Michael Spornathon: Ray Kosarin Interview

I've been on a huge Michael Sporn kick this past year, if you want a quick primer on him heavily recommend reading this, and I've been extremely fortunate to get a chance to talk with the artists who worked on his films! This time is a written interview from Ray Kosarin-- an animator and animation director on many of Sporn's short films. It's a real great read with such rigorous responses... Hope you all enjoy!

1. What was that piece of animation that made you want to animate? A specific scene you saw when you were younger and thought, “I want to do that,” or did you always have a passion for art and animation from the beginning?

I wish I had a great origin story like that for you, but I really don’t. As a kid, I was fascinated by animation and movies in and of themselves—that a series of still images could be made to look as if they moved. And so I watched cartoons pretty much any chance I could. I certainly admired the Disney features, and could tell even as a kid that they were, at least as far as commercial studio animation, which was all I saw, more polished and accomplished then almost everything else—but with or without Disney, I was fascinated already.

2. How did you end up at Michael Sporn’s studio? Were you already doing animation in the industry beforehand or was that your first animation job?

Michael’s was more or less my second animation job. I had worked earlier, one summer during school, as a production assistant at Noyes & Laybourne, a great boutique studio downtown run by Eli Noyes—who, sadly, just left us last year—and Kit Laybourne. A fun job, with nice bosses, where I got to work on a great mix of projects in different techniques, cel, clay animation, pixilation. That job indirectly led me to Michael’s after I finished school. I’d met animator Tony Eastman—amazing animator; he’s gone now too, unfortunately—who freelanced with Noyes & Laybourne and a bunch of other studios, who introduced me to Michael. Michael met me, looked at my work, said he expected to be starting on a couple projects in a couple months and, to my amazement, actually called me a few weeks later to start work.

3. I see your earliest credit was on Abel’s Island as a “rendering artist” and "additional animator” I know rendering artist is equivalent to clean-up, but what does the additional animator credit entail?

ABEL was actually, I think, at least the third project I was on; before that I worked on LYLE, LYLE, CROCODILE and an educational short.

A helpful thing to keep in mind about Michael’s job categories—and this gets reflected in the screen credits too—is that Michael wasn’t a big believer in regimented job classifications. He liked for people to do different kinds of tasks—I believe for a variety of reasons, both philosophical and practical, which I think are interesting in themselves. I loved, for example, that during a lull after animation finished on LYLE and SANTABEAR, and we were waiting to start on ABEL, Michael moved me into the editing room and suddenly I was an assistant editor, splitting dialogue tracks, cutting in sound effects, writing cue sheets for the mixer. It made people in the studio more versatile and more conscious and respectful of the people before and after them in the process.

But to answer your question, “rendering” was kind of a catch-all job description, not really about clean-up—the animators almost always turned in cleaned-up drawings—which could describe pretty much any task which, in a more traditional studio, might get classified as “ink and paint”. “Rendering” covered more or less anything that went into creating the artwork which wasn’t a more concrete job description like “animator” or “background artist”. It included coloring the characters; inking them, if the animator wasn’t working in ink; cutting and mounting them onto cel. Since Michael didn’t like the flat look of traditional cel-paint, he always liked to try out different rendering techniques to get different colors and textures, so a rendering artist might be working in marker, or Prismacolor pencil, or layering colors onto tinted paper, or combinations of techniques to get richer textures or define highlights or shadows. Michael wanted to honor the artists doing these crafts and didn’t like the culture where studios acted, as he put it, like “the animator was king” and had a demeaning attitude toward the other artists. I remember when HBO was doing a documentary about animation and had a camera crew visit the studio, Michael said, with some pride, “One thing they’re not going to see is all men animating and all women doing ink and paint.”

I don’t actually recall getting “additional animator credit” on ABEL; I was an assistant animator on that film, but there were a handful of scenes, like when Abel is swimming against the current, where I somewhat embellished some of the action, so it’s possible Michael was trying to acknowledge the extra effort, but that’s just a guess.

4. I see your earliest credit as an animator was on “What’s Under My Bed,” shortly after doing clean-up on Abel’s Island. Did you want to do animation on it yourself, or did Michael assign you the scene? Did you feel like you were ready to become an animator at the time?

