A few days ago, I was thinking about my favorite Bugs Bunny cartoon. I bet you can’t guess, although it’s true most of my most beloved Bugs cartoons were directed by Chuck Jones. No, it’s not What’s Opera, Doc, considered by many, despite not winning the Oscar the year it was released, to be the best cartoon short in history. It’s not any number of other cartoons you might guess, including my close second, 1948’s Haredevil Hare, the first appearance of Marvin the Martian. My fovorite Bugs Bunny cartoon is 1952’s Water Water, Every Hare. As it happens, the anniversary of Water, Water, Every Hare is April 19th, and in the spirit of celebrating what I think it a perfect cartoon, I’m writing about Bugs Bunny, his history and art, and the important role Chuck Jones played in creating some of the best cartoons in history, all starring Warner Bros’ wascally wabbit, then I’ll circle back to talking about Water, Water, Every Hare, and try to convert a few of you folks to better appreciate the Gossomer co-starring cartoon I love so well.

Bugs Bunny is particularly interesting as a character, not just because he’s so sassy, but because he was developed by not one, but several important creators. Before Bugs went though a number of changes, got his name, and ultimately looked like the bunny we know and love, he premiered in a 1938 cartoon called Porky’s Hare Hunt. Interestingly, Silly Symphony’s 1935 short, The Tortoise and the Hare, features a somewhat similar storyline, and even the rabbits in each cartoon are similar. Many believe the earlier Disney cartoon was inspiration for the Looney Tunes short, which spawned a character that has arguably been more popular than Mickey Mouse over the years!

As to the similarities, you can be the judge. Here’s the Disney cartoon, Silly Symphony’s The Tortoise and the Hare:

Here are the first moments the rabbit that became Bugs appeared onscreen:

Porky’s Hare Hunt was created only a year after and is almost identical to Tex Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt, which introduced Daffy Duck in 1937. From his very first appearance, this troublemaking rabbit was voiced by vocal genius Mel Blanc.

Here’s an absolutely wonderful interview on David Letterman with Mel, who says he did over 400 different voices over his career, and called Bugs a “tough little stinker”:

The second cartoon with the Bugs Bunny prototype was in 1939, and directed by Chuck Jones. It was a Merry Melodies short called Presto Change-O, but Bugs still didn’t look even close to the character we know, and still wasn’t named. The first cartoon considered to be the official premiere of Bugs is Tex Avery’s 1940 short A Wild Hare. Animator and character designer Bob Givens had redesigned the rabbit into the earliest incarnation Bugs fans might recognize, and it’s also the first time Mel Blanc uses the voice we know and love, using his iconic New York accent and the catchphrase “What’s Up, Doc?” in connection with the character. A Wild Hare is the first time a Bugs Bunny cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short.

Tex Avery, who has only four Bugs Bunny cartoons to his credit, then Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob McKimson, and Bob Clampett are all responsible for various aspects of developing and enhancing both Bugs Bunny’s design and character. It was a Chuck Jones cartoon that first showed Bugs Bunny’s name on-screen, with Elmer’s Pet Rabbit in 1941. Although originally Merry Melodies has been designed to create one-time-only characters, by 1942, Bugs had become its biggest star. His popularity soared during World War II, in large part because regardless of the seriousness or danger of any situation, he kept a cool head and a smart mouth. By 1943, he was getting special billing, and starred in a series of propaganda cartoons where he is the hero fighting everyone from Adolf Hitler, to Mussolini, and even gremlins trying to rip a fighter plane apart. That last is a 1943 short called Falling Hare, directed by Bob Clampett.

Falling Hare makes several references to Disney, which is interesting given Disney was in the process of creating a feature based on Roald Dahl’s The Gremlins. I was particularly fond of this cartoon, because my dad had an original copy of Dahl’s Disney book, which I still have!

Bob Clampett’s Falling Hare shows all the reasons Bugs Bunny became a household name during the second world war:

Following the war, Bugs Bunny entered his Golden Age, with most shorts of that era directed by Friz Frelend, Bob McKimson, and Chuck Jones.

Some of the most recognizable and beloved Bugs Bunny cartoons come from this era, in part because secondary characters like Friz Freleng’s Yosemite Sam (first appearance of many is 1945’s Hare Trigger), Bob McKimson’s Tasmanian Devil (debuting in 1954’s Devil May Hare), and Chuck Jones’s Marvin the Martian (1948’s Hare Devil Hare was his debut), Gossamer (or Rudolf, as he’s called in Water, Water, Every Hare), and Wile E Coyote, (whose second appearance is in 1952’s Operation Rabbit).

It’s arguably Chuck Jones who has the most enduring cartoons that have gotten the most play over the years. Hare Devil Hare is the cartoon where Marvin and Bugs Bunny first face off, and it is a worldwide favorite. There are Bugs/Elmer pairings like 1950’s Rabbit of Seville, and nearly everyone’s top pick, What’s Opera, Doc? from 1957.

Many fans of Bugs and Daffy as foils love Ali Baba Bunny (1957)  – but there are even cartoons with Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer, like 1952’s Rabbit Seasoning, and its follow-up, 1953’s Duck! Rabbit, Duck!, then there’s 1955’s Beanstalk Bunny, a delightful departure based on Jack and the Beanstalk.

It’s at the very least interesting, if not bizarre to note that it was Friz Freleng, NOT Chuck Jones, that won Bugs his one and only Oscar, for 1948’s Knighty Knight Bugs. Pepe le Pew won in 1949, BEFORE Bugs did, and even then, Chuck Jones, Pepe’s creator, didn’t win, the producer of the cartoon, Edward Selzer did. MGM and Hanna and Barbera’s Tom and Jerry decimated Bugs year upon year, winning 7 Oscars. *Gallic shrug*.

The Golden Age of Warner Brothers cartoons ended in 1964, and there was a long break of Bugs Bunny featured onscreen, broken by the tv specials and series of the 70s and 80s.

SO: That brings us back to my very favorite Bugs Bunny short, Water, 1952’s Water, Every Hare. The first cartoon that featured the character that became known as Gossamer was 1946’s Hair-Raising Hare.

The plot to Hair-Raising Hare is similar the the later film, in that it features Bugs winds up at a mad scientist’s castle, this time lured there by the Peter Lorre caricature as a meal for his orange monster, using a bunny fem-bot. Bugs winds up giving that monster a manicure, trapping the orange beast’s fingers with painful mousetraps. While it’s a fun cartoon, there’s more focus on the bunny fem-bot, and indeed the ending involves him following her offscreen.

I prefer Water, Water, Every Hare for a lot of reasons. First, the way Bugs winds up with the mad scientist is a rainstorm that floods his rabbit hutch and floats him up to the castle. The scientist is designed to look, this time, like Boris Karloff, my preferred Universal Monster performer. He’s also after Bugs to use his brain for his colossal robot. The monster, now called, not Gossamer but Rudolf and, having lost the green fingernails of the previous cartoon, is put at the mercy of Bugs as hairstylist. Seeing the monster hand bobby pins to Bugs and listening to his stylist ramblings is just **chef’s kiss**. Of course it all leads to Bugs giving the monster a “permanent” with dynamite.

