Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Before the Animation Begins The Art and Lives of Disney's Inspirational SketchArtists by John Canema Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists. Title: Before the Animation Begins: The Art and . Publisher: Hyperion. Publication Date: 1996. Binding: Hardcover. Book Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included. Edition: First edition. About this title. For the first time ever, the lives and work of the "inspirational sketch" artists who created Disney's classic animated films have been chronicled from the thirties to the present, with never-before-revealed details about their lives and interactions with the studios. For the first time ever, noted animation historian and John Canemaker documents the lives and works of Disney's "inspirational sketch artists" from the 1930s to the present. These are the people who visualize all the details surrounding each character in the initial creative period before the grueling labor of animation begins. "Through daydreams and doodles, they attempt to 'find' the film." The happy result of these flights of fancy are dancing ostriches and personality-rich broomsticks. Drawings and paintings of Disney characters leap right off the pages of this lush book, where you'll find pastels from Fantasia , faux wood-cuts of the Seven Dwarfs, paintings of Alice in Wonderland, and hundreds of other delightful, rarely seen images. The stories of artists such as Ty Wong, who created , and Bianca Majolie, the first woman to join the story department at (in 1935), are as provocative as their art. Canemaker does a fine job of placing the artists' lives and interactions with Disney studios in the historical context of modern art. Before the Animation Begins is a beautiful book. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. ORDERING BOOKS : Since our internet stock is stored in a separate warehouse, email is a virtual necessity for the initial inquiry. Please email orders using the Advanced Book Exchange order buttons. If you use your own forms, we need the book number and book title to locate the book. If you telephone first, please have our book inventory number and title ready and please be prepared to call back later when we have had time to pull the book from storage. Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney's Inspirational SketchArtists by John Canemaker. John Canemaker has won an Academy Award, an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his animation and is an internationally-renowned animation historian and teacher. A key figure in American , Canemaker’s work has a distinctive personal style emphasizing emotion, personality and dynamic visual expression. His film, The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, won an Oscar in 2005 for Best Animated Short, as well as an Emmy. A 28-minute autobiographical essay about a troubled father/son relationship, The Moon and the Son marked a personal and professional breakthrough in animation storytelling. Canemaker is also a noted author who has written nine books on animation, as well as numerous essays, articles and monographs for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal , among other publications. He has taught at several colleges and universities in the course of his career, including a guest residency at Yale, but he is most closely associated with New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he began teaching in 1980 and was one of the founders of the animation program. Canemaker is a full, tenured professor who became the program’s executive director in 1988 and served as Acting Chair of the NYU Undergraduate Film and Television Department in 2001-2002. John Canemaker was born in Waverly, New York, in 1943 and raised in nearby Elmira where he completed his first animated film while in his teens. After graduating from Notre Dame High School in 1961, he moved to , where he pursued an acting career for the next decade. He appeared off-Broadway, in stock companies and in over 35 national TV commercials. In 1971 he became an undergraduate at Marymount Manhattan College, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in 1974. He later completed a MFA in Film at New York University. His advisor at Marymount, Sister Dymphna Leonard, encouraged him to return to his childhood interest in animation. She arranged for Canemaker to do research at the Walt Disney Studio Archives in 1973. His interviews there formed the basis for his first published writings on animation, and stimulated him to continue researching animation history. In addition to more than 100 newspaper and magazine articles, he produced the documentaries Remembering Winsor McCay (1976) and and Felix the Cat (1977). At the same time, Canemaker began making the first in a series of personal animated shorts. These films, including Greed (1974), The 40's (1974), Street Freaks (1975), Confessions of a Stardreamer (1978), The Wizard's Son (1981), Bottom's Dream (1983), Confessions of a Stand-Up (1993) and Bridgehampton (1998), are part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA has twice hosted retrospectives of Canemaker’s films, in 1984 and in 1998. His commissioned work for television and feature film includes commercials, , , Pee Wee’s Playhouse , and an animated sequence in The World According to Garp (1981). He created