I loved WHAT’S UNDER MY BED? and had a great time working on it. Though I also did a little animation on DANCING FROG, which was slightly before that. I was excited to animate, and happy that Michael just started handing me more and more sequences. I loved those characters; I loved James Stevenson’s illustrations and working in his style; I loved the voice tracks—especially Eli Wallach as the grandfather; I loved Ernest Troost’s score, which was composed before the animation. I did by this time feel ready to animate, though I think the truth about animating, like probably most skills, is you’re ready to do whatever you’re ready to do, and you keep growing and gradually expand the things within your capabilities. That was a very satisfying film to dive into, because the designs were simple and not fussy, so I could focus on the acting without having to fuss over a lot of details. 

5. I saw “The Story of the Dancing Frog” come out around the same year too. Alot of great animation there– for sure one of Sporn’s more ambitiously animated films– do you remember what scene you animated? I also see you have a rendering credit too, did you also clean-up your own scene as well?

THE DANCING FROG was, as I remember, the first film I animated on at the studio. There were several of us who had been mainly assistant animators that Michael threw some smaller scenes to animate—I think Mike Wisniewski and George McClements got their first scenes to animate on that film too. I remember animating some of the scenes of Gertrude checking in at the hotel. Michael gave me zero direction—I had the feeling he was being a little like the dad who decides to teach his kid to swim by just tossing them into the pool. Looking back, this was the start of a growing period at the studio. Michael had just gotten several half-hours to do for HBO and I think was conscious that it was time to start building up his crew, so he started throwing some of us into the pool and seeing what would happen. It was right after DANCING FROG that he signed the lease on the 632 Broadway space, which was like four or five times the size of the West 38th Street space we were in, and was ready to see what everybody could do.

6. Tissa David was credited on the film too– as well as a ton of Sporn’s work in general– how do you feel about her animation? Did you ever feel inspired or influenced by her work? I think she’s a brilliant animator who embodies Sporn’s empathic and thoughtful approach to animation.

I couldn’t agree more. Tissa is a stunning animator, in a lot of ways my favorite animator, and a huge influence and mentor for me—and for Michael and others too. I could go on forever about Tissa and not do her justice—not just about her gifts, but her philosophical approach to her work, her way in the world, her zest for life, her passion for every kind of art, the fullness of her appreciation of the art she loved, as well as the contempt she displayed for work she disliked, the poetry and integrity she brought to every scene she animated.  It’s a little funny to hear you say that she "embodies Sporn’s empathic and thoughtful approach”. She absolutely does, and she and Michael are beautifully matched on his films, but if anything, given Tissa’s long body of work and the history of their relationship, Tissa’s empathic and thoughtful approach was firmly established well before Michael came into the industry and became her assistant at the Hubley Studio. Michael clearly brought his own sensibility too, but made no secret of Tissa’s influence on him as an animator and filmmaker.

Getting to know Tissa and learn from her was for me one of the absolute greatest blessings of working in his studio. Just working with her scenes was an education—seeing how she approached animation, also storyboarding and layout—the thinking behind how she set up her exposure sheets, her strong written admonishments on her artwork to the artists who came after her what to do and what absolutely not to do.

But there were also a few special years where Tissa taught an extraordinary animation class. It was hosted by Bob Blechman’s studio and was not publicized—you just had to have been one of the lucky handful of animators in the right place at the right time for the studio to decide you were in. They were apparently developing a feature at the time. It was almost like a speakeasy or, I later realized, like one of the private salons that the legendary composer Nadia Boulanger used to hold at her apartment in Paris: they were both strong, accomplished, mature, opinionated, uncompromising, no-nonsense women, who were masters at their craft and passionate teachers. Tissa gave you homework assignments to animate and then savaged your drawings with corrections in red pencil. Sometimes she’d invite you over to her apartment on East 83rd Street to video test your scenes on her pencil test system—animation software was barely getting started at that point—and work with you one-on-one. 

