Animation on Turner Classic Movies

Robert Osborne (left) with John Canemaker

Steve Stanchfield

Tom Stathes

On Monday, October 6, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time, TCM will be running three specials featuring animation historians John Canemaker, Steve Stanchfield and Tom Stathes.  Canemaker will be talking about Winsor McCay, Stanchfield will be talking about the Van Beuren studio and Stathes will be talking about the Bray studio.  All three programs focus on animation done in New York and contain many examples.

This is the 100th anniversary of McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur as well as the 100th anniversary of the start of the Bray studio.

You can read about the Van Beuren cartoons that will be screened here and read about the Bray cartoons here.

If you have any interest in animation history or just want to see cartoons that you've never seen before, I highly recommend these programs.  Each of these people is an expert in the field.  John Canemaker is an Oscar-winning animator and author of many animation related books.  His most recent are The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheiss & the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic and Magic, Color, Flair: The World of Mary Blair.  Steve Stanchfield is the proprietor of Thunderbean Animation, a production company that also produces restored DVDs and Blu-rays of classic animation.  Tom Stathes runs film screenings in the New York area.

Later the same night, TCM will screen Lotte Reineger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Max and Dave Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels, Akira Daikubara's Magic Boy, and Chuck Jones' The Phantom Tollbooth.  That's ten solid hours of animation.

Jack Kirby Makes Disney and Marvel Blink

Next Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States was to announce whether it would hear an appeal from the Jack Kirby estate over the estate's copyright claims.

Today, Marvel and the Kirby estate jointly announced that they have reached a settlement.

“Marvel and the family of Jack Kirby have amicably resolved their legal disputes, and are looking forward to advancing their shared goal of honoring Mr. Kirby’s significant role in Marvel’s history.” 

I hope that more details emerge.  From my perspective, I hope that Jack Kirby receives co-creator credit on the various comics he spearheaded with Stan Lee.  Furthermore, I hope that the estate receives royalties on Kirby reprints, Kirby designed merchandise and the flood of superhero movies that are being made using characters that Kirby designed and co-created.

There are people who are constantly commenting on various news sites that Kirby's children and grandchildren had nothing to do with creating the work and so don't deserve anything.  My response is that Robert Iger and the stockholders of the Walt Disney company had nothing to do with it either, yet they're making money from it.  Why do their rights trump Kirby's family?

I congratulate the Kirby family for their persistence.  If Jack and Roz Kirby were alive, they would be very proud that their family stood up to one of the largest entertainment conglomerates on the planet and made them acknowledge the value of Jack Kirby's work. 

It's nice to get a happy ending.

Book Review: Genius Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth

This is the third volume by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell chronicalling the life and career of Alex Toth.  Toth spent the bulk of his career illustrating comic books but spent a significant portion of his life designing animation for TV.

The earlier two volumes focused on Toth's work in comics and included a fair amount of biographical material from Toth's co-workers and family.  This volume is entirely about his work in animation, though the text is sparse and frankly not very valuable.  The interviewees, including Mike Kazaleh and Robert Alvarez, never worked with Toth.  The bulk of the book are designs, model sheets and presentation art that Toth created for TV cartoons.

Toth was a master of composition and design.  His cropping is unusual and he constantly tried to strip down his drawings to their essentials.  His use of blacks, patterns and textures went far beyond what most other artists in comics or animation concerned themselves with.  His influences included Noel Sickles, Milt Caniff, and Jesse Marsh.

 His initial foray into animation was Space Angel, and in many ways it sums up the issues surrounding Toth's animation design.  Toth's drawings for the show are excellent, but the drawings don't move.  The lip synch was done by photographic real mouths and superimposing them on the drawings.  While the graphics are very sophisticated, the motion is primitive. 

 
While Toth simplified his work for later animated shows he designed for Hanna Barbera, there was always a considerable gap between the quality of the designs and the style of motion.  Joe Barbera used Toth's work in his sales pitches to networks, but it was all smoke and mirrors and everyone agreed to ignore the truth.  The artists at Hanna-Barbera couldn't draw as well as Toth and there was never a hope that there would be a consistency between the style of drawing and the style of motion.  The network executives knew that the shows would never look as good as Toth's presentation art, but the limited profits for Saturday morning cartoons were not enough to cause them to bother about it.

