Some Like It Hot -Running Wild

I apologize for posting such a lengthy clip-the scene I had on my mind is a couple of minutes in, and until someone gives me a tutorial in excerpting my own DVDs to youtube this'll have to do.

What hasn't already been said of "Some Like It Hot"? Brilliant film; great director, great script, great cast. Take the little musical interlude of Sweet Sue's blondes rehearsing "Running Wild": what particularly strikes me is how such a simple scene manages to be so infectious and feel so totally uncontrived--even though Jack Lemmon is playing a dead ringer for Daffy Duck and Tony Curtis is in the most grotesque drag since...well, perhaps ever.

Even with all the broad, Wilderian goofiness they seem real. They genuinely enjoy their jazz playing, "Sugar"(Marilyn)has a ball shaking the lead vocal and strumming her ukelele, and it all results in making you feel like you're not only sharing the ride on a Florida-bound train in the 1920s, you are a part of the relationship between the characters, however improbable they are.

If there's one thing that doesn't get enough attention in many animated films it's the character relationships. It doesn't matter how they're related--whether on the surface the relationship is what we'd call conventional--what matters is that we really buy that these characters believe in each other. I don't mean "believe in" in a sentimental "I have faith in you" way (not that there's anything wrong with that-that certainly has its place in the right narrative), but rather that one character clearly knows and has real feelings towards another.

This sounds pretty elementary--a no-brainer--but oftimes in the midst of getting the plot moving along, throwing in a gag here or there(or taking one out), and making the nominal plot exciting or whatever the characters can lose their realness. I'm sure everyone has expereinced the sinking feeling in a theater when you disconnect from the characters...and then the action on the screen; the next step is checking your watch and after that--planning where you're going for dinner. Uh-oh.

"Some Like it Hot" has some ludicrous characters in silly, totally implausible situations--but we're with Joe and Jerry all the way. They argue, laugh, get furious and concerned with each other as believably as if they were in an Elia Kazan film, not a farce by Wilder and Diamond....but then, all of Wilder's best films manage to sell some pretty messed-up plots and seriously compromised characters by making the audience empathise with them, like them ,and just plain buy them.

it's been argued that animation filmmakers have their work cut out for them in the casting department: we can't rely on the human face to carry a scene, or the comes-equipped charm of an actress or actor to fill in the subtext; we have to build a real person(or animal)from scratch. But surely Wilder and Diamond had the same problem here: two goofball, skirt-chasing jazz age musician losers, dressed as women for the majority of the film, affecting silly voices and enduring ridiculous circumstances. I think the glue that holds their characters together--including Monroe's--are very clever and suprisingly subtle touches that add up to people we can relate to and believe in. The St. Valentine's Day massacre scene isn't played for laughs in this oh-so-broad comedy, and Lemmon's delivery of the line "I think I'm gonna be sick" after witnessing murder is as straight as if it were part of a hard core film noir. Monroe's Sugar has real poignancy along with her burlesque-style blonde goofiness...again, very careful nurturing of characters.

The film has so much bizarre action, broad characters and great lines that the characters might be presented a fraction as well and everyone would still laugh...but the way it turned out results in a flm that can be watched over and over again without too much fatigue. There's no reason the same can't be true of animated actors.

In a story, it's the little things that count-a sort of manifesto

If anything from my experience of the last 15 years or so has made itself clear to me as a story truism, it's that the importance of the smallest details matter.

It's that the difference between a dull scene or a stock character and one that breathes, that thinks, is in the details. Details spring out and suggest themselves when the story artist believes in a character's reality no matter how superficially unlikely the scenario they're placed in might be.

There are times when a story artist is given a sequence that's already laid out pretty extensively: the characters must say this or that, do this, that and the other thing, get from here to there. Now, you might think that that would be a boring sort of sequence to work on--not necessarily.

