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Don Bluth might be an animation legend, but you don't need to give money to him.

The post Don Bluth Doesn’t Need Your Money To Make A ‘Dragon’s Lair’ Pitch appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Don Bluth smiled at me. "I wouldn't worry about being laid off from Disney's, Steve. Nobody gets laid off around here. When somebody messes up, the studio just sends them to WED."

Background painter and stylist Ron Dias died in California on Tuesday, July 30th at the age of 76. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 15, 1937, he first decided to pursue an art career after seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the age of 6.

A graduate of the Honolulu Academy of Art and the correspondence art program Famous Artists School, he was hired at the Disney Studios in 1956 after winning a nationwide stamp contest. He explains his unlikely path into the animation world in this video interview:

Starting in the inbetween department during the production of Sleeping Beauty, this would be the beginning of a forty-plus year association with the Disney Company that included illustrating their characters for Golden Books, art directing limited edition cels for Disney Art Editions, art directing The Little Mermaid TV series and creating artwork for Disney’s interactive CD-ROMs in the 1990s.

His background art was seen in the cartoons of many major studios during the animation industry’s silver age, including Hanna-Barbera (Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear, Jonny Quest, The Man Called Flintstone), DePatie-Freleng (The Pink Panther), Warner Bros. (Return of Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ century), UPA (Uncle Sam Magoo) and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. He also worked as a color stylist on The Secret of NIMH (pictured above), Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace for Don Bluth, and the Toon Town sequence in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (below).

He retired to California’s Monterey Peninsula in 1999, focusing on fine art painting and advocacy for art in the school system. He is survived by his partner of thirty-five years, Howard, as well as two sons and three grandchildren. Go here to see a portfolio of Ron Dias’s artwork.

In 2005, Don Bluth and producing partner Gary Goldman donated their animation archives to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). The substantial collection includes all the artwork they had saved beginning with Banjo the Woodpile Cat in 1979, as well as administrative and legal documents, scripts, unproduced concepts and publicity materials.

SCAD is currently on a years-long mission to process and catalog the material so that it will be accessible to researchers and students. They’ve posted a generous sampling of the materials on the Don Bluth Collection website including pencil tests from Space Ace, storyboards from The Secret of NIMH, and character designs from Thumbelina. Even if you’re like me, and find Bluth’s work to be mechanical and generic, it’s hard to deny the immense value of preserving an archive of this scale and making it available to future generations.

(via Michael Sporn’s Splog)

“Animation is a young man’s game,” Chuck Jones once said. There’s no question that animation is a labor-intensive art that requires mass quantities of energy and time. While it’s true that the majority of animation directors have directed a film by the age of 30, there are also a number of well known directors who started their careers later.

Directors like Pete Docter, John Kricfalusi and Bill Plympton didn’t begin directing films until they were in their 30s. Don Bluth, Winsor McCay and Frederic Back were late bloomers who embarked on directorial careers while in their 40s. Pioneering animator Emile Cohl didn’t make his first animated film, Fantasmagorie (1908), until he was 51 years old. Of course, that wasn’t just Cohl’s first film, but it is also considered by most historians to be the first true animated cartoon that anyone ever made.

Here is a cross-selection of 30 animation directors, past and present, and the age they were when their first professional film was released to the public.

1. Don Hertzfeldt (19 years old)
   Ah, L’Amour

Animation legend Don Bluth hardly needs an introduction on Cartoon Brew. Long story short, he started working at Disney in the late 1950s, and rose through the ranks to become a key animator at the studio. In the 1970s, he famously rebelled from the then-current vision of animation by Disney’s bosses and launched his own company, Don Bluth Studios, with fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy.

His independent spirit led him to create animated features like The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time, but for some gaming fans, it’s his work on innovative arcade games like Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace for which he is most fondly remembered. Fast forward to today, and that’s the reason we’re talking to Bluth as Zuuka Comics is releasing a digital version of a Dragon’s Lair comic Bluth co-authored as an app for Apple devices.

Bluth is a seminal figure in animation, in many ways a canary in the coalmine for the downturn at Disney in the late 70s as well as positive turns like the use of animation in video games, now a billion dollar industry of its own. Bluth’s last feature film was 20th Century Fox’s Titan A.E., and since then he’s been keeping busy doing work on video games like 2003’s I-Ninja and his own game company, Square One Studios. In 2004 directed the music video “Mary” for the band the Scissor Sisters, and him and his partner Gary Goldman have been working on various Dragon’s Lair projects including a potential feature film and this  new digital comics app.

Chris Arrant: We’re talking to you today because Zuuka Comics is putting out a digital comic app of the comics based on your Dragon’s Lair work. First of all, what’s it like for Dragon’s Lair to be one of your best known works?

Don Bluth: Well, it has been very strange. Even as far back as our move to Ireland (1985) the young art students knew us more for Dragon’s Lair than for The Secret of NIMH. But then, Dragon’s Lair made a huge splash around the world. To us, the game was not as dear as working on feature films. We just had fun with it. It was truly a surprise when we heard back from the distributor that the three short sequences we had finished for the Chicago Gaming Convention in March of 1983 was the hit of the convention.

Chris: For this app you drew the cover to chapter one as well as a bonus story – comics seem a rarity for you. What do you think of the comics form with your own art in mind?

Don: I actually read a lot of comics when I was a kid on a farm. And, I used the comics to copy and practice drawing the characters. Mostly Disney comics at that time. I think the artists that drew our characters and laid out the pages did a great job, as did the inkers and colorists. I enjoyed doing the pencil for the cover art. It had been 20 years since the release of the original game (1983 – 2003), so I had to drag out of the old model sheets to draw the Dirk and Princess Daphne characters.

Chris: Although Cartoon Brew readers kno

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