There’s some business with Bugs using a “vanishing tonic” and disappearing, then using a “reducing tonic” and shrinking the monster, but the BEST PART, (and something completely inappropriate and delicious for a cartoon…) is when Bugs releases ether and both he and the mad scientist float through the castle halls high as a kite, and Bugs escapes. You can see the whole thing here:

As I mentioned, Chuck Jones is the director of not only Water, Water, Every Hare, but many wonderful cartoons from the Golden Age of Looney Tunes. Here he is talking to Charlie Rose about his career, and drawing various characters in the process:

====

As part of my research on this particular cartoon and the blog, I reached out to Craig Kausen, grandson of Chuck Jones and son of Linda Jones, who started one of the first businesses that celebrated animation art as real art. Their company very kindly offered a few original production cels featuring Bugs Bunny for me to show here, all from their archives and most signed by Chuck Jones, who passed away in 2002. I am also able to show an old illustration based on Water, Water, Every Hare created by Chuck Jones. Click on the images for more information or to purchase!

This first image is particularly cool, because it’s from the opening sequence for Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Needless to say, it’s a rare original indeed, and perfect for fans of all things Gremlins! Also, it’s great because of course Bugs has a long-standing history with Gremlins! Here’s the opening sequence from the movie, where you’ll see the cel:

There are several pieces from 1980’s Bugs Bunny’s Bustin’ Out All Over, which is particularly timely, since that cartoon special is centered on the joy of spring and the coming of warmer weather.

This image is from one of the three new cartoons created for the special, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Bunny. You can see the exact cel in this sequence:

Here’s another great image from that cartoon:

This last image is from 1979, and The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, which was a compilation of some of the best classic WB cartoons. As mentioned in the wiki page for this compilation, “In the introductory segment, Bugs Bunny recounts his encounters with various antagonists from past cartoons. This is followed by a satirical overview of comedy history and a pivotal scene where Bugs addresses his “several fathers.” Authored by Chuck Jones, this scene serves to refute claims made by animation director Bob Clampett in the 1970s that he solely created Bugs. Clampett’s absence from Bugs’ acknowledgments reflects the discord between Jones and Clampett at the time.”

Here is the original cel directly from the Chuck Jones estate available from the introductory segment, and it really captures Bugs as the “superstar” he is:

Then, lastly, here is the limited edition created based on an original illustration painting by Chuck Jones, capturing a pivotal scene from Water, Water, Every Hare, called “Dynamite Hare”:

This image, which is a giclee on canvas, is available in three sizes. We have just included the most popular size, which is 18 x 24, on our website, which is $950 in an edition of 750. The other sizes, all with 750 in the edition as well, are 12 x 16 ($450), 29 x 36 ($1350), and 39 x 48 ($1850). Reach out to the gallery if the other sizes are of interest!

Imagine my surprise when I discovered NO ONE was having the official 50th celebration of one of my favorite Peanuts animation specials, Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. The show premiered on January 28th, 1975, and went on to nominated for an Emmy, against two other Bill Melendez Productions studio releases, It’s the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, and Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. Proving that throughout Emmy history mistakes were made, the Valentine special lost to Virginia. The first Valentine special, however, has gone on to become a favorite and distinguish itself as a SPECIAL special, from the over 50 released by the studio.

Obviously, I had to take on the mantle of celebrating this great Peanuts special! I have my own memories of Valentine’s Day. It’s never been a holiday that I paid much attention to, beyond watching the Peanuts special, except that my dad has been sending me a “secret admirer” Valentine for almost as long as I can remember. I think it was in part because I loved the special so much, and in part because I was always focused on grades more than guys, and maybe he was worried I’d be a bit like Charlie Brown, wishing for Valentines that never came.  It has become a beloved custom, and now that my dad is older, each one means the world to me!

For this 50th celebration, I did research on the original release of the show, and my friends at Peanuts pulled together rare art for me to offer from 1975. It was wonderful to discover Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown was the first special our friend, award-winning and beloved Peanuts director Larry Leichliter worked on. He was hired as an animator’s assistant and assigned two of my favorite sequences, the scene with Sally reading a candy heart laden with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet Number 43 from the Portuguese, and the scene with a brokenhearted Linus on the bridge, chucking chocolates that Snoopy and Woodstock catch and swallow whole.

*SCROLL DOWN TO READ OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH LARRY LEICHLITER ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCE AT BILL MELENDEZ STUDIOS AND HIS WORK ON BE MY VALENTINE, CHARLIE BROWN

Some of the things I learned about the special in my research:

1) How did the whole Valentine’s Peanuts thing, and Charlie Brown’s experience of the holiday start in the first place? Charles Schulz mentioned many times his connection with unrequited love was the REAL little red haired girl, whose real name was Donna Mae Johnson. After dating for a while, he asked her to marry him. Donna turned him down for a firefighter, married him, and became Donna Mae Johnson-Wold instead.

Here’s a great video about how he created Charlie Brown and Snoopy, in his own words:

Here’s Sparky on the Charlie Rose show sharing his experience and his career:

2) Schulz included strips that mention Valentine’s Day as early as the 1950s. Here’s a Valentine’s strip from 1956, and much like all the specials were inspired by Schulz’s comic strips, this one clearly influenced part of the 1975 special.

3) All the color keys and much of the concept work for color designs were created by our favorite Peanuts artist, Dean Spille. They really capture the spirit of the special, and you can see how directly they influenced the finished film:

The top and bottom images are reflected very closely in the finished special in this scene:

3) In Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, during the Valentine party the Peanuts gang attends at school, the names being called out to get their Valentines included folks who worked at the studio like ink and painter Joanne Lansing, and several of Schulz’s kids. The only one of his kids not included was Craig, which is funny because he has become a producer for the Apple+ Snoopy show, so far producing 12 Peanuts shows and one full length feature, with a second feature in the works.

4) The closing credits for the special features Snoopy and his “Pawpet” theater, but the animators gave traits from the various artists and crew working on the project. That included Bill Melendez, Vince Guaraldi, and other folks that Larry identifies in our interview.

5) Another crew member represented n the closing credits was John Scott Trotter, the music supervisor on Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. Known as Uncle John, Trotter was an arranger, composer and orchestra leader. Trotter was best known for conducting the orchestra that backed Bing Crosby on his radio programs from 1937 to 1954.

He worked with Vince Guaraldi as arranger and musical director starting with It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. He  died of cancer the same year as the release of the Valentine special, making it one of his last projects.

6) Carole Barnes, whom Larry mentions in his interview, is also portrayed in the closing credits, which was exciting to see. I spoke to Carole years ago at the studio, and you can hear her talk all about her career:

7) Miss Othmar, the teacher for whom Linus develops a crush, was introduced in Schulz’s strip on October 5th, 1959.  In the animated specials, she is voiced by a trombone. She breaks his heart, leading him to the scene on the bridge that Larry Leichliter helped animate.

