A. Film L.A. test

The studio is moving! In an effort to consolidate functions, A. Film will have this new address from next week: A. Film A/S Mosedalvej 14 2500 Valby Denmark [We are still in Copenhagen, but in a part that has its own name...] Some of you may recognize the address: for a hundred years it has been the address of the Film Studio Nordisk Film . Arguably the oldest constantly-producing film studio in the world, Nordisk Film was started November 6th, 1906 . Yes, Pathé is ten years older, but it has not had the same continuity... This Friday afternoon, after the main move, we will have a "House Cooling Party" in our old address on Tagensvej, for which this invite was made (in Danish!): By the way, we keep our telephone numbers! Our scanners have already moved, so that settled it - no new posts until sometime next week!

Our third own hand-drawn feature film was also the most expensive film to have been put into production in Denmark in the last millenium. Originally released theatrically on October 6th, 2000 as " Help! I'm a Fish ," it was released on DVD in the US as " A Fish Tale " some four years later, with a CG cover, to make it look like "Shark Tale" which came out four years later (again, the choice of the distributor, out of our hands). I just noticed that it is available again in the UK . It started as an animation test for our assistants during our time at Swan Film in Copenhagen in 1986, two years before we founded A. Film. The test was "draw poses with different personalities for a fish, a starfish and a jellyfish." That was all. One of the first ideas we had for a feature film - see my previous post - was a film with these three characters basically commenting on the state of pollution under the sea. A few years later we cooked up the bit about

After having animated on several films for Don Bluth, and having animated sixteen minutes of FernGully: the Last Rainforest, we felt it was our turn to produce our own feature film, and Denmark being a small country, we found that this was only possible through co-operation with a well-known Danish author. We contacted Flemming Quist Møller who had written a little good-night story for his son, and it was this story that became our first feature film "Jungledyret Hugo" ("Hugo the Jungle Animal," in English called "Jungle Jack" and later "Jungo") which was released in 1993. At the time, I had myself rented out to work on a project called "The History of Our Wonderful World" which I co-directed with Anders Sørensen - more about this later. I got to edit the animatic of "Jungle Jack" and animate only two scenes, as well as program the production software at night while working on the World History in the daytime. In the mean tim

Hans Christian Andersen lived from 1805 to 1875. His first volume of fairy tales was published in 1835, and ever since, his name has been an indelible part of Danish history. His remains were interred at Assistens Kirkegård in Copenhagen, where one can also find Søren Kierkegaard, H.C. Ørsted, Lauritz Melchior and Niels Bohr, painters Abildgaard, Eckersberg, Købke, Skovgaard and Heerup, as well as Basie-trombone player Richard Boone (from Little Rock, AR) who came to Copenhagen with jazz greats Ben Webster and Kenny Drew who also are interred here. In the summer this is also a nice park. In the year 2005, which was the 200th anniversary of his birth, my studio A. Film produced a series of television programs called Hans Christian Andersen: The Fairy Tales . Actually, the original name of the series is "The Fairytaler," which admittedly is rather constructed. We received the Hans Christian Andersen Award 2005 for this series, for “re-interpretation of H.C. Andersen's s

Mr. Mouse is 81 today! Let's see if I can find something worth posting today... ...erh - maybe you like this one? It was originally also part of the " Kentucky Stash ," the box of papers that Burt Gillett gave to the daughter of a family he befriended after being hired by Van Beuren in New York in 1934. It seems to have been made as a gag drawing, to show a few things that you were not expected to do with Mr. Mouse.

Last year, we co-produced with Anima Vitae, Cinemaker and Magma Films an originally Finnish project "Niko - Lentäjän poika," internationally released as "Niko and the Way to the Stars," in the US as " Flight Before Christmas ." We did most all of the animation and a whole lot more, and are pretty pleased with the film. It was seen by 9.35 million viewers when it aired last December on CBS and CW domestically, and is currently in release in theaters in Germany as "Niko - Ein Rentier hebt ab" where it runs in nearly 400 cinemas and has been seen by over 200,000 in the past two weeks, which is a lot! Here are the US and Dutch covers! Have a look up close - they are actually similar yet completely different! I wonder why this is - I guess it is a rights issue between the distributors. I can only hope that everyone buys the film, if only to see what they missed by the cutting of 27 minutes for the US airing!

The last one of this type for now, it is a short one - not for a short cake but shortning for an upside-down cake. Also from the Babbitt/Hubley reel, this is so controlled, it MUST be Art Babbitt's animation! I wish someone would make a DVD with all these wonderful commercials!

