Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Since I presented some photos of Yurij Norstein yesterday, I thought today I’d call attention to several pieces about him on line.

His short film adapted from a haiku by the Japanese poet Bashō is on YouTube. This was a project done for an compilation animation feature. Go here to view it if you haven’t. Actually, you should see it again if you have seen it.

In the withering gusts,
a wanderer …
How much like Chikusai I have become!

Then take some time to read the excellent interview with Norstein about this film.

Follow this by watching a short commercial Norstein directed/animated.

Of course, if you really want to do justice to this great artist, you should view (not on YouTube but on DVD) Tale of Tales. And watch it a couple of times to really get the brilliance. This DVD also includes all of his other films (which are equally brilliant.)

The Norstein DVD also includes a 15 minute documentary about his work and his work methods. This has been placed on YouTube in two parts. It includes several shots of him working on his multiplane camera set-up.
Here’s part 1
and part 2

There’s also a wonderful book by Clare Kitson, Yuri Norstein And Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey. It’s an inspired and inspirational book. Especially if you know the film.

I highly recommend it.

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- I was surprised and pleased to see the editorial in yesterday’s NY Times. It was written in support of Jack Kirby, who shaped Marvel comics with many creations and has been given short shrift as Stan Lee takes much of the credit for the success. To quote the editorial:

Marvel took his talents for granted and denied him the credit and compensation he clearly deserved. Worse, he was overshadowed by his loquacious and photogenic collaborator, Stan Lee, who became the public face of an enterprise that depended heavily on Mr. Kirby’s skills.

Mr. Kirby eventually quit, leaving behind characters like the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Silver Surfer, and ending what was easily the most fruitful collaboration in comic book history. His long and ugly battle with Marvel over the rights to his original artwork galvanized the artistic community and raised his public profile.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon obviously was a fantasy novel shaped around the partnership of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Mr. Chabon’s continued support of him as well as an editorial such as this may help give Mr. Kirby his due. With the enormous financial success of his creations, it’s certainly appropriate that Marvel should at least give him some credit for characters he created.

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As for overlooked cartoonists, Hans Bacher, on his site Animation Treasures 1 gave us some screen grabs of the German animator Hans Fischerkoesen‘s two films Weather-beaten Melody (1942) and The Snowman (1943).

David Nethery picked up Hans’ thread and posted part of the video Weather-beaten Melody. The film employs unique 3D set ups (one assumes these are multiplane camera shots though it looks at time like the Fleischer 3D sets) for long sections, and David’s focus is on these shots. Hans Bacher tells us that these were done in Prague. If you want to see many of the best shots of the film without watching the full thing, go to David’s site.

The character animation, itself, is typical of 40′s Europe, very mechanical work done, for the most part, on ones. They follow the Disney mold and are technically elaborate. Walks and character animation is often rotoscoped, however well done.

Once WWII broke out, the Germans realized they couldn’t get the films from the West. They financed elaborate animation studios to produce work that they expected to equal Disney. Fischerkoesen was one of the key producers of these films.

William Moritz wrote a valuable thesis on Fischerkoesen, Resistance and Subversion In Animated Films of the Nazi Era. You can read an abbreviated version of this on AWN.

Naturally, Fischerkoesen’s films are readily available for the YouTube world. Including the two films above, some earlier works and several ads.
. Weather-beaten Melody
. The Snowman
. One an elaborate ad for Philips light bulbs that gives The Sunshine Makers a run for its money.
. Another, a very creative cigarette ad with dancing smoke done for Schall and Rauch in 1933.
. Das Blaue Wunder is another 1935 cigarette ad that seems to have more in common with Fleischer than Disney.

Thanks to Hans Bacher and David Nethery for pointing the way to this artist. And, of course, the amazing William Moritz had done the in depth analysis that’s so informative.

Did Walt Disney wear a Goldwater for President button on his lapel when he received the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964?

The question seems to have provided lots of speculation and gossip among those who don’t know and like to say they did. Michael Barrier has the answer today on his site, and it makes for a good read about a complex individual, Walt Disney.

I’m sort of sorry that this debate had to end.

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– Jeff Scher has his latest film segment posted on the NYTimes Opinion page. “You Won’t Remember This” is a portrait of his son, Buster, from the age of a few weeks until he was four years old. As Jeff writes, “The film came from the notion that Buster wouldn’t remember these years, as, indeed, he doesn’t seem to, but the more I drew the more I realized that I didn’t remember them as clearly as I thought I would, either.