While Toth groused about the quality of the comic book scripts he was given, they were far better than the animation that resulted from his work.  People forget how truly terrible TV animation was in the 1960s and '70s.  Toth designed the first TV version of Marvel's Fantastic Four.  Take a look at how poor the show's opening credits are.

There are people who are nostalgic for shows Toth designed like Space Ghost or The Herculoids. Toth may have improved the quality of the designs, but the shows never rose to the level of his work.

There are a lot of great drawings in this book.  All three volumes are valuable for showing Toth's evolution as an artist and demonstrating what's possible in visual storytelling.  The third volume leaves an important question unanswered, though.  Are Toth's drawings, as good as they are, appropriate designs for animation at all?  Given the realities of the marketplace, are the designs functional? Perhaps Bruce Timm and company came closest to answering the question, but even their shows feel compromised in terms of motion to me.

Many have commented that Toth is an artist without a monument.  He has no work universally acknowledged as great or remembered by the audience.  That's the tragedy of his career, but it doesn't negate the quality of his drawings or design.  Every Toth drawing is an education, and that alone makes this book, and the preceding volumes, worth having.

Art Babbitt, Gunther Lessing, and the Disney Strike

Jake Friedman is working on an authorized biography of animator Art Babbitt.  He also has a blog where he has been publishing various Babbitt-related documents and footage.  His latest entry is below, chronicling the relationship between Babbitt and Gunther Lessing, attorney for the Disney studio.  I wish that it had been uploaded at a higher resolution, so that the documents on screen would be clearer.

The Disney strike is one of those seismic events that continued to be influential long after it was over.  It caused people to leave Disney, others to be fired, and many of those people moved to other studios, spreading the knowledge they gained at Disney.  It also created animosities that continued for decades.

If the Disney studio had negotiated a contract with the Federation of Screen Cartoonists and blocked the entry of IATSE, would the strike have occurred?  The history of the Disney studio and unionism in animation might have been significantly different, but the opportunity was missed.

Tissa David and John Canemaker

John Canemaker has generously shared a lengthy video interview with the late Tissa David. It is part autobiography, part nuts and bolts instruction and part philosophy, illustrated by clips of Tissa's work for John and Faith Hubley, Michael Sporn, R.O. Blechman and others.

I knew Tissa when I was beginning my career and it's remarkable how little she changed physically in 30 years.  I also realized when watching this that there are things I'm teaching my students that I learned from Tissa. 

Tissa rarely had the opportunity to work on projects with large budgets.  She was a fantastic draftsman, but she was always conscious of how to get the maximum effect from each drawing.  Her animation was forced to be limited in the sense that she was only allowed a limited number of drawings, but her art and acting were so strong that there was no limit to the expressiveness she could communicate.

It's wonderful to have this video available as a record of her thoughts and work.  Not enough animators write autobiographies, but this lengthy visit with Tissa is the next best thing.

John Canemaker's generosity doesn't stop with this video.  May has been a banner month for John, with the release of an updated version of The Art and Flair of Mary Blair and two new books.  Magic Color Flair: The World of Mary Blair was created to accompany an exhibit of Blair's work at the Disney Family Museum.  The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis and the Secrets of Walt Disney's Movie Magic is an annotated version of a manual put together by an early Disney special effects artist.  Cartoon Brew has published samples from the book and Jerry Beck has reviewed it at Cartoon Research.

Raymond Chandler Hates the Oscars

"The head of a large studio once said privately that in his candid opinion the motion picture business was 25 per cent honest business and the other 75 per cent pure conniving. He didn't say anything about art, although he may have heard of it. But that is the real point, isn't it?—whether these annual Awards, regardless of the grotesque ritual which accompanies them, really represent anything at all of artistic importance to the motion picture medium, anything clear and honest that remains after the lights are dimmed, the minks are put away, and the aspirin is swallowed? I don't think they do. I think they are just theater and not even good theater. As for the personal prestige that goes with winning an Oscar, it may with luck last long enough for your agent to get your contract rewritten and your price jacked up another notch. But over the years and in the hearts of men of good will? I hardly think so."

The Oscars are this weekend.  I stopped watching the ceremony years ago as the results are completely irrelevant to me.  I would never say I hate the Oscars, as that would require more energy than I'm willing to devote to them.

