MOODY BLUES

 

A seemingly simple but stunning artwork by Lee Everett Blair (1911-1993). A piece of concept art created for the live-action silhouetted orchestra shots leading iinto the opening, abstract sequence of Fantasia (1940) featuring Bach's 'Toccata and Fugue in D minor' as orchestrated and conducted by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Blair was an American artist, born in Los Angeles and died in Soquel, California, and was the younger brother of Preston Blair and husband of Mary Blair.

DRAWN TO SUCCESS

Tomorrow (Sunday 27 March)

Channel 5 Television 

presents

a celebration of the   

GREATEST ANIMATED MOVIES 

This cartoon marathon will be transmitted from 4:10 to 7:00 pm

Honouring some of the finest and funniest films in the history of animation will be Brian Cosgrove, Craig T Nelson, Floyd Norman, Henry Selick, Brian Sibley, David Silverman and Billy West ––––

PLUS... 7 Dwarfs, 101 Dalmatians, Wallace & Gromit, The Snowman, The Iron Giant, Shrek, Roger Rabbit, a boy named Charlie Brown and many others!

Tune in to see how your favourites fare against those voted Top of the Toontown Toons!

Roger says...

"DON'T MISS IT!!!"

SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

She was a woman working the male-dominated world of film animation and what she brought to it was a artistic sensibility that helped shape some of the best-loved Disney animated films of the 1950s and one of Disneyland's most popular and enduring attractions, it's a small world...

Mary Blair (1911-1978) had a talent for graphic art with, as her fellow concept artist, Joe Grant, noted, "almost a calligraphic quality to her line" combined with an eye for shape and form and how they might be expressed in animation and, above all, an astonishing talent for choosing colour palettes that arrest the eye and fire the imagination.

Mary Blair's work is currently being celebrated at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco in an exhibition entitled Magic, Color, Flair: The World of Mary Blair, a title shared by the accompanying book/catalogue written by Disney authority, John Canemaker. You can read more about Mary Blair, her art, the book and the exhibition on my decidedly disney blog.

Meanwhile, here are few favourite examples of Mary's sensational art * from arguably her three greatest film projects: Cinderella...

 

  ...Alice in Wonderland...

 

 

...and Peter Pan...

 

* Not all of the art are featured in this blog post appear in the exhibition or the accompanying book.

ONCE UPOIN A DISNEY TIME

When you read this, I will be on my way to Derbyshire to speak at tomorrow's funeral of my friend Robin Allan, with whom – over some 40+ years – I have shared so many common enthusiasms and from whose knowledge of art, literature and cinema, I have learned so much.

What initially brought us into a friendship was a mutual obsession with the life and films of Walt Disney. Later we both went on to write about Disney and Robin earned his Phd for his superbly researched and argued 1993 thesis, The European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney.

Five years later, this ground-breaking study was published as Walt Disney and Europe: one of the most significant books on Disney art to be written and to which I was honoured to contribute a preface.

Robin and I lectured together on one or two occasions and whenever I got the opportunity, I would involve him in my broadcasts. He appeared in programmes I wrote about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which he he had seen as a young boy on its first release and which remained one of his favourite films), a documentary marking Mickey Mouse's 60th birthday and a feature on Disney's 1940 masterwork, Fantasia, and its sequel, Fantasia 2000. 

Today, I am posting a broadcast I made for the BBC World Service in 1992 to mark the release of Walt Disney Productions' Beauty and the Beast and which explores the way in which fairy-tales have been retold in the cinema. Robin Allan is joined by fellow commentators Christopher Frayling and Marina Warner and I hope you will enjoy the programme and the observations of my oldest and dearest friend...

Here are some more Disney radio programmes featuring contributions from Robin Allan...

The Fairest of Them All

The Mouse That Walt Built: Mickey at Sixty

Fantasia Revisited

POST-HASTE

If you haven't started tackling the Christmas card list, you'll need to get cracking as (in the UK) you're just a week away from the Last Posting Dates.

As an incentive here's a little animated film from 1949 by that wonderful silhouette artist, Lott Reiniger...

Not sure who's voice Santa is using, but I'm pretty sure that St Peter is played by veteran BBC actor, Norman Shelley. Whoever they are (and the lady actresses being children!), it is a delightful blast from the post––– I mean past!

