101 Dalmatians: Part 21

Sleeping Beauty Puts Me to Sleep

My sentiments, exactly.

I just watched the new DVD release of Sleeping Beauty. It’s the first time I’ve seen the film in over a decade and maybe two. It has never been one of my favourites, but watching it now I’m struck by how poor the story and characterizations are. If not for the high production values and the presence of artists that I know to be more than capable, I would say that Sleeping Beauty is a poor imitation of a Disney film.

I am not a fan of Eyvind Earle’s artwork. I don’t have any insightful reasons for that; it just leaves me cold. Beyond Earle’s design style, I’m also not one who is impressed by detail. For me, all stories are about people and if the visuals don’t support a worthwhile story and characters, they are wasted. It’s no different than the common refrain that a particular movie isn’t very good, but the special effects are great. If a movie isn’t very good, I don’t care about any of the elements.

The story of Sleeping Beauty is ludicrous. An evil fairy is insulted for not being invited to a party, so she puts a curse on the princess in the cradle. By the sunset of her sixteenth birthday, the princess will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. I can’t begin to fathom how absurd this is. If Maleficent is angry enough to kill the child, why not do it on the spot? Why drag out the process for 16 years? And why a spinning wheel? Why not a disease or a fall or choking on food? This may be what the fairy tale original demands, but the Disney studio was never shy about rewriting its source material.

What’s worse is that Maleficent has no motivation to speak of beyond being miffed. Does she have a history with the royal family? Have the three good fairies caused her trouble in the past? Is she unable to have a child of her own? We are told nothing. Furthermore, Maleficent is a dolt. Her henchman search for the princess unsuccessfully for 16 years and she only questions them closely at the end of that time? What’s she been doing all those years? Watching the clock?

The three good fairies are even more empty-headed than Maleficent. They know that the curse will expire at sundown on the princess’s sixteenth birthday. They put away their wands so that their magic will not draw attention to her. Yet with hours to go, they bring out the wands and tip off the bad guys. Their reasons for using magic are also unbelievable. They’ve been living in the woods for 16 years and haven’t figured out how to make clothing or prepare food? Who made the princess’s clothing as she grew? What have they been eating all this time?

This stupidity is compounded by them bringing the princess back to the castle before the sun sets. Instead of leaving her hidden in the woods until the curse expires, they tempt fate by bring her out into the open. Why? The only reason I can think of is because the story artists couldn’t think of anything better. There is no logic to this.

What’s most disappointing is that the good fairies and Maleficent are the most interesting characters in the film. The king and queen have longed to have a child. When they finally do, they are forced to give up all contact with her for 16 years in order to protect her life. In the interim, they have no other children. Imagine the psychological stress these parents would endure and how their loss would colour their entire lives. That’s meaty material, but the film ignores the Queen entirely and the king is barely more fleshed out. When it comes to the climax of the film, the royal family is literally asleep, unable to influence events in any way. When the king and queen are finally reunited with their daughter, the sum total of the emotion displayed is a hug.

The two kings are more poorly developed than the two kings in the Fleischer version of Gulliver’s Travels. It isn’t often you can credit the Fleischers with better character development than Disney, but it is absolutely the case here.

The princess is stuck in the woods for 16 years. Has she had contact with anyone besides the three fairies? Has she ever encountered men? She dreams of romance, so she has to be aware of them. She can see the castle from the woods. Has she never been curious to visit it, just as a tourist? If the princess has any thoughts, the audience is not privy to them. In dramatic terms, she has no motivation; she seeks romance, but only in the most generic way. Unlike later Disney heroines like Ariel, she does nothing to find or sustain her relationship. The prince finds her in the woods and she falls instantly in love. Is it possible to be more passive?

The prince is over-matched by Maleficent if not for the fairies. Every step of the way, they use magic to allow him to escape and battle the dragon. Why don’t they cut out the middle man and just battle Maleficent themselves? What’s worse, they put the inhabitants of the King’s castle to sleep, so why don’t they do the same to the inhabitants of Maleficent’s? That would have saved everyone a lot of effort.

There are many Disney features done while Disney himself was alive that suffer from story structure problems. What was usually present, though, were memorable personalities. Many claim that Sleeping Beauty suffered due to Disney’s interest in Disneyland and the studio’s TV work. That may be so, but the film looks like the studio forgot everything it knew about story and character when it made this film. The fact that nobody could see this or stop it, plus the fact that so much money was spent to finish the film, resulted in major layoffs and marginalized the animation department. While some people celebrate this film, I see it as a self-inflicted wound.

101 Dalmatians: Part 20A

This is the climax of the film where Cruella and the Baduns attempt to stop the truck carrying the dogs back to London.

While it is an exciting sequence, what strikes me is how little the dogs have to do. They have been active characters before this - searching, fighting and avoiding capture - but there's nothing left for them to do. Except for Perdy catching a pup by the tail as the truck tilts dangerously, the dogs are literally just along for the ride. While the audience has been asked to identify with the dogs as protagonists, now the audience is stuck rooting for a truck driver who has no history with the audience and no idea what's really going on. It's a bit of an odd turn for the film to take.

It's also something of a disappointment that the bad guys are the authors of their own misfortune. Again, after the dogs have worked so hard to rescue the puppies and return home, why not give them the opportunity of striking the final blow? Instead, the bad guys cancel each other out and the dogs ride home to safety.