The above quote is from a long piece by Raymond Chandler that appeared in The Atlantic in 1948 and you can read it in its entirety here.  Chandler was the creator of the private eye Philip Marlowe in the novels The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely, both of which have been turned into movies several times.  He was also a screenwriter who contributed to Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train.  Chandler had an inside view of the Oscars and he hated them.  In this age of Twitter, I don't know how many people will bother to read his entire article, but it is a good counterpoint to all the hype that will wash over us in the next few days.

Anniversaries

For a short month, February has a lot of anniversaries, and this February marks several milestones.

February 8 was the 100th anniversary of the release of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur.  First performed in vaudeville by McCay, it was not the first animated film by McCay or others, but it was arguably the most influential of the silent era, as it inspired many other cartoonists of the time to try their hands at animation.
February 2 was the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's debut on film in Making a Living.

That was followed on February 7 by the release of Kid Auto Races at Venice, the first film where he wore the costume of his tramp character.

February 1 was the 120th birthday of director John Ford and February 6 was the 20th anniversary of Jack Kirby's death.  Both of these men continue to occupy my thoughts and their work continues to occupy my attention.

Persistence of Vision

Richard Williams

I will write an entry about TAAFI's third day, but Kevin Schreck's documentary Persistance of Vision, which screened at TAAFI, deserves an entry of its own.  The film is a chronicle of the making and unmaking of the Richard Williams' feature The Cobbler and the Thief.  Williams began the film as an adaptation of stories featuring the mullah Nasruddin written by Idries Shah.  A falling out with the Shah family led to the reworking of the story to eliminate the Nasruddin character and a cobbler became the new focus of the film.

Williams financed the film out of profits made from his studio's commercial work.  After the success of Williams' contribution to the animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Warner Bros. agreed to finance his feature.  When Williams failed to deliver the film on time, Warner Bros. decided it was better to drop the project and collect the completion insurance, which put the ownership of the film in the hands of The Completion Bond Company.  At that point, the film had been in production for 24 years.

Stuck with a film they didn't want, the bond company took it away from Williams and had it completed in the cheapest, fastest way possible.  They hoped to salvage something financially by bowdlerizing the film to make it look like other animated features of the time.  The film, released as Arabian Knight, was a failure and Williams withdrew from active production to lecture, write The Animator's Survival Kit, and to work on personal projects.

That's a very bare outline of events, but the man at the center of it, Richard Williams, is a huge contradiction: he elevated the art of animation but was the author of his own misfortune.  Schreck's film explores both of these aspects of Williams' career by interviewing many people who worked on the film and using footage of Williams himself from interviews he gave over the years.

Left to right: Ken Harris, Grim Natwick, Art Babbitt, Richard Purdom, Richard Williams

Williams understood that the men who created character animation were getting on in years and that their art would die with them.  At his own expense, he brought animators Art Babbitt, Ken Harris, and Grim Natwick to his studio to train his staff.  These veterans of Disney and Warner Bros. gave their knowledge freely as well as contributing to the studio's output.  Williams himself was a perfectionist who demanded the best possible work from his staff.  While he was often a difficult boss, those who worked for him acknowledge the opportunity he gave them to grow as artists.

Left to right: Ben McEvoy, Kevin Schreck, Tara Donovan, Greg Duffell.  Donovan and Duffell both drew inbetweens on the Williams feature 17 years apart.

After the screening, Kevin Schreck made the comment that Williams had the sensibility of a painter working in film rather than the sensibility of a film maker.  That crystallized my thinking on Williams.  While he brought over veteran animators and idolized Milt Kahl, it's interesting that over the course of the production, he never brought in veteran story men like Bill Peet, Mike Maltese or Bill Scott.  He never consulted with directors like Wilfred Jackson, Dave Hand or John Hubley.  At no time did he hire a famous screenwriter or novelist.  He was interested in creating better animation, but he was uninterested in what the animation was there to serve.

Williams treated content as an excuse to create elaborate visuals, but he didn't much care what the content was and may not have been able to tell the difference between good and bad content.  In this way, he was perfectly suited to the commercials his studio turned out.  He was lucky that during that period, British ad agencies were writing literate and witty ads.  The combination of their content and his astounding artwork made his commercials the best in the world.

