JacketFlap connects you to the work of more than 200,000 authors, illustrators, publishers and other creators of books for Children and Young Adults. The site is updated daily with information about every book, author, illustrator, and publisher in the children's / young adult book industry. Members include published authors and illustrators, librarians, agents, editors, publicists, booksellers, publishers and fans. Join now (it's free).
Login or Register for free to create your own customized page of blog posts from your favorite blogs. You can also add blogs by clicking the "Add to MyJacketFlap" links next to the blog name in each post.
Blog Posts by Tag
In the past 7 days
Blog Posts by Date
Click days in this calendar to see posts by day or month
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: RIP, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 26 - 50 of 55
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: RIP in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
Margaret Groening, the mother of Simpsons creator Matt Groening, died in her sleep on April 22 at age 94, as reported in an obituary in The Oregonian.
Born Margaret Ruth Wiggum, to Norwegian-born parents in Everett, Washington, she went on to become high school valedictorian, May Queen of Linfield College and a high school English teacher. Her late husband, Homer Groening, whom she met in school and she “chose because he made her laugh the most,” passed away in 1996.
A spokesperson for The Simpsons confirmed the obituary in the LA Times and said that her son had declined any public comment. She is survived by her brother Arnold; her children, Mark, Matt, Lisa and Maggie; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Further confirmed by the obituary, Groening famously used names from his own family when creating Simpsons characters, with the exception of the name Bart, which is an anagram for “brat”.
Stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, whose work is featured in classic adventure films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and The Argonauts (1963) and Clash of the Titans (1981) died in London on Tuesday, May 7th at the age of 92. The New York Times has an obituary.
Born in Los Angeles in 1920, Harryhausen had an early fascination with animated models in the 1930’s after discovering the stop motion work of Willis O’Brien in King Kong. He went on to work with George Pal on the Puppetoons shorts, the Army Motion Picture Unit during World War II with Frank Capra and O’Brien himself on Mighty Joe Young in 1949.
Using a signature technique of combining rear projection and stop-motion puppetry called Dynamation he brought life to science fiction and fantasy creations in almost thirty films and shorts spanning five decades. The influence of Harryhausen on film luminaries like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron is immeasurable and his work continues to inspire animators and VFX artists around the world.
Ray Harryhausen. Farewell to an astonishing talent – He was a one-man industry and a one-man genre. Alsoa true gentleman.
Hollywood animation studios seem to think that 2D animation is dead so we may as well go ahead and make it official. Former Walt Disney Feature Animation artist Raul Aguirre Jr. is organizing a mock-memorial service for hand-drawn animation that will take place this summer at the San Diego Comic-Con. He put out a call for participation on Cartoon Brew’s Facebook page:
I am putting together a panel discussion which I want to do a tongue in cheek Memorial Service for 2D traditional animation” Everyone on the panel would give a little speech in honor of the dearly departed. I’m hoping to get a little casket with an animation disc in it and some flowers. I would love to have some ladies in shawls crying hysterically the whole time. I want to end it with a positive note and revive the departed with audience participation. Like clapping your hands to revive Tinkerbell in the Peter Pan shows.
On Aguirre’s personal Facebook, a couple women have already volunteered to perform the crying-ladies-in-shawls role. This should be fun if he can make it happen.
We received an email this afternoon from a friend of photographer and film editor Jay Lawton, who passed away on Tuesday, April 23, after a battle with cancer. He was 51. Lawton’s family provided the following obituary:
As an assistant editor he worked at several Los Angeles animation studios, including DreamWorks Animation, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Television Animation. Projects included Recess, Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure, The Jungle Book 2, Clifford’s Really Big Movie, Loonatics Unleashed, Johnny Test, and The Replacements.
For over a decade Lawton ran his own fine art studio, JayPG Photography, and his recently completed “Project 50,” a set of fifty portraits of gay men over the age of fifty (a demographic Lawton felt was unjustly marginalized within an already marginalized minority), is scheduled to be exhibited at this summer’s LA PRIDE / Christopher Street West Festival. Lawton’s photo archives documenting over two decades of Gay and Lesbian history in Los Angeles have been acquired by the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives housed at USC. Lawton is survived by his partner, Peter Ayala, and a sister, Janet Brunty, of Waycross, Georgia. Donations in his name may be made to the ONE Archives, www.onearchives.org.
Edward Levitt, an unsung hero of the Golden Age of animation, has died. He was 96. Levitt died on Tuesday, April 2, in Palmdale, California.
Levitt worked as a production designer, storyboard and layout artist, and background painter for thirty-five years in the animation industry. His superb skills as a designer made him a key figure during the Cartoon Modern era of the 1950s.