There are some interesting shots where the backgrounds recede behind the characters riding in vehicles. If they were done as traveling mattes, the matte work is excellent as there are no matte lines visible. Those lines are visible in later films like The Rescuers, so why are the shots here better? Perhaps they were done using the multiplane camera, which would not require matte work as the entire shot would be done in camera. Does anyone know?

This part of the film really belongs to Cruella. While her henchman have done most of the dirty work until now, she is the main villain in the chase. In shot 158, her car crashes through some trees and parts of it get stripped off, the resulting look in shot 160.1 is very much a nod to the California hot rod culture of the 1950s. Big Daddy Roth, anyone?


Prior to those shots, in 149-154, the car lands in a snowbank and instead of animating the snow, someone decided to use the live action footage from the model shoot of the car. The live action images were transferred directly to cels and painted. As a viewer, these shots have always called attention to themselves and taken me out of the story momentarily. For one thing, the texture of the snow in these shots doesn't match any snow in the rest of the film. For another thing, there are registration problems. You can clearly see the live element weaving relative to the painted backgrounds they've been inserted into.


The film leaves Cruella, Horace and Jasper stuck in the snow without a way home. Are the arrested? Horace and Jasper are guilty of burglary. Cruella is guilty of attempted murder of a truck driver. Are they fined? There's no doubt that Cruella has broken the speed limit and driven recklessly. We'll never know.

Richard Williams Interview at Spline Doctors

Richard Williams (left) and Ken Harris

Spline Doctors has an audio interview with Richard Williams where he talks about his experiences with animators Ken Harris and Milt Kahl. Williams also talks about the creation of his new instructional DVD series.

(link via Alan Cook.)

Emru Townsend

Emru as I remember him.

Emru Townsend passed away last night after a lengthy battle with leukemia.

I can't remember how and when I first "met" Emru. He was probably the one to contact me in the days when the internet was mostly usenet groups and email lists. He approached me to write about the production of Monster By Mistake and I was grateful for the opportunity. He was the editor of fps, a Canadian magazine devoted to animation and my TV special was an early example of an all-cgi half hour. He gave me another chance to publicize the show when it went to series and I continued to write reviews for fps thereafter when it migrated to the web.

Emru and I were also members of Apatoons, a private publication about animation that's been going on longer than The Simpsons.

I only met Emru face to face two or three times, and I think that all the meetings may have taken place at the Ottawa Animation Festival. The one thing that struck me about Emru in person was his great baritone voice, one that was made for radio.

Emru was someone who made things happen. Lots of people have ideas or complain that the world is deficient in some way. Emru turned ideas into reality. Creating a magazine from scratch and getting it distributed is not an easy task, and it doesn't get any easier when the subject matter is animation. Emru attracted people like a magnet and was able to organize them so that there was a tangible result.

That organizational ability served him well during his illness. He used all his media savvy to publicize his situation; he needed a bone marrow transplant and had to find someone who was a match. He and his family (especially his sister Tamu), mounted a campaign that included a website and blog, email lists, newspaper articles and radio interviews, all focused on publicizing the need for people to provide samples for the bone marrow database. His ethnic group, the Afro-Caribbean community, is under-represented and one goal of his crusade was to register more people in that community so that they would have an easier time if they were unfortunate enough to be in Emru's position. For all the work that Emru did with fps, with the Siggraph organization, with the larger animation community, it will probably be dwarfed over time by the work done by him, his friends and family to expand the bone marrow database. We'll never know how many lives that database may save in the future as a result of their efforts.

Emru's illness was not easy or pleasant. In addition to the effects of the disease itself, he suffered with the problems associated with chemotherapy: exhaustion, fuzzy-headedness, and mouth sores. It suppressed his immune system, so he spent time in hospital wards where he could only be visited by people wearing masks and gowns as he was in danger of infection. There were other complications having to do with his heart rate and his legs swelling. Through all the treatments and over 40 transfusions, Emru wrote about his illness. There was no self-pity in those reports; Emru approached his illness like a journalist, documenting everything he went through dispassionately. This is what's known as grace under pressure.

Emru found a match for the transplant and underwent the procedure in September. Unfortunately, it didn't relieve his condition. He knew several weeks ago that there was nothing else doctors could do for him and that it was only a matter of time. Time ran out yesterday evening.

I've lost a friend, animation has lost an advocate, and the Townsend family now has a hole it in that will never be filled up. Emru is survived by his wife Vicky, his son Max, his sister Tamu, and his parents and in-laws. I know something of what they went through and I don't envy them the pain and uncertainty that has dominated their lives since Emru got sick. There's nothing left to say except that I hope that his family can find solace from how much we'll miss him and most especially from the way Emru lived his life. We're richer for having known him.

Joe and Bill Explain It All

Here is a CBC news clip from 1961 where Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna explain the production process for making TV cartoons. It's a shame that the clip is in such poor shape.

One of the interesting things is the casual sexism. "Girls" do ink and paint, but a "man" paints the backgrounds. Welcome to the era of Mad Men and Wilder's The Apartment.

If you can identify any of the artists who appear on screen, please comment.

(Thanks to Chris Walsh for pointing me to this.)

Housekeeping and Items of Interest

I've updated the template to this blog so that "older posts" appears at the bottom of each page. This has also allowed me to add links to the mosaics of 101 Dalmatians and Pinocchio. Previously, only a portion of those entries was accessible through the tags and now all of them are. Thanks to Alan Cook for pointing me in the right direction, even though it took me weeks to finally get to this.