Just a little thing from the Babbitt/Hubley reel that I have had lying around a loooong time...

Seq. 15-A "Snow White Dead" - Dwarfs by Frank Thomas, animals by Milt Kahl Seq. 15-B "Titles" - Three titles by the effects dept. Seq. 16-A "S.W. in Coffin - Back to Life - Away with Prince" - Snow White by Ham Luske, Grim Natwick and Jack Campbell, dwarfs by Frank Thomas, Dick Lundy and Fred Spencer, animals by Jim Algar and Bernard Garbutt. Frank Thomas' famous sequence of crying dwarfs - the sequence that had hardened moguls crying at the premiere - is so well described in The Illusion of Life that I will suffice to refer to that most important of all books on animation. If you do not have it, GET IT ! It is still in print! Then look it up on pages 173ff. and 475ff... This concludes the draft for Snow White: it is no secret that they lived happily ever after... Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Walt Disney's BIG gamble, which grew bigger as it went along. At first it was thought that it would cost about the same as ten short films, since its l

Seq. 14-F "Snow White Starts Wish" - Snow White by Bob Stokes, Witch by Norm Ferguson Seq. 14-G "Dwarfs on Way to House" - Animals and dwarfs by Bernard Garbutt Seq. 14-H "Snow White Dies" - Snow White by Jack Campbell and Ham Luske, Witch by Norm Ferguson, Dwarfs on deer by Eric Larson. Seq. 14-J "Dwarfs Chase the Queen" - Witch by Norm Ferguson, Dwarfs by Bill Roberts, with fast action scenes by Jim Algar, Bernard Garbutt and Eric Larson, vultures by Ward Kimball. Fast cutting, lots of excitement! Not a lot of surprises on the draft...

Seq. 14-B "Dwarfs at Mine - Animals Warn Them" - Dwarfs by Shamus Culhane, Bill Roberts, Al Eugster, animals by Eric Larson, Jim Algar and Bernard Garbutt (incl. incidental dwarfs). Culhane will always be connected with Heigh-Ho! Also it is interesting to see the "animal expert" Garbutt be entrusted to "put dwarfs on his deer," as if they are just part of the animals' overlapping action. Seq. 14-C "Witch Urges Snow White to Make Wish" - Witch by Norm Ferguson and Frank Kelling, Snow White by Bob Stokes. Frank Kelling, another of the animators that found their way onto Gulliver's travels, like Shamus Culhane, Grim Natwick, Al Eugster and Stan Quackenbush, not to mention Joe D'Igalo, Tom Palmer, Bob Leffingwell or even Thurston Harper and Ben Clopton (who worked on Disney's Alice series), may here have been animating assistant for Norm Ferguson. We know that Kelling was animating for Disney already in 1931. He worked on Oswald for

Seq. 13-A "Snow White Making Pies - Witch Enters House" - Snow White by Bob Stokes, Witch by Norm Ferguson, animals by Eric Larson, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball (vultures) and Bernard Garbutt. This very scary sequence has some very interesting cuts: having the vultures land while the Witch says "Just wait till you taste one!" is a strong statement of imminent death. The birds attacking the Witch again is very symbolic - nature tries to help poor innocent Snow White. Bob Stokes' animation is, of course, based on photostats, but he manages to make it look natural and not just boring tracings, while Fergy's witch is deliciously over the top.

Seq. 11-B "Bed Building" - Dwarfs by Ham Luske, Al Eugster, Dick Huemer, Marvin Woodward, Bob Wickersham, Woolie Reitherman and Dick Lundy, animals by Eric Larson, Jim Algar and Milt Kahl (incl. one dwarf scene). How much of this sequence was actually animated, I do not know. Again, the missing check marks on this Morgue draft tell me that there are no animation folders extant. This sequence was all storyboarded, though, and at the very nice exhibit a year or two ago in DCA (south of Disneyland), quite a few of the story drawings were on display. Al Eugster complained that all his animation was cut out of the film. We will see later that this was not altogether true, but at least here went one scene. We haven't anything by Dick Huemer either! But what I find most interesting to see is the (quite logical) casting of Woolie Reitherman on action scenes with the dwarfs... [Quick note, nothing to do with Snow White: publication date of Colin White's book on Kay Nielsen n

Seq. 10-B "Queen on Way to Dwarfs' House" - Witch by Norm Ferguson, Vultures by Ward Kimball. Seq. 11-A "The Lodge Meeting" - Dwarfs by Ward Kimball, Les Clark and Dick Lundy. The Lodge Meeting is the second of the three sequences cut from the film, where the information is still found in the draft, and the second cut sequence with animation by Ward Kimball, in this case nearly a minute and a half (133-03 ft or 1min:28sec:19fr), basically only leaving him the vultures that follow the witch. It would be interesting to know just how far the animation had been finished when the sequence was cut. Since there are no check marks in this, the Morgue's, draft, I am tempted to deduce that there are no animation folders in existence... (But wait and see Seq. 14-E Sc. 12!)