But when the content was mediocre, as it was in his feature Raggedy Ann and Andy or in The Cobbler and the Thief, the result was an elaborateness that wasn't justified. Character designs were overly complicated and had a multiplicity of colours.  Layouts used tricky perspectives.  The inevitable result was that artists could only work at a snail's pace, driving up the budget and jeopardizing delivery.  The detail overwhelmed the flimsy stories and the films collapsed under their own weight.

Someone in the documentary revealed that during the period when Warner Bros. was financing the film, Williams was still creating storyboards.  That was twenty years into the project.  It was obvious that Williams considered story an inconvenience; it had to be done so there would be something to draw.  In the panel discussion after the film, Greg Duffell recalled that there were mornings where Williams had to create sequences off the cuff in order to supply Ken Harris with work.  There was never a structured story, just sequences that tickled Williams' fancy. The visuals were what Williams cared about.

Schreck's film encompasses the heroic Williams and the self-destructive Williams.  Williams is animation's Erich Von Stroheim, making an impossibly long version of Greed.  Or maybe Williams is Captain Ahab, inspiring his crew to pursue the white whale but leading them all to destruction.  Williams set out to make a masterpiece, to show the world animation as it had never been done before.  Those parts of his film that survive are unlike anything else that's been done.  But being different and being worthwhile are not the same.  Williams chose to work in a medium where the audience expects a story that evokes emotions, but Williams saw story as a necessary evil instead of the heart of the project.

This documentary is a major work of animation history.  Schreck has been traveling with it to festivals all around the continent.  I don't know if the film will be picked up for distribution as clearing the rights to various clips would be expensive and time consuming.  For now, festivals may be the only way to see the film, so you'll have to seek it out.

Williams' career has undoubtedly been a benefit to the entire animation industry, but his success with audiences was greater when others created the content that was the basis for his work.

Fleischer Gag Cartoons

Check these out.  Gag cartoons from various Fleischer artists: Willard Bowsky (pictured), Tom Golden, Gordon Sheehan, Orestes Calpini, Tom Moore, George Germanetti, and Jack Ozark.  All seem to revolve around Dugan's cake, so there must have been a party where this cake was served.

A History of Computer Animation

Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation by Tom Sito is a sprawling chronicle of the development of cgi.  That sprawl is both a blessing and a curse.  The blessing is that Sito makes it clear how many people, institutions and companies each contributed to the development of computer animation over decades.  He has interviewed many of the pioneers and looked at many of the individuals, institutions and companies that doggedly pursued the dream of images and animation created on computers.

The curse is that this wide-ranging approach has made the book's organization clumsy.  Rather than work chronologically, Sito devotes chapters to contributions by government, academia, business, gaming and individual artists, so the book keeps doubling back on itself.  Certain films, people and events pop up repeatedly, muddying the historical sequence.  A timeline in the appendices would help clarify the history.

Hearing the pioneers speak about their own ambitions and accomplishments provides an intimate look at an art and technology as it was struggling to be born.   The path was not a smooth one; the failures were as common as the breakthroughs.  There's a cgi graveyard filled with people and companies who chased their dreams before the hardware, software and economics were in place to make those dreams come true. 

While certain well-known figures, such as George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter, are present, so are many who are unknown to the general public in spite of their importance: Alvy Ray Smith, Jim Blinn, Charles Csuri, Alexander Schure, John Pennie, Robert Abel, Bill Reeves, David Evans, Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Cray, and James Clark.  Each of these people and the others chronicled in the book made contributions that changed the course of the field.  Each worked to create better looking images or to make computer animation flexible enough to communicate ideas and entertain audiences.

While Tom Sito is a traditional animator who has also done storyboards and directed, he has no hands-on experience with cgi.  That lack of familiarity shows in various ways throughout the book.  The development of hardware, particularly the rise of Silicon Graphics followed by the development of video cards for consumer PCs, had huge a impact on the proliferation of cgi and its ability to produce more complex images.  Similarly, viable off-the-shelf graphics software put cgi into the hands of artists who didn't know how to write software.  Sito doesn't fully recognize the impact that each of these things had on the growth and success of the industry.

He also doesn't fully grasp cgi concepts.  His description in the glossary of forward and inverse kinematics is "formulas used in 3D animation," which says nothing about their most common use in moving characters' arms and legs, let alone defining the difference between them.