Of course one wants to be as creative as one can, but in putting a feature film together there's not always an opportunity to start from scratch(and if there always is, the film's probably in trouble). Does that mean there's no room for the story guy to have fun, to make an impression, to enhance or "create" the scene? Far from it. But you'd better believe in the characters you're working with.

If you do, wonderful things can happen. Some of it might wander off in a direction that will result in the kibosh being put on the sequence in whole or in part--a great big old redo. But sometimes (often enough of you're both lucky and inspired)a sudden, truthful idea will pop up seemingly out of nowhere and work so well it's just got to go in. No one planned for it until it struck--you didn't see it until you were least expecting it, surrounded at your desk by crumpled paper and worn down stubs. Suddenly it's there, and it seems exactly the thing the character should say or do at that moment. If it really is as right as it feels, it'll make it into the film. You'd be surprised how often that happens, in spite of any and all obstacles.

This to me is the most exciting, rewarding part of my job, but it's not a daily occurance--it couldn't be. Films just don't play with too much going on at every second, all the time. They flow in a narrative dance in any of a million permutations, all with one commonly understood goal: to tell you a story.

And I should mention that the function of your storyboards is twofold: not only are you designing the action withon the frame, but most importantly you're responsible for setting the mood and emotion of the scene--that's how it's supposed to be, anyway. This really can't be stressed too strongly. The times that a completely flat, emotionless story sequence didn't work in boards but came to life in animation, out of nowhere is exactly zero. Can sequences be plussed by animation? You bet, and they almost always are--hugely. The medium is about moving drawings/characters, after all. But plussing has to start from something. The drawings needn't necessarily be fancy, but they must certainly read, and communicate. The more direct and meaningful the better. Otherwise the animator really is left with nothing to work with.

We in animation have a big hurdle, a doozy: we have to take a two-dimensional, stylized design of a character and entice the audience into caring about it. I believe the key to doing that is to lend the characters your faith while you board them--to invest them with little parts of your life in the form of those little details.

All of this comes from you, from your own real personal experience and your unique observation. To have to squeeze the wonky story-peg into a predetermined hole doesn't always work--often these characters take over, just a bit. Or a bit more than a bit. To know when and how to apply your observation and build each character a soul--that's where your day to day story experience hopefully takes you.

It's why I do this job, why I love it; it's like climbing a mountain that grows as I grow. The mountain is impossibly huge but it can be conquered at the most unpredictable times, if you keep your imagination open and remember to find truth and realness in the little details of life.

Tips on Animation, part 2

Courtesy of Dan Jenkins genrosity, here's the rest of the booklet "Tips on Animation". It's actually a very sober, accurate, solidly composed basic animation guide--again, I wish it had been available when I was growing up. There's no "talking down" here, even though the target audience is one of kids. And who can't love the offer to (for an unspecified fee) actually shoot the juior animators' tests, and return them?

Disney's Tips on Animation, part 1

the Disney Animation Kit--an Ebay item I unfortunately didn't win about a month ago: this example shows what a swell item it really was for kids wanting to try their hand at the art of animation. The question is--why didn't Disney keep this sort of thing available for the next 30 years? I would have killed for one myself, but by the time I was old enough to read they were long gone.

Dan Jenkins, a reader of the Diaries and a serious collector of cool Disney items, has offered to share scans of the rest of the series of booklets that were sold both in the Disneyland's Art Corner in the early 1960s and as part of an incredibly cool "animation kit" that from the looks of this wasn't half bad. Herewith is the first of a series of posts of these fun "How to" books, "Tips On Animation"--and thanks, Dan!











Remember to click the images to open them in a larger window. More to follow.

Vorkapich-pure genius, never dated

Slavko Vorkapich was a genius of film, little known today although he personally contributed to incredible sequences in many Hollywood films of the 1930s. The first I ever saw was a hallucinogenic dream sequence he designed for the Claude Rains film "Crime Without Passion" which has to be seen to be believed; if my memory's correct, it probably helped inspire some of the more bizarre imagery in Fantasia's Bald Mountain sequence. Vorkapich was practically unique in his freelancing just montages for so many large scale films for different studios-which gives an indication that the studio bosses knew greatness when they saw it.

