Gordan Sheehan Part 3

(This is the continuation of an interview with Gordon Sheehan conducted by Harry Arnold and Dave Daruszka and printed around 1976 in Zoetrope, a trade publication. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.)

Zoetrope: Another unique element in Fleischer films was the three-dimensional backgrounds behind the cels. How was was this done?

Sheehan: Max was a prolific inventor, and quite scientifically and mechanically-minded. He invented the three-dimensional type of background. It was comprised of a big revolving aluminum cylinder about six feet in diameter, with a flat table top, and holes drilled in it about every inch or so, so tiny props could be inserted in the holds. Miniature background settings would be placed on this table; such as a city scene with buildings and telephone poles and that sort of thing. The table would be situated behind the cels, and the camera would shoot the cartoon characters on the cels and pick up the background on the table behind them. As the cels were changed, the table would be revolved one frame at a time to give the illusion of panorama, plus a marvelous third-dimensional effect.

Zoetrope: What type of animation stand was used in this setup?

Sheehan: Max used lathe beds for his animation stands, in other words it wasn't a vertical setup, it was horizontal. The camera was situated on one end, and on the other end the upright platen. The cels were held in place by vacuum air pressure. I don't think Max ever used a vertical animation stand.

(You can see the Fleischer camera systems, including the 3D setups, starting at 2:50 in this documentary film.)

Zoetrope: How long did you work for the Fleischers?

Sheehan: As I said, I started with the Fleischers in early 1933. I believe it was 1942 when the Fleischer brothers lost their studio to Paramount, who sort of ousted them out. I had been with them all of that time, which was the good part of ten years. Then I continued with Paramount, after they renamed the studio "Famous Studios" and moved us from Miami back to New York. They kept the same staff, but the Fleischers and their relatives were out, all except Max's son-in-law, Seymour Kneitel. Paramount gave control of Famous Studios to the ex-production manager of Fleischer, Sam Buchwald, Seymour, and another fellow named Izzy Sparber.

I as never particularly happy with Paramount and New York City after we moved back there. The war was on at the time. It was about a year after Pearl Harbor. We started doing a few films for the government. I did some technical animation for companies like Westinghouse that was aimed towards the war effort. I remember Paramount News put out an animated version of the Allied invasion of Europe six months before it happened, and it was almost identical to the actual battle. I began doing freelance animation in New York. There was a lot of freelance available as many of the animators were in the armed services. I became connected with a firm on Broadway and 46th Street that produced training films for the U.S. Navy. They offered me a good spot to come over and set up an animation department. So I left Famous Studios and went to Soundmasters. The people at Paramount didn't like that too much as they were having a difficult time finding experienced help. But I liked it much better, and I got a chance to direct and organize my own department. The productions were much more interesting, even though it was mostly technical animation. It was more exciting than working at a desk drawing the same character day in and day out.

Zoetrope: How long did you stay there?

Sheehan: I stayed at Soundmasters all through the war. The firm I worked for also produced a great number of commercial motion pictures. We had been experimenting with television animation even when the war was on -- before the television market came into its own. Television had been invented and pretty much perfected for home use, but it wasn't being marketed because the materials needed to produce it were not available. But after the war television came into its own, manufacturers started making sets, networks started to form, and we began to produce some of the first television commercials. I did a series of thirteen films for Pepsi-Cola, one of the first animated-commercial series.

Zoetrope: What year was that?

Sheehan: That was about 1946 or 47. I worked with Rube Goldberg, who was a senior citizen then. Rube wrote the gags for Pepsi and Pete, the Pepsi-Cola Cops. It was the sort of a situation where there always would be somebody in trouble, then Pepsi and Pete, like Popeye eating his spinach, would reinforce themselves with Pepsi-Cola and go to the rescue. They had to do it all in one minute. All animation was shot on ones, and every frame counted. They took about ten seconds of the sixty to sing their jingle: "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that's a lot." We produced several commercials of this sort plus many inudstrial films. I left this company to start my own studio in New York, and was quite successful there, doing a number of television spots and other types of animation.

(To be continued.)

Two New Links

I've added two new links on the side. The first is Brad Goodchild, who I had the pleasure of working with at Nelvana years ago. Recent posts of his include work by Disney designers Albert Hurter and Ferdinand Horvath.

The other link is Kevin Koch, who I've never had the pleasure of meeting. His recent posts have included some James Baxter quicktimes from Sinbad as well as some very interesting discussions about spacing (that's the distance between drawings or frames for those who don't know).

Gordan Sheehan Part 2

(This is the continuation of an interview with Gordon Sheehan conducted by Harry Arnold and Dave Daruszka and printed around 1976 in Zoetrope, a trade publication. You can read part 1 here.)

Zoetrope: What was the atmosphere like?