Ed Levitt was born in New York City on April 17, 1916 and grew up in Somers, Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York. His family moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1930s and following graduation from high school, Levitt applied to the Disney Studios in 1937. He was hired at $16.50 per week and did rotoscape tracing on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The Disney studio recognized his talent as a painter, and by the end of production on Snow White, he had switched to painting backgrounds. He worked as a background artist on Pinocchio, the “Rite of Spring” segment in Fantasia and Bambi. Levitt picketed during the Disney strike of 1941. He returned after the strike was settled to work on Victory Through Air Power, but left again to enlist in the Marines in 1943. During the war, he made training films while a member of the Marine Corps Photographic Section in Quantico, Virginia.
Here are a couple examples of his paintings from Fantasia and Bambi:
After the war, Levitt became a partner in a Los Angeles-based production company called Cinemette, which was formed with ex-Marines (and Disney artists) John Chadwick, Jack Whitaker, and Keith Robinson. The studio operated between 1946-1950, and they created a number of industrial films, as well as entertainment short subjects and early TV commercials.
Levitt’s liberal politics led him to direct Grass Roots (1948), which called for establishing a world government through a revision of the United Nations charter and was partly funded by the United World Federalists. He also produced a popular anti-nuclear film Where Will You Hide? (1948), which attracted the attention of no less than Albert Einstein, who commented, “Somebody, after having seen this film, may say to you: This representation of our situation may be right, but the idea of world government is not realistic. You may answer him: If the idea of world government is not realistic, there there is only onerealistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man.”
Levitt’s star rose during the 1950s when commercials and commissioned films were produced at an increasingly frenetic pace. His graphically accessible yet sophisticated style made him much sought after as a designer, storyboard and layout artist. “He was a great artist,” said animator Bill Littlejohn. “And his layouts were the best. He could animate, too. I sure liked working with him. He was so damn good at what he did. He knew the problems that the animators would face and he would design things with that in mind.”
These are a few examples of commercials and films designed and laid out by Levitt:
Through the 1950s, Levitt worked as a freelancer at more than a dozen studios including Graphic Films, Cascade Pictures, Raphael G. Wolff, Quartet Films, John Sutherland Productions, Eames Office, ERA Productions, United Productions of America, Ray Patin Productions, Academy Pictures, Churchill/Wexler Film Productions, Storyboard Inc., and Fred A. Niles Productions.
At Playhouse Pictures, Levitt worked closely with director Bill Melendez on many of the Ford spots starring the cast from the Peanuts comics. When Melendez opened his own studio in 1964, Levitt was one of the first artists he hired. “I remember Ed as being reliable, steady, pragmatic, kind and generous,” said Melendez’s son Steve, who also worked at the studio. “I know that he helped Bill in the early days not only artistically but also financially. Bill always considered Ed to be ‘The Best’, a title he did not bestow easily or often. Ed could draw anything and had a great grasp of how a film is made. He was the best layout person I have ever met.”
Levitt played a key role in designing the first Peanuts special, A Charlie Brown Christmas with backgrounds like this:
He also coined the famous credit used for many years at the end of the Peanuts specials—Graphic Blandishment. “Blandishment” is defined as “something that tends to coax or cajole,” which speaks to Levitt’s modesty and his view of the role he played in the filmmaking process.
Steve Melendez recalled that Levitt was proud of A Charlie Brown Christmas even during times of uncertainty and doubt:
“When we completed A Charlie Brown Christmas, and we all had a chance to look at the answer-print, Bill, Lee [Mendelson] and everyone else thought we were the authors of a great disaster and we would probably never make a film again. Ed was the sole voice who said, ‘Don’t be silly, this film will be shown for a hundred years!’ And he was right. I don’t know if he believed it or not, but his calm confidence gave everyone hope that perhaps things were not as bad as they seemed.”
By the early-1960s, Ed identified himself as a Cartoonist-Rancher on his income tax returns. He had begun taking animal husbandry classes at Pierce College, and had purchased a ranch in Lake Hughes, an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles, near Gorman, California. There, he planted cherry and apple orchards, and began to raise cattle.
Bill Melendez made this drawing of “cartoonist-rancher Ed”:
He spent most of the 1960s working on the Charlie Brown TV specials, and also directed a couple of Babar specials for Melendez. Other Sixties projects included the titles of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and the features Gay Purr-ee and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.
Levitt retired from animation in 1973 to become a full-time rancher and orchard owner. “As you get older,” Levitt told a newspaper reporter, “it just seems a lot nicer to sit up here in the forest and listen to the trees grow.”
Levitt is predeceased by his wife, Dorothy. He is survived by his brother, Julius Levitt; sister, Annette Priemer; his four children, Alan Cyders; Geoffrey, Dan and Paul Levitt, along with numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, the family has requested that donations be made in his name to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital.