I've also added a category called "Favourite Entries." Right now, the only thing there is the major research paper I wrote for my Masters degree. Other items will eventually be added. I regret that Blogger puts the most recent entries first. If you're interested in following the feature mosaics or my paper, you've got to start at the bottom and work your way to the top.

I've added all my old links and tested them, but if you note any problems with the new set-up, please leave me a comment and I'll do my best to correct them.

Clay Kaytis at The Animation Podcast has added the second part of his interview with Eric Goldberg. Most interesting to me were Eric describing the making of Pocahontas and his feelings about computer animation. All of the interviews that Clay has done are worth listening to. They are a major resource for artists and historians and I wish that this technology had been around in the 1930s and '40s so that we could be listening to Fred Moore, Norm Ferguson, Emery Hawkins, Rod Scribner, etc. As we're now in a period where studios are less interested in publicizing artists than they were in the '90s, we're lucky that Kaytis and others are doing their part to put faces and voices to the work that we see on screen.

Kevin Langley has published some emails that he received from the son of Lantz and UPA animator Pat Matthews. Matthews is one of dozens of animators whose work deserves greater recognition and study. Though his animation is broad and vigorous, his drawings are solid and controlled. He was the Preston Blair of the Lantz studio in that he was the animator the studio turned to whenever sexy girl animation was needed. Matthews' anonymity is due to working for two studios whose work has been under-represented on DVD and his early death. He also worked at studios farther off the beaten path, such as Mexico City, at a time when animation appreciation was even more United States-centric than it is now. Kevin's entry includes embedded videos of the UPA cartoons Robin Hoodlum and Rooty Toot Toot, both of which Matthews animated on, as well as a compilation of Matthews' animation at the Lantz studio.

Will Finn has written an interesting entry on story and the role of villains within them. As a professional story artist himself, he offers some alternate ways to look at the story structures of some very well-known films. We are in a period when far too many studio features are being made according to formula and Will argues that there are possibilities that are being ignored.

Various Links

Over at popmatters.com, there's a review of Madagascar 2 which includes this interesting take on modern family films:

Many know it as the Fox/Dreamworks design, and it goes a little something like this: hire yourself a group of recognizable voice actors, preferably from mediums (TV, music) that provide some conceptual crossover appeal; take your spec screenplay and strip it of anything remotely resembling complicated characterization or narrative; insert multiple examples of lame pop culture quipping, everything from tempered Top 40 hits to fame whore in-joking; offer up a few mindless musical montages; and don’t forget the borderline offensive toilet humor and bodily fluid/noises jokes. Wrap it all up in a ribbon of riot act ridiculousness, a level of ADD inspired attention spanning that will leave the underaged spent and the adult feeling they got their Cineplex-inflated money’s worth, and you’ve got a F/D derivative. And a big fat hit, probably.

At Cinematech, Scott Kirsner wonders why Disney is pushing the Blu-ray version of Sleeping Beauty so hard while not making it available for downloading.

My point: why spend all that marketing money to remind people about the existence of a 50-year old movie if you're not going to offer it in all the formats people might want to watch it in?

Also, Apple said last year that there were 500 million active iTunes users, and about a million new downloads of the software every day. The most optimistic projections about Blu-ray players envision that there will be about ten million of them in use by the end of this year. (And yes, that includes those built in to Sony's PS3 game console.)

So you're going to spend millions of marketing dollars to sell to a potential audience of 10 million instead of 500+ million? I own some Disney stock, and that don't make sense to me as a shareholder.

The New York Times reports on Disney's high end approach to merchandising.

The most expensive piece of clothing sold by the Walt Disney Company six years ago was a $75 sweatshirt embossed with a mug shot of Mickey Mouse. By Magic Kingdom decree, home furnishings were required to exhibit at least one Disney character, leading to children’s play rugs ($65, in Pluto) and nightlights ($9.95, in Winnie the Pooh).

Disney still peddles all those things. But now the company also sells $3,900 designer wedding gowns — no characters in sight — and women’s cashmere sweaters “inspired by Tinker Bell.” Interior design offerings include $2,800 leather club chairs and $6,000 chandeliers patterned after the Art Deco décor in Mr. Disney’s former office. One of the company’s new products: couture soap.

Welcome to Disney, the “lifestyle brand.”

101 Dalmatians: Part 20

Animation in 1919

Allan Holtz's blog, Stripper's Guide, dedicated to comic strips, has reprinted a 1919 article by an animator named Bert Green from The Student's Art Magazine, explaining the process of animation as it existed at the time. Among the revelations are:

Cartoons like the “Katzenjammer Kids,” “Happy Hooligan,” “Mutt and Jeff,” etc., that run five hundred feet, require a staff of from fifteen to thirty people, men and women, to produce this amount of animated cartoon a week, with salaries ranging from ten to three hundred dollars per week, so you can readily get some idea of the time and expense involved. Cartoons such as these contain from two thousand to three thousand drawings, and it takes two photographers one solid week working into the nights under pressure to photograph these drawings.

There are references in the article to Winsor McCay and Frank Moser. One other interesting thing is that Green's assistant was a woman referred to as Miss Kelly, with no first name mentioned unfortunately.

Wall-E for Best Picture?

The New York Times is reporting that the Hollywood studios have decided to push box offices success for the Academy Awards this year. With the viewership of the awards telecast falling every year for the past several years, the thinking is that the TV audience has no rooting interest in the independent, small films that the Academy usually honors. The way to higher TV ratings is to nominate films that the audience has actually seen.