animation for two award-winning documentaries: HBO’s You Don’t have to Die (1989), which won an Academy Award for documentary short; and Break the Silence: Kids Speak Out Against Abuse (1991), a Peabody Award-winning CBS special. His first book, The Animated Raggedy Ann and Andy , detailing the making of an animated feature based on Johnny Gruelle’s storybook characters, was published in 1977. Eight more books followed: Treasures of Disney Animation Art (1982), Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (1987), Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World’s Most Famous Cat (1991), : The MGM Years (1996), Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (1996), Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards (1999), Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men and the Art of Animation (2001), The Art and Flair of (2003), and a revised and updated edition of Winsor McCay (2005). A collection of Canemaker’s animated films, John Canemaker: Marching to a Different Toon , is distributed by Milestone Film and Video. This DVD also includes the documentary Otto Messmer and Felix the Cat. Milestone has also released his documentary, Remembering Winsor McCay , as bonus material on the DVD Winsor McCay: The Master Edition . Canemaker himself is a featured commentator on many classic animation DVD releases, including the Disney films Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , The Fantasia Anthology , , Peter Pan , and Beauty and the Beast , as well as Cut-Up: The Films of Grant Munro, The Mask, and Winsor McCay: The Master Edition . He has been interviewed on NBC’s The Today Show , PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer and Entertainment Tonight , and lectures at film and animation festivals around the world. Archive Profile: The John Canemaker Animation Collection at NYU. by John Canemaker In 1988, I signed a formal agreement with New York University to house fifteen years worth of my animation research materials. On October 5, 1989, The John Canemaker Animation Collection opened to animation history scholars and students in a special collection known as the Fales Library, which is located within the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU in New York City. John Canemaker. My donation consisted of materials and data I had gathered through the years preparing and writing on animation art, artists and techniques in periodical articles, film reviews, and books, such as The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy (1977), Treasures of Disney Animation Art (1982), Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (1987). Included were dozens of files containing interview transcripts, correspondence, news clippings and publicity regarding such diverse as Tex Avery, Alexander Alexeieff, Claire Parker, , , Otto Messmer, Winsor McCay, Walt Disney, Kathy Rose, , , John Halas, Joy Batchelor, Shamus Culhane, Tissa David, Caroline Leaf, Richard Williams, George Griffin, Suzan Pitt, , Dennis Pies, Len Lye, and , I. Klein, Bruno Bozzetto, , as well as others. Also included were fifty books, several of them out-of-print, over 200 periodicals, and a collection of original animation art, posters, 53 flip books, as well as production folders on my own animation film projects, both independently produced (i.e., Confessions Of A Star Dreamer, Bottom's Dream, etc.) and commercially sponsored (i.e., John Lennon Sketchbook , Yoko Ono Prod.; You Don't Have To Die, HBO, Academy Award winning documentary animation sequences; The World According To Garp, Warner Bros.) I also donated fourteen videotapes and over 100 audio tapes containing interviews with artists such as J. R. Bray, Shamus Culhane, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Art Babbitt, Otto Messmer, Terry Gilliam, and Len Lye, among others. This audio/visual material is housed in the Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media which is also part of the Bobst Library. A Growing Resource The Canemaker Animation Collection is a "living archive" in that I continue to contribute materials as I complete book and periodical projects and animated films. For example, in 1993 I donated research and interviews for a March/April 1993 Print magazine article I wrote on 's unfinished animated feature Finian's Rainbow . Other items I have donated include a complete publicity packet and magazine articles on Douglas Leigh, Broadway's electric sign "king," and publicity, production notes and interview transcripts with animators of Disney's Aladdin for my essay that appeared in Sotheby's 10/9/93 animation art auction catalogue. In 1995, I added to the Collection a file of production information on the CBS-TV Peabody Award-winning documentary, Break The Silence: Kids Against Child Abuse, for which I designed and directed animation sequences; the original unedited manuscript and documentation for my book Felix - The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat (Pantheon, 1991); a file of data regarding an exhibit I curated and wrote the catalog essay for, Vladimir Tytla: Master Animator , at the Katonah Museum of Art (September through December, 1994). Again in 1996, I donated a large number of files on my recent books Tex Avery: The MGM Years (Turner, 1996) and Before The Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (Hyperion, 1996). Files include information