Michael Sporn reports the sad news that Mary Louise Whitham Eastman passed away last Wednesday, February 27th, at age 97. Eastman worked as a color model supervisor at Disney on films like Fantasia and Bambi. She married Disney artist Phil (P.D.) Eastman in April 1941, and both of them went out during the Disney strike that began in May 1941.
I’m unaware if she returned to animation after the strike, but her husband went on to become an important figure in the industry, writing numerous UPA shorts including The Brotherhood of Man and Gerald McBoing Boing before becoming a well-regarded children’s book author. They had two children, Alan Eastman, and Tony Eastman, who continues to work in animation. Visit Michael Sporn’s bog to see a fascinating article in which Mary Eastman described the work that she did at Disney.
Some of the biggest names in the UK animation scene are expressing their condolences on the occasion of Bob Godfrey’s passing. Here’s what they’re saying on Twitter:
Filmmaker Joanna Quinn (Body Beautiful, Britannia, Famous Fred, Dreams and Desires—Family Ties):
Peter Lord, Aardman co-founder and director of The Pirates! Band of Misfits:
British animation legend Bob Godfrey has passed away. We received a note from his grandson Tom Lowe this morning with the following sad message: “He passed peacefully in his sleep, on Thursday 21st February 2013, aged 91.”
Godfrey once told an interviewer that he considered his life a long-lasting ambition to make people laugh, and he did exactly that during an animation career that lasted over fifty years, spanning dozens of shorts films and TV series. In the process, he became the first British animator to win an animated short Oscar (for the short Great), and he also helped animation mature by exploring contemporary and adult themes in his work.
Born in Horse Shoe Bend, West Maitland, Australia on May 27, 1921, and raised in London, Godfrey attended the Leyton Art School. He began his visual arts career working in advertising. In the late-1940s, he began working at David Hand’s G. B. Animation, and helped create promotional items related to Animaland shorts. This led to his full-time entry into the animation field in 1950 at the modernist commercial studio W. M. Larkins.
Still from “Polygamous Polonius” (1959)
Godfrey left Larkins in 1955 to set up an independent studio called Biographic Films with partners Keith Learner and Jeff Hale. [UPDATE: Keith Learner has written a fine remembrance of Godfrey on the Guardian
website.]
While at Biographic, Godfrey began making personal short films. Early efforts like Polygamous Polonius and Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit (1961), with their sharp satiric humor and quirkily designed cut-out animation style, were considered fresh for the time. The BFI Screenonline website says that these films, “display the range of influences and preoccupations that characterise his work—music hall routines, avant-garde comedy in the spirit of The Goons, political satire, and concerns with British attitudes to sex and social conduct.” Historian Giannalberto Bendazzi also notes that in these early films, “Godfrey comes out as one of the few animators to share some common traits with the Free Cinema of his contemporaries Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz.”
Still from “Great” (1975)
Godfrey continued his career as a short filmmaker with a string of successful films including The Rise and Fall of Emily Sprod (1962), Alf, Bill & Fred (1964), Henry 9 ’til 5 (1970), Kama Sutra Rides Again (1972), an erotic-comedic short that Stanley Kubrick personally selected to accompany the UK release of A Clockwork Orange, and culminating with his ambitious Oscar-winning short-epic Great (1975), about the life of British civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
In the mid-1960s, Godfrey set up his own studio, Bob Godfrey Movie Emporium, through which he not only produced shorts and commercials, but also began making a variety of children’s TV series, such as Roobarb (about the rivalry between a dog named Roobarb and a cat named Custard), Noah and Nelly in… SkylArk, and Henry’s Cat, all of which became beloved staples of generations of British children.
Godfrey also created the Do-It-Yourself Animation Show in the mid-1970s, a how-to series with weekly guests who included Richard Williams and Terry Gilliam. The show, which made animation accessible to the masses by taking the mystery out of the production process, was vastly influential and inspired an entire generation of kids in England, including Nick Park, who created Wallace & Gromit, Jan Pinkava, who directed the Pixar short Geri’s Game, and Richard Bazley, an animator on Pocahontas, Hercules, and The Iron Giant.
Enjoy this great BBC mini-doc about Godfrey from the early-1970s:
My old friend Harald Siepermann has passed away this morning. He was suffering from cancer. Harald was one of the foremost character designers, an incredible artist and wonderful human being.
Siepermann was 50 years old. Born in Bochum, Germany, he studied art and illustration at the Folkwang School in Essen, where one of his teachers was Hans Bacher. Siepermann began his career working for ad agencies in Düsseldorf, London, and Zürich.
In the mid-1980s, Siepermann became the character designer for Alfred J. Kwak, a character that originally appeared in a Dutch theater show created by entertainer Herman van Veen. The resulting comics and TV series, which he worked on closely with his former teacher Bacher, have appeared in dozens of countries.