The clip here is of course of Vorkapich's visualization of the Great 1906 earthquake in MGM's "San Francisco", directed in all but this montage by W.S, Van Dyke("The Thin Man", among many others). The rest of the film is fairly straightforward romantic drama with Clark Gable at his staccato angriest, tempted as he is to decency by lovely Jeanette MacDonald. Spencer Tracy plays his usual tough Irish priest, friend to both the leads. But all the melodramatic twists of the plot pale next to this incredible, impressionistic, utterly jaw-dropping piece of cinema that represents a staggering disaster--made in 1936.

See how the tension in the conventional plot builds with Gable's public embarrassment of Jeanette, and how a few disturbing quick cuts to the audience members create a sense of unease and disturbance(probably Van Dyke's)...then as Jeanette walks through the crowd the familiar rumble of the earthquake starts, resulting in the actress stopping abruptly and turning back with a muffled, panicked "What's that?"--so clipped it almost sounds like an ad lib(it surely wasn't). Then here we go...

There's no music. The shots are seemingly erratic: the ceiling, the slivers of plaster, the glasses, the roar of the earthquake, the screaming starting...the sound building to the wheel falling--and then a second or two of pure silence.

It's still got every bit of its impact today. The only pity is that this is humble YouTube quality, and doesn't do it full justice. But what a lesson in editing for impact. I think we have a lot to learn from this.

There's one little historic inaccuracy: the actual earthquake struck at 5:15 am, not many hour earlier as the film's plot indicates, but that's a small caveat. Everything else shown is based on a reality that was--hard to imagine--only thirty years in the past at the time this was made.

Working on it

from my sketchblog. I've got to put something visual up, for pete's sake.

Simply because I myself get antsy when a blog doesn't update I thought I'd enter a little placeholder of a post to say that I'm currently in the process of writing a couple of things. There's a lot going on at work--even more than usual-- and a full plate outside of work, precluding much writing time. In the meanwhile I'm really enjoying zipping around having a good look at what everyone else is updating. There's an unbelievable amount of great stuff going up lately--especially personal artwork. If you haven't clicked through the links here lately, I urge you to do so--it's a long list but every one is a treat.

I did recently pull out my old facsimile copy of "The Mousetrap", a privately published...well, it's a kind of zine of the 1940s(very early 40s, I think--I believe the date is in the book). Contributors to this onetime magazine/book included Ward Kimball and Fred Moore--Moore's drawings from this publication(there are several pages of them) have been reproduced many places at various times, but as these copies are so good-looking I thought I'd scan them for inclusion here.
So that's one thing.

I've also been promised scans of the other "How To Draw" books that Disneyland sold in the 1950s: Chip and Dale, Mickey, and Donald among them. I'll be sure to put those up as soon as I received them--it's a lot of work for the owner to do, and he's been very generous to offer to share them here.

More soon, then. Happy midweek, everyone.

Calarts au courant: Lorelay Bove and Leo Matsuda

My friend Dave was waxing proudly on his class at Calarts.
He teaches story to second years, frequently asking friends and colleagues to come to Valencia to speak and offer the students some feedback.

Last night the guests were Shannon Tindle and Shane Prigmore, two artists Dreamworks is fortunate to have. Definitely visit their respective blogs.

And speaking of blogs, Dave introduced me to two current Calarts students you should know:


Spain's Lorelay Bove


And from Brazil, Leo Matsuda.

Both of these young artists have blogs filled with juicy eye candy. It's wonderful to think that they're at the very start of their careers. Heaven only knows who else is out there that we generally don't know about or stumble across in the blogosphere--that's what makes it especially fun to see the work of brand new talent. Great stuff, guys.

And the Oscar goes to...

