I am glad I didn’t say that the new Pinocchio release was perfect, just that it had accurate colors. DVNR is present on the new DVD, and while it’s not nearly as bad as the recent mutilation of Sleeping Beauty, it seems to be worst when the camera is moving (rather than when the characters do), as with this shot of the Coachman. I wonder if Disney has begun using DVNR (as they almost never have in the past) because it makes the image clearer for Blu-Ray. We should hope not.
Bill Tytla’s animation of Stromboli in this film is a marvel to look at. Every drawing carries an enormous amount of power. Tytla’s wonderful use of distortion to portray emotion here greatly foreshadows Rod Scribner’s work for Bob Clampett at Warners. But as Mark Mayerson said awhile ago, you can read Stromboli like a book; there’s no layers to this character. He’s just a psycho gypsy-fuck. It’s not as big a problem as it could have been, seeing how little screen time Stromboli has but I can’t help but feel Walt wasted his greatest animator in some ways. It’s a problem I have with just about all of the characters in Pinocchio, and also (to carry on with distortion) when watching too many of Clampett’s cartoons in one sitting too; too many generic, shallow characters, rather than multi-layered ones with real mental problems as in the very best ones. To make a food analogy, it’s too much frosting and not enough cake. These scenes of Stromboli are very broad and funny pieces of animation, but if you want to see Tytla putting most of these same rules into action with a multi-layered character, go back a few years to Grumpy.
I made a montage of Tytla’s animation of Stromboli: the scene where he has a shit fit over finding a single washer in the money he’s panhandled. Be forewarned: it’s about 4MB.
I also want to address a recent post over at Cartoon Brew, since it’s related to Tytla; the one erroneously attributing a piece of Little Audrey animation to Tytla. While it’s clear that this was just an innocent assumption made public (and that the actual Tytla drawing of Audrey looks nothing like the animation), some of the comments need to be addressed.
I’ve corresponded with Bob Jaques about it, and he recalled how he asked John Gentilella about Tytla; while he helped the animators and did an occasional drawing, Tytla never actually animated at Famous Studios. Something like this tells what I’ve known for years: that the credited “director” on the Famous shorts never really did any actual directing, they just supervised the voice recordings and the overall production. I’d be amazed if Kneitel or Sparber did a single drawing during their long careers at the studio.
This is the price we’re paying for years of Golden Age historians snubbing anything that came out of New York after the Fleischers left: this stuff wasn’t written down and recorded. Getting misty-eyed over anything spawned out of Disney and Warners, huge gaping holes with other studios’ histories were left in their wake. All people like me, who would have seen that it got recorded (and only haven’t because the artists are too dead to interview), have to go on are sparse interviews and anecdotes. I wonder how shallow art history in general would be if biases shaped how it was written.
I LOVED what you wrote in your last paragraph, Thad, and I can’t help but agree with you 100% since I’ve long suspected that animation history in general has been sorely neglected and understudied for years as well. I can’t help but wonder if Leonard Maltin’s “Of Mice and Magic” was the ONLY animation history book fans of the subject had to go by until just recently and if even that book for that matter reeked of biases (on Maltin’s behalf) of the kind you speak of (the Paramount/Famous Studios chapter itself, for example, seems to be somewhat lacking in terms of in-depth information in OM&M compared to the rather more detailed information Maltin went into for his Fleischer Studios chapter). It’s a shame.
You brought up a problem I’ve had with animation history books in general. The authors confused animation history with animation criticism, and the less respected bits of “history” were doomed to obscurity.
While I got a lot of help from “Talking Animals and Other People”, I’m still itching to learn more about Famous Studios history.
It’s too bad that Disney’s using DVNR on its features. It’s not as bad as it could have been, but that’s still pretty shoddy work on the Coachman. However, if you look at that picture in smaller view, it makes him look even more demonic because it looks like he has no pupils.
I like Bill Tytla’s animation in general. He put his heart and soul into all of his work.
I understand that the Mike Barrier book was originally twice as long as it was written. I wonder if the parts that were left out were about the “lesser” studios. All the interviews that were made for the book exist. I wonder how much of that information is about the people that we know so little about.
It’s ironic that Maltin gave such short-shrift to the Famous shorts, considering he was in New York for most of the time when “Of Mice and Magic” was being put together.
What is noticeable about the Famous shorts — at least in the late 1940s — is that while the head animator really was the one who controlled the main aspects of the cartoon, the director did have a certain amount of input on the final “look”of the cartoon. Sparber, without an animation background, was more likely to give the head animator freer reign to adjust the style and pacing of the cartoon to his liking, and Dan Gordon seemed to feel the same way, which may explain why Famous’ shorts were so good in the first few years of operations — they out-voted Seymour Knietel 2-to-1.
Kneitel just appears to have been more affected that he may have ever let on by the demands for “Disneyfication” of the Fleischer shorts in the late 30s, and as a former head animator for Max, he seems to have been more demanding that the cartoons out of his unit be “polished” in a West Coast way. The problem was the fastest way to polish a cartoon was to repeat the same actions, walks, looks and timing, which is what killed the studio by the end of the 1940s, where if they didn’t have a strong story, there was little in the animation that was going to surprise anyone into laughter.