Following the series, Siepermann began working in animation regularly. His first feature film credit was story sketch on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It was his character designs for which he was most sought after, and he contributed visual development to numerous Disney features including Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Brother Bear, Treasure Planet, and Enchanted, as well as to films from other studios such as Jester Till and Space Chimps. Visit his BLOG to see a selection of his character design work.
Siepermann, who frequently lectured about character design, was also a regular attendee of the Annecy animation festival. While I can’t admit to being close friends with him, I got to know Harald as a festival friend over the past decade, and I shared many pleasant conversations with him at picnics, cafes and parties at Annecy. My memories of him are always as an affable and easygoing artist who was deeply committed to his art. I’m sorry I won’t get any more chances to see him at the festival.
For German speakers, here is the first part of a TV interview with Harald:
Petro Vlahos, a visual effects pioneer and inventor of camera hardware, died last Sunday at age 96. His invention of the sodium vapor travelling matte system was used extensively in Disney films like Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks as a way of combining live-actors with background footage. That accomplishment alone is impressive, but it barely begins to describe the number of innovations that Vlahos introduced to the film industry. A comprehensive obituary detailing his life’s work can be found in The Hollywood Reporter.
Former New York City mayor Ed Koch died yesterday at the age of 88. A caricature of Koch was the star of Jimmy Picker’s 1983 Oscar-winning animated short Sundae in New York. (Koch did not voice the character.)
A cartooned Koch also appeared once on The Critic:
Well, it just so happens I have illustrated a Dinosaur Book for Red Robin Books, Don't Invite Dinosaurs to Dinner, written by Neil Griffiths. It came out in Jan 2012.
2 Comments on Dinos Do Dress-up (and groceries), last added: 11/7/2012
One of the giants of 20th century animation, Czech animator and director Břetislav Pojar, died last Friday evening. He was 89. After studying architecture in college, Pojar started his animation career in the early-1940s. He was among the first group of artists to work at the state-run Studio Bratri v triku in Prague. There, he met Jiří Trnka, and in the mid-1940s, he left with Trnka to start a new animation studio. Pojar became Trnka’s key animator on numerous puppet shorts in the late-1940s and early-1950s, including Story of the Bass Cello, The Emperor’s Nightingale, and Old Czech Legends. Even after Pojar became a director, he continued to animate on Trnka’s later films like A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Pojar began directing his own films with the 1951 short Gingerbread House (Pernikova chaloupka). Among Pojar’s first important films was the anti-drinking short A Drop Too Much (O sklenicku víc. The film is a mixed bag: “Today’s viewer might find [it] melodramatic and artificial,” says historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, but he also praises “a rare cleverness in its camera movements, expressionist illumination and visual invention.”
Pojar’s 1959 short The Lion and the Song (Lev a písnicka) is an allegorical tale about the struggle of art against power. The short won the top prize at the very first Annecy animation festival held in 1960.
The films by Pojar are not easily classifiable and represent one of the most diverse bodies of work by an animation director. He worked in stop motion and drawn animation, and his films tackled a wide range of eclectic themes, often revolving around political, humanistic, social and anti-war concerns.
Pojar’s films also displayed a sophisticated sense of comedy and humor. His most beloved work is the 1960s children’s series Hey Mister Let’s Play. The shorts, which were featured years ago on Cartoon Brew, have a freshness and playfulness that sets them apart as some of the most brilliant children’s animation ever produced.
Even when tackling serious ideas like intolerance, as in the NFB short Balablok, Pojar did it with style and humor.
Pojar was active until the very end. He continued to direct well into the new century, and at the time of his death, Pojar was the head of the animation department at FAMU (Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague.
British animation artist Edd Gould passed away on Sunday, March 25 from leukemia. He was the creator of the popular online animation series Eddsworld, which achieved a devoted following on numerous video platforms including Newgrounds and YouTube. On YouTube alone, his shorts have been viewed over 80 million times. The Eddsworld universe also included comics and Flash games. Gould animated all the shorts, co-wrote them, and provided some of the voices. It is not clear at this point whether the series will continue without his participation, but the rest of the Eddsworld crew has promised fans that they will finish the two-part episode that Gould was working on at the time of his death.
Don Markstein may not have been a household name in animation circles, but he was one of the best friends comics and cartoon history ever had. His wife, GiGi Dane, just informed us of Don’s untimely passing.
Donald David Markstein was a comic book writer and creator/proprietor of the indispensable online Toonopedia. Among his many accomplishments was being the founding editor and co-creator (with Rick Norwood) of Comics Revue and the co-founder (with wife GiGi) of the animation apa, Apatoons.
Long before the internet, Markstein got the idea of adapting the established comic and sci-fi fanzine communication network (known as Amatuer Press Associations) to a world wide community of animation enthusiasts. I was a grateful participant in Apatoons (cover of a typical edition, with art by Dave Bennett, below). This project was a rich and rewarding experience for all involved, and helped bond fans, professional animators, cartoonists, writers and all like-minded enthusiasts in an era way before blogs and Facebook.
