Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

– Well, last night I got to see The Simpson’s Movie. By the time I was in the theater, I was almost tired of it already. There’s been so much publicity about this it’s been hard to avoid. I watched Matt Groening and James Brooks on Charlie Rose this past Monday evening, and I have to say that I fell in love with Brooks but was really irritated by Groening. Perhaps Matt Groening hasn’t done many tv appearances, but he answered every question in a manner that sounded rehearsed and not at all from the heart. His ego seemed front and present, but maybe it was just my interpretation of something that wasn’t really there, and I respect his work enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. TV always seems to add a few pounds.

About the movie. $71 million over the weekend. What more need be said?
A lot, I guess. Ratatouille didn’t perform as well as this one will, but it was a very much better film. This cartoon is the TV show on ones. It’s a laugh riot as expected, but I saw no hint of real character animation. No personality other than what the great voice work gave it. Just a lot of smooth movement mixed with cg movement.

In a sense, like the TV show, you can only judge it by its script. As A.O. Scott, in the NYTimes, wrote, the movie doesn”t live up to its best TV episodes. “It’s no “22 Short Films About Springfield” or “Homer’s Enemy” or “Krusty Gets Busted” or “Lisa the Vegetarian” — and it doesn’t strain to be.”

In short, the film didn’t get under my skin, and I don’t think it wanted to.
It was just a humorous diversion passing through the summer.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut did dig deeper and was a much better film, completely separate from the cable TV show.

One comment Groening made on Charlie Rose got me, though. He said that when they started the series, after the short inserts they did for The Tracie Ullman Show, James Brooks told them that audiences had to get caught up in the emotions of the shows and forget they were watching animation. To me this is the start of where the show changed and got smaller.

On the Ullman Show, the characters were graphic creatures that existed both emotionally AND graphically. When Homer strangled Bart, both characters distorted out of their physical forms. It was brilliant, hilarious and completely worked. (The image on the far left comes close to depicting my point but it’s still not quite as far as they’d go in the early days. The other image isn’t even as tame as the stranglehoods done in the movie.)

Once the show was pulled from Klasky-Csupo and sent to Film Roman, the show’s look got slicker, and the artwork suffered. No hint of that graphic distortion appeared again. The Film Roman crew actually tried to reproduce that distorted strangle-hold, but they wimped out and completely lost anything that made me laugh.

The show was best rough around the edges with hints of anything that was great about Groening’s Life In Hell strips. It was able to work emotionally, remind the audience that they were watching graphic hand-drawn distortions, and keep you laughing. Of course, this is just my preference. I’m annoyed by the ones and the slickness and the big-dollar look that removes any hint of the little-cartoon-that-once-could.

The show’s been on forever, and the movie has already made a fortune hitting the $$$ jackpot last weekend. I wish them well, and hope it furthers the success of other animated features. I just wish I had come home with something more.

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– Let me call your attention to what I think is a stunning piece of animation done for Greenpeace. Japanese director, Koji Yamamura has a beautiful short piece on line.
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This artist just keeps doing one great piece of animation after another, and this delicate film is enormous to me. I think this animator is one of our best artists.
Go here to view it.

Yamamura’s most recent film, Franz Kafka’s A Country Doctor was in Cannes, Annecy, Karlovy Vary and will screen in competition at the Ottawa Animation Festival in Sept.

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John Canemaker writes to tell me that the second part of his article on former Disney story artist & children’s book illustrator, J.P. Miller. The article will appear in the new issue of CARTOONS, the International Journal of Animation (Vo. 3, issue 1 Spring 2007), entitled “In Search of John Parr Miller.”

The article is beautifully illustrated with photographs and illustrations by Miller. Several of these images appear below.

J.P. (Jack) Miller ( far right) in 1941 in Mexico with
(l.to r.) Disney publicist Janet Martin, Lee Blair and Herb Ryman.
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J.P. Miller Golden Book illustration from “What If?” (1951)
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“Dr. Squash the Doll Doctor” (Golden Book, 1948)

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