Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– This cartoon by Marjane Satrapi illustrates an article in this week’s Village Voice about the films at the New York Film Festival. Persepolis closes the Festival this coming Sunday.

The Voice mention of Persepolis comes with this praise:
__You’d have to be blind not to
__see the excellence of Persepolis,
__an affecting, amusing, visually
__arresting adaptation of Marjane
__Satrapi’s graphic-novel memoir
__about growing up during the
__Iranian Revolution and coming of
__age amid the punk-rock
__intellectuals of Vienna.

The accompanying caption reads:
____________________________Closing-night jitters: Writers/directors Vincent Parannaud
____________________________and Marjane Satrapi will screen Persepolis on the last
____________________________night of the festival, October 14. Satrapi imagines it will
____________________________go something like this.

_______________________ __
– There’s another great film by Jeff Scher posted on the NY Times Op Ed page. The Times now makes this available to everyone, and I encourage you to take a look. The pieces are not done in Flash (meaning it’s real animation) and are pure art.

This piece is about Grend Central Station during the morning hour rush. Jeff has this to say about the animated piece on the NYTimes site:
__. . . I shot a two-minute roll of film before rushing off
__to catch my train. Most of the film was shot with a 75-year-old 16 mm Bell and Howell
__Filmo, which was one of the first home movie cameras ever mass-marketed. There is a
__lot of this beautiful old camera’s personality in this film. I used black-and-white because
__Grand Central is always black-and-white in my mind. This particular film has a very low
__sensitivity to light (A.S.A. 6) and is very contrast-y. The only way to make an exposure
__was to literally shoot the pools of window light. As people move through the light, it’s
__almost as if they are sculpting it with their passing silhouettes.

A Weegee for a new century. It’s a good call for the NY Times to post these pieces every month, and I have to believe that the more hits it receives the more the NY Times will be encouraged to run more of them. Stop reading this now and Go.

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– A couple of sites have devoted some attention to the actual residences of some of the Golden Age animators and artists.
Joe Campana‘s Animation – Who & Where, an excellent site, seems to have started it with this post on some Santa Barbara artists, Paul Julian and Erni Nordli . Now there’s this post on Fred Moore and Tex Avery‘s residence.

By the way, this is a GREAT site. Browse around if you’re unfamiliar with it.

Hans Perk on his site, A Film LA, has a more general post about the artists working at the 1933 Hyerion Studio. Maps give us a good guide to how far a travel these guys had to their homes. It all seems so close, until you think about the kind of roads they had to travel, the kinds of autos they drove and the traffic in general.

I can’t imagine doing the research these guys are offering us, but I love. I love it.

By the way, Hans Perk has today posted video clips on this site of Roy Disney presenting and Floyd Norman accepting his Disney Legend award. Congratulations to Floyd, I’m truly happy for him. A well deserved recognition of his achievement for some of the great work he’s done in animation.

– My big Museum of Modern Art retrospective is rapidly approaching, and plans are getting tighter and tighter. We have a program for the shows and I thought this might be a good time to let you know what it is (especially since MOMA has just posted it on their calandar this weekend.)

There are three film programs starting on Friday, November 9th at 6:30PM. It continues all day Saturday at 1:30, 3:30 and 5:30. One of the Saturday shows is a repeat of Friday’s. The rest of the films repeat on Sunday at 2:45 and 4:45.

On Monday, November 12th at 7PM the programs conclude with a live chat between John Canemaker, Josh Siegel (of MOMA) and me. This program will include film clips new and old – including two new shorts we’ve just completed as well as a sample of the animatic we’ve done for our feature, POE.