Sheehan: It was a very grueling job you might say. Doing these things over and over again; painting, inking, inbetweening, that sort of thing. Fortunately, there was a lot of good companionship. There were a lot of nice young people in the company. Almost everyone in the business at that time was quite young. The heads of the company, Max Fleischer couldn't have been more than fifty years old and Dave, perhaps around forty. To me, at the time, they were old men. They were about the oldest in the company, with the exception of one other person, the janitor, Mr. Cheeseman. He was probably about sixty and the only person in the company, by the way, who was called "Mister." Everyone else was on a first name basis, even Max and Dave Fleischer. Mr. Cheeseman, I guess because of this age, always rated that title.

Zoetrope: How old were you when you started?

Sheehan: I was twenty-three when I started in the animation business. I was twenty-five or twenty-six before I was put under contract as an animator, and got to move the characters around. I began by painting cels, and fortunately, this was only a two week experience for me. I was promoted to tracing almost immediately. I did spend a great deal of time in the tracing department, mostly because I wasn't too keen about staying in animation. At that time, the lower jobs didn't pay well. If it wasn't for another job I had moonlighting, I wouldn't have been able to live on that amount of money. I painted posters for a YMCA in Brooklyn for my room.

Zoetrope: How did they go about training you at things such as inbetweening?

Sheehan: You had to practice inbetweening on your own time, bring in samples, and show them to the head of the inbetweening department. It happened that it was a woman [Edith Vernick] in charge of the department in those days. Once she felt that you were acquiring a certain amount of skill in inbetweening, you would be promoted to that department when the next vacancy occurred. Once in the inbetween department you couldn't help but learn, because you were handling experienced animators' extremes all the time. You were flipping drawings constantly. We hardly ever used moviolas in those days, in fact I don't believe we used moviolas until we did our first feature, Gulliver's Travels. An animator judged his timing and the effect of his action, by flipping the drawings. Holding them in one hand, and flipping with the other; like a flip-book. By flipping the scenes that came into the department from the animators one couldn't help but learn something about animation techniques. Most of us would try to animate something of the same type of action for practice. In inbetweening you learned to work from exposure sheets. You didn't fill them out, but you studied them to learn how drawings were combined and timed.

Every Friday afternoon the Fleischers would screen a picture that was just finished. This could be a Screen Song or Betty Boop or Popeye; whatever happened to be coming through that week, and the whole studio would get to see it. Not all at one time, because I think there were one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five people working in the studio at that time. The first in would be the executives and the head animators, then the animators and inbetweeners, finally the opaquers and inkers. But you would get to view the films, and observe scenes you had worked on.

Zoetrope: You spoke earlier of flipping the drawings to get a feeling for the action. Where there any type of pencil tests done?

Sheehan: Pencil tests just weren't heard of in those days except in a few extreme cases. There were a few pencil tests for certain types of scenes. I remember Max did a film of Betty Boop as Cinderella [Poor Cinderella] and I believe there were scenes taken from rotoscope which were pencil tested. By the way Max Fleischer invented the rotoscope, and used it with Koko the Clown, back in the silent days. The rotoscope process was simply photographing human motion, and projecting this film up onto frosted glass. The outline and key details of the character were traced off onto paper. We didn't use much rotoscoping in the animated shorts, but when Gulliver's Travels came along several years later all of the Gulliver character was rotoscoped. In Mr. Bug Goes to Town, another feature that we produced in Miami, Florida back in the late 1930's the human characters were rotoscoped. The cartoon characters were very seldom rotoscoped, unless in a special case such as a dance scene in which the rhythm and movement were important.

(To be continued.)

Somebody Gets It

I have never worked in the video game industry and I don't play games either. I am aware, however, that games have become a major part of the animation industry. The New York Times has an article about John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts, one of the largest companies in the gaming business, but one whose market share and reputation have slipped lately. Riccitiello has apparently seen the light, realizing that creative businesses are not like others and that management's approach has to be different as a result. I hope that this realization is genuine and not just a public relations ploy.

With his new outlook, Mr. Riccitiello echoed the film director Gore Verbinski, who gave the keynote address at the Design, Innovate, Create, Entertain conference. Mr. Verbinski hammered on a point that is often obvious to consumers of popular entertainment but is lost on the corporate overseers of mass media: a company’s main asset is not a brand or a marketing tie-in, but people. Intuitive, idiosyncratic and sometimes maddening, the writers, artists and designers at the core of the creative process are those who drive the business of intellectual property.

“Frankly, the core of our business, like in any creative business, are the guys and women who are actually making the product,” Mr. Riccitiello said. “You can’t just buy people and attempt to apply some business-school synergy to them. It just doesn’t work. The companies that succeed are those that provide a stage for their best people and let them do what they do best, and it’s taken us some time to understand that.

Gordan Sheehan Part 1

(This interview appeared in a trade publication called Zoetrope around 1976. Zoetrope was published in Chicago by Larry Janiak. Because the pages are oversized and won't fit on my scanner, I'm transcribing this interview and it will appear in several parts. Here we go:)

Gordon Sheehan has spent his professional life in the field of animation, which is not bad considering he never intended it to be that way. Beginning with the Fleischer Studios, Gordon has worked his way around the country including some pioneer commercial work for Pepsi Cola, recently retiring from Coronet Films where he had started an animation department a number of years earlier. In this interview with Harry Arnold and Dave Daruszka, Mr. Sheehan talks about his hears with the Fleischers and his impressions of the animation industry.