And she would demonstrate for us her thought process in whatever she might be working on at the moment—sometimes one of Blechman’s beautiful TV commercials, sometimes a sequence she was animating for Michael.  I think my favorite moments with Tissa were when she would free-associate on some animation demonstration and wade into more philosophical contemplations about animation, where you could begin to see the shape of a spiritual and even ethical connection to animation. She’d suddenly frown and say something like, “Eight frames is the first real hold”.  She’d be discussing animating dialogue and call our attention to live actors, observing things like, “Watch Liza Minelli—she always hits her accents eight or ten frames ahead of the sound.” And she pounded home the importance of authentic performance. “It’s not: ‘How does a little girl move?’—it’s: ‘How does this little girl move?’”. “Respect your character. Don’t take a piece of Disney animation and torture them with that.”

So yes, to this day I feel deeply influenced and inspired by Tissa. And on those days I sense I am doing my best work, it’s because her voice is in my head.

7. Speaking of influences and inspirations, what are yours? While animating specific scenes– what artists and animators were trying to channel. Any influences outside of animation?

There are so many influences—animators and all kinds of artists and creators I love and have internalized in one way or another. But when it comes to making an animated performance, “channeling” another artist is not something I find a helpful approach—because, first and last, what an animator wants to channel is the character they are embodying that very moment. This includes fully absorbing the voice track, if it’s a speaking character, because the performance is a marriage between the voice actor making the portion of the performance for the ears, and the animator making the portion of the performance for the eyes. You must believe that you are that character, in their predicament, with their wants, desires, blindnesses, and fears, and feel, in every action, how these feelings come through in their physicality and the physical space they are in: a heavy character will take longer to start and stop than a light one, and that sculpts their mannerisms.

The only times I consciously draw on another animator or artist are if I’m fine-tuning some very specific challenge where they've already invented a specific tool for solving a very specific need. Ken Harris underscored breakdown drawings by having a micro-cushion in the middle of an action, which is a great, practically invisible way to sell a physical gag. Tissa beautifully used negative space and gestural lines of a character’s form, or fabric, to lead the viewer to look at an important prop or detail. So I will draw on these kinds of solutions in similar situations, but never in a way that imposes them on the behavior the character tells the animator they must do. The character comes first and last.

8. Was there anyone in the studio that inspired and motivated you? I know the studio would attract people from all walks of life, seems like a very creatively nourishing environment to work at. 

Michael and Tissa above all, of course. But there were so many great people, most of whom inspired me in different ways. 

Bridget Thorne is a powerhouse art director with a great work ethic and can shapeshift to whatever is needed for a film.

She dives deep into the emotional guts of every story and literally paints it on the screen. I’ll never forget the color timelines she painted for ABEL’S ISLAND that served as a blueprint for every palette in the film. She’s artful and amazingly disciplined—she’d tape down her watercolor paper for entire sequences, grab her paints, and then go into a kind of seance, working on every shot at once, fine-tuning the color accents over the whole sequence, and then blasting them all dry with a hair dryer before running out the door to catch her train home. Laura Bryson is also brilliant—she can work with everything from acrylic and watercolor to oil pastel, and has an indefatigable can-do spirit that’s inspiring and contagious. Doug Compton, John Dilworth, and Dante Barbetta are all great animators—all draw beautifully and animate in totally different styles, which they all morphed to look like Michael’s. Dante came out of the old Paramount / Famous Studios, and there's a sweetness to his work. But his animation for Michael shaved away all that studio’s clichés and I think is possibly his best work.

9. Many of Sporn’s films were adaptations of children’s books. Did the team have a chance to work with any of the original illustrators? Like Steven Kellogg and Bernard Waber to name a few.

I was delighted to meet Bernard Waber, a nice, gentle guy, who came to the studio during LYLE. As far as I know, he had no formal relationship to the production, but Michael brought him in as both a matter of good will and also to settle a creative disagreement with one of the HBO producers, who was pushing the idea that it would be more faithful to the story for the film to mimic the book’s sometimes using only process color accents on many of the pages, which was a common cost-saving approach to picture books of the era, but one that Michael didn’t believe had a creative purpose. Michael showed Waber around, showed him Bridget’s beautiful backgrounds, and asked if he thought there should be less color. Waber said, “Oh, no, it’s fine. I like color.” Mostly the illustrators were not involved. I met Russell Hoban who wrote MARZIPAN PIG, though he didn’t illustrate the book. Michael asked Hoban to draw the pig as he imagined him, and Hoban, who had also worked as an illustrator, sent a sweet sketch in the mail. Later, when Hoban was visiting from London, Michael booked a screening room to show him the finished film, an expense Michael wouldn’t have indulged in for just anyone. Hoban was personable and gracious. And Michael had a trans-Atlantic correspondence with Quentin Blake who, I remember, praised Michael for capturing his “accented” style of drawing.