Here’s the complete breakdown of the shows appearing in MOMA’s catalogue:

Friday, November 9, 6:30; Repeated Saturday, November 10, 1:30. T2
Michael Sporn Program 1: New York Stories

Mona Mon Amour. 2001. Humorist Patti Stren looks for love in all the wrong places in this comical monologue of modern-day neuroses. 9 min.
Champagne. 1996. A moving animated documentary portrait of Champagne Saltes, a bright and sassy fourteen-year-old who lived in a convent school while her drug-addicted mother was in prison for murder. 13 min.
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. 2005. On an iconic moment in New York history, the day in 1974 when French aerialist Philippe Petit made his death-defying tightrope walk across the towers of the not-yet-finished World Trade Center. Based on Mordicai Gerstein’s Caldecott Award-winning book and narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal. 10 min.
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile. 1987. The comic misadventures of Bernard Waber’s beloved neighborhood reptile (in the classic children’s book The House on East 88th Street) are narrated by Tony Randall with songs by Charles Strouse (Annie). 26 min.
The Little Match Girl. 1991. Abandoned to the wintry streets of New York, a little girl inspires compassion for the homeless in this lovely rendition of the Hans Christian Andersen tale. Narrated by F. Murray Abraham. 26 min. Program 84 min.

Saturday, November 10, 3:30; Repeated Sunday, November 11, 2:45. T2
Michael Sporn Program 2: Fables

Doctor DeSoto. 1984. An Oscar-nominated adaptation of William Steig’s classic story about a clever mouse-dentist who outwits a conniving fox. 10 min.
Abel’s Island. 1988. A sudden gale storm whisks William Steig’s Edwardian mouse, Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint, away from his wife and home, depositing him on a primitive, deserted island. With the voices of Tim Curry and others. 26 min.
The Red Shoes. 1990. Using a vibrant palette, Sporn transposes Hans Christian Andersen’s touching tale to contemporary Harlem. Narrated by Ossie Davis. 26 min.
The Hunting of the Snark. 1989. Lewis Carroll’s wondrously nonsensical poem, narrated by James Earl Jones, is brought to life through a range of visual conceits and animation techniques. 19 min. Program 81 min.

Saturday, November 10, 5:30; Repeated Sunday, November 11, 4:45. T2
Michael Sporn Program 3: A Peaceable Kingdom

Goodnight Moon. 1999. Margaret Wise Brown’s sixty-year-old book, with illustrations by Clement Hurd, has pride of place in every American child’s bedroom, and is joyously brought to the screen in this award-winning adaptation. Narrated by Susan Sarandon. 4 min.
The Marzipan Pig. 1990. Based on Russell Hoban’s deeply touching fable of unrequited love involving a marzipan pig, a bee, a taxi meter, a flower, a mouse, and a clock. Narrated by Tim Curry. 26 min.
The Amazing Bone. 1985. Dark adventures await Pearl, William Steig’s sweet-natured piglet, when she discovers a magical talking bone that has fallen out of a witch’s basket. 12 min.
Ira Sleeps Over. 1992. A delightful adaptation of Bernard Waber’s story about a momentous sleepover, with songs by Tony Award-winning composer William Finn. 26 min.
The Story of the Dancing Frog. 1989. A sophisticated British widow becomes the stage manager to a debonair frog, who dazzles crowds the world over with his cakewalk, polka and tap dance routines. Based on the book by Quentin Blake, narrated by Amanda Plummer. 26 min. Program 94 min.

Monday, November 12, 7:00. T2
An Evening with Michael Sporn.

The artist in conversation with animation historian/filmmaker John Canemaker and MoMA assistant curator Joshua Siegel, illustrated with clips from his award-winning animated films, including a new short, Pab’s First Burger, and an excerpt from his feature-length work-in-progress about the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. Sporn’s career is also traced through his commercials, public service announcements, title sequences, and visuals for the Broadway stage. Program 90 min.

What’s happened? Is Joanna Quinn no longer doing these spots? This is ugly and unfortunate and criminal! Here’s an ad agency without any real taste. MoCap is going to kill me; I know it.