Historical errors also creep in.  The TV series ReBoot ran on the ABC network, not the Disney Channel.  The animation for the TV series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was not produced by Omnibus.  The studio did a sample to try to land the project, but lost it to Arcca Animation.

There will undoubtedly be more histories of computer animation written in the future, some that will go into greater depth on certain topics.  However, in Moving Innovation, Tom Sito has begun to map the territory, making it easier for those future authors to understand how the pieces fit together and who the important players were.  While not perfect, Moving Innovation is a good introduction to how computer graphics grew and have spread throughout almost all areas of computing and our daily lives.

Visualising The Rite of Spring

May 29 marks the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring."  That's a piece that should be familiar to animation professionals and fans as it was one of the segments in Disney's Fantasia.

The above video is by Stephen Malinowski, a musician and computer programmer who has been attempting to visualize complex musical scores.  Watch it full screen for the best effect.

Here is an NPR interview with Malinowski, where he talks about his process.

"People usually respond to sound in a unitary way. It's the reason why you can't follow more than one conversation at a time at a party, for example. But with vision, your brain is trained to comprehend multiple things at once: you can take in many more elements simultaneously. In music, there's often much more going on than you can grasp in that moment of hearing. When you have a visualization, your eyes lead your ears through the music. You take advantage of your brain's ability to process multiple pieces of visual information simultaneously."

Bing Crosby's 110th Birthday

May 3 is Bing Crosby's 110th birthday.  While most people these days only know Bing Crosby for singing "White Christmas" or the duet he did with David Bowie, he was unquestionably one of the leading figures of popular culture for a good 30 years.  He was a success in recording, radio, movies and TV.  He was parodied in animation in cartoons like Bingo Crosbyana, Swooner Crooner, and Catch as Cats Can, but he lent his voice to animation on several occasions.  He sang for Paul Whiteman in the animated segment of the feature King of Jazz in 1930.  As well, he narrated Disney's version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and as spokesman for Minute Maid orange juice he voiced an animated caricature of himself.

Who Are the Next Inspirations?

Sheridan College was lucky to host Disney writer-director John Musker last week.  There's some coverage here.  In addition to talking to students about their work, Musker gave a two hour presentation about his career, where he generously included the work of animators.  The names were no surprises: Glen Keane, Eric Goldberg, Mark Henn, etc.

Musker also talked about the early days of his career, particularly his time with Eric Larson and being taught by Jack Hannah.

Listening to Musker and staring at the young students in the audience, I started wondering about the next animators who would serve as inspiration.

Animators were pretty much invisible through the greatest part of what we call the golden age.  Bill Tytla got some publicity in Time magazine at the time of Dumbo's release and many of the Disney crew were anonymously featured in the live action portions of The Reluctant Dragon, but it really wasn't until Disney moved into TV that behind-the-scenes material started to appear.  When Disney was publicizing the initial release of Lady and the Tramp, there were segments with Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Woolie Reitherman, etc.  Those shows, and Bob Thomas's book The Art of Animation were really the public's first view of the people who made the characters move.

The TV audience for those shows (as well as Walter Lantz's copycat segments on The Woody Woodpecker Show), was the generation that grew up to enter the animation business in the '70s and '80s.  At the same time they were entering the business, others in their generation were writing about animation history, further publicizing animators, and not only those at Disney.

In the '90s, the TV generation had risen to prominence  in animated features.  Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, etc. were all used to publicize the films on their release and then appeared in DVD extras.  These are the people that the Sheridan students were familiar with and who were featured in John Musker's talk.

But who are the animators who have risen to prominence in animated features in the last 15 years?  I'm not talking about directors (though only Pixar has really publicized them to the point that they have independent reputations).  Since cgi has taken over feature films, are there any cgi animators whose work is known to the general public? The same question can be asked about stop motion animators.

At Sheridan, it's been clear to me for years that the students seem to gravitate more to design than to story or animation.  There are relatively few who have stories they're desperate to tell or characters they want to bring to life.  I wonder if the flood of "Art of" books is responsible for this in some way.  It's one of the few places where animation artists get credited, but the books are mostly pre-production art. 

Whatever the reason, I think that the writing of history and publicity is having an impact on students' career aspirations.  Without animators as examples, there are fewer who aspire to follow that path.  There are fewer "ignition moments," when someone sees an animator bring a character to life and is struck by the desire to do the same thing.