Animation historian Jim Korkis recalled the group’s origin:
“On May 12, 1981, Don Markstein and GiGi Dane sent out a one-page orange flyer to a select group of fans. The flyer announced the formation of an apa for animation buffs. Markstein wrote, “There’s a potential for an animation fandom lurking among publishing fans. We don’t knowhow many people there are in it, but we do know Funnyworld and Mindrot aren’t being published in a vacuum. That potential has probably always been there, but lately, with more and more lifelong cartoon buffs becoming video collectors, it’s been exploding. Just as comics fandom grew out of science fiction fandom to create its own fan movement 20 years ago, we expect cartoon fandom to come into its own very soon now.”
“The first issue of APATOONS appeared July 1981 and that first issue had only seven members: Jim Korkis, Alan Hutchinson, Don Markstein, Meera Dane (GiGi’s daughter), GiGig Dane, Marcus Wielage and Rick Norwood. I think one of the key things I remember about Don is that he loved ideas, loved cartoons and loved doing something to fill necessary gaps whether it was with Apatoons or Toonpedia.”
I asked several fellow Apatoons alumni to contribute their thoughts about Don. Disney comics historian David Gerstein wrote to say,
“I had the great pleasure of editing Don Markstein’s Disney comic book stories for Egmont Creative Center, the Denmark-based Disney comics studio, from 2000 to 2004. Many of these inspired, often outrageous stories were later reused in the American-published Gemstone Disney comics. We can’t forget Don’s original Disney creations – Sam Simian and his giant wrestling robots; the high ministers of Outest Bungolia, forever seeking the “King of the Bungaloos”; even über-cheap filmmaker Freefer F. Freefer (Don told me that the middle F. stood for “Freefer,” too, though he was sworn not to reveal it in the story). Only Don could give us a supervillain whose master supercomputer was powered by a cat brain and a dog brain – which didn’t get along very well.
And only Don had an affection for Bucky Bug, Disney’s early newspaper strip character, so deep that it manifested itself – somehow, somewhere – in a good fifty percent of all the Disney output Don created. We’ll all miss you, Don.”
I’ve posted a panel (above) from Don’s King of the Bungaloos St
For more than a half century, Bil Keane’s clever “Family Circus” comics entertained readers with a mix of humor and traditional family values, intentionally simplistic because the author thought the American public needed the consistency. Keane, who started drawing the one-panel cartoon featuring Billy, Jeffy, Dolly, P.J. and their parents in February 1960, died Tuesday at age 89. His comic strip is featured in nearly 1,500 newspapers across the country. Jeff Keane, his son, said his father died of congestive heart failure.
0 Comments on RIP – ‘Family Circus’ creator Bil Keane dies at 89 as of 1/1/1900
Del Connell, who was a veteran Disney animation artist, Western Publishing editor, and comic strip/book writer, passed away on August 12 at age 93. Connell started working at Disney in 1939. Among other accomplishments, he worked in Joe Grant’s Character Model department, served as a story artist on Alice in Wonderland, and wrote the shorts The Pelican and the Snipe and The Cold-Blooded Penguin.
In the 1950s, he started a thirty-year run at Western Publishing where he wrote and edited thousands of Dell and Gold Key comics featuring cartoon characters from Disney, Warner Bros., Walter Lantz, Hanna-Barbera, and MGM. He remained especially close to the Disney characters: he wrote Donald Duck comics for decades, scripted the Mickey Mouse newspaper strip between 1968 and 1988, and invented Goofy’s alter-ego Super Goof.
I never met Connell, but heard plenty of nice things about him from his colleague Pete Alvarado who worked with him at Western Publishing for many years. For more about Connell’s life and work, follow these links:
The outpouring of love and affection after Corny Cole’s passing has been tremendous. In the past three days, over one hundred artists have shared their appreciation for Corny’s friendship and teaching on our obituary post. Take a few minutes to read through the comments in that post. You may be touched, as I was, seeing the profound effect he had on the lives of so many artists.
Dozens of former students have shared lessons they learned from him, such as these words from Scott Morse:
Man, what a punch in the gut. Corny was one of the most genuine people I’ve ever met. As an 18 year old kid I learned so much from him…the basics of timing, which end was up on an animation disc, how pans worked. I learned how a seasoned professional can pay reverence to another seasoned professional by watching him interact. I also learned that it’s OK to take the wind out of the sails of a cocky professional through Corny’s playful outlook on the world. I learned that it’s OK to draw with a pencil taped to a stick using your left hand. I learned that sometimes art can be about someone you love by watching how Corny would invest years in ballpoint pen drawings on frosted cells to pay tribute to his late wife. I learned that even if my drawings sucked, Corny still thought I was great and had potential. I learned that a studio can sometimes be nothing more than a place to work: it’s about the people.