8) While Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown is the most known special surrounding the February 14th holiday, there is a second one. A Charlie Brown Valentine, the 40th release from Bill Melendez Productions, premiered in 2002. It was the first special released after Schulz passed away in 2000. It features Snoopy dressing like the little red haired girl to cheer Charlie Brown up after, once again, he receives no Valentines.

Here’s a cel from that sequence, which you can buy! (click the image for more info)

Here’s an official making-of about the special, with famous folks who love it talking about it, and a bit of history about it:

========

A CONVERSATION WITH LARRY LEICHLITER

I was thrilled that we were able, not only to release vintage original art from the special through our 50th Anniversary celebration, but also we have original art for the show created by Larry Leichliter! We also sat down with Larry and chatted with him about his time at the studio, which began with Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown, his memories of Valentine’s Day, and why he thinks the special is so beloved after 50 years:

Leslie Combemale: Thanks so much for taking time to share your memories and experience working at Bill Melendez studios, starting with Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. Let’s start with what you remember from childhood of Valentine’s Day?

Larry Leichliter: I went to an all boy boarding school so Valentine’s Day was a non-event. It was only when he started dating that he thought about the holiday.

I do remember being very impressed with those little candy hearts. I can’t remember when I was first introduced to them, but I thought, oh, candy. And it has a little message on it that’s cute and so and, you know, it’s something about, I guess I was a cartoonist at heart from the very beginning, so that the idea of compressing an idea or a thought into just a few words like in a cartoon, just hit me the right way. And I did form a crush every now and then on. I don’t know how, but I must have seen girls here and there, and they generally did not go well.

So you had sympathy for Charlie Brown?

and Linus for that matter. I’m thinking now, in retrospect, that that may be why he’s or maybe partly why he’s my favorite character.

Did you have a crush on your teacher like Linus did?

Yes, and for the longest time, I had a photograph of her. My first camera was one of those little Kodak cameras and and I took this picture of this teacher that I had, I think I was in second grade. She was standing out in the middle of the black top, looking very wooden, or, rather certainly not in any way standing in a provocative or particularly attractive pose, but there she was. I ran into the picture many years later, and I thought, “oh yeah, I remember her”. And I think that’s the last time I ever saw the picture. So I don’t remember her name or anything else about her. I think she was the homeroom teacher.

When was the first time you met Charles Schulz, or did you?

I met him in passing in the hall once or twice before I actually made an impression on him, because mostly I kept a pretty low profile at the studio. I was always looking over my shoulder thinking they’d discover I didn’t know what I was doing and that I wasn’t nearly as good as any of the rest working their, and was afraid that’d be the end of my job.

The studio itself was in three separate bungalow homes, and I was in the third. When he’d come around, it was usually to one of the first two. The first housed Bill’s office, and the secretaries and higher end of production, and the second one was the conference room and the ink and paint department. But one time my wife’s cousin came to visit from Northern California, and it happened to be one of the days Schulz was there for a story conference with Bill. I worked up the nerve to interrupt the conference, which probably also had Bernie Gruber and Phil Roman, and I introduced myself and asked for an autograph for my wife’s cousin. He stopped what he was doing and drew a Snoopy for her and signed it. I thanked him profusely and got out of there as fast as I could. From that day on, he remembered me and would stop me and say, “Hi, Larry!”, and asked about my wife.

How many people worked at the studio at the time?

At any particular time, between 10-14 people, so all the more reason I felt lucky to be there. I’d had only two other jobs, one at Hamma Barbera, which was a big studio with hundreds of people, and one at Ralph Bakshi, which was about the same size, but seemed bigger because there were more people workin in-house. At Melendez, most of the animators, assistant animators, and ink and paint girls worked freelance. At the other studios, you did a job and you’d pack up, move on, and look for something else. At BIll’s studio, one I was hired in-house, I was there permanently. Sometimes there wasn’t a lot to do, sometimes there’d be a commercial. Sometimes there were Peanuts shows, sometimes other shows, but he kept us going all the time.

What do you remember of your earliest time at the studio?

It was a long time ago, but there are some things I remember. Yes, the Valentine’s special was the first one I worked on, as an assistant animator. I had just left this other studio and had heard Bill was looking for people, so they gave me some freelance work and that’s how I met Al Pabian for the first time. Later when I worked there full time it was just the two of us in a room. At any other studio, there’d be five of us packed in there. Anyway, on the Valentine’s special, they gave me a few scenes to take home. They were just trying me out. One of them was the scene with Linus throwing candy off the bridge, which is near the end of the show. So I did it, turned it in, and figured that would be that for a while. Christmastime came around and I got a gift in the mail from Bill, which really surprised me, because i’d only worked on the show for a few weeks on a handful of scenes. I called them to say thanks, and they said, “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you and didn’t know how to reach you! We want to put you to work.” From then on they kept me really busy.

What about the bridge scene made it more complicated?

Well, we’ve talked before about Don Lusk and what he taught me about throwing characters off balance. Even just walking down the street you’re throwing yourself forward and if you don’t move your foot forward fast enough, you’ll fall on your face. You’re off balance, canting yourself, regaining your balance, and then throwing yourself off balance again. In the scene, Linus is doing this very dramatic windup and then hurling the candy with all his heart and emotion. One of the wonderful things about working in animation is it’s like you’re acting without having to be in front of the camera. There are all these things going on with the characters, emotions you’re conveying through your drawings. That was a lot of fun, and it still is.

What other scenes in Be My Valentine did you work on?

The only other one I remember was the scene with Sally reading her Valentine candy with Snoopy behind her acting out in pantomime.

Sally and Snoopy in Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown:

What do you remember working on that scene?

How easy it was, because it was mostly just one character, and then just two, with her and Snoopy. The scene on the bridge was much more complicated, and much more challenging, although animating Snoopy clowning around was a lot of fun to do.

How did your early days working at Bill Melendez Studios change your perspective?

Well, one of the things that Al Pabian taught me working with him is community. He taught me something I didn’t realize at the time. At the larger studios, you put your head down and your nose to the grindstone. You just try to do the best you can at what you’re doing. When it came to being at Bill Melendez Studios, it was suddenly like a lot of friends together working at the same thing, but not taking it too seriously. We had time to talk about the things we had in common and what we liked about whatever project we were working on. I learned a lot about the business of Hollywood, the animation industry, and about a lot of the different people in the business and what their backgrounds were, their contributions, each individually, and it gave me a different point of view of who I was working with and who I might meet. When I started working at Melendez, I had a few heroes, mostly Disney artists and animators. But working there opened me up to a whole new world. It suddenly became a real career for me, and I suddenly wasn’t just focused on being the best assistant animator I could be, I wanted to see what everyone else was doing, and see how I could be more myself.

Al played a huge part in that?