- Per Variety:
Luis Cook’s The Pearce Sisters won Europe’s Cartoon d’Or at the 18th Cartoon Forum, which wrapped Saturday in Girona, north of Barcelona. This prize is awarded by the European Association of Animation Film for best European short film of the year. The competition is restricted to winners from one of Cartoon’s 10 partner festivals.

Produced by Aardman Animation, Sisters turns on a couple of old spinsters living a despondent existence on a remote strip of coast. One day, the sea washes up a half drowned and handsome man, whom they try to revive and then captivate.

The other four finalists from 27 candidates were: Tomek Ducki’s Life Line from Hungary, Suzie Templeton’s Peter & the Wolf from the U.K., Ami Lindholm’s The Irresistible Smile from Finland, and Daniel Gray and Tom Brown’s t.o.m,” again from the U.K.

________________________

- Miyazaki on the big screen. Wednesday, Sept. 26th, for one night only, Miyazaki’s feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, will be screened in theaters across the country. This is part of a program called the Anime Bento movie series. The film will be screened in the dubbed version, which is no doubt a disappointment to anime purists. However, it is a rare chance for fans to see a Miyazaki film on the big screen.

Thursday, Sept. 27th, they’re screening Karas: the Prophecy, which is not a Miyazaki film; it was directed by Akira Takata.

To locate the theater nearest you go here.

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The Ottawa Animation Festival ended yesterday and sounds as though it were a good one. I’m sorry I missed it. There were a number of screenings that sounded very attractive to me.

Congratulations to these and all other winners:
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Persepolis [2007] Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi, France

BEST INDEPENDENT SHORT ANIMATION
Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor [2007] Koji Yamamura, Japan

INDEPENDENT SHORT ANIMATION COMPETITION
Narrative Short Animation under 35 minutes: Madame Tutli-Putli [2007] Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski, National Film Board of Canada, Canada

BEST COMMISSIONED ANIMATION
Golden Age [2007] Aaron Augenblick, Augenblick Studios, USA

Thanks to Frames Per Second for posting all of the award winners. One wonders why most festivals are always the last to announce their own award winners on line.

Methinks some of these may show up again at Oscar time.

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And speaking of Alvin & the Chipmunks, if you haven’t seen the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive site’s go there. They’ve posted the storyboard for the pilot for this tv show (the original by Format Films, not the unattractive offspring). You can’t do better than to study a successful board by Leo Salkin.

- Persepolis played at the Toronto Film Festival this past week after having done well at Telluride, and it has garnered some fine reviews. Wired has a glowing paragraph in their film festival coverage:

In fact, I’ve only seen one film here that has any interest in what used to be called Wisdom: Persepolis, the stunning animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel about growing up fractious and female in post-revolutionary Iran. Visually, it’s a 2D triumph, with influences as diverse as stark communist iconography and Lotte Reininger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Perhaps a little contempt has crept into my familiarity with the protracted American journey to adulthood, but I found this decidedly non-Western (yet 100% accessible) version hugely refreshing. (Also: Shorter! A good quality at a film festival.) Absorbing the genuine life experience from her grandmother, parents and uncle, Young Marjane negotiates real peril, moral and bodily, and discovers that the battle to maintain one’s integrity is waged daily, in war and peace.

Now that’s some real grown-up talk.

If you’d like to see a couple of other reviews here they are:

PopMatters, of Illinois loved it and includes a trailer in French on their site. (You can see this in English on the Persepolis site.
and
Cinematical offers their post-Telluride review.

Next up for this film will be a screening at Ottawa on the opening day and the closing night’s program for the NYFilm Festival. Very posh, indeed.

The film is scheduled to open in the US on Dec. 25th.

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- China is using animation to try to stop child abuse. The pictured police woman and police now appear on gateway websites in China. These characters will pop up every half hour on websites.

The cartoon figures of the “virtual police” were created by the Beijing Public Security Bureau.

The cartoons are designed to encourage people to turn in offensive pornographic websites as well as child abusers. _
(Click any image to enlarge.)