10. “Jazztime Tale”, a personal favorite of mine, was one of your first jobs as Animation Director. What was it like looking at other animators' drawings and making corrections alongside modifying the timing? Or did the role differ at the studio?

Animation direction at Michael’s had a lighter hand than most other places I’ve been—I’d guess for both studio culture and time-and-budget reasons.  Michael didn’t believe in micromanaging animators; he used people he liked and gave them space to breathe. The focus of direction was at the front-end: I’d discuss the characters and situations, key acting moments with the animator before they started work, and place important cuts and camera moves and scene transitions in relation to the dialogue. We almost never worked with an animatic—different from now where the animatic is on most productions a major approval ritual—but hashed out the main timings on the exposure sheets, and we didn’t spend more time and money on retakes than we absolutely had to.

11. I see you did animation direction on a Steven Kellogg story, “The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash,” his drawings are very detailed and densely packed. What was it like trying to adapt it for animation?

Kellogg’s drawings are hilarious—but yes, they’re dense and detailed and not friendly to duplicate and follow through on whole stacks of drawings, especially on a limited budget. We aimed for a compromise—kept the drawing count low and, rather than drawing quite as much shading and hatching as the book, looked at the logic of how Kellogg arranges things like those crinkles he draws on faces and hands and fabric, and added those details in a more scaled-down way.

The story is a lot of fun, but I think Ernest Troost’s great score carries that film as much as anything else.

12. I think animation timing in general is an interesting thing to talk about, there’s a Tissa David lecture (Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRLbjWFmHik) where she talks about how "Limited animation does not have to mean bad animation, contrary, it's just another style of animation.” Has there been a piece of animation that resonated with you despite being “limited?”  

You’re preaching to the choir, here—I love good animation whether it’s full or limited, but have a special appreciation for animation which accomplishes much with fewer drawings. I don’t in any way see fewer drawings as a shortcoming so much as a discipline and distillation of animated performance. It’s a sad mistake to think of "limited" animation as a lesser form; it’s like saying a string quartet is disappointing because it isn’t a symphony. If anything, the starker expression of fewer, well-considered drawings amounts to a more focused, almost muscular, connection with the character’s developing energy and emotion and accents within the unfolding of the scene. It’s easier for a murky performance to hide behind the smoothing-out of many drawings per second; but if you have done your thinking, and engaged honestly with your character, letting your audience recognize individual drawings here and there is not laziness; it’s emphasis—a powerful tool for coaxing out those instants that are meaningful and important.

I especially love the limited animation from the Hubley studio in its prime—and it’s no accident that both Michael and Tissa worked on many of their films in this period. Michael and Tissa both used limited animation in a smart, mature, way. Tissa did brilliant animation on COCKABOODY, EGGS, and many brilliant shorts the studio did for Sesame Street and The Electric Company: these films are so smart that more drawings not only wouldn’t improve them—they would dilute their power.

That’s true in a slightly different way of the hilarious, old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons from the Jay Ward studio. Obviously these cartoons are brilliantly written, with great voice acting—but their nakedly limited animation punches the comedy even more. They don’t hide that they use so few drawings—they flaunt it in a funny way which becomes part of their swagger; it’s almost as if they are saying, “You don’t want us to waste your time on those drawings where Rocky and Bullwinkle start walking again, we’d all have more fun with a jump cut to a wider field, so we’re doing that. You’re welcome."

13. On Michael Sporn’s blog he talks quite highly of you, he said you’re “one of his favorite staff animators.” While working on “The Poky Little Puppy’s First Christmas” Rodolfo Damaggio was your assistant. Sporn had great faith in you training someone younger, and I would like to hear more about that experience if you feel comfortable talking about it. 