Yes. I learned from Al how to look at the characters and how to draw them from all different angles, whether Schulz had drawn it or not. You had to be able to to draw the characters upside down and backwards. Carol Barnes had an office next door to me. She taught me all about the way she’d prepare a scene and her part in the process. Sometimes the scene worked really well, but then it had to go to camera and there were things to consider. Sometimes there’d be a number of cel levels and there were ways to make it little things work together more easily for the cameraman. So sometimes she’d cut out pieces of paper, making holes in the drawings to expose the drawing underneath so she could combine the drawings. She wouldn’t change the drawing in any way. She didn’t redraw it, she just made it one level. I learned about all that and about inking and painting, and backgrounds, and scene planning, editing, and camera work. Each person at the studio showed me something I had never even thought about before. IT made it much less of a mystery but way more fun.

It’s one of those examples like in more independent and artistic productions where everyone was on the same level, rather than a hierarchy where everyone was limited in their roles.

I think one of the first introductions that I had with that way of thinking was at UPA. The cartoons they did there were not only Mr. Magoo, but also things like Edgar Allen Poe’s Telltale Heart.

Telltale Heart:

There’s also a need for being inventive because of limited budgets.

Bill certainly learned a lot of that for his own studio from working there. And working with him and at a small studio is that it asked me to do almost everything. Opportunities come up to do so many different things. Like when one of the guys, the layout artist Bernie Gruver, for example, someone would ask him to do a job, and he’d turn to me and say this guy needs this thing, and I’d do it. It was the perfect way to constantly be learning.

One thing I love about the Valentine special is the scene when they’re handing out the valentines and a bunch of the names relate to either people close to Schulz, like family members, or people who worked in the studio.

Handing out Valentines in Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown:

Oh yeah, like Schulz’s kids and various folks who worked there. That happened all the time. When I was working at Nickelodeon, there was a layout artist who was always trying to put my name in the background. I caught one that was so glaringly out of place, I told him we had to take it out. Later, on another show, there was a character named Mr. Leichliter, but it was so integral to the show I couldn’t make them take it out!  As a commentary to me, they made him a critic.

Mr. Leichliter in Hey, Arnold:

My favorite sequence in the entire show is the “Pawpet Theater” scene.

In the closing credits, that are more “Pawpet Theater” characters designed after people who worked at the studio, including Bill Melendez and Vince Guaraldi. I saw one that had a cigar and looked a bit “rough and tumble”. Any thoughts on who that might have been, because what a great design!

Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown closing credits:

My guess is that it was Chuck McCann. He wasn’t exactly rough, but he had kind of graying hair but he dyed it, and he always had a cigarette or cigar. He had a gruff exterior but had a really soft side. He was an editor. He wasn’t one I visited, I didn’t have the nerve to spend time with him at the beginning, but we became great friends over time. In fact, when I wanted to help my brother get started in his career, I asked Chuck if he could introduce us to his friend who ran a pretty sizable camera service in Hollywood, Nick Vasu, and see if he’d give my brother a job as a cameraman, and he did. My brother went on to do a lot of work with him, and eventually became a computer programmer. I owe all that to Chuck.

You had another editor at the studio you’d visit a lot?

Yeah, that was Roger Donley. Roger used to play as a trombonist in the Spike Jones band. There was a picture hanging in his office of him in this loud, zany suit, along with Spike Jones, and I was a big Spike Jones fan, he was one of my heroes, so I just thought that was so cool. He did a lot of editing at the studio, but he also had worked with Jay Ward on Super Chicken and George of the Jungle. He was great, and taught me so much about editing.

What do you remember about Bernie Gruver?

Where do I start? He was one of my favorite people at the studio. He was a layout artist with a wonderful sense of humor. Whenever he went on vacation, which wasn’t often, he would bring a sketchpad instead of a camera, and he’d draw cartoons of whatever things he experienced or saw that inspired him. He and his drawings were always incredibly entertaining.

And Al Pabian, you got to know him very well, right?

When I started working in-house at the studio, at their place on Larchmont Boulevard, I worked in that office with Al, and so he and I became very very good friends. What I remember about him is he took his work very seriously, but then at any moment he might birth out in a Woody Woodpecker laugh or a loud bird whistle. That was all without warning. I think he did that partly to break me out of my shell, because I was really quiet. He was the one that brought in all the animators’ assistants, so I got to see all the work and meet them. I also got to meet all the animators when they’d come to see Al. I heard so many stories about different people in the business.

How wonderful!

Yes! Bill had a running joke about Al, because his whole family worked in animation, All three of his brothers were animators. It just kept growing. When Al’s wife Joan, whose maiden name was Tipper, started working for the studio too, it was more fodder for Bill’s ribbing, because her whole family was in animation, too. Bill kept saying they were going to take over the industry.

Joan and Al Pabian:

Well, Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown is the first special you worked on at Bill Melendez Studios, but do you remember watching it for the first time?

Not at all. It was a long time ago. But I was always a huge fan of the Charlie Brown specials, so I never missed one, and I’ve seen it many times through the years. To me, it was a straightforward story about the pangs of heartache and how hard it can be when you have feelings for someone and they don’t feel the same way. What’s so endearing and lasting about it is that Charlie Brown remains so hopeful and optimistic, against all odds. Linus, on the other hand, is heartbroken. So really there’s something, no matter who you are, that just about anyone can relate to in that special. That’s why people still love it after all these years.

PSA: *Don’t let your dog eat chocolate.

=======

We have a lot of wonderful images available for the 50th anniversary of Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown. Here are a few of my favorites, many of which are reflected in the video clips posted above. Click on the image for more information or to buy the art.

You can see ALL available Peanuts original art BY CLICKING HERE.

Art from the VALENTINE PARTY sequence from 1975:

Scenes from “PAWPET THEATER” sequence!:

An original layout graphite created by Larry Leichliter for the show:

He really captures the sequence beautifully! (you can see it here):

To see all the art available from Be My Valentine Charlie Brown, click HERE.

To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, “it’s comin’ on to Halloween”.  For film lovers, that means lots of great classic horror. There’s 1922’s Nosferatu, James Whale’s Frankenstein and the other wonderful Universal Monsters, seminal works of the 60s like Hitchcock’s Psycho, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and the best Hammer horror, to 70s and 80s classics for hardcore horror fans like The Exorcist, The Shining, and slasher hits Halloween and Friday the 13th, there’s no shortage of great flicks to get in the spirit of the season. One essential on the list would have to be The Nightmare Before Christmas. Though it started out a dark horse and a redheaded stepchild to Disney, to fans who love it, it’s become as important a part of October as the ubiquitous pumpkins, or pumpkin spiced lattés. In fact, as classic Halloween film fare goes, The Nightmare Before Christmas is now officially a classic, as its addition in 2023 to the National Film Preservation Board’s film registry attests! But what makes The Nightmare Before Christmas so special, how did such a unique and artistic stop motion animated feature come to be, and how did it become such a cult classic?