- A couple of years ago, I walked past Muhammad Ali on 57th Street. As expected, there was a crowd approaching him asking for autographs. I noticed what Ali did. In his breast pocket, he had a number of business cards that he’d signed, and he passed these out. (I’m sorry now that I didn’t ask for one.)

As I noted back a week or so, I have some Grim Natwick drawn Betty Boop pictures. He did them in the early 70′s to pass onto interviewers, fans, others who asked for them. I suppose this was somewhat similar to Muhammad Ali’s prepared autographs. It saved Grim the task of drawing Betty on the spot.

(Click image to enlarge)

Here’s one of these cartoons he did for what is obviously the Bicentennial (which dates the cartoon from 1976.) I thought of posting this for Labor Day, but the two holidays didn’t really match. Happy Fourth of July !

– Wade Sampson has another probing article that should be read about The Sweatbox, the documentary directed by Trudie Styler, Sting‘s wife, about the development of The Emperor’s New Groove. The documentary has been closeted since completion; Disney will not give permission to show any of their film or artwork. They see it as an attack on the empire, and would like to keep the film under wraps. Sampson tells the history of this documentary and gives a thorough review of what’s in it. (His column may be as close as we come to previewing it.)

Steve Hulett also offers some nice comments about the film on the TAG Blog. He and I don’t quite agree on the completed film, The Emperor’s New Groove. I very much did not like that film.

There are a number of pieces on the internet that give a good indication of the turmoil that followed this film. If you haven’t read Dave Pruiksma‘s letter of resignation from Disney animation, I encourage you to.

When I met Trudie Styler in 1994, at a film festival in Indianapolis, she had just screened the documentary she’d produced with the fine director, Michael Apted. Moving the Mountain was a film about the demonstrations and confrontations between students and police in Peking, 1989, for more democracy in the People’s Republic of China. Kingdom of the Sun and The Emperor’s New Groove weren’t even on the horizon at that time.
On the opening day of Tarzan‘s showing at the Guild theater in Manhattan, I took my small studio to the first screening. As we exited, Sting was outside buying a ticket for the second show. Somehow we caught eyes, almost as though he’d known me; an odd moment, I continued on. It’s obvious, look back on it, he was about to get entangled with the Disney machine and was checking out the work Phil Collins had done for Tarzan.

Too bad Sting’s collaboration didn’t turn out as well. I suspect it wasn’t his fault.

____________________________
Ever busy animator, Patrick Smith, has an art gallery opening and showing coming up this next Tuesday. About the work, Patrick had this statement:

Using the figure as a building block, intertwining with other figures, is a powerful method of constructing a broader configuration. The concept of people supporting others to achieve something larger than themselves can have a sublime result, and it’s something that I enjoy illustrating.

It sounds a bit like he’s describing the animation studio process. Not a bad model to emulate in his art.

Patrick Smith – Configurations
CVZ Contemporary Gallery
446 Broadway(below grand) 5th floor, NYC.

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Once again, I have to point out the excellent work Mark Mayerson is doing on analyzing Pinocchio. This has been a monstrous feat to accomplish, and Mark continues earnestly, now approaching the final climax. Coupled with the beautiful BG reconstructions on Hans Bacher‘s site, we can reappreciate the brilliant work done at Disney’s studio back then.

I bow to both Mark and Hans for the work and attention they’re giving this treasure of a film.

___________________________ _
Can someone tell me how in hell we went from . . .

_____________________this . . . __________________ . . . to this ?

_

- The weather was crystal blue clear. It was weather that you remember because of the positive way it made you feel. Today, six years later it’s raining off and on. Constant buzzing on the tearstained skylight and the sound of drips and drops around it.

I’m pleased that the dictocrats in NY, our Governor and Mayor, have decided to allow those who feel the need to celebrate their anniversary down at the actual site, rather than a park several blocks away. This was the original plan until too many protested. What’s wrong with people? Why are they so insensitive?