I helped train a couple new assistants around the time of MIKE MULLIGAN and EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES, and was thrilled to see new artists growing their wings, but Rodolfo wasn’t one of them. Rodolfo was already an accomplished animator the day he arrived at the studio—I didn’t "train" him in any way. As I recall, he assisted some scenes I animated on IRA SLEEPS OVER, but that was more of an expediency to rush the final scenes to camera than anything to do with training.

14. Also on his blog he also talks about your scene for “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” and says it’s his favorite scene in it. Not much animation but it’s heavy on the camerawork. Reminds me alot of The Tale Heart short by UPA. Did your approach for this differ from how you usually handle your animation?

I love TELL TALE HEART also—that film does so much with very little animation with masterful layout, design, and virtuoso camera work, so I’m delighted at the comparison. 

That sequence was all about the camera. The situation of these scenes was a young boy confined to his bed, playing with his toy soldiers on his quilt, and imagining them out in the wide world, which was a universe away from being stuck in bed. Charles Strouse wrote a beautiful song which captured his longing for a bigger world. The aim was to feel both his confinement and something of the larger world that the boy was reaching for in his imagination. Anything more than small, contemplative actions would have fought against his circumstances. So it’s the camera that gives lift to his inner fantasies and the feeling of freedom in his own spirit.

I actually designed the scenes to have very slow, overlapping dissolves, so that the multiplane pans would mix and expand the layers of movement crisscrossing each other, and we were going to do this as a lab optical in order to avoid reshooting all the scenes in case there was a camera error with the multiple peg tracks panning at the same time—but whether for time or money reasons, in the end the film editor finished it as straight cuts. It still feels like it gets the right mood, but I will always miss the slightly richer version that never quite made it into the final.

15. I see your last credit at Sporn’s studio was on “Monty” what was your decision for leaving the studio? Did you feel like you did everything you could there?

I had an offer to direct at MTV, and was excited for the opportunity, so I grabbed it. It wasn’t uncommon for people at Michael’s to work on another production and then come back on projects after that, and I didn’t see the MTV job as a decisive break so much as a good gig in what is substantially a gig industry. I loved working on Michael’s films and it never occurred to me we would not do other films together.

16. I’m always interested in hearing about the great NYC animation scene at the time– It seems to greatly differ from the California scene– what was the environment like? I know MTV was starting up an animation studio around that time.

It makes me laugh a little to hear about the “great NYC animation scene“ when, at the time, just about all you could hear industry veterans talk about was how slow things were, and how much better it was 10 or 20 years before. Most of the work being done then was TV commercials, with a few excellent studios landing most of that work, and more boutique studios doing lower-budget things like Sesame Street. Michael’s was about the only studio doing longform animation on a regular basis until the arrival of Jumbo Pictures, with DOUG, and then MTV Animation, a couple years or so after that.

But it was also a lot of fun, and there was a bit of a spirit of guerrilla filmmaking. The talent pool pretty much all knew each other, and most artists were quite versatile. I enjoy working in California also, though it’s different. The demand is steadier, so more often artists can settle into a production contracted to deliver 20 or 26 half-hours at a time.

Jumbo and MTV were both great incubators of newer talent. At both places there was a mix of older, seasoned artists and newcomers just out of school. It was fun to have that level of energy.

17. Do you have a favorite story involving Michael? Or anyone at the studio in general?

There are so many great stories I don’t know where to begin. But one thing I especially loved about Michael, and the kind of thing that doesn’t necessarily come through in interviews with him for anyone who didn’t know him personally, was how much he loved being with everyone. He wasn’t one of those studio heads who act like they live in an ivory castle and keep a guarded distance from the lowly artists. Every Friday afternoon, while you were working away, Michael would roam up and down the rows of desks with a bottle of Merlot and a stack of plastic cups, saying, “Wine? Wine?” He loved shooting the breeze with all the artists at whichever bar across the street—whether it was the 38th Street studio or the Broadway studio, it was always, “Who’s going across the street?”

One time between shows when the studio was tiny—just Michael, Bridget, and me—Michael suddenly said, “Let’s go to a movie,” and we did. And one time Michael threw a party at his home in Forest Hills, after which he insisted on driving everyone home all over the city at about 2 am, in his old, blue Caddy. What other boss does this?