Rest in peace, Corny, you’ve earned it.
It’s not just younger artists expressing admiration either. Bob Inman first met Corny over fifty years ago:
Good bye dear friend. You have had a huge influence on my life. I met you when we were both students at Chouinard School of Art in the 50’s.
One day you called me and said “Get over here there is an opening in the background dept at UPA.” I got the job thanks to you and it changed my life. I was working at the place in a boring technical art dept & very frustrated. Thanks to you Corny, I spent next 17 years working in animation as a key background painter. Then I had the courage to devote myself full time to fine art painting.
Yes, Corny, old friend, you were the big reason I became the artist I am today. Thank you for being you.
Dan Haskett perhaps put it most succinctly:
Corny spent a lifetime smashing holes in the boundaries of Hollywood animation. He did this with a devastating talent, a good heart, and a devilish wit. No more pain, Corny. Just loving memories. God Bless.
Cole’s death has also spurred some wonderful tributes. Legendary director Bob Kurtz posted Corny’s animation reel:
Also, historian Michael Barrier posted a fantastic interview that he conducted with Corny Cole in 1991. It’s packed with fresh insights about the early years of Corny’s animation career, and especially about working at Warner Bros. For example, I never knew Corny was Abe Levitow’s inspiration for the animation of Daffy Duck in Robin Hood Daffy. In the interview, Corny also offered the following thought about how he felt he differed from his boss Chuck Jones:
[Chuck Jones] was so much into reading, and my artwork was based on what was ac
I must say a farewell to the sweet, sweet LK Madigan. Her words have been such an inspiration to me. I met LK (Lisa) in 2009 when she roomed with Lindsey Leavitt at SCBWI LA. Not only was she sweet but she was hilarious.
This was a picture taken at breakfast one morning. I totally forgot about this until I was looking back through SCBWI pictures I've been sent or collected hoping I had just one small memory of the time when I met her. I think Lindsey took this picture and I think it's a perfect shot of LK. Happy.
I don't remember too much of that time but I for some odd reason do remember Lindsey Leavitt and I not having as healthy a breakfast as LK and Kimberly.
Even though I did not know her as well as many, I am saddened by her passing and more so for those (especially my friends) who are left behind with a hole in their heart that will never close. To her heartbroken hubby and son - my thoughts and prayers are with you during this difficult time.
If you want to honor LK - maybe go buy her wonderful and inspiring books or maybe even donate money to the Cancer Society in her name. She has touched so many and she has made her mark on the world through her brilliant words.
I don't want to say rest in peace because LK seemed to have so much energy and zest for life - I doubt she could ever rest...she probably has many things to do and many people to watch over.
So instead of RIP - I say...
FLY HIGH LK - may you soar to even greater heights.
12 Comments on Fly High LK Madigan, last added: 2/25/2011
What a touching tribute, Shelli. I teared up last night reading Lisa Schroeder's beautiful post. All her family and dear friends are in my thoughts and prayers.
That was a lovely tribute, Shelli. What a beautiful picture of a beautiful woman. It seems that smile captures the breadth of her life. My heart goes out to her family and loved ones.
ive never read her books, though i definitely will soon. either way she was an amaaazing author and a wonderful, wonderful person. lovely tribute, shelly. :) i think thats part of the reason why i love the blogging community so much--that we're all so supportive of each other even in times of tragedy. may LK always fly high<3
Lovely. I didn't know Lisa, but I've read about her a few times today - she will be dearly missed. My thoughts go out to her family and her friends. I'm sure she is flying high.
Perry Moore, whom I interviewed here back in 2007, has been found dead in his NYC apartment of, according to sources in the NY Daily News, possible prescription overdose. He was found by his partner, Hunter Hill. This is nothing but sad, so I'm reposting the interview (sans most of my commentary) from when he was hot off his YA Title, Hero, and the success of producing the first of the new Narnia movies.
November 6, 2007:
In Hero, we find a teen who wants more than anything to have a superpower, to work with the heroes he admires, and to bring his family out from under the infamous shadow his former superhero father casts. There's more though; Thom is gay. His father makes openly homophobic statements, and as Thom slowly discovers that he does have superpower, he has to hide more that just his sexuality from his dad, since heroes and power are just as forbidden as being gay.
Perry Moore enters the world of teen lit from a unique angle, his other job is as a producer on the Chronicles of Narnia movies. This of course makes me rather curious:
1. You are a first time novelist who's coming from Hollywood. Have you read much of the current fiction written for young adults? What have you especially enjoyed? As a producer, is there a teen book out there you'd love to see on the screen?