THE (NEAR) RETURN OF MARY POPPINS

This year's London Film Festival closes this evening with the premiere of Saving Mr Banks, Disney's film account of the difficult time the studio's founder experienced, in the early 'sixties, when making what was to become one of his most successful movies – Mary Poppins.

The new film stars Tom Hanks as the Hollywood dream-merchant and Emma Thompson as P L Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, who was fiercely protective of her heroine and feistily determined to be heard in script conferences with the film's screenwriter, Don DaGradi, and the soon-to-be-legendary Oscar-winning song-smiths, Richard and Robert Sherman.

Saving Mr Banks, which skillfully interweaves, the Burbank back-stage story with that of Pamela Travers' difficult childhood growing up in Australia, has brought back many memories of this extraordinary – but far from easy – woman who was, for many years, a friend and, for a brief while, a collaborator when, in the mid '80s, we worked on a to-date unmade sequel to Disney's 1964 box-office triumph, provisionally entitled Mary Poppins Comes Back.

What followed (or, at least, some of what transpired) is revealed in an article by Vincent Dowd, who recently interviewed me for the BBC World Service –– Mary Poppins: Brian Sibley's sequel that never was.

At the time all this was happening, another friend of mine, Academy Award-winning Animator Richard Williams, was working for the Disney studio as Animation Director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Dick made me a drawing that still hangs on my wall as a reminder of a project that nearly-almost-might-have-happened...

In the end, like the hapless Roger, I (and Mary Poppins 2) went headfirst down that manhole, but it was a memorable trip!

You can read more in past blog-posts about P L Travers and 'our' film, here and here.

THE PRICE OF FAME

John Cleese is selling part of his art collection at Chris Beetles gallery: there's a John Bratby portrait, a couple of Henry Moores, a nice collection of Albert Goodwins, some great cartoons by Rowland Emett, Ronald Searle and Gerald Scarfe as well as a smattering of movie and TV memorabilia – you can view the lots here.

Prices range from £4000-£14000+ but there are one or two cheaper buys, notably a black-and-white publicity photo from the 1970 Walt Disney animated film Artistocats, which, unsigned, is going for a mere £250!

Now the things is, these glossy 8"x10" publicity shots were produced by the zillion, circulated to every movie reviewer and every newspaper and magazine that carried a feature on the film. Gremlin Fire Arts are selling similar items for a mere $75 a still ($109 framed) and at the film mart or boot fare you're talking of prices in single figures.

Now, I've come up with a great wheeze, if Messrs Cleese and Beetles will only go along with it... The thing is I've got boxes of these publicity still and colour front-of-house sets (of the kind we used to look longingly at outside the Odeon and Roxy) several thousand in fact and many of them going back to a time when Walt Disney was still alive including his first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937.

So, I was thinking, if I 'sold' them to John Cleese then he – acting as a 'fence', as it were – boosted the price by virtue of his fame and association and sold them on, through Beetles Gallery, to his many admirers eager for a slice of Cleese, we could divi up the proceeds and all do very nicely, thank you!

Come to that, in the case of Aristocats, I've actually got a couple of original cel paintings from the film that Mr Cleese (for a consideration) might be willing like to help me shift...

DRAWN FROM MEMORY

Isn't it strange how a single image can evoke a whole chapter of past memories?

July 1959 and the ten-year-old Sibley received, as a birthday present, a book that was to become a much-loved and highly-treasured possession...

Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp, published by the British company Dean & Son of (if I'm not mistaken) Ludgate Hill, London.

The book was filled with what are now thought of as iconic images from the then newly-released Disney animated film...

 

 

Thus, long before I saw the movie, I knew the story  of the elegant Lady and her liaison with a mongrel from 'the wrong side of the tracks' and had all the key scenes by heart.

Then came that fatal day – I still shudder to recall it – when I came home from school to find that we had been visited by an aunt and uncle and their son and that my Mother had given my cousin my precious book to keep him amused and allowed him to carry it off...

Picture my shock! Imagine my despair! Visualise, if you will, the trauma: desperately trying to be 'grown up' and not show my inexpressible anger, my inconsolable grief at being parted from 'just a silly old children's book' that I had, apparently, 'outgrown years ago'!

It took me two decades (in those pre-eBay days) to find myself a replacement copy with which to assuage the gnawing canker of loss...

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was browsing through an animation auction catalogue when I spotted an item that was, according to the cataloguer, the original art for the cover of a Disney storybook based on Walt Disney's The Lady and the Tramp...

