Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The Albert Hurter book, He Drew As He Pleased, continues. This book is a beautiful edition, which reminds me – in a tactile way – of The Robert Field book The Art of Walt DIsney – of drawings Hurter did while at the Disney Studio in the 30s and early 40s.

Hurter was a key designer from Europe who was allowed to draw what he wanted as inspiration for the designs of the films in production at the time. He was an enormous influence on Snow White and Pinocchio.

These pages are all scanned and sent to me by Bill Peckmann and I have to thank him. The book is not easy to scan. So here we complete the posted book.

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“Opera”

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‘When “The Reluctant Dragon” was in preparation,
these medieval studies appeared… each from memory.
Albert never resorted to “scrap”…’

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“Stalwarts”

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“Refreshments… Fifteenth Century”
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“Knighthood’s dignity never seemed to impress Albert”

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“St. George warms up”

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“Between Halves”

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“Complete Overhaul”

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“A pet character of Albert’s who never quite never reached the screen”

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“Some of his last sketches.”

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“Between serious thoughts Albert succeeded in elevating
the practice of doodling until it approached a fine art”

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- Many thanks to John Canemaker for offering this great scene by Milt Kahl from Peter Pan. The scene is made up of roughs by Kahl without the inbetweens or the Clean-up drawings. Enjoy.

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Here’s a QT of the scene with drawings exposed to what I think are
their appropriate frames.

- Continuing the drafts to Raggedy Ann & Andy, I’m posting two sequences today:
5 contains Emery Hawkin’s taffy pit and
6 contains the meeting with the Looney Knight. (This is where the picture really goes off its wheels and takes a deep spin downhill.)

Seq. 5 employs these animators: Emery Hawkins. (A number of scenes were left blank for animator. At the end of the production they pushed this through pulling the sequence from Emery. Assistants became animators, and the animation looked shoddy.) Art Vitello, John Bruno, and Grim Natwick.

Seq. 6 is animated by: Willis Pyle, Art Babbitt, and John Kimball (Ward’s son). Again, several other animators came on at the end: Jim Logan stepped up from assisting to animating the Looney Knight, since Dick felt he was handling it so well.

Sequence 5
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Here are some images from John Canemaker‘s excellent book, The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.

Sequence 6

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- Really Rosie was a special “directed by” Maurice Sendak from his miniature-sized children’s books, The Nutshell Kids. The show in reality was overseen by Ron Fritz and Dan Hunn who received the credit of “Animation Director.” It was done out of their studio, D&R Productions, for CBS television.

In 2007, I wrote: “The animation was good, but the composition always seemed off, to me. I remember back in 1975 (I was still in college at the time) thinking that the show looked like it was done in one long shot on 12 fld artwork. Then they seemed to move the camera in tight for all the poorly executed camera moves. The line work got unpleasantly large in close ups and the detail wasn’t good. The film just isn’t smooth.”

Animation for the show is credited to:
Lu Guarnier, Marty Taras, Willis Pyle, Doug Crane, Jack Schnerk, Cosmo Anzilotti, and John Svochak.
Asst animators included:
Jim Logan, Gerry Dvorak, Helen Komar, and Joe Gray

Here’s a scene animated by Lu Guarnier from the sequence pictured above. The pegholes atthe top are Oxberry. (You can see the 2007 post about this sequence, here.

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Here’s a QT of the scene with drawings exposed to whata I think are
their appropriate frames. I don’t have exposure sheets so I may be
missing a hold or two. Purely guesswork on my part.

- Here is the third installment of the drafts for the feature of Raggedy Ann & Andy. This was the Dick Williams directed feature done for Bobbs-Merrill (who owned the property – the books and wanted to create a long ad to make them popular again. It didn’t work.) I’m not quite sure who I’m posting these charts for, but I was asked, so here they are.

If you haven’t seen the film and want to, you can go here. A wonderful page on YouTube. The sequences worth viewing are this one – seq. 4 – and the taffy pit. Tissa David did some nice, emotional animation for the first; Emery Hawkins did the wildest sequence in the film for the second.

I keep reading strange rewirtes of the history of this film (by people who worked on it), so I’ll talk about what I know in an upcoming post. I was involved from the first day Dick Williams came on board. The first animator he contacted was Tissa, and the two of them did a test pencil test.

Here is sequence 4 “The deep, dark woods.” Part 1 was animated by Tissa – 876 feet. Part 4.1 & 4.1A was split between Tissa, Art Babbitt and John Kimball. Babbitt did the camel, and his Ann & Andy were so far off model that we had to keep Tissa’s work away from Babbitt’s. After all, his character was the Camel with the wrinkled knees. No attempt was made to bring his characters closer to the model sheets.

Art Babbitt’s Ann & Andy
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Dick Williams’ cleanup of Tissa’s Ann & Andy
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Babbitt’s “Camel with the wrinkled knees”
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The charts
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- I had planned a different post today, but at the last minute decided to post this one again. It’s from March 2009 and has material in it brilliant beyond words. Tytla’s brilliance, of course. Jim Tyer and Rod Scribner might have taken something from this.

