Cartoon Modern

Wow, it certainly took me long enough to get around to discussing the work of Eyvind Earle (1916-2000). Earle painted and designed backgrounds for many of the Disney shorts in the 1950s, including MELODY, TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM, PIGS IS PIGS, THE TRUTH ABOUT MOTHER GOOSE and PAUL BUNYAN. He was also the art director of SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) and largely set the tone for the look of the film’s backgrounds. There is no question that Earle produced some excellent work during the 1950s, particularly on the Disney shorts, but in my opinion, his art direction on SLEEPING BEAUTY was an artistic failure. It took me a long time to understand why I didn’t like Earle’s art direction on the film. That’s because in and of themselves, there are some beautiful backgrounds throughout SLEEPING BEAUTY. It’s not that Earle’s vision for the film is poor; it’s that as art director, his vision extended only as far as his backgrounds and didn’t encompass the needs of the entire film.

The costliest mistake was that Walt Disney granted an inexperienced animation artist like Earle so much control over the look of the film. When Earle was made the film’s art director in 1955, his total experience in animation totalled less than four years. He failed to understand the nature of animation production, which demands a creative give-and-take between competing artistic visions. Instead, Earle insisted that everybody follow his unwavering artistic ideas, not recognizing that his vision wasn’t expansive enough to carry an entire animated feature on its own. He ended up alienating himself from the animation crew, and didn’t pay attention to how his backgrounds worked in context of the character designs, animation and storytelling. Perhaps that’s one reason why people frequently describe the film’s look as ‘cold.’ Earle was unable to bridge the visual gap between backgrounds and characters, and there is an uneasy distance between the film’s visual elements. Granted, Tom Oreb did a commendable job of styling the character designs to fit into Earle’s visual scheme, but it is a superficial stylization that wasn’t followed through by the animation director or the animators.

The poor visual harmony of SLEEPING BEAUTY is moreso apparent when placed alongside Disney’s follow-up feature 101 DALMATIANS. Here is a terrific example of what happens when an entire crew is on the same page. DALMATIANS screenwriter and storyboard artist Bill Peet, who set the tone of the film’s design, had worked in animation for over twenty years, and he understood the type of characters that could work in animation. Peet’s direct and sketchy visual styling was picked up by the film’s art director Ken Anderson, who developed the look of the film in tandem with other artists like layout stylist Ernie Nordli, color stylist Walt Peregoy and character stylist Tom Oreb. Animator Marc Davis, who was sympathetic to the modernist qualities of the film, delivered one of the finest animation performances of his career, Cruella de Vil. 101 DALMATIANS feels solid visually because it was creatively inclusive and the entire crew was working together, unlike SLEEPING BEAUTY where a single individual took charge of the design and unsuccessfully tried to force the entire production to adapt to his stylistic eccentricities.

Below are some of Earle’s concept paintings for SLEEPING BEAUTY. The first two are extremely atypical of what we’ve come to associate with the SLEEPING BEAUTY style. One is a stark drawing of trees that recalls German Expressionist woodcuts. The other is a black-and-white painting of organic, abstract birds flying through some dreamlike space. The other two paintings, which look more traditionally Earle, are color keys from the film.

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This will be the last post about ROOTY TOOT TOOT for a while. The following are sequential frame grabs from scenes animated by Pat Matthews. One thing that really stands out to me about these drawings is how much liberty Matthews takes with Hubley’s character designs. Hubley had established clearly what the characters should look like, but he did not stifle the animators so that they could not add a bit of themselves into the work. Matthews, who had a strong ‘cartoony’ animation background, took advantage of the opportunity and really pushed the design of the character Johnny. His drawings have a slightly grotesque quality, which is perfectly expressive of the frantic happenings in his scenes.

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Below are more of John Hubley’s model drawings from ROOTY TOOT TOOT. His gestural designs are so incredibly rich and give the animators so much to work with; it was a real treat to finally see this film projected on the bigscreen at the Egyptian last weekend. These drawings were originally in color, like the image from the post below, but who knows where the actual artwork is. Thankfully, artists like Alan Zaslove and Pete Burness saved tons of photostat model sheets from UPA, giving us access to at least black-and-white versions of Hubley’s drawings. If anybody out there is handy with Photoshop and wants to try restoring the red color and black ink lines, feel free to give it a shot and if it’s accurate, I’ll post the version up here.

UPDATE: Woodrow Phoenix took me up on the offer and colorized the Hubley model sheet. It looks much better now. You can compare it to this original Hubley drawing in an earlier post. Thanks Woodrow!