Zoetrope: When did you get started in the field of animation?

Sheehan: I started working for Max Fleischer in New York in 1933. Max Fleischer and Dave Fleischer had been very successful in producing Betty Boop and Koko the Clown along with several other cartoons, and their experience dated back into the 1920's. When sound came along, Betty Boop became a popular singing cartoon star. Shortly after that, when I got into the business, they were just trying out a comic strip character; Popeye the Sailor who became quite a sensation in the cartoon world.

Zoetrope: What brought you to Fleischer and why did you choose animation as a career?

Sheehan: Well, it was kind of a fluke. I had attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn for three years, graduated and got out during the Depression. I had studied magazine illustration. I didn't consider myself much of a cartoonist, in fact I didn't care much for this line. But in the Depression days, you couldn't pick your career. There were too many people out of jobs and too many looking for jobs, especially in the art line. After pounding the sidewalks of Manhattan for a good nine or ten months, I finally got a connection with the Fleischer Studios on Broadway. They were just starting to expand then. The motion picture business, by the way, was one of the few industries that prospered during the Great Depression era. Magazines, newspapers, and advertising agencies were folding. The movie business was booming because people had to go to the movies, I suppose, to get away from their troubles and worries. So I got into the animation business sort of as a tie-over job. I had no intention whatsoever of making a career of it. It was a new business, nobody knew much about it , and very few people had much confidence in animated cartoons as an entertainment media.

Fleischers had a very unique system of apprenticeship. They started you off painting on acetate cels, in black and white of course; everything was done in black and white in those days. Then after you became proficient at painting, you were promoted to the tracing department where you traced with ink on acetates, then eventually you would be promoted to the inbetweening department. That is, if you practiced and were accepted; this was the very lowest stage of assistant animation. Then eventually you got into assistant animation, and then full animation. Of course you could go higher, and become a director or start your own company, I suppose.

The common theory was that one could become an animator through this apprenticeship system within two years. There was one fellow who made it into animation in one year, but it turned out he was a relative of one of the employers. A bit of nepotism. It took me the best part of two-and-a-half years to get into the animation department.

The pay was very meager in those days, to say the least. We worked forty three-and-a-half hours a week, but instead of working a half day on Saturday as many companies did, we would work on Friday nights for three-and-a-half hours. We could then have two full days off for the weekend. I started at the tremendous salary of twelve dollars a week. I think there was a labor law at the time which said if anyone worked over a certain number of hours a day, he would receive supper money. So on Friday, the day we worked through till ten thirty in the evening, the accountant would come around with a big bag of silver half dollars, and give each worker a half dollar for supper. This made my salary $12.50 a week.

It was a very exacting routine, and it took a lot of practice to get promoted. Once a person got into the animation department, they were signed to a three year contract. Written into the contract was a raise every six months. You started at thirty dollars a week, then in six months you would get a five dollar raise. Eventually, when your contract was up, you would be getting sixty dollars a week. This was pretty fair pay in those days.

(To be continued.)

Happy Birthday Børge

Kaj Pindal tells me that February 17 is Børge Ring's birthday, so I want to take this opportunity to wish Børge many happy returns.

I wrote about his film Anna and Bella here, and it remains a touchstone film for me. Many independent animated films can only be appreciated by artists or fans, but Børge's films don't require any special knowledge or perspective in order to be appreciated. Because his films are about families and relationships, they speak to the world.

I recently read a profile of filmmaker Jean Renoir by Penelope Gilliatt and she quotes Renoir as saying, "Something many people ignore is that there is no such thing as interesting work without the contact of the public -- the collaboration, perhaps. When you are listening to great music, what you are really doing is enjoying a good conversation with a great man, and this is bound to be fascinating. We watch a film to know the filmmaker. It's his company we're after, not his skill."

I agree with Renoir's viewpoint. There are relatively few animation filmmakers I choose to keep company with, and Børge is certainly one of them. If you are unfamiliar with his films, take a look at Anna and Bella, Oh My Darling and Run of the Mill. And will someone PLEASE collect these films and the documentary on Børge and release them on DVD?

A Correction

In reviewing Jeffrey Stepakoff's book Billion-Dollar Kiss, I printed something that Stepakoff credited to an internal memo by Michael Eisner. That quote presented Eisner purely as a mercenary, uninterested in anything besides money.

Commenter David Lemay noted that the quote was not accurate according to Disney War by James B. Stewart and that the quote wasn't even from Eisner's time at Disney. It dates from his time at Paramount. I've since read the relevant portion of Stewart's book and what Lemay said is completely the case.

Because Stepakoff worked at Disney and credits the quote to "an internal memo," the reader is left with the impression that Eisner's memo was sent while at the Disney studio and that Stepakoff received a copy. I have no idea if Stepakoff was aware of the quote being inaccurate or if he intended that impression. However, as I related that quote with the belief that it was accurate, I have to acknowledge that wasn't the case. While I am hardly a fan of Michael Eisner, I am not a fan of distorting the truth even if it bolsters my own prejudices.