I remember with The Nightmare Before Christmas came out, in October of 1993. ArtInsights was already in existence, and the New Golden Age of Animation was in full swing. In 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit had begun reinvigorating the world of animation, with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin following quickly on its heels. Although the Academy had given special awards to Snow White in 1938, Roger Rabbit in 1989, and Toy Story in 1996, there would not be an official category for full length animated features until 2002. Still, Disney animation was breaking box office records around the world. 1991’s Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture, a first for animation. Anyway, I had seen the trailer for the film, and it looked gorgeous.

That last moment in the trailer explained why Disney decided to release the film under its Touchstone banner, instead of presenting the classic Disney castle and promoting it as a Walt Disney film. They thought it would scare kids. but, for better or worse, it was clearly based in the world of Tim Burton, whom many had celebrated for Beetlejuice and Batman, both of which had won Oscars, Beetlejuice for best makeup, and Batman for best art direction…and I LOVED stop motion animation. I was a huge fan of Rankin/Bass’s 1964 Christmas special Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and Harryhousen’s work in Jason and the Argonauts. Who could forget the wonderful skeleton fight, and didn’t those of us who saw it as kids ask “how the heck did that do that??” Let’s let Leonard Nimoy and Ray Harryhausen explain it to us:

I went to see The Nightmare Before Christmas the day it came out in limited release on October 21st.

To put the time into context, understand…nowadays, Nightmare stuff is everywhere. They change The Haunted Mansion to Halloween Town every year now, for goodness sake! Back in 1993, however, it was by no means the usual trusted Disney kid fare.

Burton had just released Batman Returns, which had caused controversy for its graphic violence. There was a marketing tie-in for Batman Returns at McDonalds, but Burton’s 2nd Batman film was ceaselessly (some would say gloriously) dark, and there was backlash. Said one parent, “Violence-loving adults may enjoy this film, but why on Earth is McDonald’s pushing this exploitative movie through the sales of its so-called, “Happy Meals”? Disney was nervous. Granted, animator and former Burton colleague at Disney Henry Selick was directing The Nightmare Before Christmas, but everyone knew it came out of Burton’s brain.

So of course, if you don’t know about Henry Selick’s career, you’ll want to learn more, and here’s this wonderful interview at the British Film Institute where he talks about his life in film and animation:

So they released the movie on October 15th ON TWO SCREENS. Two. It earned $95,000 per screen. The next week, when I got to see it, it has out on 563 screens, and did $11,000+ per screen. People who could get to the movie, (it expanded to 1600 screen Halloween weekend), loved it, as did the critics. Roger Ebert was one of them. Here he is, doing an interview with Tim Burton back in 1993:

The first time I saw the film, I hadn’t realized it was effectively an operetta. It was visually stunning, and the songs were great, but at the same time, I was thinking, “when will they shut up?”  Then I went again the next day and declared my lifelong and undying fealty to the film. I went nuts. Because it was released at the zenith of Disney’s marketing and merchandising craze, the Disney Stores were full of Nightmare merch. I bought everything I could get my hands on. They had boxer shorts with Lock, Stock, and Barrel, about 12 different tie designs, and stuffed versions of Zero in every shape and size.

While I was excitedly going from rounder to rounder, I heard two women talking right next to me, “I can’t believe they have such an ungodly film. This Nightmare movie is demonic and horrible. Children shouldn’t watch that!” I turned around and said, “Have you even seen the trailer? I’ve seen the movie twice, and it’s beautiful. It’s a love story. It’s full of joy and optimism. You should go see it.” They gaped at me and left the store. *Gallic shrug*

THE PRODUCTION: A lot went into the finished film that I saw and fell in love with…Over 200 animators and artists worked for over 3 years to make it. Creator Tim Burton described his visual inspiration as being from German Expressionist cinema like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari combined with Dr. Seuss. Some illustrators were also touchstones, including Edward Gorey and Ronald Searle. You can certainly see their influence:

The film used more than 20 sound stages and constructed 227 puppets. The filmmakers created sets that were fitted together, with each section the size necessary to allow for the puppeteers to reach no more than 2 to 2 1/2 feet to move the characters.

The cinematographer Pete Kozachik, who was nominated for a Best Visual Effects Oscar for the movie, had been on the visual effects teams for movies like Dreamscape, Star Trek IV, Innerspace, and Willow, but The Nightmare Before Christmas was his first time as director of photography, and he went on to be DP for James and the Giant Peach, Corpse Bride, and Coraline. He sadly passed away in 2023, but not before talking extensively about his work on the film in his great book Tales from the Pumpkin King’s Cameraman.

In it, he talked about how he lit Sally to look like a 1940s Hollywood leading lady. “Romantic interest is found in the character Sally, a shapely rag doll who wishes Jack would turn his narcissistic eyes her way. I had wanted to try glamour lighting in stop motion, and here was a chance. Would it translate, or just look silly? Photography of the leading ladies of the ’40s was emulated with a high special on Sally’s face, vignetting surrounding areas, and extra diffusion. Sometimes a tightly cut eyelight was included, requiring animators to keep Sally in the light, or animate dimmers. Ray Gilberti and Chris Peterson used this approach in a sentimental finale. Male crew members indicated a hormonal response in dailies, verifying the success of the experiment.”

And a more technical, but no less fascinating quote from him about camera angles: “Henry and I wanted to use camera moves as freely as live-action does. The ability to follow action with pan and tilt would permit tighter framing and more dramatic angles. Dolly and boom movement would let us shift perspective during a shot, and push in or out for dramatic emphasis. And a flying camera would greatly enhance musical sequences, with its own performance complementing those of the characters.”

There’s a great article he wrote for a website “American Cinematographer“, part of the American Society of Cinematographers, that gets pretty technical, but it’s fascinating. (YOU CAN READ THAT HERE)

Jack Skellington had over 400 interchangeable heads and dozens of different eyelids for when they made Jack blink. Actually, my friend Brigit, who worked in marketing for Disney art at the time, helped design a limited edition based on some of his heads which was signed by Tim Burton himself!

COLLABORATIONS: Tim Burton came up with the story while he was working at Disney Animation in the 1980s. He wrote a poem (which you can read HERE) that he said was based in the Night Before Christmas, and all the Xmas TV specials he grew up with, and Disney dug it, but they weren’t sure what to do with it. Nothing came of it, and then Burton left Disney and blew up with his movies Beetlejuice and Batman, which he released though Warner Brothers. The combination of the popularity of Roger Rabbit and Burton’s discovery that Disney still had the rights led to a deal in 1990 to develop it as a film. By the time production was gearing up, he was committed to Batman Returns, so he tapped his friend Henry Selick to direct. It made sense. Selick has often said that aesthetically he and Burton “live in the same neighborhood”. Burton also hired frequent collaborator and Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman to compose the music. Although at the time, he was still touring and releasing albums with his band, he had already worked with Burton on Beetlejuice (1988) and Batman(1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Batman Returns (1992). He too could tap into that creepy aesthetic Burton became so known for, and had been handed a number of horror projects like Nightbreed and Darkman. Elfman has gone on to become a main stay as part of Burton’s go-to below-the-line artists, to the great joy of many of us soundtrack geeks!

