101 Dalmatians: Part 8

Ken Harris

Thad Komorowski has written an essay about Ken Harris, best known for his animation for Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. and for Richard Williams on A Christmas Carol and The Cobbler and the Thief. The essay includes lengthy quotes from animator Greg Duffell, who worked with Harris at the Williams studio. The grand finale is a video of Harris's work for Jones compiled by Thad.

Walt's People Volume 6

Editor Didier Ghez has announced that Walt's People Volume 6 is now available from Xlibris.com and will be available to those outside the U.S. from Amazon.com in 6 to 8 weeks. The contents include:

Foreword by Michael Sporn

Michael Barrier: Carl Stalling

I. Klein: The Disney Studio in the '30s

I. Klein: Some Close-Up Shots of Walt Disney during the "Golden Years"

I. Klein: Golden Age Animator Vladimir (Bill) Tytla

I. Klein: Walt Disney Took Another Giant Step!

Steve Hulett: Wilfred Jackson

Steve Hulett: Eric Larson

Steve Hulett: Ward Kimball

Steve Hulett: Ken Anderson

Steve Hulett: Ken O'Connor

Steve Hulett: Claude Coates

Robin Allan: Claude Coats

Christopher Finch: Frank Thomas

Christopher Finch: Ollie Johnston

Christopher Finch: Milt Kahl

JB Kaufman: Maurice Rapf

Richard Hubler: Lillian Disney

Richard Hubler: Roy O. Disney

Richard Hubler: Edna Disney

Richard Hubler: Sharon Disney

Richard Hubler: Diane Disney Miller

Richard Hubler: Ron Miller

Richard Hubler: Dick Irvine

Richard Hubler: Marvin Davis

Richard Hubler: Joe Fowler

Richard Hubler: Roger Broggie

Dave Smith: Fred Joerger

Jim Korkis: Ken Anderson

Richard Hubler: Frank Reilly

Frank Reilly: The Walt Disney Comic Strips

Jim Davis and Alberto Becattini: Ken Hultgren

Wes Sullivan: Bud Hester

Wes Sullivan: Iwao Takamoto

Gabe Essoe: Larry Clemmons

Christian Renaut: Joe Hale

Didier Ghez: Steve Hulett

101 Dalmatians: Bill Peet

I've only just read Dodie Smith's novel 101 Dalmatians. As I'm breaking the film down, I was curious to see how it compared to the source material. While I am a long-time admirer of Bill Peet, his adaptation of 101 Dalmatians is an excellent measure of his talents and only increased my admiration for him.

The book has many differences from the film that resulted. The dogs' owners are the Dearlys, not the Radcliffs, and they never get first names. Mr. Dearly works for the government in finance; he is not a musician in any way. There are two nannys, one who worked for each of the Dearlys before their marriage. There are three adult dalmatians: Pongo, his bride Missis, and a wet nurse named Perdita. Cruella is married to a furrier and her plan isn't just to own a dalmatian coat but to go into the manufacture of them. Cruella has a Persian cat whose kittens she keeps drowning. The Badduns are brothers: Saul (not Horace) and Jasper.

The book begins with the Dearlys already married. When the puppies are stolen, it happens off-stage. Cruella is visiting and waiting for the Dearlys to return. While Cruella keeps Nanny busy, the dogs are stolen without any confrontation whatsoever. Tib (not Tibbs) is female and her real name is Pussy Willow. The horse in the book is not associated with the Colonel and Tib but is part of a Gypsy encampment. The end of the book does not include a chase sequence. Once the dogs board the van heading to London, they make it to Regents Park without further incident.

The book spends an awful lot of time on logistics, dealing with how the dogs are going to find sufficient food, water and shelter. The humans in the book, including Cruella, are developed in general terms only. None of them is particularly vivid as a personality.

I mention all of the above to show how much work Peet had to do in adapting the book. He was forced to invent a lot and restructure a lot of what was left. He streamlined many of the plot points and incidents. One of the best things he did was to eliminate characters, cutting out Missis, one nanny and Cruella's husband. He understood that he needed scenes that included conflict and suspense. The opening of the film is a lovely sequence that Peet created out of whole cloth. The kidnapping of the pups includes a direct confrontation between Nanny and the Badduns and is far more interesting than what's in the book. The final chase is also far more exciting than the novel, where the climactic tension comes from trying to move so many puppies over a great distance while keeping them fed, watered and rested. Besides increasing the threat to the dogs, Peet includes the point of view of the villains where the novel only sticks with the dogs.

It's in the area of personality that Peet really shines. Cruella is distinctive in the book, but she lacks the flamboyance that Peet gives her. Roger is far more interesting as a musician, which instantly gives him physical business to do, than Mr. Dearly is as a financial advisor in the book. The Badduns are ciphers compared to Horace and Jasper. The relationship between Tibbs and the Colonel is better developed in the film and Tibbs is given a greater role to play.