Disney will be campaigning for Wall-E in the best picture category.

As early as midsummer Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal’s film critic, was arguing that “Wall-E” should be considered for best picture. “The time to start the drumbeat is now,” he wrote in a July 12 essay, noting the extreme difficulty animated films, while hugely popular, have faced in vying for the most prestigious Oscar. Only one, Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” released in 1991, has ever been nominated for best picture.

“If we didn’t do it, I don’t think we’d be giving the movie its due,” Richard Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios, said of the decision to promote “Wall-E” for the top prize, even if that complicates the movie’s simultaneous bid for the more easily won award as best animated feature. One problem is a presumed tendency to split votes. Academy members can vote for a film in both the best picture and best animated feature categories. But they may not be inclined to do that or even know that the rules permit it.

The awards are often a rebuke to mainstream Hollywood, where the creative community gets to place art over business. The big question is whether the Academy membership, whose votes determine the nominees and the winners, will go along with this approach.

The Last Hurrah

A rather startling layout from Chuck Jones' Bear Feat. The trees are an animated pan, adding even more interest to the shot.

The latest, and last, Looney Tunes Golden Collection has been released. It's the sixth volume in a series that has delivered over 300 restored Warner Bros. cartoons as well as behind the scenes documentaries and commentaries. This edition contains two live action films of the staff made for Christmas parties in 1939 and 1940, several Captain and the Kids cartoons directed by Friz Freleng at MGM, two TV specials, a documentary on Mel Blanc, a generous selection of early black and white cartoons as well as propaganda cartoons made during World War II. All this in addition to a generous helping of the expected Warner Bros. cartoons.

While Warner Bros. will undoubtedly continue to release cartoons on DVD, this may be the last time we see such elaborate extras and relatively obscure cartoons. My guess (and fear) is that we'll be inundated with no-frills sets devoted to the most famous Warner characters, leaving the lesser-known cartoons to languish in obscurity.

There is much to celebrate in this set. While many have expressed disappointment that a whole disk has been devoted to early Bosko and Buddy cartoons, I'm thrilled to have them (though happier about the Boskos than the Buddys). The early Harman-Ising cartoons run on adrenaline. The enthusiasm that created these cartoons, and the speed and anything goes qualities on screen, are a reminder of how exhilarating animation can be even when it lacks polish. There's more animation in a single Harman-Ising cartoon than there is in a whole season of Family Guy. It's ironic to me that a culture that is obsessed with sports and watches reality shows like Dancing with the Stars somehow thinks that motion is an unnecessary frill in animated cartoons. When did animation become a synonym for stasis?

The youthful energy that propels the Harman-Ising cartoons sometimes resulted in great films. Bosko the Doughboy takes a perverse glee in the murder of cartoon characters. It's total war, stripped of politics or ideology. There's no reason for the chaos on the screen except for the pleasure of doing damage. This cartoon is a nihilist black comedy, fit to be run on the same bill as Dr. Strangelove.

Bosko the Doughboy

The two Christmas party films are live action equivalents of Looney Tunes. They show, without a doubt, that it was the sensibility of the entire staff that was responsible for the humour that ended up on screen. Martha Sigall and Jerry Beck provide commentary, and Sigall is one of the few people living capable of identifying so many of the crew, including the secretary and ink and paint women who normally remain anonymous. It's a real pleasure for me to see footage of animators such as Ken Harris and Bobe Cannon.

Ken Harris

Robert "Bobe" Cannon

Bob Clampett's Russian Rhapsody is both a political satire about the relationship between Hitler and Stalin and a catalogue of caricatures of the Schlesinger staff, identified in the commentary by animator Mark Kausler. You have to turn to South Park for anything similar today, and of course, the quality of the Warner Bros. art and animation is far superior.

All the directors are represented by excellent, though rare works. Besides Russian Rhapsody, Clampett's Horton Hatches the Egg is here, based on the book by Dr. Seuss. Chuck Jones cartoons include Rocket-bye Baby (a favorite of mine with lovely designs by Ernie Nordli), Chow Hound (a black comedy worthy of an E.C. horror comic) and Now Here This (Jones imitating the Zagreb studio). Freleng has Goo Goo Goliath in the UPA mode and Herr Meets Hare, written by Michael Maltese and an obvious precursor to Jones' later What's Opera, Doc? Bob McKimson not only has mainstream work of his like Crowing Pains in this collection, but also two more experimental films, The Hole Idea, which he animated himself, and Bartholomew Versus the Wheel, a modernistic fairy tale written by John Dunn. Tex Avery's Page Miss Glory is here in all its art deco splendor.

Page Miss Glory

There's more than 30 years of Warner Bros. cartoon history here, but even if you're not particularly interested in animation from a historical standpoint, these cartoons are a treasure chest of artistic riches. There's a wide variety of stories and design approaches. There's great animation by Rod Scribner, Bob McKimson, Manny Gould, Ken Harris, Bobe Cannon, Ben Washam, Art Davis, and Virgil Ross. These cartoons are a textbook on how music can accompany animation and how it can be used to propel animation forward. There is more to be learned from a set like this than from any book written about creating animation. And this set is also an inventory of all the animation techniques that the industry has abandoned or forgotten. Sadly, it may also be the last time the Warner Bros. cartoons are collected with this much love and respect. Enjoy the Looney Tunes Golden Collections because we may not see their like again.

Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels

I've always had mixed feelings about Bill Plympton. He draws beautifully. His short films always provoke a strong audience reaction. He is an inspiration as an entrepreneur, having developed his own market niche where he creates the films he wants to and makes a living at it. Where most independent animators produce shorts, Plympton has directed at least five features.

On the other hand, I think that Plympton's animation is starved for drawings. While I understand the economic necessity of limiting the amount of artwork he produces for a film, the animation and stories often feel padded as a result. While Plympton is a strong draftsman, he has trouble portraying weight and momentum in motion. Perhaps my greatest reservation about him is the shallowness of his characters. This isn't much of a problem in his shorts, which tend to be very gag driven, but becomes a larger problem in his features.

Idiots and Angels is Plympton's latest. I saw it screened at the Toronto After Dark festival where it played to a large audience and got a good response. The story is a morality tale about a thoroughly unlikeable character who sprouts angel wings. The character and the wings battle for control of the character's actions and his soul.

While many people thought that Wall-E was daring for doing without dialogue for forty minutes, Plympton has essentially made a silent feature. For eighty minutes, there is no dialogue and the storytelling doesn't suffer for it. What is lacking, however, is depth in the characterizations. With the exception of the main character, the characters' personalities do not evolve over the course of the film. Plympton is good at communicating who they are, but once their personalities are established, the characters never grow or do anything unexpected. This lack of complexity is the film's weakest point. While eighty minutes is short for a feature, the film still feels padded because the characterizations are static. Plympton adds fantasy sequences and visually interesting direction (he does some marvelous things with match cuts), but all stories are about people, and these people aren't interesting enough to fully hold our attention.

I've seen I Married a Strange Person and Hair High and think that this film is stronger than either of those features. There is no question that Plympton is advancing as a film maker, but I wish that his progress was faster. Economics may prevent him from ever putting more animation into his features, but the scripts could be improved. I wonder what Plympton could do if he had stronger characterizations to work with? Perhaps he should adapt an existing story or collaborate with another writer.

Idiots and Angels is definitely worth seeing. It contains some deft visual storytelling, some excellent gags and an intriguing premise, but I'm still waiting (and hoping) for Bill Plympton to make an animated feature that will banish my mixed feelings.

For a look at the film's trailer, go here.

George Pal Puppet Animation Online

Europa Film Treasures, an online archive of films, has a section devoted to animation. The highlights of that section, by far, are two films produced by George Pal: The Philips Broadcast of 1938 and the Puppetoon Tulips Shall Grow (pictured above). Both are from excellent colour prints and include the original titles.

The other animated films there are more historical curiosities than satisfying entertainments. However, for John Ford fans, the site does include a rare Ford feature done at Universal starring Harry Carey, Bucking Broadway from 1917, Ford's first year as a director. Very few of Ford's Universal films survive, and this one is a well-preserved print.

Walt's People Volume 7

October 14 marks the release of the seventh volume of Walt's People, a collection of interviews with people who worked with and for Walt Disney, edited by Didier Ghez. The cover, as always, is by Peter Emslie. Here's the table of contents for the latest volume:

Foreword by Hans Perk
David Lesjak: William Rast
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston: Wilfred Jackson
Richard Hubler: Wilfred Jackson
Wilfred Jackson: The New Spirit
Grim Natwick: The Goldfish Caper
Grim Natwick: Bill Tytla
Grim Natwick: The Three-Fingered Hand
Grim Natwick: Analysis
Grim Natwick: Soundtracks
Grim Natwick: Hobbies
Brian Sibley: Adriana Caselotti
Milt Gray: Clarence Nash
Milt Gray and Michael Barrier: Billy Bletcher
Milt Gray: Jim Macdonald
Richard Hubler: Jim Macdonald
David Tietyen: Paul Smith and Hazel George
Christian Renaut: Carl Fallberg
Dave Smith: George Goepper
Rick Shale: Harry Tytle
Richard Hubler: Milt Kahl
Darrell Van Citters: Milt Kahl
Darrell Van Citters: Ollie Johnston
Richard Hubler: Ward Kimball
Richard Hubler: Frank Thomas and Ken Anderson
Christopher Finch and Linda Rosenkrantz: Grace Turner
Jérémie Noyer: X. Atencio
Scott Weitz: X. Atencio
Didier Ghez: Bob Kurtz
Richard Hubler: John Hench
Jim Korkis: Marc Davis
Charles Solomon: Marc Davis and Andreas Deja
Alberto Becattini: Tom McKimson
Alberto Becattini: John Carey
Didier Ghez: John Ewing
Pete Docter: Art Stevens

Those living in the U.S. can order from xlibris.com. There is no direct link for this volume up yet, though I assume that it will appear in the next day or two. Those outside the U.S. will have to wait until the book is available through Amazon, the online book seller, which usually follows in about six weeks.

I've read every volume in this series and have enjoyed them all. Some interviews provide new historical knowledge, some amusing anecdotes and others technical information as to the procedures at the studio. If you have any interest in Disney or animation history or technique, these volumes are worth reading.

Mosaics Listed in the Sidebar

A commenter named Holger suggested that I list the mosaics in the sidebar so that they'd be easier to find. It's an excellent suggestion and I've started the process.

While I generally like Blogger, it does have limitations. The first is that there seems to be a limit as to how many posts will display with a given tag. For instance, if you click on the "101 Dalmatians" tag at the bottom of an entry, you will not get all the posts relating to that feature. For that reason, there are no sidebar links listed for Pinocchio or 101 Dalmatians yet as I have to figure out how I'm going to handle them.