Elfman wrote the songs and the story was being developed, and while Burton had in mind hiring another artist to perform them in the finished film, everyone fell in love with Elfman’s interpretation of Jack’s singing voice. Since he was less comfortable with the speaking parts, they hired Chris Sarandon, who sounded very much like Elfman. They do make a perfect pair!

Sarandon talked about his experience and its joy at the film’s longevity, at the 30th anniversary:

THE MUSIC: These days, The Nightmare Before Christmas is everywhere! You can generally find somewhere playing it right around Halloween, sometimes even with a whole symphony playing against the film, and of course it’s always streaming online. Then there’s the concert series, which has been done multiple times, including last year, when The Nightmare Before Christmas turned 30. In fact, a friend of mine, Richard Kraft, was one of the producers of the concert series. He’s Danny Elfman’s manager, and through Kraft Engel Management, he represents a ton of film composers and has been producing live shows for years, including the Emmy Award winning Beauty and the Beast 30th Anniversary Celebration.

Here’s a great video that shows a side-by-side comparison of the film and a live performance.

You may or may not know that not only is Catherine O’Hara (Emmy winner as Moira in Schitt’s Creek, mom in Home Alone, and frequent collaborator with Christopher Guest in his films) plays Sally, she is also the voice of Shock. Barrel is voiced by Danny Elfman, and Lock is voiced by the late great Paul Reubens. Burton had worked with Reubens as director of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure in 1985, his feature directoria debut. He credits him with having a huge impact on his career. After discovering Reubens had died, Burton said, “I’ll never forget how Paul helped me at the beginning of my career. It would not have happened without his support. He was a great artist. I’ll miss him.” As you can see from the above picture, you can watch Pee-wee aka Paul Reubens performing Lock live at the Nightmare Before Christmas concert.

I fell so in love with the score and music, that I bought it not only in English, but in French. Here’s “C’est Ca, Halloween”:

I could go on and on about the many aspects of the film and I love and that fans around the world now celebrate, but the blog would be too long, so hopefully you’ll watch some of these videos if you’re interested in knowing more about the production itself. Here’s a great making-of video, if you feel like taking a deeper dive:

MERCHANDISE: Though after the initial release there was a dearth of Nightmare merchandise, now there’s a seemingly never-ending parade of products…There are Disney Store items, a new makeup collection, LEGOs, jewelry for both the thrifty and the flush with cash, clothing from geek design folks like Her Universe and whole bedroom suites dedicated to the movie.

Aaaaand of course we at ArtInsights have art for sale representing the film, but that was a long time in coming. It took our begging for years and the Disney art company that works with Disney years of dealing with them before they allowed limited editions to be made. It’s literally this year that we’ve seen more than 2-4 images available!

Here are a few you fans and collectors might love:

For romantics that love the romance of Jack and Sally:

Here are some for folks who want to celebrate THE JOY OF JACK:

And if you love the whole cast, one of these might be for you:

You can see all official Disney art releases available from The Nightmare Before Christmas HERE.

Talking about doing a “Christmas in July” show all began when we discovered there would be a new limited edition being released based on the Tree Lot scene in the classic and historic 1965 animated Peanuts TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas.

In case you didn’t know, “CHRISTMAS IN JULY” is an actual thing, and has been for over 100 years! The first reference to it is in the English translation of the 1892 French opera Werther, in which someone says to kids practicing a Christmas carol in July, “When you sing Christmas in July, you rush the season.” (in French, it’s “vous chantez Noël en juillet… c’est s’y prendre à l’avance.” In 1935, there’s a reference to Christmas in July in the National Recreation Association’s journal, saying the event at a girl’s camp was full of mystery and wonder. Yellowstone park got into the fun with their own Christmas in August, a tradition that started in the 1950s.

and did you know there was a movie written by Preston Sturges released in 1940 actually CALLED Christmas in July? 

Meanwhile, right down the street from here in DC in 1942, The Cavalry Baptist Church instituted a yearly event where they sang carols and passed out presents. The post office and Navy and Army officials threw a luncheon with the same theme in 1944 and 1945, in the hopes that letters and gifts would make it to servicemen overseas in time for the holiday in December.  The idea expanded to become a theme on classic radio shows.

Fans of A Charlie Brown Christmas will remember the scene with Snoopy that Charlie Brown declares is “a dog gone commercial”. Actually, examples of advertising and promotional events celebrating Christmas in July can be found as early as 1950. There’s even a perfume from 1954 inspired by the trend! In countries in the southern hemisphere, holiday events are often planned in July (in ADDITION to those that still happen in December), because that’s their midwinter, and they want the holiday to have that wintery feel. In the northern hemisphere, parties themed around Christmas in July are meant to bring the feeling of cold climes into what is often a particularly hot time of the year. They celebrate with Santa, fake snow, and hot comfort foods. Coming into the fray recently is Hallmark and its movie channels, which show Christmas movies this time of year to coincide with their Hallmark ornament release. For folks who can’t get enough of those flicks, there are FOUR Christmas in July original releases happening this month, along with a ton of already released favorites. CLICK HERE TO SEE I AM NOT JOKING.

I can’t say we at ArtInsights had any idea about just how dog gone commercial July has been since all the way back in the 50s, but we DID know about the movie..(I mean, PRESTON STURGES!) and we also knew about the Hallmark movie thing. I love that this event has such a history!

Anyway, we partnered with the Peanuts animation folks to put together a collection of Christmas art to compliment the new limited edition, which, by the way, is spectacular. This new piece was designed and perfected by Emmy-winning animation director Larry Leichliter, who my friends and clients will know from other events we’ve featured him in, and the several blogs we’ve written about him, like this one and this one. Knowing he was the one behind this new limited edition (which has only 50 pieces) we wanted to offer other Christmas-themed art Larry was involved in, so we got some great original art from the 2002 special Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales, a great piece from I Want a Dog for Christmas, a few key setups with ORIGINAL BACKGROUNDS BY DEAN SPILLE (who you can read about HERE) from various specials, and DRUMROLL…..THREE lovely original layouts created especially for our show by Larry Leichliter himself. Also, for folks who do buy the new Tree Lot limited edition, you can, for FREE, choose between two special 3×5 original drawings of Linus or Charlie Brown, drawn by Larry for our event.

Since this show is virtual, we decided to do an interview with Larry Leichliter about the memories of Christmas that inspired him while working on the tree lot limited, which is officially called “Do They Still Make Wooden Christmas Trees, Charlie Brown?”. We also talked about his experience working on the piece itself, his recollections of directing Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales, and creating the three wonderful layouts inspired by the A Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Sandy, our friend from Peanuts who helped curate the collection sits in, too, and gives her thoughts, too. I learned a lot, as usual. Read on, and I promise you’ll see and learn all sorts of new great stuff!  Remember, if at any point you want to see all Larry’s art in one place, you can go HERE.