You can read the correct version of the quote in David Lemay's comment here.

Emery Hawkins

Thad K. has posted John Canemaker's complete interview with animator Emery Hawkins and created a compilation of Hawkins' animation from Columbia, Warner, Lantz, MGM and Disney cartoons (there's even a Hubley commercial in there).

The Hawkins interview was done for John Canemaker's 1977 book The Animated Raggedy Ann and Andy, as Hawkins animated much of the character of The Greedy in the feature directed by Richard Williams. While portions of the interview appear in the book, this is the first time I'm aware of that the entire interview has seen print.

In the 1940's, Hawkins was doing brilliant work at Lantz and Warner Bros. His Woody Woodpecker is probably the most attractively drawn version of the character, yet he doesn't skimp on Woody's hard, manic edge. Hawkins' animation for the Art Davis unit at Warners is a highlight of cartoons that deserve to be better known and appreciated. His work in this period was built on rounded forms with lots of follow-through. There's so much drag on the characters that sometimes it appears as if they're moving underwater (though they're still timed normally).

Starting in the '50s, Hawkins worked for John Sutherland doing industrials and many studios that did commercials. That work is generally obscure, which is a shame. Hawkins was too good for his work to be anonymous. Undoubtedly there are hidden gems waiting to be discovered, but Hawkins wanderlust took him to so many studios in his career that compiling any kind of filmography is a daunting proposition. His work on theatrical shorts is reasonably well documented, and Thad's excellent compilation will give you a good idea of Hawkins' gifts.

Thru the Mirror Part 4

History isn't fair. Bob Wickersham had the misfortune to animate at Disney in the 1930's, when there were no screen credits. In the 1940s he directed at Columbia on series like The Fox and the Crow, but those cartoons were never highly visible on TV, VHS or DVD. According to Alberto Becattini, Wickersham has a pretty good filmography as a Disney animator. He worked on The Band Concert, Pluto's Judgment Day, Lonesome Ghosts, The Flying Mouse, Who Killed Cock Robin?, The Old Mill, Little Hiawatha and Wynken Blynken and Nod. It must have been tough to work on the cream of the crop with no public acknowledgment whatsoever.

In Thru the Mirror, Wickersham gets the entire opening of the cartoon, setting up the situation and taking Mickey through the mirror, up through jumping rope on the telephone cord. Wickersham knew how to draw appealing poses. His drawings don't have the same strong rhythm as Fred Moore's, but the proportions are very pleasing and the poses are well balanced. Wickersham's Mickey is also extremely flexible and he has a functioning brain. If you keep your eye on Mickey during these opening scenes, you see that Mickey reacts to everything that happens to him in a variety of subtle ways.

When the animation passes to Dick Lundy, Lundy's proportions are not as appealing as Wickersham's; Lundy draws Mickey's eyes, nose and ears somewhat smaller. When it comes to animation, though, Lundy is as good as anyone in this cartoon. He does three dance sequences: one on the top hat, one with the gloves and one with the Queen (a Garbo caricature). Each dance is completely different from the others. Animating dance is difficult enough, but Lundy had to master three different styles all for a single cartoon. That's a real achievement.

Leonard Sebring is less well known than Wickersham. According to Becattini, he only worked in animation from 1933-36 and only at Disney. I wish I knew why he left the field. While his dance animation isn't as sophisticated at Lundy's, he meets the challenge of dealing with a deck of cards and matching a musical beat. These scenes are not simple by any means and Sebring handles them flawlessly.

Hardie Gramatky is best known as a childrens' book author and illustrator. He created Little Toot as a book, which Disney adapted to animation in Melody Time. Is there a case where anybody else left Disney and created something that the Disney studio then animated? I can't think of any.

Gramatky's animation isn't as controlled as the other animators. He doesn't have a good sense of weight and his animation feels a little twitchy, as if he didn't understand spacing fully. His drawing of Mickey is also the crudest in this cartoon. Mickey's exit in shot 33 feels like he's being pulled out of the scene rather then moving under his own power. I don't think that it's any mistake that Gramatky was given the broadest scenes to animate, where his looseness would be least noticeable to the audience.

Wickersham handles the end of the cartoon, and his scene of Mickey growing back to normal size is done completely differently than the shrinking scene he animated early in the cartoon. Like Lundy doing dances, the Disney animators of the time had multiple solutions to any problem and didn't need to repeat themselves.

This cartoon, like many mid-'30s Disney cartoons, gets by on charm. The story is slight and there's not much acting. However, there's no shortage of gags or imagination and each idea is so well timed and executed that it captivates the audience. There's a level of skill and confidence in this cartoon that leaves most other studios of the period in the dust.

Thru the Mirror Part 3

Some beautiful animation by Bob Wickersham, showing how entertaining flexible shapes in motion can be. This is the underlying essence of animation and one that is too often ignored in favour of design or dialogue. I defy anyone to look at these drawings without smiling.