on Albert Hurtor, Ferdinand Horvath, Gustaf Tenggren, James Bodrero, Kay Nielsen, Joe Grant, Tyrus Wong, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Mary and Lee Blair, , Bianca Majolie, Ken Anderson, David Hall, as well as others, and interviews with actors and the director of the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, used for my 11/24/96 New York Times article on the film. Unusual items in the Canemaker Collection include a copy of Richard Williams' notebook on Art Babbitt's legendary 1973 animation workshops; years of correspondence between myself and Disney master animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, and letters between myself and Academy Award-winning Danish animator Borge Ring, a knowledgeable fan and scholar of American character animation; transcripts of Disney director 's 1946 animation lectures when he was starting a studio in ; a 1941 unpublished biography of Winsor McCay; Robin Allan's University of Exeter 1993 thesis Walt Disney and Europe; four large files of data on Mary and Lee Blair, including personal correspondence, tax forms, their 1941 South American itinerary and research for Disney's and as well as early publicity and interviews. For An Appointment. This rich resource of documents, graphic materials and information for the study of international animation art and artists is available to scholars visiting New York City by phoning or writing for an appointment: Mr. Marvin J. Taylor Fales Librarian Elmer Holmes Bobst Library New York University 70 Washington Square South New York, N.Y. 10012- 1091 phone: (212) 998-2596. It was my hope in establishing this unique collection, and now putting information about it on the web, that I could preserve this hard-won information and share my love and enthusiasm of animation to others around the world. John Canemaker is a filmmaker and animation historian. He heads the animation program at New York University and his books include Before Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (Hyperion), Tex Avery: The MGM Years (Turner), and Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat (Da Capo). Animation World Network will publish the complete 21-page Finding Aid of Documentary and Graphic Materials in the John Canemaker Collection at NYU , within the Vault Archive section of AWN. This is now available to the public ! See also an article about John Canemaker in the December 1996 issue of Animation World Magazine, Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney's Inspirational SketchArtists by John Canemaker. John Canemaker teaching a storyboarding class at NYU Tisch School of the Arts Kanbar Department of Film. Photos copyright (c) Nick Johnson 917-544-2264. THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, 4 April 1997. "Designs That Come to Life: 'the Basic Magic of Animation'" by Zoe Ingalls. Master manipulator: John Canemaker, head of the animation program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, uses his craft to communicate serious matters. Copyright 2000, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission. This article may not be posted, published, or distributed without permission from The Chronicle. New York. John Canemaker relishes the story about a film animator who had a reputation for doing "really zany, crazy, off-the-wall stuff." After getting a call from a producer who wanted him to do a film, the animator said, "Okay, what's it about?" The producer said, "Dyslexia." The animator groaned and said, "Oh, no. You've got to call John Canemaker." Dyslexia, cancer, nuclear war, child abuse - topics that most animators avoid - are topics that Mr. Canemaker embraces. He is a film animator well known for his intelligent handling of serious subject matter. His animated sequences for the Academy Award-winning YOU DON'T HAVE TO DIE, a documentary about an 8-year-old boy's struggle with cancer, were praised by critics. Mr. Canemaker, a [full] professor and head of the animation program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, is also a noted historian of animation. He has published six books on the topic and writes regularly about the field for The New York Times. His most recent book, Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists (Hyperion) appeared in November [1997]. Recently, Animation magazine, a trade publication, listed him as one of the most influential people in animation today, along with the likes of Roy E. Disney, Michael D. Eisner, and Steven Spielberg. Mr. Canemaker refers to himself as a "traditional" animator - "that means I work with a pencil and paper and a light box" - a distinction made necessary because of recent changes in the medium. Animation used to refer to "any object or drawings that is changed frame by frame," he says. "But now, frames are going away. Videotape has not frames; the computer has no frames. So it's more the thinking about manipulation of the image. We have so many choices now. And animation is everywhere. It's pervasive. "Animation is in titles. It's in feature-length films, live action as well as animation. Entire films are built around the effects that you see on the screen - TWISTER, for example, or JURASSIC PARK. That's animation. Disney is animation. The Pillsbury Doughboy is animation." The computer is a useful tool - like his pencil, he says - but good animation is not just about