ALSO: If you want to see all the art that is part of our Christmas in July show, you can see them all HERE.

=======

Leslie Combemale: I know you watched the Christmas special when you were in high school and were excited when it played every year. I know that you particularly love Linus, and the tree lot scene so captures both their friendship and each character’s personality. What does the tree lot scene evoke for you in terms of personal memories or nostalgia?

Larry Leichliter: I remember when I was a kid going to a Christmas tree lot at night to pick out a tree with my family, which was so special. Then the A Charlie Brown Christmas special came out right about the same time my father brought home a shiny aluminum tree in a box. We all assembled it and it really looked amazing with this color wheel that reflected all the different colored lights. It was like a disco ball before disco. So I had both sides of the experience, the traditional and the new. That scene, if you remember, of Charlie and Linus, walking away from camera towards the spotlights and you knew he was heading toward this Christmas tree lot, it brings back memories for kids of that era and folks who have gone out to get a real tree, of wandering through a forest of trees with lights all over, and getting a bit lost because you can’t see very well, but you smell the pine and you’re surrounded by these wonderful trees, and it’s magical. And then in the cartoon, they get there, and there are all these crazy colored trees. It’s just fantastic. There’s a contrast between those two memories for me and the fact that  Lucy sent him to get an aluminum tree, and what I remember as being what a real Christmas tree would be, which is more about what we think of as the spirit of Christmas.

~footage from 1965 of Christmas by the real tree in California:

~footage the 60s around the aluminum tree:

LC: Did you as a child or adult remember having a true A Charlie Brown Christmas tree?

LL: Not so much that but when I was in school and living in a little apartment, of course, I could neither afford nor headspace for a full grown tree. It was it was much more practical to just buy a little desktop tree, and so I had one of those for many years, a live tree, which I decided that I really kind of preferred a live tree just for sentimental reason.

LC: You lived in California, so where did you get your trees? What are your memories around that?

LL: There’d be a vacant lot, and in those days, there were more of them than there are now, or just the parking lot that they set up much like it is now. Until the day we left Los Angeles, there were still parking lots where they would come in and bring in truckloads of trees and set them up.

LC: You’re a pretty outdoorsy person. Did you ever choose to go out into the forest and pick a tree at a farm?

LL: My wife and I learned early on when we moved up to Oregon in 2015. Oregon was where we’d driven through looking for a home and there were trees everywhere. Christmas time comes, and I figured we’d  just go to a lot that had live trees. There was one just up the street from our home. There was a forest and I could cut down a tree, but you had to get permission. In California, you can wait till the last minute and still go to a tree lot, and they still have hundreds of trees. In Oregon. It wasn’t like that. If you didn’t get a tree or go looking for a tree the day before Thanksgiving, by the day after Thanksgiving, they were all gone. There was nothing but just bare bones, maybe a Charlie Brown tree or two, but that was about it. So we learned. Then when we came here to Iowa, we started going to this place just up the street from where we live now that grows all kinds of trees for Christmas time, and you can pick your own tree, so that’s what we’ve done for the last few years.

~In honor of Larry’s many years in and around LA at Christmastime, here’s a lane of trees that has been decorated since the early part of the 20th century:

LC: Early on, what did you and your wife do?

LL: Actually, in our first year together, I invited her to go to the Los Angeles railroad station, where trains would be coming in from up north and unloading trees, and you could actually buy your tree right off the train. It was late at night. It was all dark. None of the tree lights or any of the niceties of a tree lot. It was like an auction house, and just mayhem, but it was a lot of fun. We got a tree, brought it home, and we invited friends over for a streaming popcorn and cranberry party.

~Want to decorate your own Christmas tree like Larry did all those years ago? Well now you can:

LC: I think that speaks to the power that this TV special has of capturing the spirit of Christmas, and what memories the Tree Lot scene and limited edition evokes in all kinds of people. My family often got a tree and decorated it on Christmas eve, so we wound up with a LOT of A Charlie Brown Christmas trees, but it was a tradition that I hold dear. There are so many people, not just Christian but folks from all kinds of backgrounds, who have leaned into the tradition of the Christmas tree, because they’re so beautiful and the decorating brings people together, and they’re just such a wonderful addition to a winter home. Everyone who ever had a tree growing up and as an adult has their own memories, and the tree lot scene captures them all, which is amazing. Did you know that A Charlie Brown Christmas is what caused the aluminum tree fad to effectively end?

~If you love aluminum trees or just want to see a collection of them, look no further!:

LL: In my own family, as I said, we got that aluminum tree and then when I saw the show, I think it influenced me. I loved unwrapping the tree and putting it together and putting the lights on, it really was pure fantasy. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. After I saw the special, though, it made me a fan of live, real Christmas trees, and I’ve been a fan ever since. There’s nothing like a walk in the woods or a trip to the lot where it’s cold and smells like pine.

LC: Sandy, what are your memories of trees growing up?

Sandy: I grew up in Chicago, so we didn’t go to a lot, we always had a fake tree, but I do remember when we got the very first aluminum where you put the spokes in. Ours was green, and we had the color wheel. We had a cat and my parents didn’t want the cat going up a real tree, so I always remember just getting the fake tree out, and now to this day, we keep looking for one of those truly old aluminum trees from the 60s. My mom always decorated the tree. That was her joy. As kids, we’d tell her where the holes were. Now with my husband and I, we love putting the decorations on. Unboxing and seeing the ornaments is my favorite part. I remember my first ornament, and it was a Peanuts ornament, a bell with Snoopy and Woodstock. I still have that ornament.

~Watch the splendor of a great tree lot captured with this time lapse video:

===

ABOUT THE NEW A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS TREE LOT LIMITED EDITION ART DIRECTED BY LARRY: “DO THEY STILL MAKE WOODEN TREES, CHARLIE BROWN”

LC: What were some of the challenges of creating the new limited edition?

LL: First, I knew one essential element. The part where there’s this incredible pan, slowly going through the tree lot and seeing all these wild colored trees that are just so dazzling to look at and crazy to think about, that was just a wonderful moment for me. Right from the start, I knew I wanted to bring that out. In terms of challenges, there were two particularly difficult things.

One was getting all the overhead lights right. I couldn’t just copy the background, because it didn’t work with the setup of the characters and the trees. It all had to be pieced together and flow correctly. The other issue was I had to put together these three poses of the characters, and had to get that exactly right.

~Watch the scene of Charlie Brown and Linus going to the tree lot from the original 1965 special:

LL: We knew we wanted to start with Linus knocking on the tree. When Linus knocks on the tree and says, “This really brings the feeling of Christmas to home to you”, it was so fun, so that was a given. Then we wanted to end with the two of them admiring the little tree, so we chose a connecting pose of Linus pointing and Charlie Brown seeing his little Christmas tree for the first time.

