Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- I’m sad to learn that Billy Taylor died this past Tuesday. He was a smart, intelligent guy; I’ll miss his not being there. A a small crack in the world has grown larger for me. Of course, this is because I got to meet him on a one-to-one basis.

Back in the mid-70s – I think it was 1975 – Billy Taylor showed up at the Hubley Studio. I was the only person there, at the time. He was working on a tribute they were about to have for Quincy Jones at Carnegie Hall. It was hoped that John Hubley would say a few words and show a bit of EGGS (which QJ scored). Unfortunately, I couldn’t answer for the Hubleys.

Dr. Taylor decided to wait around for Hubley to return. That meant that I was there to entertain him until John got back. We talked for maybe two hours over some tea. I showed him artwork from a number of pieces we were working on, and we talked about all the work Quincy had done for the studio. (He also scored OF MEN AND DEMONS.)

Billy Taylor, in fact, had written the music and performed it for a number of the Hubley Sesame St. and Electric Co. pieces. He was a brilliant pianist, and many of the pieces just built around the piano. We also talked about that.

The Hubleys never returned that afternoon. Billy Taylor finally decided to leave and said he’d call back. I didn’t see the Quincy Jones tribute, and I don’t know if the Hubleys turned out for it (though I can’t imagine they wouldn’t have.) However, I had a short slice of glory that afternoon and a great memory to boot.

I’m sorry I never thought to work with him on any of my films. But then my budgets were always so tight, I wonder if I’d have had the nerve to offer him what little I could for a film’s music.

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- I just received a DVD for THE GRUFFALO in the mail. This is the 2nd DVD of an animated short sent to me this year. The last was the WB cgi version of the roadrunner. The roadrunner was a horrible short that completely missed the point of Chuck Jones’ brilliant work, and I couldn’t make it through the whole DVD version. I did, howevwer, watch the whole thing on a big screen, in 3D at the Academy screening. Ycch. THE GRUFFALO, on the other hand, is a first rate short. The voice work is spectacular. Tom Wilkinson, alone, makes this film fun to listen to. The animation done by Soi Films in Germany is quite delicate and good. I’ll see this one again next week in a theater at the Academy screening, Saturday, Jan 8th, of the short list for animation. I’ll be watching animated shorts in the morning, live action shorts in the afternoon and a play (The Importance of Being Earnest) in the evening. A long and passive day. I’m looking forward to it. I expect THE GRUFFALO,one of the better films, will be nominated. I hope, also, that Michel Gagne’s film will be nominated. I can’t think of any other astract animated film to have EVER been nominated.__________________

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- Speaking of experimental animation, it’s wonderful that Mary Ellen Bute‘s animated film, Tarantella (1940), was added to the National Registry this week. Her films have often been ignored by the public. Cartoon Brew led me to a great YouTube video about her work, and I advise you all to take a look at it.

My one connection with Mary Ellen Bute came just after she had died in 1983. Her husband, Ted Nemeth, in a desperate attempt to raise money, offered to sell off some of her possessions. It didn’t take long for a beautiful cel of Jiminy Cricket to enter my collection at the low price of $65. Actually, this felt like a not low price back then, but it was in such good shape and was a wonderful image.

The cel bought from Ted Nemeth.

- Here are copies I have of four random Fantasia layouts. Make of them what you will.
It’s worth clicking the images to enlarge them.

Seq 5.6 Scene 21 / Les Clark

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The scene’s Background
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Exterior of the scene folder

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Seq 5.3 Scene 016 / Cy Young

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Flower BG

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Seq 5.3 Scene 018 / Cy Young

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Waltzing flowers

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The guide for the waltzing flowers

The exterior of the scene folder.
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Seq 5.4 Scene 023 / Two Fish

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Dancing Fish guide

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Dancing fish plan

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Now visit Hans Perk’s wonderful site, AFILMLA, to see the drafts of Fantasia.

Steven Hartley has begun making a mosaic on his blog. To see that, go here.

I posted this back in 2006 and love it so much I’ve decided to put it up again.
Lu has since died, and I post this in memory of him.

- Years ago, Lu Guarnier, an older Warner Bros animator who relocated to NY after WWII and has been working here ever since, offered me a photostat of a christmas card from the WB studio back in 1937.

He told me two days later that he was heading out to LA, and he’d see if he could get any of those pictured to sign it for me. Imagine my surprise when he came back from California with the stat covered with original signatures. Even some of those not in T.Hee’s drawing signed it. (Unfortunately, not T.Hee). They’d all met at a local watering hole. (I guess animators drank together back then.)

Though the card has been seen on line before, I thought it a good image to put up for the holidays. I’ve identified a lot of the people in the picture. My favorite is Henry Binder; he stands out in his stiffness. The lord overseer. And the only one shorter than him is Friz.

Have a great Holiday Week.

Below is the key to I.D. most of T. Hee’s caricatures in this picture.

(Click on either image to enlarge.)

- Grim Natwick animated a wacky character in Raggedy Ann & Andy for Richard Williams. Dick, himself, did the rough cleanup. You can see Grim’s drawings erased and cleaned up. (The semi-erased semblance of Grim’s very large numbers remain on many of the drawings, as do Grim’s notes. The inbetweens were all done by Dick. (It’s his writing in the lower right corner, and I remember him doing this overnight.)