drawing or the seamless manipulation of an image. "it's about communicating with an audience," he explains. He tries to teach his students a "vocabulary of motion." For example, "if you turn the character's head this way and leave it for eight frames, it will look like he's thinking." In a recent animation class, Mr. Canemaker reminds students of the importance of "anticipation" - the small, contrary motion a character makes that anticipates a major movement. If the character is going to stand up, he sinks ever so slightly first. If he's going to jump to the right, he first draws back almost imperceptibly to the left. One student has prepared a short film that shows a man drinking poison. After he drinks, his head shrinks like a deflating balloon. Good, as far as it goes. "Have some anticipation," Mr. Canemaker advises. "Have the head go out, swell, before it shrinks." Grasping the vocabulary of motion is key, he says. "Drawing is really a secondary ability." He encourages his students to take acting courses, and he brings actors, mimes, and dancers to class so that students can study live movement. "In the '30s at Disney, animators looked at Chaplin films and Keaton films in slow motion. They brought in obese dancers and watched how the flesh moved." Disney perfected what is called character or personality animation, which lends a character an "intrinsic individuality that is expressed basically by the way it moves rather than just through dialogue," says Mr. Canemaker. The seven Dwarfs are good examples," he says. "Dopey puts on his pajamas differently than Grumpy, and Bashful brushes his teeth differently than Sleepy." Disney animators have a "live-action approach" to animation, he continues. "They want to convince you of the reality of their world and their characters. They don't want you to think it's a cartoon, so they go to all of these lengths to disguise the cartoony origins of things." His own work "celebrates the cartoon as cartoon," he says. "Animation is not live action, so why disguise that fact?" But while celebrating the cartoon, his work is a far cry from what he calls "the cat-chasing-the-mouse type" of animation. "Animation has been ghettoized, for the most part, into a children's category. I really love the challenge of taking serious subject matter and trrying to adapt it to animation. I think animation can do anything. I think it can go anywhere. It can be used for any subject. And it hasn't." In a documentary film, BREAK THE SILENCE: KIDS AGAINST CHILD ABUSE, he used animation to help describe the children's emotions. In one scene, a child tells her mother that her stepfather has sexually abused her. The mother turns into a brick wall, symbolizing her denial. In YOU DON'T HAVE TO DIE, animation is used to describe what happens during chemotherapy. A green liquid travels down a tube and into the cartoon child's arm. The liquid fills up the child's body as if he were an empty bottle. When it reaches the top of his head, his hair falls out. "He tries as a cartoon to put it back on his head," Mr. Canemaker says. "And then he just looks aghast and runs into the distance. I thought that that was a perfect way to show emotion in animation that live action couldn't do." As a boy growing up in Elmira, N.Y., he dreamed of working at the Disney studio. (FANTASIA remains his favorite film.) he liked to draw and showed promise as an artist; he made his first animated fiolm -- a - at age 15. it was largely based on what he had learned from reading books and watching the "Disneyland" television show and Walter Lantz's "Woody Woodpecker Show," both of which were popular in the 1950s. After graduating from high school in 1961, Mr. Canemaker says, he had no idea what to do. "Nobody in my family ever went to college." He decided to go to New York and become an actor. He got a job as a doorman at Radio City Music Hall and studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Soon he began to get work off-Broadway and in television commercials. Tall, thin, and dark, he stunt-doubled for Dick Van Dyke in two movies. He was drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War, served for two years, then returned to New York and resumed his acting career. From 1967 to 1970, he appeared in 35 commercials - "mostly musical ones, acting, singing, dancing," he says - including ones for Camel cigarettes and Foster Grant sunglasses. He did 15 spots for the American Dairy Association. "I was wholesome," he says. "I was white milk." Wholesomeness paid well. But, one day, a friend said to him, " 'Well, what are you going to do? You've made this money, but you're uneducated. You never went to college.'" He decided to enroll in Marymount Manhattan College, where, from 1971 to 1974, he worked toward a degree in communications. Between classes, he served as the host of "Patchwork Family," a children's show on a local television station, on which he drew cartoons and sang. Much later, when some members of his audience attended N.Y.U., they would "do double takes when I walked down the hall. They'd say, 'Isn't that the guy that used to draw?' Then they'd come into the class room humming the theme song." He sings, "Isn't it fun to scribble?" then groans, "Dreadful. Dreadful." "School literally opened the world to me," Mr. Canemaker says. A professor who knew of his early interest in animation offered to give him