The other thing is that Blogger will display the posts relating to a tag with the newest on top. As a result, the actual mosaic, which is usually the first thing I post relating to a cartoon, will be at the bottom with later commentary above it.

In the future, I'll probably put together a "Best of" list on the sidebar, with articles that I think still have value even though they may have been posted some time ago.

101 Dalmatians: Part 19

101 Dalmatians: Part 18A

As I go through this film shot by shot, one of the things that keeps jumping out at me is how much re-used animation there is. It's fairly well hidden as the animation is placed over a new background and the story material is different, but this film probably re-uses more animation from itself than any other Disney feature.

I don't know if the re-use was Woolie Reitherman's idea or not, but he certainly endorsed it. In all the features that list him as a director, re-use is present. In Reitherman's later films, he lifted animation from earlier features and usually had it cleaned it up for use as a different character, though there are spots where animation is lifted without changes. There are websites (here, here and here) devoted to documenting Disney re-use.

The reason for it boils down to money. The feature before 101 Dalmatians was Sleeping Beauty. That film was in production for many years as Walt Disney was seemingly more interested in Disneyland than he was in the movie. As a result, the expenses were high and the resulting box office did not meet expectations. There was a massive layoff when Sleeping Beauty was finished and there was some question as to whether the studio would continue to make animated features.

As a result, the financial pressure on 101 Dalmatians to come in at a significantly lower cost was strong. The introduction of the Xerox process was done to save money, as the inking department could be laid off. Xerography also made the animation of the puppies far more efficient as they could be repeated. The fact that cels are not truly transparent always restricted animated scenes to four or five cel levels before the background colour was degraded unacceptably. Today, the puppies could all be animated individually and there is no limit to how many levels could be digitally composited, but when you've got dozens of dogs on the screen and only five possible cel levels, life becomes a lot more complicated.

Here's just a few examples from this sequence of animation re-use. The first and third images below are from the current sequence. The second and fourth images are from earlier in the film, where the animation originated.

Happy Birthday Buster

October 4 is Buster Keaton's 113th birthday. I admire many film makers and artists, though for some reason, Buster's birthday sticks in my head and the others don't. I think that John Ford was born in August and I have no idea what month Chaplin was born. Walt Disney, Walt Kelly, Howard Hawks, etc. -- I couldn't tell you what day they were born if my life depended on it.

Rather than try to figure out why, I'll just guess that something about Buster is important to me in ways that the others are not.

If you've noticed a slow-down in posts here, you're not imagining it. My teaching schedule is heavier now than it's been in the past. I'm also animating on a personal film, which is taking up time. This blog is feeling the effects. Besides, things seem pretty quiet on the animation front. The elections and the economic news are sucking up a lot of oxygen and there haven't been any major animation releases or controversies to stimulate discussion. Perhaps that will change as we get closer to Christmas and the holiday films are released. Time will tell.

What Cartoon Is This?

A reader named David Graves sent the following query:

I found your name through your blogs, but feel that my naive question might be appropriate for your readers.

I am the Process Architect at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. My job is to re design operating processes, particularly when they are changed by installing computer automation. At a recent conference, my peers and I discussed our problem in explaining what we did.

I remember seeing a early black & white animated short that I felt captured the essence of the problems we all work on. I am trying to identify the short so I can acquire a copy.

In the short, a group of mice is taking mail from a basket and sorting it into a series of mail slots. On the back of the slots are a series of mail chutes that merge into one chute that drops the mail in a basket where a group of mice takes it and sorts it into a series of mail slots. On the back of the slots are a series of mail chutes that merge into one chute that .... and so on.

As you might image, Process Architects seek out and re-design that sort of process.

I am not a student of animation. I am seeking someone who is and can help steer me to the short. Can you tell where to look or how do the research that will lead me to the short?

I can't name the short, though I remember the gag. Most likely, it's a Terrytoon. If anyone can name the cartoon, please comment.

Spike Lee Quote

Spike Lee is interviewed at Salon.com. While this quote does not relate directly to animation, it does relate to the larger film industry that animation operates in.

People try to pretend like they have the answers. They don't have the answers. Man, I still think William Goldman had the best quote ever: "Nobody knows nothing." When I sit across the table from these executives and they're telling me stuff, in my mind I'm saying, "You don't know what you're talking about. You don't have a crystal ball. You don't know what this thing can do. All you're thinking about is saving your neck and your job."

I understand that self-preservation is Rule No. 1, but I don't have a lot of respect for these people. I'd rather they said, "I'm doing this because I got to save my job." That I can respect. But when it comes to aesthetics, or film history, or what's happening, they don't know.

Good Photograph

Emru Townsend, founder and editor of fps, has been suffering from leukemia and monosomy 7. His family, especially sister Tamu, have been campaigning to raise awareness of bone marrow registration. If somebody needs a bone marrow transplant and no members of their immediate family are a match, the next step is to search databases worldwide, hoping to find someone, somewhere, who can provide a match. The Townsend family has worked hard not only to locate someone for Emru but also to increase the size of the database so that others in need have a better chance of finding a match.

The reason this is a good photograph is that Emru had his bone marrow transplant on September 16. He is posing here with the donor stem cells. I certainly hope that the transplant does its job and starts Emru on the road to recovery. He's a longtime booster of animation in its many forms and the sooner he can resume his normal life, the better for us all.

