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This is a very special post. Here is the complete storyboard to the pilot cartoon for The Alvin Show (1961). This is the board that Format Films and Ross Bagdasarian Sr. (aka: David Seville) used to pitch the show to the networks. It was probably done by Disney/UPA storyman, Leo Salkin. Salkin was the Associate Producer on the series and handled a lot of the story duties, working side by side with Bagdasarian to develop both the Chipmunk and Clyde Crashcup cartoons.
I know that this might look like a checkerboard on your screen at this resolution. I made an extra effort to make the large size images big enough for you to read clearly, so please click on the pages and take the time to sit down and read this from beginning to end. I think you’ll be amazed at how well it plays in your head. It’s like you’re watching the cartoon.
The drawings are simple, yet funny and expressive. Note how the compositions frame the action clearly, without clutter. Many current TV shows repeat the same oblique two-shot setups over and over. But this board keeps things interesting through clever staging and cutting.This is truly a model for television storyboard artists to follow. Enjoy!
Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of e-books packed with high resolution scans video downloads of rare animated films set up for still frame study, as well as podcasts and documentaries— all designed to help you become a better artist. Make sure you download this Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!
The latest Animation Resources Reference Pack has been uploaded to the server. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find when you log in to the members only page…
In 1907, Swinnerton was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was given two months to live. William Randolph Hearst was fond of him, and sent him West to Colton, California in hopes that the mild weather and dry air would help his illness. Swinnerton’s tuberculosis cleared up completely and he never left the West for the East coast again.
Traveling and living in Arizona, Swinnerton’s art began reflecting a Southwest desert landscape. He befriended Native American locals and treated them as peers. He was quoted as saying, "No one can become bigoted and narrow in the midst of broad desert vistas and great canyon walls." Good Housekeeping magazine hired him to produce full color single page stories about Native American children called Canyon Kiddies. Chuck Jones admired the comics and hired Swinnerton to work on an animated adaptation called "Mighty Hunters" in 1940.
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Two More Commercial Reels Mid 1950s
Television commercials are so ubiquitous, we rarely give them a second thought. But a great deal of strategy goes into their creation. A commercial is designed to do three things… First, it must create a desire in the public’s mind for a particular product or service. Beautifully photographed scenes of steaming hot coffee being poured into cups; syrup dripping down the sides of buttered stacks of pancakes, pizzas being pulled out of ovens… all this is designed to get us salivating for the product. Secondly, an advertisement should build brand awareness and convince the audience that the sponsor’s product is better than that of the competitors. We are told that a product is “new and improved”, or it’s the brand doctors recommend, or studies show it’s 25% more effective against arthritis pain. Lastly, and this is often overlooked, a commercial is expected to engage and entertain the audience. Animated television commercials can inspire desire and build brand awareness as well as live action can, but it’s particularly effective at achieving that last goal.
Animation Resources has shared many commercial reels with its members in the past, and we’re happy to share two more courtesy of our Advisory Board member, Steve Stanchfield.
The Legend Of The Forest (1st Mvt.) Osamu Tezuka / Japan / 1987 Download this article
Throughout his life, Osamu Tezuka greatly admired Disney’s Fantasia, and aspired to make a film that synthesized classical music and animation in the same manner. He chose Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony Op. 36 as a soundtrack and set to work on animating his impressions of the music. Tezuka’s concept for "Legend Of The Forest" was to use the forest as a metaphor for the development of animation as a technique. The animation would mirror the step by step advancement of animation techniques from primitive animatics based on comics, like the early years of animation; and as the film progressed, the style would develop as animation developed, all the way to full animation. In the fourth movement, TV animation would invade the Disney style and drive it out, the way TV animation techniques replaced the labor intensive full animation of the 1940s and 50s.
Tezuka only completed the first and fourth movement before his death. We are sharing the first movement in this Reference Pack, and we will share the fourth one in the next.
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The Music Box Nikolai Khodataev / Russia / 1933
The state sponsored studio Mezhrabpomfilm, employed most of the animators in Russia at that time, but Nikolai Khodataev was an exception. As an independent animator, he could come up with his own stories without the interference of government censors. "The Music Box" was more primitive technically than the state sponsored films, but creatively it was much more daring. The designs were by Daniel Cherkes and were highly stylized with a sinuous inked line, not unlike the drawings in contemporary caricature journals and avant-garde posters. The film was quite different than anything being made at that time, but ultimately that difference led to its downfall.