six credits for independent research at the Disney archive, which has just opened in California. It was a turning point in his life. "There I met all these great animators who I had learned about when i was a kid," he says. That experience sparked an interest in other pioneers of animation, most of whom were by them quite elderly. Casually at first, then more intently, he began conducting and taping interviews with those animators, in an effort to preserve their history. "I'm their Boswell, in a way, if I may be so bold," he says. "That's pretty cheeky, but in a way I'm a conduit for the information about their lives, and how these films were made, that might have been lost otherwise." The fruits of his research are available to scholars in the John Canemaker Collection in N.Y.U.'s library. After graduating from Marymount Manhattan, Mr. Canemaker enrolled in the graduate film program at N.Y.U. and continued interviewing pioneers of animation who lied in the area. He did a documentary film on the creator of Felix the Cat, Otto Messmer, who was living in New Jersey. For his master-of-fine-arts thesis, he made a documentary on Winsor McCay, a seminal pre-Disney animator. "So before I knew it, I started to have this two-track career of historian and animator-film maker," says Mr. Canemaker. He gave up acting altogether. "I was acting through my animation," he says. When he earned his master's degree from N.Y.U. in 1976, he had a contract for a book, The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy, was working as animation editor for Millimeter magazine, and was busy making short animated films that were shown at festivals. He began teaching at N.Y.U. in 1980 and eight years later became head of the animation program. His work now is divided between personal films on serious subjects and television commercials for products including Huggies, Diet Pepsi, and Raid. In Mr. Canemaker's office ay N.Y.U. is a poster featuring two elderly men surrounded by a horde of Disney-cartoon characters, from Bambi to Pinocchio. The men are Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of the pioneering animators whose histories Mr. Canemaker has preserved. They signed the poster with "Thanks, John." Although Disney animators, like Mr. Thomas and Mr. Johnston, helped inspire Mr. Canemaker's earliest work, other influences moved to the forefront as he learned more about animation: John and , who took on serious subject matter, and George Dunning, director of YELLOW SUBMARINE, who also did a series of short personal films that "played with the medium," as Mr. Canemaker puts it. In Mr. Dunning's DAMON THE MOWER, for example, a flip book sits on a table and an unseen hand riffles through a series of drawings. "There was the proof that you could be involved in animation and still be aware of the technique," Mr. Canemaker says. In his own films, he makes his audience aware of the technique through the hand-crafted quality of his images, which have a painterly, Impressionistic look. It is not unusual for penciled outlines to show through the paint, and some color is thinly enough applied that the paper underneath is visible. "I'm interested in seeing process on the screen," he says. "I'm not afraid to see pencil lines and have it be very scribbly or Impressionistic. I like to see texture from paint. "Oftentimes, I'll go to a museum and look very closely at the canvases of Matisse or something and see how thin the paint was put on and how much the real canvas shows through. It just fascinates me." Painters refer to this as seeing the "hand" of the artist. Mr. Canemaker likes to see the hand of the animator: "That's what interested me about George Dunning's films, the flip book there in the middle of the table-obviously drawings. And yet the magic was still there, the mystery of inert designs coming to life. "And they're not supposed to. How did it happen? That, I think, is the basic magic of animation - to see something you're not supposed to see. It's not supposed to come to life. It's a drawing. But there it is - boing!" Book Review: 'Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists' Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists. Book. Biography Nonfiction. Don’t let the clunky title fool you: Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists is no bland tie-in tome. John Canemaker, a respected animation historian who has brought a curator’s exactitude and an artist’s insight to books about Little Nemo creator Winsor McCay and Felix the Cat, among other subjects, here diagrams the gears that have oiled many of the mouse factory’s most successful cartoon features. Nobody else has gathered in one place so much bracingly adult biographical detail about the cultured, highly idiosyncratic men and women whose suggestions and sketches generated many of the strongest moments in Pinocchio , Bambi , and other ”golden age” Walt Disney features — or so deftly sketched an evocative, unvarnished portrait of Walt himself as a driven tyrant genius. Surveying intimate studio politics from the 1930s right up through next year’s feature Hercules , Canemaker doesn’t appear to censor himself or his material: Get ready for penile dwarf proboscises in sketches for Snow White , randily priapic Fantasia revelers, and doodles of babies decapitating themselves. What a treat — a ‘toon history that’s not Gerberized. A-