Peet took the novel only as raw material. He kept the central conflict of the book and what worked cinematically, like the twilight bark and the pups' interest in television, but pulled the whole thing apart and rebuilt it adding drama, suspense and personality. Anyone having to adapt a story for animation would benefit from comparing the novel of 101 Dalmatians to the resulting film. While the Disney film is admired for many things like the art direction and the animation, the underlying appeal of the film really has to be credited to Bill Peet. He's the one who gave the film its overall shape and appeal.

Industry Day Revisited

Here are two local news reports about Sheridan's recent industry day. The students and facility shown in the reports are from the post-graduate cgi program. That program's films screened in the morning and I'm assuming that the reporters featured those students as they needed time to edit the stories for the evening news.

101 Dalmatians: Part 7A

In Dodie Smith's novel, the kidnapping of the puppies takes place off-stage and is only discovered after the fact. Bill Peet wisely realized that this event held great potential for conflict and suspense, and he uses it to introduce the remaining villains Horace and Jasper. The sequence also gives Nanny a chance to shine. Her dialogue with the crooks at the front door shows that she's no fool and her physical resistance once the crooks enter the house gives her heroic stature.

When I see sequences like this, I'm always puzzled as to how animators are assigned. For shots 2 through 8.1, Horace and Jasper are sitting in their truck discussing the job to come. Eric Cleworth and John Sibley share these shots. I would think it would be simpler to have one animator take care of everything or have each animator assigned to a single character. Cleworth and Sibley both have shots where they animate both characters, so it's not like one of them was incapable of some part of the sequence.

Horace and Jasper are very economically introduced. We quickly learn that they're crooks with a record and that Jasper, the tall thin one, is the dominant one of the pair. When they get to the door, it's Jasper who delivers a line of blarney intended to get past Nanny, and when she firmly resists allowing them to enter, it's Jasper who forces his way in and then traps Nanny long enough for Horace to grab the pups.

John Lounsbery's animation of the pair at the door is wonderful stuff. Jasper has a very flexible face and Lounsbery makes the most of it while Jasper attempts to con Nanny. Shots 34 and 35, where Lounsbery animates Jasper talking at the attic door also show off some great facial expressions. In shot 30, Lounsbery animates a terrific walk when Jasper goes up the stairs. Jasper's proportions are very odd; he's all arms and legs with a hunched over body. His walk is distinctive and funny, looking like a very odd spider.

John Sibley also gets some very good Jasper shots. Shot 8.1. clearly establishes the relationship between the two bad guys. Sibley animates Horace and Jasper approaching the front door in shot 12, doing an excellent job on Jasper's walk. Sibley animates Jasper pulling Nanny's hat up and releasing it in shot 29.1. He gets a bit of Jasper at the attic door in shot 34.2. Sibley's handling of Jasper is as good as Lounsbery's, but he never gets a chance to build up any kind of performance with the character because he rarely gets two shots in a row.

Hal King continues to animate the puppies for the few shots they have in this sequence. Where Ollie Johnston animated a lot of Nanny in earlier sequences, here Cliff Nordberg and Don Lusk inherit her and do a fine job of maintaining the drawing and personality of the character. This sequence is Nanny's big acting scene. In fact, in terms of range and emotion, it might be the biggest acting scene of any of the human protagonists and I'm surprised that the nine allowed someone outside the inner circle to animate it.

Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist

Last night I attended a screening of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, a documentary written and directed by the brothers Jon and Andrew Cooke. I'm a longtime reader of Eisner's work and I approached the film with a certain nervousness. I was afraid that the film would be too fannish, only working for those who are immersed in Eisner's work and the comics subculture. Happily, I can report that the film is excellent and works well for a general audience. The film screened as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. The majority of the audience was not comics people and they were appreciative of the film as it laid out the importance of Eisner's life and work.


(You can see a longer version of this trailer here.)

Eisner died during the five year production of the film, but it does include interview footage of him that was shot for the documentary. In addition, the film includes on-screen appearances by comics creators Art Spiegelman, Joe Kubert, Gil Kane, Frank Miller, Jules Feiffer, Jerry Robinson, Denis Kitchen, Max Allan Collins, Scott McCloud and Neil Gaiman as well as novelists Kurt Vonnegut, and Michael Chabon. The voices of Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Neal Adams and Milton Caniff can be heard in interviews that Eisner conducted himself acting as a comics historian. A great deal of Eisner's artwork is featured, much of it shot from the original drawings.

The film covers the course of Eisner's life from his poor beginnings in New York, his struggle to find work as an artist during the Great Depression and his innovations in the early comic book field. It recounts his time in the military during World War II when he became heavily involved in using comics for training and maintenance purposes. It discusses The Spirit, a comic book insert distributed with newspapers that allowed Eisner to create stories that appealed to the entire range of newspaper readers, from children to adults. In the '50s, he formed a company to create sponsored comics for educational purposes and in the early '70s, he sold the company and created a series of highly personal graphic novels.