I’ve always been a rabid fan of YA literature. That’s how I came to play such a special part in getting the Chronicles of Narnia made. Sheer passion for staying true to what makes the source material special. By the way, I don’t come from Hollywood. I live in NY. Only lived in two places in my life. First Virginia, then New York. I go to Hollywood often to work, but I’ve never lived there. To be honest, I think that played a crucial difference in helping to get the rights to Narnia. I’m not very Hollywood. It’s funny because most reviews will often mention this like I’m some Hollywood producer taking luxurious baths in all my cash, but it’s not like that at all. My passion is good storytelling. Always has been. I live in a modest one-bedroom in NY. I work out at the local rec center. I play tennis on public courts. I surf waves in Montauk, not Hawaii.
At any rate, I loved so many books growing up. I never knew how much of a bookworm I really was until I started working in Hollywood where few people have time to read books. My favorites, among so many others, were The Chronicles of Narnia, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, S.E. Hinton’s books, I went through a huge Lois Duncan period when I was a boy, too. I’m sure they’re so many more. Actually, I’d classify Stephen King’s Carrie as a YA book, too. I just loved that one. The movie was good to, It was such a dream to co-direct a movie with Sissy Spacek as the star. I would love to make Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles into a movie franchise like Narnia. Same for Madeleine L’Engle’s books. Not to mention HERO! (Stan Lee is hard at work?)
2. Thom is mostly unaware of the extent of the power he wields - to the point that he doesn't even take credit for what he does. Not only that, but
2 Comments on RIP Perry Moore, last added: 2/18/2011
I’m tired of beautiful, talented people dying too soon.
I met Clément but twice, and the first time I didn’t even remember until he and Yanick Paquette reminded me:
It was at a convention in Toronto. Clément approached me with a portfolio of work, of which I approved. I asked him about his pace, and he professed that he was quite slow. Authoritatively, I replied that no matter how good he was, the faster artist would always get the job.
It was meant to encourage good work habits, but he was crushed, knowing already, at that young age, his own parameters. He went on to mostly do things outside of the sometimes brutal deadlines of comics, and it’s just as well; he was too good to be wasted on the monthly grind.
Later, he was working in Yanick’s studio at a time when I was writing (and sometimes drawing) Adventures of Superman. Yanick filled in on pencilling for issue #577 and I drew the cover, with Superman literally bursting through a window to intercede between a Kansas State Trooper and a thin young man with close-cropped hair and a t-shirt… much like the man reading my little yellow book in the upper left above, much like Clément.
So much so that in the studio they thought I had drawn him from life, but of course that wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t even know his name until seven years later, in an elementary school cafeteria on the other side of the world.
You meet a lot of people at the convention table, and you try to do right by them for a few minutes. It’s hard to remember that after you part, they might take that encounter back into their own lives, that it might make a difference for good or ill. I wish that Clément had had more opportunity to influence others in that way, to become a mentor befitting his talent. He had more to give than 33 years.
Stuart Immonen beautifully and eloquently remembers Clément Sauvé, who lost his fight with cancer last night. Our kind thoughts go out to his family and friends during this difficult time.
0 Comments on maisonimmonen:
Clément Sauvé 1977-2011
I’m tired of beautiful,... as of 1/27/2011 4:34:00 PM
Well, here's a kick in the teeth. I just read in School Library Journal that British author Dick King-Smith died on Tuesday, 4 January. He was 88. It's not right to feel cheated by the death of an 88 year old man--that's a long life (and if you read his autobiography, Chewing the Cud, you will know that it was a varied life which he enjoyed to the fullest.) But Dick King-Smith is an author that I
2 Comments on Goodbye to Dick King-Smith, last added: 1/10/2011
Oh no! I never sent him a fan letter! His just slightly out of the norm animals often worked for my son with autism. I hope he had a wonderful life and a peaceful end.
I read that he did in his sleep, which seems to me the best way to go. If you can find his autobiography, "Chewing the Cud", I really recommend reading it. His was a life lived well.
Hollywood legend Tony Curtis, immortalized in The Flintstones as Stoney Curtis, died last night at age 85. Below is a TV Guide piece about his Flintstones gig. Click for the big version. (Scan taken from Kerrytoonz’s Flickr stream.)
It’s not a good week to be a Japanese animation legend. Stop motion animator and puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto, passed away last Monday at age 85. The cause of death was pneumonia.
Born in 1925, from an early age Kihachiro Kawamoto was captivated by the art of doll and puppet making. After seeing the works of maestro Czech animator Jiri Trnka, he first became interested in stop motion puppet animation and during the 50s began working alongside Japan’s first stop motion animator, the legendary Tadahito Mochinaga.