This may be happening at the various online animation schools where students are interacting with working animators.  That's all to the good, but it doesn't reach the same number of people who see a DVD extra or work credited in a book.

In thirty years, when the audience for John Musker's talk is firmly established in animation, will there be any star animators known outside the studios?  While there were always star animators even if the public didn't know about them, I'm convinced that the lack of publicity does impact their number.

If I'm right, then that's something that animators can do to maintain the health of the field.  Animators, publicize yourselves!  What shots have you done?  What moments have you given audiences?  The more that human faces can be attached to performances that audiences remember, the more likely that we'll get more of those performances in the future.

Sick Little Monkeys

The story of the making of Ren and Stimpy is one of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.  The irresistible force was John Kricfalusi, a veteran animation artist who was disgusted with the quality of TV animation.  He was determined to push the art and humour closer to the Warner Bros. cartoons he admired, though with a decidedly personal twist.  The immovable object was the TV industry, specifically cable channel Nickelodeon.  Like all channels, it was dedicated to budget restraint, regular air dates, and bland content that wouldn't provoke attacks.  From the start, this relationship was a disaster in the making.  The surprise, though, is that it produced a hit show.

Thad Komorowski's book, Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story, exhaustively examines the behind-the-scenes goings on.  He starts with John K's career in Saturday morning cartoon factories and details his relationship with Ralph Bakshi.  Together they made The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, a sort of precursor to Ren and Stimpy.  Even before Ren and Stimpy, Kricfalusi was butting heads with broadcasters, as his experience on the short-lived Beany and Cecil revival shows.

For those not familiar with the history of Ren and Stimpy, it was one of Nickelodon's first three original animated series and the one that attracted the most attention.  There was no question that John K's sensibility was a success with audiences.  However, right from the start, the show developed schedule problems due to a mismatch between what the artists wanted to make and what Nickelodeon was willing to air. John K. was another factor delaying production, as he wasn't willing to approve things until they met his standard.  When the delays continued during the second season, Nickelodeon fired John K. and his studio.  Nickelodon created its own in-house studio to continue production and Ren and Stimpy lasted for another three seasons without John K.

While that might have been the end of the story, John K. was reunited with his characters when another cable channel, Spike TV, revived the series for an adult audience.  Unfortunately, Kricfalusi's insistence on meeting his vision at any cost doomed the revival.  While the order was for just six episodes, only two made their air dates and the last delivered a year late.  Spike lost interest in the show and didn't bother to play three of the episodes.

John K. is a controversial figure who divides artists and fans into those who support him and those who think that he is responsible for his own misfortunes.  Komorowski walks the middle ground, showing that all parties made mistakes and refused to consider the others' point of view, but he does not excuse Kricfalusi's behavior.  Komorowski talked to many artists who worked on the show and quotes many Nickelodeon executives on the problems they faced getting episodes on air.  While I don't doubt that people involved in the production could quibble with Komorowski's version of specific events, it strikes me that the book is even-handed in apportioning credit and blame.

Fans of the show will enjoy comparing their opinion of each episode to the author's and learning of material that was cut and censored.

If you are not a fan of the show, this book is still worth reading for the light it sheds on the workings of the TV animation business.  There is always tension between artists and business people over resources and content.  People working in TV animation and those with ambitions to create shows need to understand the pressures and the pitfalls that shape the business.   Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren and Stimpy Story is a cautionary tale about walking the fine line between artistic ambition and the reality of the marketplace.

Gone But Not Forgotten

How do you follow up an animation hardware history?  With a look at The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies.

Hardware History

J.J. Sedelmaier has written an interesting history of animation disks for Imprint magazine.

People who entered the animation business in the recent past have  lived totally within a digital world.  But before computers, animation had its own set of very specific hardware, developed from the 1910s onward to facilitate the creation of cartoons.

There were studios with their own peg standards as well as Acme pegs (which dominated the California business) and Oxberry pegs (which dominated in New York).  There was even another standard, not mentioned in the article, that came from the U.S. Signal Corps from World War II and made it into the animation industry as war surplus.

The picture above is a Fleischer set-up.  Note the goose-neck lamp for top lighting.  Fleischer used top pegs, where Disney used bottom pegs.  There's a wire coil at the top right to hold pencils and brushes and the holder on the left for ink and paint.  The disk rotates on rubber rollers (pictured in the article).  As the Fleischers were inventors and very mechanically minded, they put a lot of effort into creating equipment that would make production efficient.