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And if you prefer the black-and-white photostat, here’s my original scan:

Here is another John Hubley concept from ROOTY TOOT TOOT. This one is an original whereas the previous image was a color xerox.

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The July 1951 edition of HARPER’S BAZAAR had a two-page spread about ROOTY TOOT TOOT. The article had a half-dozen of John Hubley’s concept sketches, along with the following photo of Hubley and the film’s choreographer Olga Lunick, whose movements were filmed as reference for the animators.

I just had to follow-up on Michael Sporn’s terrific scans of a 1952 LIFE magazine article about John Hubley’s short ROOTY TOOT TOOT (1952). The piece below is a character concept by Hubley of two of the film’s main characters—Frankie and her lawyer, Honest John. These designs were beautifully translated to animation, by the likes of Art Babbitt and Pat Matthews, who managed to bring the characters to life while retaining the daring graphic quality of Hubley’s original drawings. ROOTY TOOT TOOT can be seen this Sunday on the bigscreen, in all its 35mm glory, at the Egyptian Theatre in LA.

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To continue from the previous entry, here is a UPA crew photo taken in spring 1955, shortly after UPA had won the Oscar for WHEN MAGOO FLEW.

I’ve been able to identify the following people in the photo:

Top row: (left to right): Bob Dranko, Joe Siracusa, Ray Thursby, David Weidman, Alan Zaslove, unknown, Tom McDonald, unknown, unknown, Charleen Peterson, Osmond Evans, Bud Partch, unknown, unknown, Alex Ignatiev, Harry Hess, Rev Chaney, Sam Clayberger, Bob McIntosh, Morey Fagin, Buddy Getzler, Aurelius Battaglia, Jack Eckes.

Second row: (starts halfway in the middle) Earl Burnett, all women unidentified.

Third row: Frank Smith, Maurin Faillace, Rudy Larriva, Stan Wilkins, unknown, Al Wade, Henrietta Jordan, Jules Engel, Barney Posner, unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown.

Bottom row: Lew Keller, Herb Klynn, Bobe Cannon, Steve Bosustow, Pete Burness, unknown, Cecil Surry, unknown, Ed Friedman, unknown, unknown.

Right around the time of this photo, UPA signed a deal with CBS to produce THE BOING BOING SHOW. They would embark on a major expansion drive around summer and fall ‘55, with the studio hiring more artists between 1955 and 1956 than at anytime else in its history. The BOING BOING SHOW was an exciting time for UPA and would prove to be its last notable achievement before the studio’s slide into mediocrity.The new artists who joined UPA for the BOING BOING SHOW comprised a mix of animation veterans and graphically-oriented art school recruits. They included Jimmy Murakami, Ernie Pintoff, Dolores Cannata, John Urie, Roy Morita, John Whitney, Phil Duncan, Ervin Kaplan, Rod Scribner, Shirley Silvey, Ed Levitt, Dun Roman, Mordi Gerstein, Tod Dockstader, Gerry Ray, Gil Turner and Norm Gottfredson. I wish a crew photo existed with all these other artists, but, as far as I’m aware, the photo above was the last group shot taken of the entire UPA crew.

Here’s a cool photo of the UPA crew, ca. 1950, standing outside their then-new John Lautner-designed animation studio.

Below is a key that identifies some of the folks in the photo. Click on it for a bigger version. And remember that next weekend at the Egyptian Theatre in LA, you’ll be able to hear in person from some of the amazing animators in this photo, namely Bill Melendez, Alan Zaslove and Willis Pyle.

As you may recall, I put out a call for help last December asking readers to offer their suggestions on the cover for CARTOON MODERN. Well, Chronicle and I took everybody’s suggestions, gave them due consideration, and then did something completely different, though I have a feeling that everybody’s comments did help instill a stronger sense of direction in finding an approach. Also, as I discovered, the cover is the one part of the book where everybody at Chronicle wants to have their say. It was a true balancing act trying to achieve a cover that pleased me as well as the folks at Chronicle. Here’s a tip of the hat to Chronicle designer/art director Brett MacFadden, who had to take in a lot of different opinions, including way too many from me, and somehow manage to pull it all together into an elegant package.

Before I unveil the cover, here’s an interesting fact I learned about Chronicle Books which I did not previously know: Chronicle has a ‘cover board,’ a mysterious group of individuals that I know very little about, except that they really really like the color yellow. And I mean, REALLY.

I’d love to hear everybody’s opinions on the cover—positive, negative and everything in between. (PS: The image quality will improve in the final printed version.)