There is something about the omnivorous now in parenting, and the constantly shifting challenges and demands of the moment, that creates a kind of rolling amnesia for everything yesterday. This film is an attempt to hold onto some of these moments and also to share them with Buster, who is now an articulate, opinionated, sugar-and-movie-obsessed seven year old.”

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Larry Ruppel‘s web site features an ad for which he animated a short bit. It’s mostly a long live advertisement for Motorola, and it’s so interesting that I thought I should draw your attention to it today.

For some reason I’ve thought a lot about it since viewing it yesterday. Great music.

You can see that spot by clicking here.

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- This past week the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive posted more of their Milt Gross strips.

This batch includes Banana Oil Dailies from 1924 and Count Screwloose & Dave’s Delicatessen Sunday Pages from the early thirties. These strips are pure gold and you should be studying them all (for good hard laughs).

The post also links to a lot of past Milt Gross strips. What a treasure lode.

– The Seattle Times has an article which features the shop in Ratatouille which displays dead rats in their window. I was taken aback by the scene in the film and felt that it was too ridiculous an image to get us to believe that such a shop existed. Of course, I was wrong and here’s confirmation of that fact. Quite peculiar.

Still I wonder how many other people didn’t know about this window display, and whether one should put images of this kind into a film when you’re sure it’ll pull some of your audience out of the movie. There’s a fine line to draw when you’re trying to keep an audience involved in your film. Once they’ve looked at their watches or question the authenticity of a scene, you’ve lost them for a bit which might turn out to be for the rest of the movie.
Thanks to Upcoming Pixar for notice of this story.

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For some reason, I’ve always been attracted to paper sculpture art. There have been a couple of examples of this medium done in animation. Immediately, a few films come to mind.
The best known is Symposium of Popular Song done by Bill Justice & Xavier Atencio. They use Ludwig Von Drake to string together a number of music videos done with paper constructions. I remember seeing this film on its first release. (It played in theaters locally with PT 109 starring Cliff Robertson.)

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Michel Ocelot, who has now grown to great heights directing animated features such as Kirikou or Azur et Asmar did a number of elaborate and beautiful cut-out animation films in his earlier years. You can see a clip from The Insensitive Princess on YouTube. His films were an outgrowth of Lotte Reininger‘s extraordinary work and, to some extent, his love of Yurij Norstein‘s work.

Megan Brain has two sites featuring her paper sculpture art, and it’s certainly beautiful. Her blog has more information; her website has more art. There’s also a good interview with Megan at the Character Design site. Her blog was once featured on Cartoon Brew back in 2006. The site and blog have both developed since then. It’s worth checking out (again if you haven’t been there in a while.)

Béatrice Coron is a french artist who specializes in paper sculpture and cutouts. She has a page of simple animations to watch. There’s also a wealth of information about cut out art on her site Eclectic Iconoclast. Plenty of good, interesting links.

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Speaking of Michel Ocelot, this year, he’s directed a Bjork music video that combines silhouettes of people (made to look like Reininger characters) against cg abstractions. Have a look:

I thought I’d take this time to announce that the Museum of Modern Art will be doing a full-out retrospective of my work over the Armistice Day weekend (Nov. 9th through 12th).

There will be three programs of films and a fourth program which will feature John Canemaker and Josh Siegel (of MOMA) chatting with me onstage and screening some odds and ends. I’ll post more about these screenings in the near future.

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- The New York Film Festival announced this week that Persepolis would be their closing night film. Traditionally, this is the key film of the Festival, and it’s something of a coup for the directors, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud to have been given such a prime position.

This Festival does not have a long history of including animated features, so it’s quite a headline for the Sony Pictures Classics release. Although Paprika was included in last year’s program. (The first animated feature I can remember seeing there was the work-in-progress version of Beauty and the Beast that was programmed as a special midnight screening. The crowd bought it up and cheered endlessly. That was a smart move for Disney to get the word of mouth out on that feature.)

It was the lead story for several papers making headlines in the NY Times and Hollywood Reporter.

Persepolis, of course, did will at Cannes, winning a jury prize, and making its way into several other important festivals including the upcoming Ottawa Animation Festival.

By the way the Persepolis site now has a “making of” featurette to watch.

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- Michael Barrier posts more comments about Neal Gabler’s book, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. I enjoy the fact that Mike doggedly goes after this book; it’s not good and has been given too high a status by the Disney organization. He is the the perfect person to lead the charge.

Gabler’s book has been christened the “official” biography of Walt Disney, yet it’s a poor book. It’s excessively long, while offering nothing original. Gabler seems to want to psychoanalyze Disney, however Walt seems to have an hostile analyst here.