I just turned on the Academy Awards in time to see Torill Kove win a heavy golden statuette for her animated short film "The Danish Poet", and it brought tears to my eyes. I loved Ms. Kove's charming film and am thrilled that she was so honored. But had any of the five nominees won I'd still have been sniffling.

I always get choked up seeing animators win Oscars. There's something so compelling, so right, so against the ever-widening grain of big business Hollywood when an individual who's an artist in the same line as myself and as the people I've always admired gets the same award that producers and directors and composers and movie stars do.

All the aforementioned are absolutely deserving, of course--but for animators it's often the only time they are honored on the same playing field as the most powerful people in what's arguably the world's most glamorous business. That they are still included in the ceremony is a proof to me that the Academy really values all filmic contributions--as it should, as it was created to do.

This is why I get annoyed when writers and pundits on both film and televison(who should know better) carp about their annual boredom at being forced to see "nobodies" like animators, sound designers, documentarians and set designers share the Oscar stage with what we're all supposed to be interested in--"stars". This, though as everyone knows the real reason that the ceremony runs four hours instead of two and a half is due to: too many montages(this comes from myself as a lover of clever and evocative montage--but after a few brilliant presentations that well's been drunk a bit dry); too much scripted banter that it's plain many of the participants would rather dispense with(thank you, George Clooney, for your always-welcome pointedness); and unwieldy ideas such as having the presenters for best screenplay read a segment of the script, alternating with the concurrent running of that particular clip of film--this, although god help the actual winner of best screenplay(adapted or original)--he or she will get a maxuimum of much too short a time before the music cuts them off.

But back to the animation nominees: the moment when an otherwise obscure artist is called to the stage is an amazingly emotional one...perhaps some guy writing for a newspaper somewhere doesn't care about it, but I'd bet Marty Scorsese (another jump-off-the-couch-and-scream moment for yours truly) and Thelma Schoonmaker(more screaming)do...editors are the friends of animation folk, dealing as they do with the painstaking assemblage of film. And directors--Scorsese knows as do most directors I'm sure--that animation is the ultimate experience of control of film. In the case of a massive feature, it's control that is shared with many people; with a short, it's one. Toiling on their films, I'm certain none of the filmmmakers are thinking of the Academy Awards...but for five of them, here they find themselves. In their recognition you have a perfect miniature of what the Academy is all about, really: not the TV show, or the glitz(that stuff is fun, no joke, mind you)--but the "honoring of our own", stretching back to 1931 and "Flowers and Trees"; Mary Pickford handing out a statuette to Walt Disney...and Bette Davis chairing an Academy meeting.

History makes me wistful. What was news last night is history now--and now maybe many many more people might see "The Danish Poet", and remember it.


So, congratulations again to Ms. Kove--and Gary Rydstrom, Roger Allers, Don Hahn, Geza Toth, Chris Renaud and Michael Thurmeier. I admire and am happy for all of you for getting there.

ADDENDUM: "The Danish Poet", along with several other nominated shorts both animated and live action, is available now for download for the tempting price of $1.99 on iTunes music store. No, I don't get a percentage.

tags technorati : academy awards. oscar, animation, danish poet, torill kove, film

SNAFU

The things I have lying around...this still has all the matches in it. One can only hope that the GI who got this heeded the message(where do you think it was distributed? The Hollywood Canteen perhaps?).

Good old Snafu!

More of Paul Carlson's "How to Draw Goofy"

Some of the interior pages from the aforementioned "How To Draw..." booklet. All of them will open in a much larger page when clicked. There are several more pages that really should be scanned, but time only permits me to do these at the moment. More later, so check back.

From the Disney Art Corner: "How to draw..."

I've had this for years, though I can't remember its exact provenance. I think it dates from the early 1960s, and was sold at the Disneyland Art Corner--the all too brief animation area of Tomorrowland, where cels from "Peter Pan" and "Sleeping Beauty" were scattered a foot deep in a bin for tourists to paw through, priced a buck or so apiece--while earlier, more valuable artwork from "Bambi", "Fantasia", etc. were matted and framed on the wall for a few dollars more.
Where'd I leave that time machine parked again?