In 1958, he co-founded Shiba Productions to make commercial animation for television, but it was not until 1963, when he traveled to Prague to study puppet animation under Jiri Trnka for a year, that his puppets truly began to take on a life of their own. Trnka encouraged Kawamoto to draw on his own country’s rich cultural heritage in his work, and so Kawamoto returned from Czechoslovakia to make a series of highly individual, independently-produced artistic short works, beginning with Breaking of Branches is Forbidden (Hana-Ori) in 1968.
Heavily influenced by the traditional aesthetics of Noh, Bunraku doll theatre and Kabuki, since the 70s his haunting puppet animations such as The Demon (Oni, 1972), Dojoji Temple (Dojoji, 1976) and House of Flame (Kataku, 1979) have won numerous prizes internationally. He has also produced cut out (kirigami) animations such as The Trip (Tabi, 1973) and A Poet’s Life (Shijin no Shogai, 1974). In 1990 he returned to Trnka’s studios in Prague to make Briar Rose, or The Sleeping Beauty.
In Japan, he is best known for designing the puppets used in the long-running TV series based on the Chinese literary classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sangokushi, 1982-84), and later for The Story of Heike (Heike Monogatari, 1993-94). In 2003, he was responsible for overseeing the Winter Days (Fuyu no Hi) project, in which 35 of the world’s top animators each worked on a two-minute segment inspired by the renka couplets of celebrated haiku poet Matsuo Basho.
Bob McIntosh passed away on June 17, 2010 at the age of 94. Born on March 11, 1916 in Vallejo, California, and raised in Stockton, Bob discovered painting at an early age. Encouraged by Harry Noyes Pratt, the director of Stockton’s then-newly opened Haggin Museum, and mentored by local painter Arthur Haddock, McIntosh applied for a scholarship to Art Center in Los Angeles. He moved with his family to LA in 1934 to attend the school, and afterwards was hired at Disney where he worked on a number of the studio’s features, including Bambi for which he painted multiplane backgrounds directly onto glass. He was drafted into the First Motion Picture Unit during WWII. Following the war, he joined Paul J. Fennell’s commercial studio Cartoon Films Ltd. where he worked on contemporary looking commercials (along with designer Ed Benedict) that prefigured the move towards cartoon modernism in the 1950s.
He joined UPA in the early-1950s and stayed there for the entire decade, primarily painting backgrounds for the Mister Magoo series. This is what I wrote about his work in Cartoon Modern: “McIntosh worked in perhaps the most simplified style of any of the UPA background painters. His ‘poster style’ background paintings used minimal rendering techniques and clean geometric shapes, recalling the work of artists like Stuart Davis and Fernand Léger.” After UPA, Bob painted backgrounds on The Alvin Show and The Lone Ranger at Format Films, George of the Jungle for Jay Ward Productions, and Chuck Jones’s The Phantom Tollbooth, among other projects, before retiring in the early-1980s.
It was a pleasure to get to know Bob while I was writing Cartoon Modern and I kept in touch with him over the last few years of his life. Bob had an admirably unwavering commitment to painting. Though his career in animation stretched over forty years, animation wasn’t his primary passion; it was painting that excited him, and animation provided a steady income allowing him to do what he loved best. He had exhibited his personal artwork since the 1940s, and his lifelong passion for painting resulted in hundreds of canvases in almost every single imaginable style. In his final years, when painting became difficult, he continued to create painted collage canvases. A wonderful life-spanning selection of his paintings can be seen at the Trigg Ison gallery website which represents his work.
Bob was an intensely private person. He never initiated contact; I always had to call him. But when I did call, he was always gracious and friendly. The half dozen or so times I visited him at his home where memorable experiences as he would speak for hours about painting and his life. Our conversations would inevitably shift back to his latest painting projects or his personal theories on painting and color. He was ever the gentleman, even in his advanced years, and dressed with class. He had a good sense of humor about himself and the world around him; whenever I asked him about events that had happened in the past, he enjoyed making jokes about his age by saying, “I think that happened in 1939…or was that 1839?” He would laugh heartily when he recalled the last name of one of his instructors at Art Center: Stan Reckless. He once showed me a collection of unused toilet paper he had gathered during a trip to Europe in the 1940s; the shortage of paper in postwar Europe gave their toilet paper a quality similar to wax paper, which had amused Bob.
Bob is one of the unsung heroes of animation; an artist who worked in the background (and on the backgrounds) while quietly raising the standards of the art form with his masterful artistry. It was a delight and an honor having known him for the short time that I did. His wife, Helen Ner
Still from “Polygamous Polonius” (1959)
Still from “Great” (1975)
.jpeg?picon=2058)
It’s not a good week to be a Japanese animation legend. Stop motion animator and puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto, passed away last Monday at age 85. The cause of death was pneumonia. 
Des illustrations qui me paraissent extraordinaires et remplies de couleurs...
Gros bisous
Oh Peggy, these are fantastic! What energetic and exciting illustrations. I am sure kiddies (and grown up kiddies) will love them :)