I'm going to write more about the animation in this cartoon, but Mickey achieves a kind of perfection in Thru the Mirror in terms of his proportions and his flexibility, especially in the hands of Wickersham and Dick Lundy. While The Band Concert might be a better cartoon, I much prefer how Mickey looks in this one.

Later cartoons with Mickey push his acting farther and are slicker. Maybe they're too slick. This cartoon is balanced between Mickey's primitive design origins and sophisticated motion. As the motion and drawing become more sophisticated in later cartoons, the balance tips and a lot of Mickey's basic visual appeal gets lost.

The Triumph of the Assembly Line

The following is part of the commencement address given by Alan Alda to the 2003 graduating class at Southampton College on Long Island. I'm quoting it from Alda's most recent book, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.

The single greatest American invention was not Henry Ford's car -- it was Henry Ford's assembly line. In our time, it's reached the peak of perfection. Everyone on the line has a specialized role to play. Crank your nut, slam in your bolt, and go home. No one is responsible for the whole thing, just his or her little part of it. It only has to be good enough to sell -- and its value, its worth, is reckoned by the price it gets. Your ambition will be directed at getting a better place on the assembly line and someday maybe even running the line -- but as in that great Lily Tomlin aphorism, "The trouble with the rat race is even if you win, you're still a rat."

So what chance do you have to be "our future"?

This chance: You can decide to think for yourself. You can say to yourself, I will make a silk purse out of every sow's ear that comes down the assembly line.

You may be expected to tell people only what they need to know to make the sale. But if you learn to find out what they actually need and help them get it, I bet you'll feel better and even do better. It takes more energy -- much more energy -- but it's also more fun. Edmund Burke said: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." And I say that the only thing necessary for the triumph of the assembly line is for creative people with the energy of youth to do nothing but learn the ropes.

Gus Arriola (1917-2008)

Gus Arriola, best known for the comic strip Gordo, has died at the age of 90. Arriola, like many artists during the Great Depression, spent time in the animation industry as it was one of the few places an artist could earn a steady living.

Arriola started at the Mintz studio as an inbetweener. When MGM started their in-house studio in 1937, Arriola moved over and started working his way up the ladder. He was more interested in the story department than in animating and he first worked on story for Hugh Harman on cartoons like The Lonesome Stranger (1940) and Abdul the Bulbul Ameer (1941). In addition to story sketches, Arriola also did character designs. Moving over to the Rudy Ising unit, Arriola worked on Dance of the Weed (1941), Bats in the Belfry (1942), and The First Swallow (1942).

An Arriola design from Abdul the Bulbul Ameer

An Arriola design from Dance of the Weed

In 1941, he sold Gordo as a comic strip and continued it until 1985. Gordo was notable for its Mexican locale and Arriola's interest in promoting Mexican culture. He was an excellent designer whose daily strips were crisply drawn with judiciously placed black areas. The Gordo Sunday strips showed off Arriola's flair for colour.

In 2000, Robert C. Harvey and Gus Arriola collaborated on Accidental Ambassador Gordo, a generously illustrated biography of Arriola.

Billion-Dollar Kiss

I want to recommend a book called Billion-Dollar Kiss: the Kiss that Saved DAWSON'S CREEK and Other Adventures in TV Writing by Jeffrey Stepakoff. Besides being a memoir of Stepakoff's progress as a writer, the book is also a very good history of the regulatory and economic forces that have shaped American TV since the 1980's.

There's relatively little in the book that directly relates to animation. Stepakoff was involved with the scripts of Brother Bear and Tarzan at Disney, though coverage of these projects is brief. He does speak highly of the storyboard artists at Disney, though.

That is one of the strengths of the book. While it relates many questionable policies and decisions that the author encountered, the book is free of derogatory remarks about the people Stepakoff has worked with or observed. One would hope that would serve as a standard for future industry memoirs and (dare I say it) blogs.

The parallels with animation are present, though. When the FCC changed the regulations allowing broadcasters to own their own programming, rather than buy it from independent producers, the broadcasters went on a spending spree signing writers to exclusive development deals. The thinking was that writers were the ones to create hits, so the broadcasters wanted to monopolize the talents of the writers with the best resumes. The problem was that the competition drove up the cost of the contracts and the results didn't justify the expense, causing many writers to be dumped and the networks to have to move to cheaper programming like reality shows.

In animation, the situation is similar to the '90s boom where studios like Disney, DreamWorks and Warner Bros. fought to sign up art talent, driving the cost of that talent through the roof. The expectation was that Lion King-sized grosses would continue and when they didn't, the studios eventually downsized, leaving many artists out of work.

The competition for talent, and the resulting rise in costs, seems to make sense in the short term; a company can't afford to let its competitors corner the market on talent. However, the competition is ultimately self-destructive as the frenzy to hire is rarely balanced against realistic income expectations.

There is one amazing quote in the book from an internal memo written by Michael Eisner. I'm not quoting it to vilify Eisner but because I think it's a perfect expression of a certain kind of short-sighted business mentality.