I was glad to learn that Diane Disney Miller is speaking up and offering her opinion. Hopefully, she’ll eventually get the ear of a board member or two. Where’s Roy when you need him?

Just goes to show you that politics exists even in biographies.

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Jaime Weinman has an excellent column about Duckman, a show that deserves a lot more attention. I think this was probably the finest work from Klasky-Csupo in their meteoric golden era.

– On Thursday night at 10pm, Ray Kosarin‘s short, Uncle, will premiere on ReelTalk on local channel PBS Thirteen.

As I wrote about this short (click here to read) last Saturday, Ray put it out there and said what he thought was important to say, politically, back in 2003 when it wasn’t popular to go against the system. I applaud hiom for that and for the excellent craft in the making of the film.
I sincerely hope you can get the chance to see it.

– Like most cartoonists and illustrators, I’m a big fan of the delicate work of Ronald Searle. I think I first came to admire his work through all those TV Guide covers that I knew from my childhood. His sense of caricature was so exquisite.

Any time I came across his work attempted in animation, I was always disappointed. The delicacy, the composition, the heart always seemed to be out of it. The movie titles for The Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines were a good sample of this. In The Hallelujah Trail, the camera just roamed over stills, but something was missing. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of those sensitive drawings and the brash musical score by Elmer Bernstein, but it didn’t work.

Dick Deadeye didn’t quite capture his style or energy, but it the book on the making of the film is excellent. It’s filled with fine drawings by Searle including a couple of turnarounds.

I’ve become a frequent visitor to Matt Jones‘ Ronald Searle Tribute blog. There’s so much material there that it’s always a treat to visit.

I have an old issue of Cartoonist Profiles which published the following article by Searle in 1969. A good opportunity to revisit.

1 2
(Click on any image to enlarge.)

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5 6

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If you’d like to see more drawings by Ronald Searle, you might try the Chris Beetles Gallery, or Ronald Searle.co.uk.

I’m starting to get overwhelmed with all this information about Popeye flying at me from the internet. The release of the dvd (which I still haven’t seen but will soon) has prompted every animation site to offer the new and unusual in the Popeye canon.

Of course, I’m just a guilty having posted some of Jack Zander’s drawings from a breakfast drink commercial.
Part 1 and Part 2

By the way, thanks to Ken Priebe for locating a copy of a sister commercial (which Jerry Beck posted at Cartoon Brew). The drawings I offered were Jack Zander’s, but I’m pretty sure the Popeye in this other commercial was not animated by him.

I’d thought it was for Tang, but am surprised to learn the spot was for “Start,” a now-defunct competitor. (I guess having the astronauts drink Tang enabled that drink to monopolize the marketplace.) ____________________________________ (Click image to enlarge.)

- I would like to call attention to one young animation site that has a particularly useful bit of Popeye info: Understanding Animation has posted two parts of a three part history of Popeye. It’s quite a dense bit of information he’s written, very detailed. Like many a blog, it could have used an editor to correct some of the grammar. It’s hard to get the gyst of some of the sentences. There’s also a bit too much praise for John K. in a piece about Popeye, but there’s a lot of reading here.
Part 1 is about the comic strip character and Segar’s creation.
Part 2 is about the Fleischer cartoons and the subsequent developments that made Popeye a star.

This is well worth the read. I look forward to Part 3.

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– The site that keeps me in awe every time I visit is Hans Bacher‘s beautiful Animated Treasures 1.

Hans recovers stunning backgrounds from animated films and recreates them using photoshop. (Today he offers a demo.) The Background from The Nutcracker Suite, pictured to the left, is a product of Hans’ fine recreation.

However, it isn’t the how it’s the beauty of the artwork featured. Hans seems to favor the watercolor backgrounds of the thirties and forties (Bless him!) rather than the opaque work of the fifties. His taste is impeccable, and his eye is flawless.

I can’t wait to get my hands on his book, Dream Worlds.

Rob Richards has just developed his own similar site, Animation Backgrounds. It’s excellent to see more of the Disney background work, but so far my taste runs toward Hans’ eye for artwork. I guess my preference is for the watercolor backgrounds of Hoppity than the fine work done in Mary Poppins or The Jungle Book. I love having both sites available to me; there’s a lot to be learned from both of them and the artwork they feature.

- Tom Sito‘s blog reminded me that yesterday was the anniversary of Philippe Petit‘s walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. Karl Cohen followed up with an email reminder.

Two years ago I’d received this invitation from Philippe Petit in celebration of the anniversary.

I had just finished my film, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. The film for Weston Woods went on to win a lot of awards, but it also helped me keep my sanity during a very busy period where little of the work we were doing was anything to write home about.