A year after "The Music Box" was released, Stalin declared that Socialist Realism was the only artistic movement that would be allowed, and the work of Khodataev was suppressed. While other artists sublimated themselves to Stalin’s decree, Khodataev chose to abandon his work in animation, feeling that it was better to have no art at all than to be limited to Socialist Realism. Other animators, principally Ivan Ivanov-Vano, carried the torch at the government controlled studios, and Soyuzmultfilm was founded in 1936.
Sensation Of The Century Otto Sacher / DEFA / East Germany / 1959
Otto Sacher was born in 1928 and studied at the Institute for Artistic Design in Halle, East Germany. In 1955, he founded the Animation department of the DEFA Studios, the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic. DEFA was created in 1946 by the Soviets in the hopes that film was the best means to counter over a decade of Nazi propaganda. The style of DEFA was known as “Socialist Realism”, an ideologically focused kind of film that was tightly controlled by Soviet censors.
Strangely enough, DEFA was known for producing Westerns, but ones where the Indians were the “good guys” and the cowboys were the “bad guys”. The intent was to make the United States appear to be evil. In the mid 1950s, the studio began producing satirical films, and animation was the perfect medium for this. "Sensation Of The Century" is one of the earliest examples.
Kaibutsu-Kun is a horror-comedy series which follows a boy named Tarou Kaibutsu. He is accompanied by his monster friends Dracula, Wolfman and Franken. He also has a human friend named Hiroshi. Throughout the series they encounter all kinds of monsters, and in many cases are put at odds with them. The series was created by Fujiko Fujio, best known for his creation Doraemon. Production alternated between Tokyo Movie (known today as TMS Entertainment) and Studio Zero. It aired from April 21st, 1968 to March 23rd, 1969.
Gutsy Frog (known as Dokonjo Gaeru in Japanese) is a comedy series created by Yasumi Yoshizawa. It also happens to feature a boy by the name Hiroshi, who mistakenly fell on a frog (Pyonkichi). The frog sticks to his shirt and becomes his companion. The series was produced by Tokyo Movie Shinsha and ran from October 7th, 1972 to September 28th 1974, spanning over one hundred episodes.
Animators are called upon to animate the human figure in motion. They need to know how the body flexes and contracts, they have to be able to turn the masses in three dimensions, and they need to be able to convey personality through posing and gesture. There is no better way to develop these skills than figure drawing.
The nicest thing about drawing from sculpture is that the model is more patient and doesn’t get tired of holding a pose. The student has all the time he needs to capture all the planes and masses that make up the human figure. But it has to be a very special kind of sculpture to directly relate to live human models. Gian Lorenzo Bernini is one of the greatest sculptors for this purpose. His knowledge of musculature and skeletal structure is encyclopedic. His figures exude life and energy from all angles and all distances. A lifetime could be spent studying his work. Animation is a competitive field, and the best way to gain the edge and remain employed is to work on your figure drawing chops. I hope this documentary inspires you to do that.
While hand articulation may be the most technically challenging of all the principles, hair and fur simulation is perhaps the most tedious. The reasons behind such tedium are multifaceted. There is, of course, the difficulty involved with tracking each individual strand of hair or fray of fur. The more realistic the animator wishes the hair or fur to be, the more individual lines required. Thus, with each additional line, the difficulty of tracking increases exponentially. Additionally, the animator must juggle the movement of the individual strands versus the mass as a whole. If the movement of each strand is uniform and identical, the flow of the hair or fur will feel stale and lifeless. However, if the animator fails to coordinate the individual movements of the strands, the flow and rhythm of the mass of hair will not coalesce, and the hair or fur will move like a chaotic jumble that the viewer will almost certainly not recognize. Moreover, both the individual strands and the group of strands must follow the wave principle.
EBOOK: Simplicissimus Vol. One December 1903-March 1904
VIDEO: Astro Boy Pilot Tezuka 1963
VIDEO: “Sno Fun” Terry / 1951
ANIMATION RESOURCES ANNUAL MEMBERS: Bonus Reference Pack 7 is now being rerun and is now available for download. It includes an e-book of the influential German caricature magazine, Simplicissimus, the pilot episode of Tezuka’s Astro Boy, and a Terry-Toon in HD featuring amazing animation by Jim Tier. These downloads will be available until January 1st and after that, they will be deleted from the server. So download them now!