It would have been nice if Tytla had come in and followed Sparber more than Kneitel, in allowing the head animators more leeway, but having just experienced both Disney and Terrytoons, he seems to have opted to follow Seymour’s lead (er, that is after “Service With a Guile”), and being outvoted 2-1, Sparber’s shorts also started taking on that cookie-cutter pacing style by about 1949 or so. Al Eugster’s UPA tinkering starting in late ’53 appears to be the first rebellion against Famous’ blandness, and there was a certain darkness about the one-shot Noveltoons from the 40s all the way into the 1960s that kept them from falling into the same bland animation/diabetic-sweet repetitive story trap that your average Casper always suffered from.
(And just as a side point — given Jerry’s posting of “The Plot Sickens” last week — given that Irv Spector was the darkest, non-kiddie oriented writer Paramount employed, do you think there was any hidden message in the fact that the meek husband who secretly wanted to murder his wife was named “Myron”? If Spector had killed off a small white dog and two mules in the cartoon, I’d be sure there was a message hidden there).
“I wonder how shallow art history in general would be if biases shaped how it was written.”
YOU MEAN THEY DON’T?!?
So much for a certain cartoonist saying Stromboli’s movement was all just “blustery”.
You have to remember that a director doesn’t animate. He directs animators. Tytla wouldn’t have animated at Paramount, but he did direct more than the soundtrack. He directed the entire film – including the performances from the animators.
I know of a story of Tytla standing in front of a mirror with a well-known animator discussing and practicing a dance. Tytla had his pants rolled up to reveal his legs and he kept embarrassing the animator trying to get him to do the same.
The other misconception you seem to have is that directors need to have been animators. Many great directors of animated film were not animators. They just had an appreciation of animation and knew what they wanted. Conversely many bad directors were made of great animators. It’s a different job.
“Many great directors of animated film were not animators. ”
I am curious, like who ?
“The other misconception you seem to have is that directors need to have been animators. Many great directors of animated film were not animators.”
You mean some one as ignorant as me could direct an animaed film? The Horror!
I mean Richard Rich aside, what other non animator could competently (sarcasm) direct an animated film?
Michael Sporn didn’t say that anyone who can’t draw can direct a cartoon. He said that you don’t have to have been an ANIMATOR first in order to direct. (Whether Sporn believes that a non-artist can direct a cartoon, I can’t say)
There were instances where a layout artists or a story men became a director. Hawley Pratt worked primarily as a layout artist for most of his career and he became a competent director in the sixties.
John K also fits this trope. He spent most of his pre-Ren & Stimpy days as a storyboard and layout artist to a bunch of terrible Saturday Morning cartoons. He did some animation for commercials but not to the level of getting a hand of it (John admitted it himself; he only did animations on his cartoons if he absolutely had to).
Whether John was a good director or not is, um, debatable, so I won’t say.
“Whether Sporn believes that a non-artist can direct a cartoon, I can’t say”
Whether Michael Sporn belives it or not (and I think he does), it has happened before. Like I said, Richard Rich is one of them: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0723704/
That he co-directed The Black Cauldron speaks volumes on the subject.
holy shit those are awesome screen grabs of stromboli and the colors and incredible. i need to see pinnocchio again
John Hubley was one of the most famous of all animation directors, and he was not an animator. He was a designer, and he could draw better than any animator I’ve met. Maurice Noble directed frequently enough for Jones, though he wasn’t great at it. Ted Parmalee started in the effects department at Disney, moved to story and design and directed many of UPA’s best. There are more, but it’s a waste of my time listing.
I don’t think anyone working in animation should be able to draw. I’m not sure that’s the case today.
Thad, if you’re interested in the video terminology, this doesn’t appear to be DVNR in the typical sense. Digital Vision’s DVNR hardware takes motion into account and causes artefacts like you describe (artefacts relating to movement).
I’m not sure what was used to clean this release up, but it uses the “freeze the background” approach which makes me think DTS Digital Images did it. I’m a bit disconcerted that Disney is on an anti-grain crusade at the moment and is having them make their back catalogue look as if it was shot digitally. Granted the effect is convincing, but it’s wrong all the same, and I found it quite distracting when I watched it on a projection setup.
It’s often this grain removal which causes this effect. If the outlines appear thin, it’s because originally, they were under a blanket of grain (see the opening fade in to the bar in the Coachman’s introductory scene, which will have been an optical shot due to the fades used, and thus granier). Simply put, the grain covering it means that this info isn’t easily retrievable in the first place, and removing it simply draws attention to it.
In the image you post, it’s not a case of a DVNR device mistaking the lines for scratches and removing them, it’s (as far as I can tell) the combination of a grainy shot which was also photographed slightly out of focus. Because the lines would have been softened anyway due to the focus, the grain reduction algorithm has a harder time knowing what to keep and what to remove.
The point of my post (other than video geekery) is basically that, it’s not a case of carelessness on Disney (or whoever they had do the job)’s part, but it’s more a case of them taking the aesthetic of the film to a place where it was never supposed to be in the first place.
But regardless, having Pinocchio on Blu-ray Disc means that it’s the closest to the original release as we’ve ever seen. While I think studios need to stop their revisionist policies, I think animation fans need to realise that watching low-quality standard definition media on a television screen is a far cry from the quality of a 35mm print in a theater.
I wonder how shallow art history in general would be if biases shaped how it was written.
Ever read Kenneth Clark? His work was exactly as above. A lot of blathering about what he preferred as the pinnacle, and nothing else. To some he’s still the be-all and end-all.