The film also covers Eisner's personal life, showing home movies with his parents, his wife and his children and includes Eisner's perspective on comics as a business and an art form. The film is attractively put together and well paced. It does an excellent job of portraying Eisner and his work and the audience seemed interested in both based on questions they asked Andrew Cooke after the screening.

Eisner is inspirational to me on several fronts. From the standpoint of creators rights, Eisner was a pioneer in owning the rights to his work on The Spirit. In the early 21st century, Eisner was still earning money from work he had done 60 years before. It would take decades after Eisner for the idea of royalties to take hold in the comic book business and mainstream comics still resist allowing creators to truly own their work. Eisner's entrepreneurial bent propelled him into using comics as a teaching tool, broadening the market and the audience for comics. As he approached 60, an age when many business people think about retirement, Eisner began a third career creating a series of graphic novels that were a complete break with what was being done in the comics field. He was still doing new work until his death at 87 from complications resulting from heart surgery

Artistically, Eisner underwent a major change of focus between his early work on The Spirit and later graphic novels; it's as if he metamorphosed from Alfred Hitchcock into Jean Renoir or Chaplin. His early work is Hitchcockian in that it depends heavily on genre and uses the camera and editing to achieve its effects. His graphic novels are more like Renoir and Chaplin; the characters' emotions are more important than displaying technical virtuosity. Eisner had an animator's ability to say a lot about a character's inner state through how a character was posed. Like Renoir and Chaplin, his late work often looked backwards to an earlier part of his life. In Eisner's case, he was the child of immigrants in New York City's multicultural melting pot.

The film makes the point that Eisner's exposure to underground comics in the early 1970's was what inspired him to return to creating stories. While Jules Feiffer, who worked for Eisner in the late 1940s, is interviewed in the film, I think there's a case to be made for Feiffer's influence on Eisner as well. Feiffer's weekly comic in The Village Voice was completely stripped down. There were rarely backgrounds of any kind and Feiffer's panels were often occupied by a single character grappling with the politics, relationships and social mores of the 1950s. Eisner never stripped down his work to the extent Feiffer did, but Eisner's subject matter certainly moved more in Feiffer's direction than in the direction of underground cartoonists like Crumb or S. Clay Wilson.

If you have the opportunity to see Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, I highly recommend it. I look forward to owning this on DVD and will mention when it becomes available.

(For those of you in New York, Jules Feiffer will be at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway, on May 15 at 7 p.m. signing The Explainers, a collection of the first 10 years of his strip for The Village Voice. As I'll be in New York that week, I hope to be there.)

The Lure of Live Action

Two things arrived in my email this morning that are separate but related. The first is that Teletoon, a Canadian animation cable channel, will start running live-action programming. The second is that AWN reports that Chris Wedge, co-director of Ice Age and Robots, will be directing the live action film version of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, based on the book by Brian Selznick.

It's easy to understand why Teletoon is doing this. The TV winds are all blowing the Disney Channel's way, with live action tween fare pulling in the ratings. The corporate commitment to anything only lasts as long as it is profitable. If animation ratings are down, animation is not the business to be in.

The Cartoon Network has already gone this route and is reportedly upset that their name is so explicitly tied to animation. Teletoon has the same problem and one more. It is chartered by the government and its mandate is to be an animation channel. The following quote comes from an email newsletter I get from C21media.net. Here's how Teletoon will be positioning their live action content so as not to get in trouble with the government:

"We don't have to air just animation; we will do fully live-action series. It would be really interesting to hear more pitches on things like that," says Teletoon's director of programming Caroline Tyre, outlining a new drive to think outside the box.

"She points out, however, that there still must be a connection to animation, whether it is a toon/live-action hybrid or simply based on a concept that comes from the world of animation, such as a graphic novel or a pre-existing cartoon property."

So the purpose of Teletoon isn't to broadcast cartoons, it's to broadcast programming based on cartoons. See? That was easy!

There are reasons why an animation feature director would try out live action. First, there are just more live directing gigs, which means that someone with a successful box office track record has a good chance of landing a project. Brad Bird will be directing a live action film called 1906 and Rob Minkoff has helmed several live films such as Stuart Little. Even Frederik Du Chau, whose animation track record is hardly stellar, has managed to carve out a place for himself in live action.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a good book with the potential to make a good film. However, it's nothing like the films that Wedge has co-directed at Blue Sky. That's another reason why live action is attractive: a greater range of subject matter.

That might be the most pertinent issue. As much as we want to believe that animation is a medium and not a genre, maybe everybody outgrows it after a while. Which isn't to say that animation isn't capable of more than it's currently doing, but looking at what's out there now, it's not hard to sympathize with directors who want to try something new.

101 Dalmatians: Part 7