If you are currently on a quarterly membership plan, consider upgrading to an annual membership to get access to our bonus page with even more downloads. If you still have time on you quarterly membership when you upgrade to an annual membership, email us at…
Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.
Haven’t Joined Yet?
Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!
Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.
Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!
It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
Every other month, Animation Resources shares a new Reference Pack with its members. They consist of e-books packed with high resolution scans video downloads of rare animated films set up for still frame study, as well as podcasts and documentaries— all designed to help you become a better artist. Make sure you download this Reference Pack before it’s updated. When it’s gone, it’s gone!
The latest Animation Resources Reference Pack has been uploaded to the server. Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll find when you log in to the members only page…
Ollie Harrington was described by writer Langston Hughes as "America’s greatest African-American cartoonist". Harrington became a well known figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1930s largely due to his single panel cartoons for the Amsterdam News under the title, "Dark Laughter". Bootsie was a typical African American man dealing with life in Harlem. The cartoon often dealt with issues of racial inequality, segregation and poverty. Harrington’s work is forceful and hard hitting without being didactic. Instead, it’s brutally honest, showing both the good and bad of life as a black man living in pre-Civil Rights era America. I think you’ll find that a lot of the issues raised in these old cartoons are still a relevant part of our modern lives.
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The Littlest Giant John Sutherland Productions (1957)
In 1945, John Sutherland opened an animation studio, producing animated short films for United Artists as well as industrial and propaganda films. Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, his studio averaged about twenty films a year, many of them financed by a grant from Alfred P. Sloan, the head of General Motors. These films promoted the values of capitalism and the American way of life. Other films were financed by large corporations, like General Electric and U.S. Steel.
Sutherland’s films had high production values thanks to the top artists that worked under him. Carl Urbano directed the film we are sharing here, with Victor Haboush providing the design. The animators on this short include George Cannata, Ken O’Brien and Tom Ray, and the music is by Eugene Poddany. That’s a staff that would be the envy of any major animation studio.
The Wan Brothers (Wan Laiming, Vancomyein Toad, Wan Chaochen and Wan Dihuan) were greatly impressed by the cartoons from America. In 1940, they began work on their own 8,000 foot, 80 minute long sound cartoon film, Tieshangongzhu (aka Princess Iron Fan), completing it a year later. This film lay a solid foundation for the Wan Brothers’ career in animation production. Twenty years later, they released a feature film based on another part of the Monkey King saga, Hue And Cry Over The Sky, and followed that up in 1964 with a third segment titled Big Trouble. The last two films were later screened together with an intermission and titled Havoc In Heaven.Princess Iron Fan is a combination of rotoscope and the surreal metamorphosis animation of the wildest Fleischer cartoons. This film is like no other you’ve ever seen.
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Mr. Rossi Buys A Car Bruno Bozzetto / Italy / 1967
Bruno Bozzetto is an Italian animator known for his parody of Fantasia titled Allegro Non Troppo. His other feature films include a superhero parody called VIP My Brother Superman and a spaghetti western parody titled West And Soda. Bozzetto’s work is often satirical and political in nature, championing the common man and lampooning government inefficiency and oppression.
Bozzetto’s most famous character is Signor Rossi, an everyman figure he featured in many animated shorts and three feature films, Mr. Rossi Looks For Happiness,Mr. Rossi’s Dreams, and Mr. Rossi’s Vacation. In the short film we are sharing today, Mr. Rossi buys a car which changes his entire demeanor from a normal calm individual to a speed demon burning with road rage.
Happy Merry Go Round was a long-running series of films produced by Soyuzmultfilm. The intent was to provide a format for the directors there to create experimental films. The episode we are sharing today is the first in the series. It includes four short films: "Mosaic" a film with animals designed in the form of mosaics, "Antoshka" a song about a lazy boy who refuses to dig potatoes, "Distracted Giovanni" a cartoon in the style of Ferdinand Lèger about a boy who loses his body parts, and "Well, Just You Wait!" the story of a wolf chasing a rabbit.
The Russian State Committee for Cinematography criticized Happy Merry-Go-Round for "using children’s cinema as a proving ground for abstract art", but critics praised it for its creative freedom and diversity of styles. A lot of young animators received their first opportunity to direct on the series, allowing them to develop a personal style before moving on to create their own series.