The article shows a great many disks and set-ups.  It's a walk down memory lane for many of us and a history lesson for those who grew up more likely to be manipulating a mouse than a pencil.

Who's Afraid of Song of the South?

Disney historian Jim Korkis's latest book is Who's Afraid of the Song of the South? and Other Forbidden Disney Stories.  The main section of the book is an in-depth look at the production of the film that Disney has chosen to suppress.

While Korkis deals with the current controversy surrounding the film, he traces the film's origins and shows that the controversy started even before the film was released.  In the period after World War II, when the U.S. had defeated a fascist power that claimed it was racially superior, Black Americans felt strongly that it was time for the United States to abolish its own discriminatory practices.  That included the portrayal of Black people in popular culture.  Black audiences were no longer satisfied with stereotypical screen portrayals of porters, maids and lazy or frightened comedy relief.

In the post-war years, Hollywood began to tackle discrimination in live action films such as Gentleman's Agreement (1947), which dealt with discrimination against Jews, and Pinky (1949), where a Black woman passes for White before returning to her own community.  But it wouldn't be until the 1950s and the rise of Sidney Poitier before Black performers were cast in leading roles that were dramatically respectable.

Song of the South (1945) sits at the cusp between pre- and post-war racial attitudes and as Korkis shows, that's one of the things that makes the film hard to deal with.  The various screenwriters included a southerner with typical racial views as well as a left-leaning victim of the blacklist.  Black actor Clarence Muse was hired as a consultant, but left the project over the film's racial attitudes, yet Muse himself later appeared in films like Riding High (1950) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), neither of which could be considered racially progressive.  The reviews of the time also straddle changing racial attitudes, with some wholly praising the film while others expressing reservations on its treatment of race.

Korkis covers the writers, the cast, the production of the live action, the animation, the music, the reviews and the controversy surrounding the film.  Beyond the race issue, the film is important for other reasons.  It was Disney's first foray into a feature dominated by live action.  It was photographed by Gregg Toland, cinematographer of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and Citizen Kane (1941), and this was Toland's first film in colour.  Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten, the child stars in the film, went on to other star in other Disney films, making them the first live performers under contract to the studio.  It was also the first Disney live action film to receive an Oscar, albeit an honorary one for James Baskette, who played Uncle Remus.

Korkis also writes about how the animated characters were used in other Disney projects such as Splash Mountain and various comics and other publications.

The balance of the book is a bit of a hodge podge, lacking the strong focus of the first 100 pages.  Some of the material is related, such as the deleted Black centaurette in re-releases of Fantasia.  While the material covered is interesting, such as Disney's failed attempts to craft films based on the Oz books and John Carter of Mars before the films that were eventually released, this material could hardly be described as "forbidden."  Korkis is a thorough historian and the material is interesting, but as a book, it doesn't hang together as strongly as it might.

Be that as it may, there's a wealth of interesting Disneyana here.  Korkis's dedication to shining light into the nooks and crannies of Disney history always produces surprises for the reader and fills out the picture of Walt Disney and the company he created.   As the current Disney management would prefer to forget the existence of Song of the South, this book serves as the closest the film is likely to get to a "making of" book.

Kimball Christmas Cards

If you aren't visiting Amid Amidi's site 365 Days of Ward Kimball, you're missing out on some beautiful art. Currently, there's lots of Christmas related artwork.

During his talk on Kimball at the Ottawa International Animation Festival last September, Amidi made it a point to say that Kimball's style was evolving towards more modern graphics in the 1940s. The above cards (1945 on top and 1946 on the bottom) are great examples of the turn Kimball's style was taking. Both are, of course, well drawn. But while the 1945 card is conventional in its use of perspective and structure, the '46 card breaks away from realistic perspective and revels in flattening out shapes.  While UPA would animate this stylistic approach a couple of years later, Kimball was prepared to do so but wouldn't get the chance until Melody, Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and the TV episodes he directed for the Disneyland series in the 1950s.

Darrell Van Citters Interviewed

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, the first animated TV special.  Darrell Van Citters has written the book on the making of the show and film historian Frank Thompson interviews Van Citters on his podcast The Commentary Track.