The drawings inside are pretty much in the Walter Foster mold, clearly done by a studio veteran--a little staid for my taste, but miles better than what's usually done in this sort of book from the period. And thanks to Pete Docter, here's why--the artist was Paul Carlson, a Disney man with a great provenance. Pete was able to locate him and interview him at length when researching his article on John Sibley(which was published in the latest issue of Animation Blast, and is a must-read).
Pete writes:

"The books were put together by Paul
Carlson, who was an assistant to Marc Davis and Eric Cleworth back in
the 50's and 60's. He's a great guy with some amazing Disney stories.
Anyway Paul told me he consulted Sibley for the "How to Draw Goofy"
book, Bill Justice for Chip and Dale, Bob Carlson for Donald, and
Lounsberry for Mickey."

[There's a bit more about Carlson, along with a picture taken just last year, at this archived ASIFA-Hollywood page]

And lastly, a word to aspiring animators from the man himself--as valid today as in 1961:

As good as animated

Groucho and Margaret Dumont, his greatest straight man; from my big fat collection of original marx stills

Here's an original photograph from the first Marx Bros film, "The Cocoanuts", circa 1929[for sticklers, no, I won't count their lost silent "Humor Risk").

"Cocoanuts" had been a hit live show on Broadway and on the road for the Marxes so it was a natural project for their first sound film. They shot in New York's Astoria studio while simultaneously appearing on Broadway in the show that would become their second film, "Animal Crackers". By our standards--indeed by the standards of the mid-1930s--it's a crudely-shot and recorded film, more a record of the stage show than anything remotely filmic. Here Groucho's holding an important real estate map for Margaret Dumont's perusal. One detail that gives you an idea of the problems they had with very early sound recording: the paper Groucho holds here is damp, as in wet.
All the paper in the film--and there's plenty of it in many scenes--had to be soaked in water before filming as the crackling of the dry paper sounded like exploding conflakes run amok on the soundtrack. This eliminated the grating sound but made for very odd-looking documents. Watching Groucho doing his routine with Chico, trying to unfold a sopping map the size of 24-field paper...well, that's something. He manages it, though--of course. Did anything ever nonpluss Groucho? I actually crossed paths with The great man at my dentist's office, of all places, when I was a kid. I was in abject awe of him, even though he was then very, very old and fairly doddering, with his beret dwarfing his head.

I'm posting on this somewhat atypical topic because this photograph was handy this morning--and also because I believe the Marx brothers--eldest Chico("the Italian"), mute Harpo, cynic Groucho and baby brother Zeppo were and will always be one of the most brilliant, unique and inventive bunch of ex-vaudevillians ever to grace the medium of film. They occupy that rare niche that is inimitability: not to be copied. Their comedic stew is as fresh today as it was in the 1920s--an unbelievable achievment. It's rare that human beings exist that can't be caricatured in animation directly, so extreme are they already; the Marxes qualify. That said, their great films--the 5 they made at Paramount, and the 2 best of their MGM period--are fertile fields for any animation story person--any animation artist--to watch and learn from, even if nothing they do can be applied exactly as is. One comes away from watching their films with an exhilirating sense of freedom and fun. They are a tonic for anything that ails ya.
Obviously I'm a fan. If you haven't given them a try, though--start with, say, "Monkey Business", or "Duck Soup". Or "Horsefeathers". Well, any of them.
There's brilliant movement, dialogue, gags. Just a suggestion.

Closing Credits to Ernie Kovacs show

Here's one of those videos I couldn't get to post yesterday. Simple as it looks(and it was damned hard to do--the medium technically was as crude as could be, making even simple editing a problem), the thing on display here is the imagination and goofiness of Kovacs' stuff(even the credits)at a time when most TV was, well...he was unique. He's had a huge influence on me--and on a lot of other folks, including many artists.