If you're interested in details of Emru's story or how you can add yourself to the bone marrow registry, the best place to go is here, where Emru and family have documented his experiences.

Bad Photograph

We've all had bad photographs taken. I'm sure that everyone reading this has cringed at a driver's license, passport or yearbook photo of themselves. It's unusual, however, for a publisher to use such a bad photograph on the cover of a book that they want people to purchase. This book, out in October, is aimed at the 9-12 age range. No doubt many children would love to know more about Pixar and animation, but I can't imagine that the above photo will encourage them to reach for this book.

I'm sure that Disney and Pixar have excellent portrait photos available for publicity purposes. Why did an art director choose one where Lasseter is clearly not at ease? Cover up the smile and look at his eyes. This is a classic case of a face sending mixed signals. We've all done it, but most of us are lucky enough not to have it splashed on a book cover.

101 Dalmatians: Part 18

Which of These Men is Not Like the Others?

Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck and John Lasseter. All of them worked as studio heads and film makers, but one of them was significantly different than the others. I'll bet you're guessing Zanuck, who was head of 20th Century Fox, but is that the case?

I've just finished re-reading Michael Barrier's The Animated Man, his biography of Walt Disney (now in paperback). His portrait of Disney strikes me as being accurate based on my own knowledge and experience of Disney history. Starting in the 1920's, Walt Disney was an entrepreneur trying to build a business. It wasn't until the early 1930s, that he really began to see the artistic possibilities in animation, that his focus shifted. The culmination of Disney-as-artist was Snow White, a film that Disney was intimately involved with every detail of.

The problem in a collaborative commercial art form like film is that the delicate balance that has to be maintained between business and art. I could argue that Disney tipped the balance too far towards art with Snow White in that if the film had failed at the box office, the studio would have been in a precarious financial position. Disney had a weakness for taking huge financial risks (Disneyland being another example), but he was fortunate that his risks paid off.

The problem for Disney was that once Snow White was an established success, the studio had to be kept busy. Disney could have chosen to have only one feature in production at a time, with the shorts supplying the studio with work and cash flow, but he decided to launch an entire slate of features. None of the features that followed claimed his attention the same way Snow White did. It couldn't be otherwise. The urge to grow the company and to capitalize on success reduced Disney's involvement. His abilities, however strong, were diluted by the number of projects he put into play. From 1950 onward, with Disneyland, the TV series, the live action films, and the animated shorts and features, Disney functioned much the same way that Darryl F. Zanuck did at Fox: holding story meetings, watching rushes and taking a hand in post-production, especially editing and music.

Zanuck himself started out as a writer at Warner Bros. and rose to head of production there in the early '30s before leaving in a disagreement with management. He formed Twentieth Century pictures and when Fox was in financial trouble due to the depression, Zanuck's company took over Fox and he ran the combined operation for decades.

Disney knew Chaplin in addition to Chaplin being an inspiration to Disney's animators. While Chaplin was hugely successful as a film maker and was a partner in United Artists, a distribution company, he only made one feature that he did not write and direct. That film, A Woman of the Sea, starred Edna Purviance and was directed by Josef Von Sternberg. The film was never released and was later destroyed in order to take a tax write-off. Chaplin's studio existed for a single reason: to make films written, directed and starring Chaplin. He kept his crew on salary all year, regardless of whether he was actively shooting or not. He was rich enough to make films according to his own schedule (after 1925, Chaplin never released a film more frequently than every three years). All of Chaplin's mental, physical and financial resources were focused on one film at a time.

A short time ago, Pixar released the schedule for its upcoming features. I don't remember anyone remarking on the fact that none of the films would be directed by John Lasseter. Lasseter started out like Chaplin, excited about his medium and working on one film at a time. However, with Pixar's purchase by Disney and Lasseter's promotion to chief creative officer of the Walt Disney Animation Studios, Lasseter has stepped away from being a film maker and become a producer. He's gone from Chaplin to Zanuck (or Disney).

Because of the specialized nature of animation, animators often have to create studios in order to realize their films. Disney, Harman and Ising, Max Fleischer, Paul Terry, etc. all built studios from scratch in order to make cartoons. Later, Dick Williams, Don Bluth and Ralph Bakshi assembled studios to make their films. Unfortunately, the balance between art and entrepreneurship is especially hard to maintain when an artist is responsible for meeting payrolls and other overhead. I could argue that Williams, Bluth and Bakshi didn't pay enough attention to the business side, which truncated their careers. The irony, of course, is that Lasseter is paying full attention to the business side and this has also truncated his career as a director.

It's possible that John Lasseter is happier where he is than when he was directing movies. He's certainly busy and his full time job is to make creative decisions about every project going through Disney and Pixar. But just as Walt Disney's later work did not reach the heights of Snow White due to his increasing responsibilities, Lasseter's influence may also be diluted.

So while it may have looked like Zanuck was the odd man out, the real answer is Chaplin. While he was certainly a successful businessman, he stayed more focused as a film maker than any of the other three. The others were seduced by corporate growth and power. Barrier argues that it was to Disney's detriment. The jury is still out on Lasseter.

Bacher is Back

Designer Hans Bacher (Mulan, The Lion King), the author of Dream Worlds, is back again with another blog dedicated to reconstructing the background paintings of the classic Disney films.

