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The Walt Disney Family Museum has opened a new exhibit focused on one of the studio's legendary Nine Old Men: "Leading Ladies and Femmes Fatales: The Art of Marc Davis." The show will be up through November 3. Unlike the museum's current Mary Blair exhibition, the Davis show is much smaller, with around 70 pieces on display.

Who needs the Disney Company! We’ve already got the movie poster for a biopic about Walt Disney so we may as well go ahead and cast the movie. That’s what Cartoon Brew reader Ron did in the comments section yesterday. Below are his novel casting choices for the likes of Roy Disney, Ub Iwerks, Margaret Winkler, Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, Art Babbitt, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and others. Share your dream cast in the comments.

Roy O. Disney :: Joel David Moore

Ub Iwerks :: Tarran Killam

Charles Mintz :: Jeremy Piven

Margaret Winkler :: Samantha Morton

Fred Moore :: Sam Huntington

Ward Kimball :: Chris Diamantopoulos

Bill Tytla :: Kevin Dillon

Art Babbitt :: Don Swayze (Apparently, Swayze has already committed to this non-existent film. Ron wrote in the comments, “I’ve met him in person and he looks just like a young Art Babbitt. I told him that in fact and said he should try to play Art Babbitt in a biopic. He seemed open to the idea once I explained who Art Babbitt was and his contribution to history.”)

Marc Davis :: David Cross

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston :: Jason Bateman and Jon Cryer

Shamus Culhane :: Kevin Connolly

Bill Peet :: Topher Grace

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Art Babbitt, Bill Peet, Bill Tytla, Charles Mintz, Frank Thomas, Fred Moore, Marc Davis, Margaret Winkler, Ollie Johnston, Roy O. Disney,

Let’s celebrate Halloween with the creepiest Disney short ever made: Jack Kinney’s Duck Pimples. It’s quite unlike any of Kinney’s Goofy shorts from the same period, not to mention unlike any short ever produced at Disney. The weirdness may be attributed to the writing team of Dick Shaw and weirdo-genius Virgil Partch, who were parodying radio crime/noir dramas, but veered off into some wildly surreal territory. It’s not exactly a great cartoon, but it’s entertaining, which I can’t say for most other Disney shorts. The animation is top-drawer work, and the human character designs are big fun. The effect of Donald’s hallucinatory dream is enhanced by the backgrounds that abruptly change each time a new character appears in the film.

The biggest mystery in this whodunnit is who’s responsible for the animation of Pauline, which is one of the finest pieces of cartoony female animation this side of Preston Blair. Milt Kahl is the most likely candidate if we look at the credits, but Marc Davis and Fred Moore have both been credited as working on the cartoon too (see Graham Webb’s Animated Film Encyclopedia). Disney didn’t use a strict unit system in the 1940s like other studios; usually whichever animators had downtime would work on a short, so it’s conceivable that Kahl, Moore and Davis all contributed to Pauline’s animation. Now that’s a scary amount of talent!

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Dick Shaw, Fred Moore, Jack Kinney, Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Virgil Partch