"We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."

The first irony is that at the time Eisner wrote this, he was the president and CEO of a company that had been built completely on making history, art and a statement (Steamboat Willie, Flowers and Trees, The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Disneyland, etc.). The other irony is that if you eliminate making history, art or a statement, the only thing remaining is formula. The problem with formula -- any formula -- is that it's a recapitulation of something that's already been successful, which limits a company to imitation and eventually dooms the audience to boredom. When an audience gets bored, a company built on a formula is stuck with little salable product. Surely, it was pressure over the quality of Disney's product and the resulting decline in revenues that was responsible for Eisner's ouster, meaning that Eisner was a victim of his own business philosophy.

Unfortunately, that philosophy is all too common inside media conglomerates and while Stepakoff is somewhat optimistic about the future of television (perhaps because it's still where he earns his living), Michael Eisner's approach suggests to me that television's future is far from certain.

Creative Illustration To Be Reprinted

Thanks to an anonymous commenter in the previous posting here, I learned that Andrew Loomis's landmark art instruction book Creative Illustration is going to be reprinted this coming September in paperback. On Amazon.com, the price is an amazingly low $13.57. I'm curious to see if the reprint will include the colour pages, but even if the book is not complete (and at 300 pages I'm guessing that it is), this is a major bargain as well as a major event. If you draw or are interested in drawing, this is easily one of the best art instruction books ever published.

Update: Lars asked in the comments what it was about Loomis that made him so great. I find his art very appealing. In addition, he is excellent at communicating artistic principles through his diagrams, drawings and text.

Creative Illustration is broken into the following sections: Line, Tone, Color, Telling the Story, Creating Ideas, Fields of Illustration and Experiment and Study. Below are some pages from the book that I hope will give you a taste of Loomis's skill and approach.

Falling Behind With the Joneses

Will Finn has written two blog entrys (here and here) about what he sees as the deterioration in Chuck Jones' drawing ability towards the end of his life. What's below is a piece I wrote in March of 1995 for Apatoons, looking at the latter part of Jones' career as a director.

My favorite animated shorts director is Chuck Jones. I'm saying that up front, so what follows doesn't seem like Jones bashing.

I'm glad that Jones is getting the attention he deserves from the press and public and I'm glad for Jones that he's been able to stay active. However, there's something pitiful about Jones' planned projects, sequels to some of his best and most popular films like Duck Amuck and One Froggy Evening.

It's now more than 30 years since Jones worked regularly on the Warner characters. In that time, he's become an independent producer, the vice president of ABC, directed one original feature, one compilation feature and numerous TV specials, done a comic strip, a children's book and entered the original animation art market. In his personal life, he has suffered the death of his first wife, remarried, and lost many of his collaborators and contemporaries in the animation business. He has persevered through skin cancer, a pacemaker, and hip and ankle replacements. This is a lot to have experienced. Is any of it reflected in his work? I don't believe it is.

This isn't to say that Jones is completely responsible for the gulf between his life and art. The animation business is frankly retarded in the area of artistic growth. But I always hoped that Jones, one of the most intellectual directors in animation, would find a way to keep his art vital. Instead, his art is now 30 years behind his life.

It's as if the Marx Brothers reassembled in 1960 to make Another Night at the Opera or Bob Hope today making Grandson of Paleface. How about Paul, George and Ringo re-uniting to record "I Want to Hold Your Other Hand?"

Some artists create themselves continuously. They change with the times and continue to say something meaningful. Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, John Huston, Jack Kirby, and Will Eisner are examples. The late work by these artists, while perhaps not their most popular, is often their most deeply felt.

By contrast, other artists create themselves only once, and when they enter decline they thrash around noisily, trying to recapture something they once did effortlessly. Preston Sturges and Frank Capra come to mind in this category.

Jones is also in this category and he resembles Capra in many ways. Both were dependent on key collaborators (Capra on writer Robert Riskin and cameraman Joe August; Jones on writer Mike Maltese and designer Maurice Noble). Without their collaborators, both directors usually failed to do their best work. Both fell back on earlier works at the end of their careers (Capra remaking some 1930's films in the '50's and '60's; Jones returning to the Warner characters) with the new works being inferior. Jones is now recycling his earlier work, and his sequel to Duck Dodgers does not bode well for whatever comes next.

Mike Barrier was there first (he always is) with his essay on Jones in Funnyworld #13. (Hey Mike, put that essay on your website!) He implied in the early '70's that Jones' career might end with a whimper. What do we have from Jones' last 30 years that can compare to his Warner work? The Dot and the Line, The Grinch and Riki Tiki Tavi are the only things that I would put in that category. Am I missing one or two? If so, the number is still agonizingly small.

I'm not implying that this is a failure on Jones' part. Creativity is mysterious, and the artist has to be in tune with the zeitgeist and the marketplace as well as himself. Preston Sturges and Frank Capra did their best but couldn't sustain their art. That does nothing to diminish their best films. No other American animation director has managed to succeed where Jones failed, but it looked to me like Jones had the best shot at deepening his work as he aged. His current path is a painful reminder of how little he's contributed in the last 30 years and that animation directors don't gain wisdom or expressiveness with age, they just peter out.