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Professor Balthazar in “The Inventor Of Shoes” Zlatko Grgic / Zagreb Films, Croatia / 1967
In a previous Reference Pack we featured several Maxi-Cat mini-cartoons by Zlatko Grgic, a Croatian animator who later emigrated to Canada to join the Canadian Film Board. Grgic is best known for his series of cartoons featuring the character Professor Balthazar, an old man who solves problems for his friends by creating inventions with a magical machine. Produced between 1967 and 1973, the series ran all over the world. Its silent pantomime with voice over narration made it easy to translate to other countries. It aired everywhere from New Zealand to Romania to Zimbabwe. In the United States it was featured on Chuck Jones’ television program, Curiosity Shop.
Professional wrestling seems like an unlikely subject for an animated cartoon series, but in 1969 Toei Animation produced a show based on the manga "Tiger Mask" by Ikki Kajiwara and Naoki Tsuji. Directed by Takeshi Tamiya, this series is interesting because although the animation is extremely limited, it pulls off complex action with a clever combination of dynamic posing, camera moves and forced perspective. Unlike a lot of Japanese action animation, the drawings are loose and volumetric, exhibiting considerable knowledge of figure drawing. We are sharing two complete episodes of this rarely seen series in RefPack054.
Easy Street & The Aventurer Charlie Chaplin / 1917 / Analysis By Disney Studio Staff / 1937 Download this article
Charlie Chaplin was also the first international superstar. When he signed the contract to make a dozen films for Mutual in 1916, he was guaranteed $10,000 a week with a $150,000 signing bonus. Factoring for inflation, that is a quarter of a million dollars a week with a 4 1/2 million dollar signing bonus!
When a new Chaplin film was released, every animation studio went as a group to see it. The artists would go back again and again to study his films. Studio libraries contained 16mm prints of his films for the animators to study. When Don Graham set up the artist’s training program at the Disney Studio, one of the first things he did was to establish Action Analysis classes where they would screen a film and break it down frame by frame, finding the fundamental principles of staging and performance that animators could learn from and apply to their own work. We don’t have to speculate about what was discussed in these Action Analysis sessions, because a studio stenographer recorded them, and some of them have survived. In this Reference Pack, we are sharing two Chaplin films, "Easy Street" and "The Adventurer", along with the notes from the staff meeting at Disney in 1937.
The head turn is one of the earliest intermediate level animation exercises assigned to students. In said exercise, the animator must animated a head – character of one’s choosing – spinning in place for one complete revolution. This assignment is meant to test five principles: solid drawing, spacing, position, tracking, and wrapping. In our current Reference Pack, David Eisman provides examples and breaks down these principles so you can incorporate them into your own animated performances.
AUDIO PODCAST:
Stephen Worth Interview Animated Discussions 013 / Hosted by Jennifer Crittenden with Bill Aho Download this article
Jennifer Crittenden hosts a wonderful podcast featuring creative people called Books, Shows, Tunes & Mad Acts. She recently interviewed Animation Resources president Stephen Worth along with Bill Aho, and the discussion covered a variety of topics. When you have some free time, check out the interview. It was a lot of fun.
ANIMATION RESOURCES ANNUAL MEMBERS: Bonus Reference Pack 06 is now being rerun and is now available for download. It includes an eye-popping pair of animated features from China (Hue And Cry Over The Sky and Big Trouble) along with a documentary on the people who made it, the legendary Wan Brothers. These downloads will be available until September 1st and after that, they will be deleted from the server. So download them now!
If you are currently on a quarterly membership plan, consider upgrading to an annual membership to get access to our bonus page with even more downloads. If you still have time on you quarterly membership when you upgrade to an annual membership, email us at…
Whew! That is an amazing collection of treasures! At Animation Resources, our Advisory Board includes great artists and animators like Ralph Bakshi, Will Finn, J.J. Sedelmaier and Sherm Cohen. They’ve let us know the things that they use in their own self study so we can share them with you. That’s experience you just can’t find anywhere else. The most important information isn’t what you already know… It’s the information you should know about, but don’t know yet. We bring that to you every other month.
Haven’t Joined Yet?
Check out this SAMPLE REFERENCE PACK! It will give you a taste of what Animation Resources members get to download every other month!
Animation Resources is a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing self study material to the worldwide animation community. If you are a creative person working in animation, cartooning or illustration, you owe it to yourself to be a member of Animation Resources.
Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!
It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
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