'Cover?' I snorted contemptuously, 'Pah!'

I knew exactly what it was: not the cover, but the end-papers to that most dearly-loved book, showing the titular characters and their canine neighbours, Trusty the Bloodhound and Jock the Scottish Terrier – along with a series of mini-sketches of key-episodes from the story linked by a trail of doggy paw-prints!

I should like to tell you that I bid on the item and successfully secured the item for permanent display on the walls of Chez Sibley, but, alas, I was out-bid and the picture is, even now, en route to another Disney dog-fancier!

But, hey, at least I know that it's out there somewhere – like a stray dog without a collar – and, who knows, one day our paths may cross again...

Meanwhile, I have been reacquainted with half-forgotten memories – happy and sad – from my childhood, that (as David sagely observed) probably explain rather a lot about my obsessive attitude towards my book collection...

ANIMATED ART

As you know, I am a bit of an animation nerd and, in addition to loving all forms of animated film-making, have had my own occasional flirtations with the medium: I worked with Nick Park on the original draft of The Wrong Trousers and, later, scripted two 30-minute animated films: one based on the Biblical story of Jonah, the other (left) an adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick ––– don't ask why the obsession with whales!

Also, some years ago I was almost connected with a projected series devised by Martin Cheek, now a master mosaicist, but, at the time, a gifted stop-frame animator who had worked on such successful  TV series as The Wind in the Willows, Paddington Bear, Noddy in Toyland and Portland Bill.

Martin came up with a humorous, film noir-ish series featuring a Philip Marlowesque detective who just happened to be a lizard named – Art Gecko!

My friend composer Dave Hewson and I wrote a theme song for the show and recorded a demo for the show's prospective producers.

In the event we didn't get the gig and the series was never made – tough-talking, lizard gumshoes, machine-gun-toting gangsters and a gila monster heavy obviously not proving suitable fare for the Teletubbies generation!

Anyway, here's the song (and the singer) that got away...

THE PROMETHEUS FACTOR

The recent death of Ray Harryhausen reminded me of some thoughts I once expressed in relation to stop-frame animation of the kind demonstrated in Ray's films...

There is a legend telling how the gods chose two brothers, Prometheus and Epimethius, to create the living things that would inhabit a planet which was beautiful to look at but, as yet, quite empty of life. 

The brothers filled the world with their creations: birds soared above the mountains and the forests in a dazzling riot of coloured wings; shimmering fish darted through the rivers, lakes and seas; beasts huge and small, heavy and svelte, fast and slow, began to run and leap, bound, prowl and crawl, amble, waddle and lope through the woods, jungles and swamplands, across the fields, deserts and icy wastes of the new land. 

To each creature, the brothers gave a gift: to some it was fleetness of foot, to others it was strength or cunning; some were given powerful teeth, some thick skins, some simply the grace of rare beauty. 

Then Prometheus, unaided by his brother, conceived another idea: a being who would not be the fastest, strongest or most beautiful of creatures, but who would be the most intelligent of them all - Man. 

Taking a lump of clay, Prometheus shaped and formed a figure that resembled the high gods themselves; a living image of the supreme powers who could stand upright upon two legs; who, though naked and vulnerable, would have the wisdom to clothe and protect itself; who, though set upon the earth, would have the desire to lift its head to the stars and dream... 

There is another ancient story...

Yahweh, the God of the Jews, gathered the soil of the ground in his newly created world and formed from it the shape and likeness of a man. Then, breathing his all-powerful life-giving breath into its nostrils, this naked, vulnerable creature formed in the likeness of God came alive… 

The creation story is found, with variations, in many different cultures and faiths: a symbolic picture, explaining not just the origin of man but also the source of man's creativity.

Such mythologies run deep within our souls, causing us to endlessly re-enact them throughout our lives and even memorialise them in our death: when mighty rulers died in past ages, they surrounded themselves with clay figurines of children, servants and cattle, pottery armies of guardian warriors; still today the priest intones the solemn reminder, 'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, from the earth we came and to the earth we shall return…'

No wonder such stories, myths and legends have provided such a rich, recurrent theme for artists down the centuries and, in particular, through the work of the three-dimensional animators who have taken their puppets, crafted from a variety of materials from simple clay and precision-built metal skeletons covered in foam rubber, and gifted them with the ability to exhibit a range of emotions – menace, anger, joy, grief and loneliness – that we immediately identify as being as being real, honest and true to life.