Thru the Mirror Part 2

While animation fans are still looking at Disney and other cartoons from the 1930's, they're not always aware of how the cartoons were influenced by what else was happening in the movies at the same time. Animators were going to the movies just like everybody else, and when it came time to create cartoons, they often referred back to films that they'd seen. Steamboat Willie is heavily influenced by Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr, both in terms of the setting and also the relationship between Buster/Mickey and the captain of the ship. In Thru the Mirror, the Disney artists were working from the two dominant strains of musicals in the mid-1930's.

After the initial flurry of musicals at the dawn of the talkie era (roughly 1927-1931), musicals fell out of favour. They were revived in two different ways later in the 1930's. At Warner Bros. in 1932, 42nd Street contained musical numbers created by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley wasn't interested in dance so much as he was interested in patterns of motion. He was more interested in moving people, props and the camera around on the screen than he was in presenting fancy footwork. He was also noted for his overhead camera shots. 42nd Street was so successful that Berkeley created the climactic musical numbers for a whole series of Warner musicals as the 1930s progressed.

The other branch of musical was dominated by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers starting in 1934 in Flying Down to Rio. Dance in their films was an expression of romantic feelings between the pair or else was played as a novelty. Astaire often danced without Rogers, instead working with props.

Thru the Mirror blends both branches of 1930's musicals, though it leans more heavily on Astaire than it does on Berkeley. Leonard Sebring's scenes (particularly shots 26 through 28) and Ugo D'Orsi's (shots 39 and 40) present masses of cards in patterns of movement in a Berkeley-like fashion. Shot 28 by Sebring is a typical Berkeley overhead shot.

Footlight Parade (1933)

Thru the Mirror (1936)

In Thru the Mirror, the Astaire influence is heavily felt in Dick Lundy's Mickey scenes. Mickey is surrounded by the accessories of Astaire's costume: the top hat, gloves and cane. Berkeley's dancers might be wearing anything, but Astaire was usually found in formal wear. In particular, there's a very strong influence from the title number in Top Hat (1935) in Mickey's dance animation. Mickey uses a matchstick as a cane in a similar way that Astaire handles his cane, smacking it on the ground for rhythmic effect. Mickey uses it to make the top hat he's dancing on rise and fall. Furthermore, the climax of the "Top Hat" number is Astaire using his cane as a gun, shooting the other dancers. In shot 22, Mickey shoots at the top hat with his cane in a similar way.

Top Hat (1935)

Thru the Mirror

You can see the complete Astaire number from Top Hat here if you're interested.

Animated Oscar Nominees

Nominees for Best Animated Feature

Perspeolis (Sony Pictures Classics) Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Ratatouille (Walt Disney) Brad Bird
(Ratatouille also got a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing.)

Surf's Up (Sony Pictures Releasing) Ash Brannon and Chris Buck

Nominees for Best Animated Short

I Met the Walrus
A Kids & Explosions Production
Josh Raskin

Madame Tutli-Putli (National Film Board of Canada)
A National Film Board of Canada Production
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski

Même Les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven) (Premium Films)
A BUF Compagnie Production
Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse

My Love (Moya Lyubov) (Channel One Russia)
A Dago-Film Studio, Channel One Russia and Dentsu Tec Production
Alexander Petrov

Peter & the Wolf (BreakThru Films)
A BreakThru Films/Se-ma-for Studios Production
Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman

I have seen all of the feature nominations this year and I hope that Perspeolis wins. I have great admiration for Ratatouille, but Perspepolis points in a direction that I would like to see animated features follow. An Oscar win would certainly help that. Also, Perspepolis has yet to get a wide release, so an Oscar win would benefit the film economically in theatres as well as on DVD. The other two features are no longer in theatres and they've already made the majority of their DVD sales.

Some may argue that Persepolis could win for animated feature and Ratatouille would get the award for screenplay as compensation, but I highly doubt that an animated film will ever get the award for screenplay. However, it is a tribute to Ratatouille and Brad Bird that the script was worthy of a nomination.

I've seen three of the five shorts nominations. I won't name which ones because none strikes me as a truly great film. As a result, I don't have a rooting interest in this category. If people have comments about the nominations (and the shorts category in particular), I'd be happy to hear them.

Thru the Mirror

More on this cartoon to come.

Can This Problem Be Solved?

Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew has an excellent essay talking about Tex Avery's last days. For me, the heart of the is piece is this quote:

"Granted, an artist always has the option of charting their own course as an independent, but the fact of the matter is that an industry which consistently fails to recognize the value of the people working within it is an unhealthy industry that cannot be expected to advance or prosper."

That is exactly the problem. The people running this industry are incapable of understanding the nature and scope of the talent they employ. The few who do are incapable of capitalizing on it in any way that hasn't already been done. That's why there are so many recognizable clichés in animation. Take a look at Paul Dini's animation feature template and try to figure out if you should laugh or cry.