Thompson has also interviewed Cartoon Brew's Jerry Beck but those of you interested in film history in general will be interested in other Thompson podcasts, which include interviews with character actor L.Q. Jones (talking about working with John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Budd Boetticher), and film historians Rudy Behlmer, Kevin Brownlow, Robert S. Birchard, John Bengston, Randy Skredvedt and Joan Myers.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story

Sean Howe's book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story could just as easily have been subtitled The Never Ending Story.  It's never ending as Marvel's fictional characters die, are brought back, change their powers, get replaced, get cloned, make deals with the devil, but still go on and on.  It's also never ending because the creators behind these characters leave in disgust, get fired, sue the company and sometimes die on the job.

This book is a warts-and-all telling of the people and business behind the creation of the Marvel universe, known for characters such as Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and the X-Men.  While it is only tangentially related to animation, it shares the problems of work-for-hire and the callous way that corporations treat the very people who create the wealth.

For those who haven't followed the comics or the company, this book may be a maddening read, as the cast of fictional and real characters runs into the hundreds.  The size of the cast prevents Howe from going into depth on more than a few people, mainly the owners, editors and to a lesser extent, writers.  The artists, as usual, get short shrift.  Anyone interested in learning more about artists John Buscema, Gene Colan and similar mainstays of the company will be disappointed.  The artists are mostly bystanders while the dance of power and money goes on above their heads.

Martin Goodman was a publisher of pulp magazines, a now extinct breed of publications that focused on genre fiction with detectives, cowboys, aviators and similar action-oriented characters.  They were named pulps for the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.  After the success of Superman in Action Comics in the late 1930s, Goodman was convinced to add comic books to his list of publications.  Within the first few years, he published The Human Torch (created by Carl Burgos), The Sub-Mariner (created by Bill Everett) and Captain America (created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby).  He hired his wife's cousin, 17 year old Stanley Leiber to work in the comics division and in 1941 when editor Joe Simon left (with Kirby) after Goodman screwed them out of Captain America royalties, Leiber writing under the pseudonym Stan Lee inherited the post of comics editor.

With the exception of his stint in the military during World War II, Lee continued running the division and created nothing of value until 1961.  At that point, partnered with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, newly successful characters appeared for about a decade.  However, both Ditko and Kirby walked away from Lee and Marvel, angry over their lack of control and compensation.  Once that happened, Lee spent the next 40 years promoting Marvel and himself but failed to create anything similarly successful.  His greatest accomplishment was keeping himself front and center as the ownership changed repeatedly, garnering millions for himself while not lifting a finger as President and Publisher of Marvel to compensate the artists beyond paying them by the page.  He even colluded with his competitor, DC Comics, to make sure that freelancers couldn't play the two companies off each other for higher pay.

It's fitting that Disney now owns Marvel as the companies have similarities in their histories.  The business people who have taken over both companies after their founders have earned far more than the creative people who built the company in the first place.  Eric Ellenbogan, a Marvel executive who lasted just seven months, walked away with a $2.5 million severance package, more money than Jack Kirby made from Marvel in his entire career.  That's hardly different than the $140 million in severance that Michael Ovitz walked away from Disney with, more money than all nine old men made over 40 years.  John Lasseter is rapidly becoming another Stan Lee, agreeing to corporate moves he formerly disdained (like sequels) and becoming a kibitzer of other people's work rather than remaining a creator himself.  For both companies, the '90s were an anomaly where artists actually shared in the money their work generated.  Marvel went bankrupt and Disney abandoned drawn animation and the artists who created it.  In both cases, the good times didn't last.

The book contains just two illustrations: an ad for the first issue of Marvel Comics and a photograph of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965.  Undoubtedly, the publisher didn't want to deal with Disney's well-known reluctance to grant the rights to images it owns (see the delay in Amid Amidi's biography of Ward Kimball).  However, Howe has a tumblr blog which includes many illustrations and documents that should have appeared.  Somehow print attracts the copyright cops while the web escapes unscathed, more proof that the copyright laws are dysfunctional in the digital age.

Anyone who aspires to work for a leading comics or animation company and thinks they'll be entering a magic kingdom where creativity reigns supreme and the fun never stops should read this book.  Large media corporations share many of Marvel's problems. Artists are routinely taken advantage of, and the more artists realize this on the way in, the less likely they are to be disappointed.