a book I have, published in 1940, called How To Make Faces. The author, Frank Webb, was a comic strip cartoonist who drew the cartoon panel ‘Kartoon Kollege’ from 1940-41. When this strip ended, he created the comic strip ‘Raising Kane’, which ran until 1944.

___(Click on any image to enlarge)_______Other than that, I haven’t been able to learn
____________________-_______________much about him. I find it interesting that he signed each page of his book almost as if he expected it to run in a newspaper on a daily, one-page-at-a-time basis.

His approach was to use the alphabet and build up from there. When he runs out of the alphabet, he just turns to shapes then just asks you to copy his picture or finish the page.

This first part includes all the drawings made from the Alphabet.

– Last August, I posted bits of the book How To Make Faces which I am pleased to own. It comes from a completely different era, and contains drawings which remind me of my childhood. Romps to the public library rummaging through any book that had whatever remote connection to animation or cartooning.

I vaguely remember seeing this book there and was happy to find it on ebay. Every so often I flip through it and smile at the drawings. There’s some funny work there, and I wonder how many kids used it to try to learn how to draw cartoons.

Just this past week I received an interesting comment on that post; here it is:

Hi,
Frank Webb was my great uncle, and I am very pleased to have found someone who still knows of him. I have a bunch of his stuff, and know a bit about his history, including him publicly proclaiming Walt Disney a crook! One of Franks drawings ended up in a sale to Disney, and renamed (from “Dippy Dog”) to Goofy. Thank you for including him here.

Darren Reese

This was just the excuse I needed for sharing a bit more of this booklet. I didn’t see any resemblance of Dippy Dog, but there is a guy who looks a bit like Farmer Alfalfa. I hoped I wasn’t alone in appreciating Mr. Webb’s cartoons, and now I know I’m not. Here are a few more pages. In the pages I posted last time, Frank Webb showed how to make cartoons from letters of the alphabet. This time he works in a more traditional manner.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

– Speaking of Old Timers, Gumby celebrated his 50th birthday last week. All 200 episodes of the “Gumby Show” will be released in dvd this fall. However you can watch episodes of the show for free at AOL or YouTube.

A remastered version of the 1995 “Gumby Movie” will premiere next month at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

Congratulations to Art Clokey. Still going strong.

– Time to perk things up. Let’s draw faces!

These pages are taken from a book I have, published in 1940, called How To Make Faces. The author, Frank Webb, was a comic strip cartoonist who drew the cartoon panel ‘Kartoon Kollege’ from 1940-41. When this strip ended, he created the comic strip ‘Raising Kane’, which ran until 1944.

Other than that, I haven’t been able to learn much about him. I find it interesting that he signed each page of his book almost as if he expected it to run in a newspaper on a daily, one-page-at-a-time basis.

His approach was to use the alphabet and build up from there. When he runs out of the alphabet, he just turns to shapes then just asks you to copy his picture or finish the page.

Every other page is a blank “Practice Page.” A nice way to fill up a book.
(Click on any image to enlarge)