The scene is all on twos. There are two holds which Dick changed to a traceback cycle of drawings for a moving hold. It actually lookw better on ones, but there was a lip-synch that Grim had to follow. It is interesting that both Tissa David, one of the five key animators on this film, and Grim Natwick, who Tissa had assisted for at least 20 years, both shared the one assistant on key scenes in this film – Richard Williams. Eric Goldberg assisted on many of Tissa’s other scenes.

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An inbetween by Dick Williams.
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Drawings 44-47 are all Grim’s roughs with minor CU.
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Here’s a QT movie of the complete action from the scene.
The scene is exposed on twos per exposure sheets.

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Here are the folder in which the two exposure sheets
are stapled (so they don’t get separated.)

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Folder

- Frank Thomas is one of those animators that I took too much for granted. The more I look at his work, the more I realize he was one of the greatest animators to have graced the business.

His animation of Captain Hook is brilliant.

Per comments by Wil Raymakers and Sandro Cleuso, I’ve learned that this particular scene was animated by Woolie Reitherman. Naturally that would be under the supervision of Thomas, who controlled the character, Hook.

I can’t speak more highly about this scene. In a flash, I can tell you exactly where this scene sits in Peter Pan, and I’ve remembered it since I was a child; it’s that key to me.

The scene is obviously designed to be on ones, and I have the drawings for the second half (on ones), but the first half includes only the keys. Consequently, there’s some staccato movement in the QT movie I’ve made. Regardless, it’s beautiful.

The scene comes to me courtesy of Louis Scarborough Jr., who made the loan.

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Here’s a QT movie of the complete action from the scene, including Part 1.
Since the scene has been inbetweened, it’s exposed, for the most part, on ones.

- Here from the Mickey in B&W Treasures DVD comes some story sketches from the great, early short, Mickey’s Orphans. It’s valuable to see how much action happens between these drawings, and one wonders if there are other story drawings missing, or did the animators get to play a bit with the action.

This film was done in 1931, and certainly a procedure was developing at the studio in the process of making these films.

Here are the story sketches for this film, and some of them are beauties.

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Hans Perk has posted the draft for this film on his blog, AFilmLA, and I’ll try to put together a visual breakdown of the film to match it.

By the way, what a resource AFilmLA is. Hans is currently posting the draft to Fantasia. What more could we want? Thank you, Hans.

- Here are more pages from the book by Albert Hurter, He Drew As He Pleased (Simon and Schuster, 1948.) This gem is a rare book, indeed.

Albert Hurter was one of the European illustrators Disney brought into his studio for Snow White and Pinocchio. Hurter was the his own master, drawing designs which would be used generally to further the design of the features and Silly Symphonies.

A similar position seems to have gone to Joe Grant when he worked in the period during the making of Beauty and the Beast through The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Some of his drawings, as can be seen in John Canemaker‘s book, Two Guys Named Joe, are just as brilliant. Indeed, there were a lot of brilliant artists floating around the Disney studio in the late Thirties, early Forties.

Many thanks to Bill Peckmann for the loan of the book’s pages and the arduous task of scanning these illustrations.

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“He was fond of scarecrows . . . ”
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“They were so simple and natural . . .”
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“One of Albert’s ambitions was
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“When Fantasia was planned,
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Variations on a Centaur
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Gladiators at Work
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The Titans
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Medusa and Contemporaries
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Victims of Circe
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Siamese and Otherwise
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- Karl Essex read on my blog about Glen Keane‘s poses and saw some negative comments about Andreas Deja which I rebutted. He had a number of artwork pieces that he sent me to post. There’re no cliched poses among them; I like Deja‘s work.

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Hercules 1

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Hercules 2

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Hercules 3

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Hercules 4

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Lilo from Lilo & Stitch

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Jafar from Aladdin

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from Deja’s sketchbook King Triton from The Little Mermaid

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Roger Rabbit

- This is the last half of this scene by the brilliant, Milt Kahl, for The Rescuers in 1977.

Penny has been sent down a hole to find a diamond while Medusa from above screams at her to look harder. Kahl had a field day animating Medusa and felt it was one of his better pieces. And it was. Unfortunately, it couldn’t quite top Marc Davis’ Cruella DeVille.

Many thanks to my friend, Louis Scarborough Jr. for the loan of the scene to share with you.

As with all of these pieces we start with the last drawing from last week.

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(Click any image to enlarge.)
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Here’s a QT movie of the complete action from the scene, including Part 1.
Since the scene has been inbetweened, it’s exposed, for the most part, on ones.

- Here’s Medusa. She’s the bad guy at the center of The Rescuers. Milt Kahl, wanted a shot at creating his own version of Creuella DeVille, and he came pretty close.

The animation has the little girl, Penny, down a hole, and Medusa walks up to the hole and shouts down to Penny to find a gem down there. (Shades of Aladdin in the cave.)

The second half of the scene will follow next week.

The scene comes courtesy of a loan from Louis Scarborough Jr.‘s collection, and I thank him enormously for it.

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Here’s a QT movie of the action layed out above. Since the scene has been inbetweened, it’s exposed, for the most part, on ones.