Every studio I have ever worked in (or walked through) has had more talent at the desks than it delivered on the screen. Every artist in the business recognizes this. How many can say that they are doing the best work they are capable of, even accepting the confines of their current deadlines?

In 1978, former comic book artist Bernie Krigstein said the following:

"I think what has happened to comics is a kind of diagram of what must happen to artists and creative people in a society where things have to be produced that cost a lot of money, and that need a lot of machinery to produce them, and that need a very complicated distribution system. It's almost inevitable that the artist, who is the fountain, who is the original impulse for all this product, it's inevitable that he should become an employee, because of that almost irreconcilable conflict between the people who are putting money into it and producing the object and the individuals who are creating it. And because of the dominance of the economic power, the artist has to be a vassal, just an instrument. Now frequently an artist is able to get through all the interstices and the unfilled cracks in the system, and then their work... will create a sensation. But as soon as it becomes part of the distribution system, as soon as the wheels start locking together and everything works smoothly from the production and distribution point of view, then the [replacement artists who can produce the work the way the system wants it done] become important. Because they can manufacture the products, they can manufacture what's needed. So every now and then a great system, like Hollywood, will permit an individual, a brilliant creative person, to inject a little lifeblood into it, and then, all too often, that person is crushed... whether he's aware of it or not. The only way to confront this kind of situation is for individuals to be permitted to produce their own stuff. And Hollywood, for example, allowed individuals to work, and there was a little renaissance of movies. The European studios, when they had small budget pictures, because the total control was in the hands of individuals, were able to produce good things. But as soon as this thing reaches a wide market, as soon as it becomes a marketable commodity, the creative person is no longer needed. He doesn't fulfill any important function in this great engine. This is my pessimistic view of the situation of the artist in our society, and I don't know how that problem can be solved."

(Paul Dini link via The Beat. Krigstein quote via Steven Grant.)

The Animator As Actor

In 1979, as part of the Los Angeles International Film Exposition, there was a program called The Animator as Actor, coordinated by Steven Paul Leiva with assistance from Mark Kausler. What follows are Leiva's published introductory comments.

"The Animator as Actor -- it's a simple concept, a statement complete enough to require no explanations beyond its own words. But somewhere this simple concept has been lost, or forgotten, or possibly never even considered by the public, and, more importantly, by the press which gives the public much of the information upon which it forms impressions. When the general press runs an article on animation, it is almost inevitable that the main point made, the "news" imparted, will be that there were, "Over so many odd thousands of drawings made to complete this film." Then everybody goes "Oooh!" and "Ahh!" and shake their heads in wonder as if they were being told how many hairs there are on a centipede's leg. The impression is made that an animator is only and just an individual who does a tremendous -- possibly a tremendously silly -- amount of drawings that are somehow strung together to make a "cartoon." Animators are seen almost as manual laborers -- ditch diggers with pencils -- with brows covered with sticky sweat instead of (as it actually is) the furls of creative concentration. This, of course, is all wrong. For as Chuck Jones has said, "Animators do not draw drawings, they define characters."

"Drawings for animators are simply the instrument through which they act, emote, mime, dance, and create characters as real as any devised by nature. Their successive drawings are their instrument in no less a way than a "live" actor's body, a singer's voice, or a pianist's piano are their instruments. But no one ever seems concerned over how many individual moves an actor makes to complete a scene, how many notes a singer hits to complete a song, or how many keys Horowitz strikes during his playing of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto. The concern is over how well they acted, sang, or played; how they -- as artists -- interpreted the scene, song, or composition. It should be the same for animators. For it is not really the drawings that matter, or how many there are, but, rather, what matters is how well the animator succeeds through successive drawings in breathing life into the characters his lines define. The animator plays drawings, utilizing "movement scales" rather than musical scales to realize a desired effect. The animator mimes action, but he does it on paper, instead of with his body.

"Exactly how the animator does this cannot really be explained. But neither can it be explained exactly how Horowitz so brilliantly interprets Rachmaninoff. You can't just say, "Well, he hit all the right keys at the right times." It is something more wonderfully mysterious than that, something more interior. And so is animation. You cannot just report the thousands of drawings it takes, and feel that you've explained it. You have to try for a deeper understanding.

"As you view the classic character animation in this program, realize that what you are seeing are not drawings that move and act, but rather, movement and acting that is drawn."

For the record, the films screened were Mighty Mouse Meets the Jekyll and Hyde Cat (Terrytoons, 1944), The Natural Thing To Do (Fleischer, 1939), Hello, How Am I (Fleischer 1939), Little Rural Riding Hood (MGM, 1949), Mouse in Manhattan (MGM, 1945), Pest in the House (Warner Bros, 1947), A Bear For Punishment (Warner Bros, 1951), Ragtime Bear (UPA, 1950), The Country Cousin (Disney, 1936), and The Pointer (Disney, 1939). The program also included a panel moderated by Leiva with guests Frank Thomas, Chuck Jones and Richard Williams.