Here is a scene from Snow White, animated by Bill Tytla, in which four of the dwarfs fight Grumpy. The drawing above is the first of these drawings and it shows what it looked like in color – lots of red pencil notes, yellow pencil for rough structural lines. The rest of the drawings I have are B&W copies.

By the way, if you like this material check out Hans Perk ‘s site today. It deals with forces vs. forms in animation. This is what Tytla was all about in animating.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Check out Happy’s face on this inbetween.
Then check out Tytla’s drawing (the next one) of Happy.

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Tytla marked his own drawings with an “X” in the upper right corner.
The other drawings are the work of inbetweeners. The writing looks
to be all the work of Tytla.

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Some of these drawings are just hilarious in their own right.

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The P.T. on ones at 24FPS.
Click the black bar on the left to play.
Click on the right to single frame it.

- Continuing with the drafts I have from Raggedy Ann & Andy, I give you sequence 3.1, 3.2 & 3.3.

The animators employed are: Hal Ambro, Sencer Peel, Dick Williams, Charlie Downs, Tissa David, John Bruno, Jack Schnerk, Chrystal (Russell) Klabunde, Gerry Chiniquy, Doug Crane, and Willis Pyle.

Dick Williams did most of the cleanup of this sequence himself. He was particularly interested in the character of “Babette” which Hal Ambro animated. Dick reworked every one of those scenes while doing CU & Inbts. I’ve posted a model sheet of Babette from one of the scenes in this sequence.

For those of you who’d rather see artwork than charts, I give you another of Corny Cole’s oversized stunning bits of preliminary artwork for Tissa David‘s sequence, the deep dark woods.

“Babette”

“In the deep, dark woods.”

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- Here are the LayOuts by John Hubley for the Electric Company piece, Cool Pool Fool. Tissa David animated from these layouts and the verbal instructions from John.

A couple of drawings are missing #7 and #18

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Here are some frame grabs from the spot. They’ve been severely touched up in photoshop since the video has lost all color and is almost unwatchable except as a silhouette film. I’ve reconstructed the colors as near as I can remember them. At any rate, the purpose of these grabs is for you to see what Tissa has done with John’s layouts.

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- Today’s the day for Oscar voting narrowing the 10 films of the short list down to a reasonable five nominees. The Academy will screen the films for us, and after each one we vote a numerical score. The top five get in.

The two coasts, NY & LA have very different tastes, so I rarely expect that the films I like will be liked by others, nevermind the West Coast people – who are more studio oriented, thus favoring what I consider some dreadful films. I can only hope they won’t make it to the finals.

Part of the fun of voting is the get-together the people in NY prepare for us. Patrick Harrison and John Fahr put together a day that makes it as easy as possible for us. The lunch they serve is always the high point of the day, and we animators get to mingle and catch up on our disparate career waves. It’s just fun, even if it is a day of sitting on the butt riding out some bad movies. There are also some really good ones, too.

If you want to see what films are in the shortlist, Cartoon Brew did a nice little announcement of the titles back in November, with stills and links etc.

- Tissa David turned 90 this past week. If, as I expect, the money for my feature POE comest through in the next month, I suspect (but can’t prove it), Tissa will be the oldest animator working regularly on a film. At least, I will be privileged to have her input on my film. It’s all very exciting for me. I intend to ask Ed Smith to get involved, as well. Perhaps he’s the same age as Tissa?

- To leave off with something nice let me post this drawing I have from PLANE CRAZY. That’s a short that deserved an Oscar – but, alas, ikt came before the award existed. I bought this drawing from John Bruno, who sold such material at the time, so many years ago. He wanted $50 for it in 1977, and I couldn’t give him the money fast enough.

(Click to enlarge to see the full animation page, holes and all.)

This post, with some slight variation, originally appeared on May 16, 2006. I was thumbing through one of Shamus Culhane’s books and decided to post it anew.

- Acting as a companion piece to Mark Mayerson‘s posts re Shamus Culhane‘s direction on The Pied Piper of Basin Street for Lantz in 1944, I am posting these drawings from the early spots Culhane directed for Ajax Cleanser.

As Culhane reports in his autobiography, the call came out of the blue in 1949 from an advertising agency offering these commercials which became enormously popular. Culhane formed a studio hiring Art Heinemann to design the three elves in the spot, and Art Babbitt teamed with Shamus to animate it. The ad campaign lasted until the late 1950′s. I can remember the spots clearly, though I was never overwhelmed by them, even as a child.

It’s interesting to see how varied the rough and the clean–up are from each other (they both are for the same number.) The clean-up is also obviously designed to be inked not xeroxed (which predates 1959).

I bought these drawings which while marked as animation drawings by Culhane, are probably not. The rough could possibly be his work, but I don’t think so.

It looks more like Emery Hawkins, but that’s not much more than a guess. The clean up looks like the work of Gerry Dvorak, but that’s also an educated guess. If anyone out there has a better idea, let me know.

I’m also sure that this spot ran in the mid 1950′s. I distinctly remember seeing it originally on tv when I was a child. To see one of the Ajax commercials go here to see a number of early tv spots.

If you click on either image you’ll enlarge it to full animation paper size.