May I call your attention to a documentary film you should see: No End In Sight. It’s a beautifully made, thoroughly engrossing film that has remained with me for weeks. I expected something different and would like to see it again. It’s the most important film I’ve seen this year, and I’ve seen a lot of them.

A new blog hits the streets this morning. David Levy, the President of ASIFA-East and the author of Your Career in Animation: How to Survive and Thrive has started a blog called Animondays. This will be a weekly blog, an addition to the ASIFA-East website.
It’ll be good to have a refreshing new voice coming from New York, the original home of US animation. Welcome, David.

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– On her site, Miscellainey, Lainey Schallock posts some of Mary Blair‘s Cinderella art from the newly published book. The book includes new text written by Newberry Medal winner, Cynthia Rylant.

Lainey, on her post, writes an extensive and informed review of the book. She is a big fan of Mary Blair’s work, and has focused much of the blog’s attention on art of the period. Take the time to look back at some of the other, older posts if you’re not familiar with it. It’s quite a nice site.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

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- Cartoonist/illustrator, Ed Sorel, wrote a beautiful piece about George Herriman and Krazy Kat for American Heritage Magazine back in 1982. You can read it on-line at their website, and, if you love Krazy Kat and have five minutes it’s worth the read.

And if you’re really a Herriman fan, Alan Holtz, on his site Stripper’s Guide, has been posting Herriman’s non-Krazy Political cartoons. They were published in the LA Examiner in the early 1900′s. Every Saturday, you can sign in for another great cartoon or three. Check it out, and thank you, Alan Holtz.

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- Rachelle Bowden posts some beautifully artful photos of Wrigley Field and the Chicago Cubs baseball game on Labor Day. That’s the game where Carlos Zambrano attacked the fans verbally for booing him as he left the pitcher’s mound losing the game.

If you go to Rachelle’s site, check out the photo of her Birthday Flowers on Sept 7th. She’s a first rate photographer.

I love her annual post of the flowers she receives from her parents on her birthday. It makes for a great series; I’ve followed and enjoyed this string for years.

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- Yet again, let me point you in the direction of Hans Bacher‘s excellent site, Animation Treasures 2. This site is a must see daily for all the stunning artwork Hans is posting from the backgrounds he’s reconstructing for us.
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His recent posts of the artwork from Snow White is just glorious. Such masterful watercolors. What an excellent film. I think I’ve gone back to his site half a dozen times, just to look. As a matter of fact I hope to make time to look at the film again, today.
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- Finally, may I suggest you visit Bruce Watkinson‘s site, Understanding Animation. There he has an extensive and elaborate commentary on the life and work of disney legend, Ub Iwerks.

When I was a kid, my hero was Iwerks – (am I repeating myself?) The first short I bought to watch in my 8mm projector was Sinbad the Sailor. I studied that film frame by frame, backwards and forwards. I got the chance to talk with Grim Natwick when I learned that he probably had more to do with the film than Iwerks, himself.

I’m always excited by anything written about the man. His bio, The Hand Behind the Mouse, by John Kenworthy is one I’m pleased to own (though I wish there were another voice or two on the subject). Anything, on the subject is valuable to me. Hence, I was pleased to see and read Bruce’s piece, this morning. Check it out.

Hubley’s street scene from the film, Dig

- The website Ironic Sans has a great series going entitled Animated Manhattan. They’re commenting on all the animated films that use Manhattan as a backdrop. They’ve gone through many films from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Fritz the Cat from Sundae In New York to the animated titles for Conan O’Brien.

Images from Hubley’s short film, The Hole

Off the top of my head I can think of another half dozen films they could analyze, so I assume this series will continue for a while, and I’m glad about that. It’s a good idea.
Thanks to Animated News for pointing the way.

Gregorio Prestopino’s Harlem from Hubley’s short film, Harlem Wednesday