The front cover

The full wrap (click on it to enlarge)

One of the unexpected great things about doing this blog has been seeing folks create new drawings and paintings inspired by the artwork posted here. I did a post about some of the “inspired by CARTOON MODERN” artwork last month. Here’s a few more. The two digital sketches below were done by Doug McCarthy at Disney, who told me he couldn’t resist knocking these out after seeing some of the stuff posted here. I particularly like all the asymmetrical shapes he works into the design of the kid.

And here’s a gypsy girl painting by Sheridan illustration student Rosemary Travale. She says it was inspired by the Mary Blair posts from a couple weeks ago.

There’s still so much Tom Oreb work to show, particularly commercial stuff and SLEEPING BEAUTY designs. But I thought it’d only be appropriate to wrap the week up with the classic Ward Kimball short TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM. Below is a storyboard drawing by Tom Oreb and a still from the finished scene. Oreb may have done a more detailed layout/design leading up to the final scene, but one thing that becomes clear from the still is how much of a team effort a film like TOOT WHISTLE was. Kimball’s directorial vision and Oreb’s designs set the tone, but it was Eyvind Earle’s electric color styling and Marc Davis’s incredible animation that truly made this particular scene complete. Great animated films can only happen when the entire crew is on the same page, and there’s no better example of this than TOOT WHISTLE.

A couple model sheets by Tom Oreb for pre-rabbit Trix commercials. These were done for Disney’s TV commercial unit, most likely in 1955.

PAUL BUNYAN (1958) would have been an amazing short if it had had a director like Ward Kimball who understood that Tom Oreb’s stylized designs demanded a similarly stylized approach to the animation. As it is, it’s not a horrible film, but it could have been so much more. Here are a few of Tom’s original designs.

I’d never had any reason to think that Oreb had been involved significantly in the design of Maleficent’s goons in SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959). Bill Peet wrote in his autobiography that he had had a lot of fun working on the sequences with the goons so I’d assumed that he was generally responsible for the look of those characters. But yesterday, I ran across these amazing (and overpriced) photostats on this animation art site. I’m not 100% that these are Oreb’s drawings, but everything about them—from the sophisticated way the characters are constructed to the posing—is pure Oreb. Also, none of the other artists who were involved in the production design of the film (Don DaGradi, Ken Anderson, Bill Peet) drew like this. The only other artist at Disney who, I think, could have drawn characters with such careful attention to design was Ward Kimball. If anybody can confirm whether Oreb did these or not, please let us know.

Tom Oreb was the primary designer of Disney’s short-lived TV commercial division in the mid-1950s. One of his assigments was to redesign the Disney feature characters for use in TV spots, and he created ’simplified’ models of characters from SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, PINOCCHIO, SONG OF THE SOUTH, CINDERELLA, PETER PAN and ALICE IN WONDERLAND, as well as streamlining the shorts characters like Mickey and Donald. Below is a model sheet he did for PETER PAN.

So thanks to Ward Jenkins, who decided to scan in Tom Oreb’s Golden Book, we’ve got Tom Oreb Week at CARTOON MODERN. The problem with doing a book like CARTOON MODERN, which is about dozens of amazing designers who have barely received any credit, is that it’s impossible to devote large chunks of the book to any single individual. Oreb (1913-1987) gets quite a bit of play in the book, and he deserves it, being one of the greats of 1950s animation design; he designed Tex Avery’s SYMPHONY IN SLANG (1951) and Ward Kimball’s TOOT WHISTLE PLUNK AND BOOM (1953), and was the character stylist on the Disney features SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959) and 101 DALMATIANS (1961). But no doubt, there was a lot of his work that I was unable to fit in simply for a lack of space, and also for wanting to be fair to the other deserving designers of the era. One thing that got left out is this model sheet of character suggestions he did for the rabbits in SLEEPING BEAUTY (1959). Oreb manages to make these rabbits super-cute and super-appealing without getting too saccharine, which is a very difficult balance to achieve.

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Below is part of the model sheet for the final rabbit design used in the film. I’m fairly certain that these are an animator’s interpretation of Oreb’s designs, and that Oreb didn’t do the final design on the character. It’s not a bad translation, but it definitely loses something in the transition from concept to final model, and it’s not just Oreb’s delightful rendering that’s gone. I’d be curious to hear your comments and to get a discussion going about what everybody thinks about the concepts and final models—Is there any way that Oreb’s designs could have been better interpreted for animation or is this as good as can be expected? What exactly is lost in the move from concept to finalized design? Is the character still cute or not?