Seq. 10-A "Dwarfs Leave for Mine" - Snow White by Jack Campbell and Grim Natwick, Dwarfs by Fred Moore, Frank Thomas and Bill Tytla, animals by Eric Larson. In the first part of this sequence, Jack Campbell shares the screen with Fred Moore, with a Bashful scene by Frank Thomas and a Grumpy scene by Bill Tytla. Then Grim Natwick takes over on Snow White, and the final Grumpy character scenes are all Bill Tytla. Somehow all this sounds logical - only the scene by Frank Thomas is a bit of a surprise. My old mentor Børge Ring commented to me, based on the sequence where Snow White tells the dwarfs to go wash, that during a lunch in Amsterdam in 1984--when I got Frank and Ollie to lecture in Holland--he (Børge) told Frank "You were the first to reduce squash and stretch to its present day proportions." Frank laughed and said "Yes, and the others warned me "You'll get killed for this!"" An addition to previous postings: Tony Rivera, who seems to h

Seq. 9-A "Witch at Cauldron - Prepares Apple" - Witch by Norm Ferguson, Effects animators not named. One animator for the whole sequence, the great Norm Ferguson...

Seq. 8-C "Going to Bed" - Snow White by Ham Luske and Grim Natwick, dwarfs by Marvin Woodward, Riley [Thomson], Les Clark, Fred Spencer and Dick Lundy, effects (clock) by Cy Young. Basically we have character dwarfs by Les Clark, slapstick dwarfs by Fred Spencer and sleeping dwarfs by Marv Woodward... Note that we start with scene 6A, and there are, again, many inserted numbers, where a situation is divided into several scenes. This seems most often to entail cutting to a close up and back, which could have been instrumental in heightening our nearness--and thus our interest--in the characters. I cannot come up with an explanation as to why scenes 22 and 23 have extra footage (1-08 and 3-01 respectively) added "for real out." What would that mean? Should it be "reel" and not "real"? Why the odd length? I mean, 1-08 is one second, that's a good length in any circumstance, but 3-01? Any takers?

Seq. 8-B "Story Telling" - Snow White by Ham Luske and Grim Natwick. Dwarfs by Dick Lundy, Les Clark and Marvin Woodward. Animals by Jim Algar. In a way, this is the extension of "I'm Wishing," a reprise of the "I want" song, but here it is a whole new song, and a very memorable one, to boot. Several scenes are credited to both Ham and Grim, but in a way I am most surprised by scene 18, a long shot of the dwarfs gathering around Snow White, that has no "dwarf animator" credits. It is interesting to see the Christie's auction in London on the 24th of this month, as it does not only have the " Future Fantasias " book that I referred to in an earlier posting , but it also has a sketch of Sleepy in scene 25 in the sequence described above. By the way, I bet the Alice shot list originally came from the same box of Burt Gillett documents that I talked about earlier !

Seq. 8-A "ENTERTAINMENT" - Snow White by Ham Luske, Grim Natwick, Jack Campbell and Paul Busch. Dwarfs by Bill Tytla, Fred Moore, Dick Lundy, Les Clark, Fred Spencer, Marvin Woodward and Riley [Thomson]. Animals by Jim Algar and effects by Andy Engman. Marc Davis, Max Grey and Amby Paliwoda animated either Snow White or dwarfs. I suggest that "Riley" is Riley Thomson, on Snow White the assistant to Dick Huemer according to Alberto Becattini. Now - there was also a Larry Riley somewhere who started at Fleisher ca. 1938, and who knows, maybe he was an assistant at Disney in 37? Things like that were seen before - Izzy Ellis is not a known Disney entity, and yet his name is all over a lot of 1937 Action Analysis Classes I have. [See the comments where it is pointed out that this could not be Larry Riley!] I will have to leave further analysis to my trusted commenters, as I really do not have a lot of time to wallow in this material today!