And our identification is easily understood since, from childhood, we have played at being not the frail creatures plucked from earth, but the gods who are the creators; not the vulnerable but the powerful; not the recipients of life but life-givers. Give us a lump of clay or Plasticine as children – or, come to that, simply mud – and we will make for you a man or a woman –– or, indeed, a winged horse, a giant ape, a raging demon or  rampaging dinosaur – that can hold within its fragile form all the passions, ambitions, dreams and despairs that are the lot of humankind and of whom Jehovah or Prometheus might have been justifiably proud.

RAY HARRYHAUSEN (1920-2013)

He fashioned the creatures – marvels, wonders, demons and monsters – of my childhood dreams and nightmares.

A twentieth century inheritor of the centuries-old craft of puppetry, he took the playthings of his fantastical imagination – no more than a few inches high – gave them life and breath, empowered them with emotions and turned them into the often huge and towering beings that became the delights and terrors of several generations of wide-eyed youngsters – many of whom grew up to be amongst the most amazing filmmakers of all time.

Before digital animation, Ray Harryhausen – having learnt his art from one of great masters of the craft, King Kong's Willis O'Brien – created unforgettable moments of fantasy cinema: dinosaurs, sea monsters, snake-haired women, multi-limbed goddesses, flying horses, minotaurs and armies of skeletal warriors. He whisked us back in time to witness the brutal struggles of prehistoric life on earth and carried us off to the fantasy realms travelled by Jason, Perseus and Sindbad.

A modest, courteous, gentleman whom I had the privileged to meet with and interview on several occasions, Ray was, without question, a master artist who conjured life into the inanimate toys of his ingenious imaginings and then let them lose to roar and rage their way into the annals of movie history.

You can view some of Ray's cavalcade of creatures in this blog posted in 2010 to mark his 90th birthday.

And here's one to entice you to click that link!

 

HUCK AMUCK

When we were packing up for our temporary move, I uncovered this gem – another of those lost treasures of childhood replaced, much later, following a dedicated rummage through the contents of an antique emporium –– aka junk shop!

This Marx bagatelle was a licensed product tied-in with the 1958 Hanna-Barbera TV series, The Huckleberry Hound Show.

The show was truly groundbreaking: its economic look challenging the traditional Disney animation style and it was the first cartoon programme to receive an Emmy.

But the fact that this toy so prominently features Huck's co-star, Yogi Bear, is an indication that The Huckleberry Hound Show was but a precursor to the far more popular The Yogi Bear Show which followed in 1961. Just as the stardom of Disney's Mickey Mouse was eventually eclipsed by Donald Duck, so the Hound was fairy swiftly deposed by the Bear.

Nevertheless, to Huck goes the glory of having introduced the world to a new pantheon of cartoon stars including – in addition to Yogi (and his side-kick, Boo Boo), Pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinks – the likes of Hokey Wolf (and Ding-A-Ling), Quick Draw McGraw, Snagglepuss, The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, Johnny Quest, Wally Gator, Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant, Secret Squirrel, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo...

I still vividly remember the week in which The Huckleberry Hound Show debuted on British TV. As a nine-year old lad with an obsessive love of cartoons, I was beside myself with excitement to find that the TV Times contained an article about the show and its creators, William ('Bill') Hanna and Joseph ('Joe') Barbera, and line drawings of the cast of characters.

I spent the next few days copying these characters onto a sketchpad I had been given for my birthday. It was at this moment (rather than after watching all those Disney films I loved to distraction) that I formed the ambition (never realised) to become an animator.

My mother was appalled: wasting good drawing paper was bad enough, it was the waste of time that she really objected to. I should probably have been buckling down to my homework, certainly I was well and truly ticked off: 'You don't seriously think that drawing cartoons is ever going to get you job, do you?'

Well, that was true - it didn't! But I have spent a good many years writing, broadcasting and speaking about the art of animation, so perhaps the time wasn't entirely wasted!

Anyway, here – for nostalgia's sake – are the opening credits to The Huckleberry Hound Show – including the top-and-tailing sequences featuring the show's USA sponsor, Kellogg's (and their trade-mark Cockerel), that us British kids never saw...

As Huck would say in his Southern drawl: 'Be seein' y'all!"