ADDENDUM: Those new visitors to this blog who admire the particular genius of Kovacs as I do might like to read my previous post about him here.

Ernie Kovacs...

Kovacs somewhat skeptically regards his partner in crime and comedy--the television camera
...was born in the bowels of Trenton, New Jersey on this day in 1919.

Writer, actor, lover of UPA cartoons, doodler and prodigious loser at cards, his motto was "nothing in moderation". Look up what little there is on Youtube(I can't get the embedding to work today, for some reason).

The Artisanal Approach

Allow me a bit of a ramble here.

The New York Times has been writing a lot of articles on animation recently on almost a weekly basis. Naturally, from my perspective this is a great and good thing to see.
Today's story--making the front page of the Sunday Arts section-- details the background of a new animated feature being made in France, "Persepolis". It's based on a series of graphic memoirs by by Iranian expat Marjane Satrapi. I haven't read the books, just thumbed through them, but I think it'll make an interesting film to say the least--especially if it closely follows the style of the original artwork. And Paris is full of skilled animators that could give it as distinctive a type of animation as the style suggests.

a page from the first volume of "Persepolis"
If done well, a feature like this will be a must-see--a completely serious, truly graphic story in feature form. I can't wait.

There are some statements in the piece that are somewhat odd to me, however. Here's one:

“Persepolis” is a rarity in France: an animated feature that was entirely produced here, rather than being farmed out to Asian animators. The filmmakers favored an artisanal approach that includes hand-tracing the images on paper, an art long lost to computer animation software.

Have there really been any feature films in France that have been "farmed out" to Asia? Surely the writer is confusing televison work with features?
And the strange arms-length description of the dominant form of animation for the last 100 years as "artisanal"--making it sound slightly quaint, like illuminating texts or writing on foolscap with a goose quill. Admittedly my knowlege of the current state of French feature animation production isn't extensive, but as far as I know the art of 2D animation is far from foreign to the many talented working artists there. Someone show this lady the Gobelins website, stat!

The style of the animation references altogether reminds me of articles I've read in the past often containing statements that sound much more like quotes from a press kit or offerings from publicists than definitive facts about animation production that would have come from an filmmaker--or are well understood by the reporter.

Perhaps this is all cavilling over nothing, as the real point of the entire piece is to feature the author/artist, Ms. Satrapi, and give the backstory of her autobiographical comic. But the hook it's hung on is the A word--animation--and there's to me little sense that that's what's of true interest to the reporter. It was ever thus...or was it? While the accepted wisdom is that Walt Disney, that most famous of all animation producers/studio heads, promoted himself over the acknowledgement of his artist's individual achievements, a suprising number of articles on the Disney studio in its heyday of the 30s-50s actually did make mention of individuals and emphasize their importance to production.

Given that, one would think that 50 years later a much savvier public might be expected to have an interest in what real animation artists actually do, and who they are. I think they would.

Animated films are like none other in the history of filmmaking: more collaborative and labor-intensive than any other form, requiring more people of as high a caliber as can be got. By necessity the end product is a puppet show, an amazing magic trick of behind the scenes manipulation--orchestrated most often by producers and directors, but implemented and very often strongly influenced by every artist involved along the way. And as far as 2D/3D goes, it would be great to have it made clear once and for all that no matter how a film is animated--that is to say, what tools are used to give the illusion of life on the screen--every one of those films involves drawing, by artists. The visual development is drawn and/or painted. Storyboards are drawn; via tablet or paper, it's the same process. If no other important fact is added to the press kit, that one should be.

The knowledge of any of this isn't necessary for the enjoyment of an animated movie, but when the time comes to give out information and write articles about "how it's done", it seems that that would be the right time to bring this sort of thing up. If anyone's interested. I know I was, back then, and I know many kids(and adults)are now. When the opportunity comes along to actually educate the public about just how amazing animated films are--beyond the money spent on them or the sheer numbers involved--it would be wonderful to see it grasped. Why should we insiders keep it all to ourselves?