(link via Tom Sito)

Dick Williams at MOMA on Sept. 22

Dick Williams will be appearing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on September 22. Here's the press release:

MASTER CLASS:

RICHARD WILLIAMS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN CANEMAKER


Monday, September 22
7:00 p.m.
The Roy and Niuta Titus 2 Theater

Three-time Academy Award winner Richard Williams discusses his long and influential career in a conversation with animation filmmaker and historian (and fellow Oscar-winner) John Canemaker. Williams, who was awarded Oscars for Special Achievement and for Visual Effects as the director of animation of the Walt Disney/Steven Spielberg blockbuster Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and for his short film A Christmas Carol (1971), is one of the finest animation filmmakers of our time. His stunningly crafted, award-winning films have featured the work of veteran animators from the Disney studio's "Golden Age" and from Warner Bros. Cartoons, most notably Grim Natwick (Snow White), Art Babbitt (Fantasia), and Ken Harris (Bugs Bunny). Williams also learned from his friends Milt Kahl (Pinocchio, The Jungle Book), and Frank Thomas (Bambi, Cinderella). A distillation of his acquired knowledge went into the exuberant animation he directed for Who Framed Roger Rabbit and, most recently, into an unparalleled and indispensable series of instructional DVD master classes based on his bestselling book The Animator’s Survival Kit.

Illustrated with clips from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Charge of the Light Brigade, A Christmas Carol, Raggedy Ann & Andy, the animated titles from The Return of the Pink Panther, award-winning commercials, segments from The Animator’s Survival Kit, and more.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, and John Canemaker.

John Canemaker and Dick Williams will be doing something similar at the Ottawa International Animation Festival next week, though I understand that event is already sold out. I saw a public appearance by Dick Williams several years ago in Toronto and he is definitely worth seeing. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend either of the above appearances.

101 Dalmatians: Part 17A

In this segment, Cruella and the Baduns are searching for the dogs, who are fighting their way through a snow storm. They are rescued by a collie who brings them to a dairy barn where they are able to eat and rest.

You will notice that in Part 17, I was able to identify which animator did which character in a shot. That's because Ruth Wright, the secretary responsible for this portion of the draft, included the information whereas none of the other secretaries bothered. I did make one change to this in shot 17. Wright had Ollie Johnston animating Perdita and Hal King animating Pongo. Given the characters' relative size in the frame and the amount of acting each had to do, I believe that Wright made an error.

The opening scene between Cruella, Horace and Jasper is cast by character. Marc Davis handles Cruella (as he does throughout the film), and Cliff Nordberg takes care of her henchmen. I've talked a fair bit about the so-called "lesser" animators at Disney. Here's a perfect example of excellent work being done by Nordberg. At other times in the film, Horace and Jasper are animated by John Lounsbery or John Sibley, but Nordberg is fully capable of animating to their level on these characters. He shares the screen with Marc Davis, certainly one of the best of Disney's animators, but there's no feeling that Cruella is a more polished piece of work than what Nordberg is doing. Nordberg's handling of the acting and dialogue in shot 4 is excellent, as is his action animation when Cruella throws Horace back into the van on top of Jasper in shot 5.

The march of the dogs through the snow storm (and the draft notes that there is "live action blowing snow") is a demonstration of the power of posture to communicate a character's emotional state.
Perdita's entire spine, from head to tail, is drooping, showing her to be exhausted. Facially, her eyelids are partially closed and drooping, while a single line beneath each eye, indicating a bag, reinforces how tired she is. This one drawing shows the power of cartooning. What Hal King has done here is to isolate what conveys the necessary emotion. Adding more detail to this drawing would not strengthen it; additional detail would distract from what's important. The point of cartooning (and animation) is to strip away everything that doesn't contribute to the desired statement and to play up what's left.

Hal King pretty much handles the entire march through the snow and deserves praise for how effective the animation is in these shots. Eric Larson and Ollie Johnston get some personality scenes with Pongo, but King sets the tone.

The first shot of the collie (shot 14 by Julius Svendsen) is my nomination for the worst piece of animation in the entire film. The collie is running through deep snow, yet the dog does not appear to be exerting himself in the slightest. There is no sense of force emanating from the dog's limbs or a sense that the terrain isn't solid. There is also no effects animation of snow being disturbed by the dog's legs (though this probably wouldn't have been handled by Svendsen). The run is especially weak when you compare it to Ollie Johnston's Pongo animation in shot 16.1, where Pongo struggles to run through deep snow to let Perdy know that they have reached shelter. Johnston's run is specific to the environmental conditions, where Svendsen's is not.

Later shots of the collie tend to go quite flat. In contrast to the other dog animators, Svendsen leaves the collie in profile most of the time and doesn't turn or tilt the character's head during dialogue. It's a shame, as the collie has a heroic role to play and his voice, by Tom Conway, is quite distinctive. While other supporting characters in the film are successfully realized, the collie is a missed opportunity.

(Tom Conway was the brother of George Sanders, who later voiced Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. Sanders was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose sister Eva voiced Bianca in The Rescuers. Instead of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, for Disney features you can play Six Degrees of George Sanders.)

Svendsen is the sole animator of the collie, so he has to take responsibility for this. His animation of the horse earlier in the film is far superior. Once the characters move to the dairy barn, the drawing and animation of the collie look decidedly weak next to Hal Ambro's cows, who are far more dimensionally drawn and animated.

You can tell that censorship was breaking down by the 1960s. In the '30s, Disney had to cover up Clarabelle Cow's udder with a skirt. Here, the pups are actually shown suckling on the cow's teats, something that never would have been allowed in earlier years.

101 Dalmatians: Part 17