I was able to sneak away from those other jobs to work on this film which, however it turned out, felt more artful than the other. It gave me the small opportunity of commenting, in my own way, on the horrendous events of 9/11.

On August 6th, the weather was just about identical to the morning of 9/11. A crisp, clear day with a stunningly blue sky. We went to the park to see Philippe Petit and were surprised to find him not there when we arrived a tad late. We sat waiting for something to happen, and no sooner had we arrived than the man, himself, rode about the park on a unicycle blowing a whistle. A crowd soon formed.

He drew a chalk circle and, without using words, made us all stand at the brink of that circle. Within, he started juggling, performing, getting people to laugh. Finally, he tied a thick rope to two trees – about five feet off the ground – and started walking the rope. He knew how to entertain the crowd and keep us all smiling. It was a lot of fun.

When it was over, Philippe passed his top hat around and collected a bit of money. Then he removed himself to the side and prepared for a second performance. It was then that we said hello, exchanged some kind words and moved on.

It made for a pleasant Saturday afternoon in New York.

At the moment, my film can be viewed on YouTube, but don’t be surprised if it’s pulled off again. We’ve already been through this several times.

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- Speaking of anniversaries – unpleasant ones, today is the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. With that bombing, the atrocity of Atomic War was draped across us all by Harry Truman. To celebrate this event, I suggest you try to catch the documentary airing on HBO, White Light Black Rain. It’s extraordinarily good and deserves your time. It’s well done and imparts a lot of information intelligently.

If you prefer there’s also a brilliant dramatic feature entitled Black Rain by the brilliant Japanese director, Shohei Imamura. You can rent the dvd with no problem, and it’s worth seeing if only for the art of the filmmaking.
Master director Shohei Imamura

– After posting a piece last week about the Popeye statue in Chester, Ill., I received a letter from Mike Brooks. I found it interesting enough that I’m going to post it here with some images from goodies for sale at his store.

This is Mike Brooks in Chester, IL. I am the founder of the Official Popeye Fanclub (1989) – and editor of the club’s quarterly news-mag that we havebeen publishing for more than 18 years. I also write a local weekly newspaper column called, ‘Popeye 101′ – and have for more than a dozen years. ’101′ is published on the same newspaper page as our good friend, Hy Eisman’s ‘Popeye’ comic strip.

In 1994, my wife and I gave-up good jobs – moved to Chester, IL – bought Bill Schuchert’s ‘Opera House’ and sat-up the only Popeye shop and museum in the world (Spinach Can Collectibles). We have had visitors from all 50 states and more than 60 countries since we opened – and more than 5000 items to display. Besides E.C Segar being from Chester, Schuchert was the model for ‘Wimpy’ and acted as Segar’s boss at the Opera House. Dora Paskel – who ran a local general store – was the model for ‘Olive’. Frank Fiegel – a local custodian – was the model for ‘Popeye’.

The “Popeye’ statue turned 30 years old a few weeks ago. Sculptor – Robert Walker – now 85 – made a return and was the main speaker at a special event held in Segar Memorial Park. I was also honored to be asked to speak at this event.

‘Wimpy’ got his own granite statue last year next to our building. There will be an ‘Olive/Swee’pea/Jeep’ statue unveiled in just a few weeks at ‘Popeye Picnic’ (28th year). This is scheduled to happen – 8 September. Actor Paul Dooley who played ‘Wimpy’ in the 1980 Robert Altman film is also supposed to be here. He missed the dedication last year, but has promised a return. By the way – this is only the beginning for statues. ‘Bluto’ will be unveiled next year. An entire ‘character trail’ is being planned – as long as we have money volunteers.

Popeye may not be as visible as he once was – but I assure you____ Actor – Paul Dooley
he’s alive and well here in Chester.

Please visit our web-pages – shop and club – and the official picnic page. We are what some have called – “one of the world’s best kept secrets” – but the shop and the picnic each draw a big crowd year after year.

You can visit the Mike Brooks’ Popeye shop and buy some of these great items displayed above (for reasonable prices, I might add) by clicking here.

There’s also the site called Popeye’s Poop Deck that you might want to visit for more information about Popeye and his history.

(Click any of the images above to enlarge.)
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- Don Brockway has an interesting new blog well worth checking into.
. The report he did on Raggedy Ann & Andy is first rate and worth reading.
. However I loved the information he’s posted on Disney scores performed by British orchestras. There’re a lot of good arrangements of classsic Disney songs. The Silly Symphony pieces are excellent. A second one on early animation scores is equally good and includes a Popeye medley.