LC: Talk about the first image of the two characters.

LL: Linus is knocking on the tree, and because it’s a sound a effect and not a visual, because he doesn’t make the tree vibrate or anything, I drew a little special effect to express that, and I had to make a little room for that, so I had to adjust his pose, even accounting for the famously big Peanuts heads.

LC: the two characters convey so much.

LL: Yes. This moment of these two kids in the tree lot really captures the relationship between Charlie and Linus and they way they talked to each other. How Schulz wrote them, It’s so different than any other characters in children’s strips. It’s very gentle and honest and straightforward. It can be humorous and ironic, but at the core, there’s a kindness.

LC: Absolutely. They really represent a level of kindness and compassion we should all aspire to in our friendships, both as kids and adults. That’s one of the best elements of A Charlie Brown Christmas, is that kindness between Charlie and Linus.

LL: That first moment when Linus is knocking on the tree, there’s just a touch of sarcasm in it. Little kids are painfully honest, but they can also be so gentle. That moment just captures all that perfectly.

LC: What else in the limited edition required finessing?

LL: The background took a lot more editing. The number of trees, capturing the color of the sky, and making the Klieg lights not too obvious or be too distracting. Then the white lights that go through the lot required a lot of shifting. It took a lot of shifting but when it’s right, you know.

LC: and while you’re inspired by Ed Levitt’s designs, you never got to actually meet him.

LL: No. I was more inspired by his designs and his sense of humor, which you can see in the films and can be very subtle. It doesn’t seem like these garish Christmas trees are subtle, but it’s the way he tells the story. There’s this juxtaposition of setting up with scene, with them walking up to the lot, and you imaging a normal lot full of real trees, and then you get this very bright, dramatic visual image.

Sandy: The tree lot really captures something that’s very nostalgic but also very in style now. I follow this mid century modern expert on Instagram, DC Hilliard. He posted some pictures of the tree lot last Christmas and I wrote him about how very mid century modern A Charlie Brown Christmas was. It sent new grounds on so many levels, and now there are all these young folks admiring and collecting all things mid century modern, with all their clean lines and bright aesthetics.

LC: And someone who definitely had an impact on that colorful aesthetic was Dean Spille, who painted the backgrounds for A Charlie Brown Christmas. Larry, he’s someone you did work with for years, yes? But did you ever work with him in person?

LL: Actually, he came to Los Angeles at one point, because they were going to do another Madeleine cartoon, and he had done backgrounds for the original, so he was hoping to do them for this new one. Of course, as soon as he showed up, Bill put him to work.  I remember I would come into his office and he’d always have this music of an accordion player on. It was Astor Piazzolla. He’d have it on all the time when he was working. He did all those amazing little thumbnail color keys and to me, in terms of the color and styling, he was almost like a co-director. Dean knew what Schulz’s style was, and he knew the style of the studio’s representation of Schulz’s work was, and he made these amazing adjustments to the layout before he painted them.

You didn’t think I would make you look up Astor Piazolla yourself, did you? Here he is with a prog rock band in the 70s:

ABOUT CHARLIE BROWN’S CHRISTMAS TALES:

LC: Let’s talk about Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales, which you directed in 2002, two years after Charles Schulz passed away in 2000. His strips are the basis of every animated release, and this is true for Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales. The way it’s split into 5 sections or vignettes, Happy Holidays from Snoopy, Yuletide Greetings from Linus, Season’s Greetings from Sally, Peace on Earth from Lucy, and Merry Christmas from Charlie Brown, feels very nostalgic of the Schulz strips.

LL: I think a lot of people don’t realize that from the very beginning the shows were built from his strips. If you look at the storyboards for, say, Great Pumpkin, you’ll see Bill’s drawings setting up the scene, and then, cut and pasted, a comic strip from Charles Schulz’s collection. As to Christmas Tales, the storyboards always came to me finished, mostly done by Bill, although when the studio got really busy, he got help. I think Ed Levitt did a fair amount as did Bernie Gruber. I have a feeling that Bill and Lee Mendelson put it together. Lee was always pouring through the comic strips and coming up with great ideas for doing a show. What I know about it is that when I went on to do work at other studios, Christmas Tales was one cartoon that I would hear all the time was people’s favorite, and they’d say it was because it was so much like Schulz’s original comic strips. I had to laugh because that was because it WAS entirely from his original strips, just with little bits that tied them together.

LC: What elements can you point to that you had a strong hand in?

LL: One of my original ideas was the title sequence. Up until that time, most of them were just single cards, but of course In A Charlie Brown Christmas, there’s that whole skating sequence, Charlie and Linus, and Snoopy running into the tree, so I liked the idea of doing an animated opening title for Christmas Tales, which I did. That was my little contribution to the special other than directing it. I love having Snoopy on the doghouse holding the little shifting signs.

~Here’s the original opening sequence from 1965:

~And here is the opening sequence from Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales

LC: Do you remember working with Dean on the original backgrounds for that show?

LL: Absolutely. I would send him the storyboards, and we’d have a conversation, and then he would send back his little thumbnail sketches that he’d do in color. Most of the time when we worked together, he would pick and choose which scenes needed to be done, and he was always spot on. He always had everything covered that I needed to see. On the rare occasion when I needed more, or a little change, I could just call him up and ask, but mostly everything he did was exactly the way it needed to be.

LC: What a great collaborator.

LL: I really loved working with him. He was just so professional, and he had so many years of experience, not only at Bill Melendez Studios but at other studios, too.

ABOUT LARRY’S A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS-INSPIRED LAYOUTS:

LC: I have three layouts you created for our show, and I’d love to go through them a bit. Tell us about process on the Snoopy on the piano.

LL: I chose this one because it’s one of my favorite scenes, largely because of what happens with Snoopy. Schroeder is playing piano, and Snoopy crawls in while Lucy is admiring and flirting with Schroeder, and he starts to sway to the music and gets up and starts dancing. He’s just so overcome with the joy of the music. Then when they start looking at him, he gets embarrassed, melts down and shrinks away. It’s just so funny and sweet. I wanted to capture that moment of his bliss and abandon. I think Snoopy is most people’s favorite character for the simple reason of his joie de vivre. He just lives for the moment.

LC: Then there’s the scene with Lucy and Charlie Brown at the psychiatry booth.

LL: What I love about that scene is the contradiction between the crabby girl who sets up a psychiatric booth to help people by telling them what’s the matter with them. Here, though, she’s trying to be sweet and convince Charlie Brown she can be the Christmas Queen, and that she’s the prettiest girl in the world. Here again there’s that little bit of sarcasm that plays in these characters and their relationships with each other and I think that adds to the charm.

LC: What’s also so great about Lucy is she has a great sense of herself and a lot of self confidence. That aspect of who she is is very good for little girls to see. You really capture her self confidence in this image.

LL: That’s one of my favorite elements, too. Another thing that was important for me to include was getting the sign exactly right. I love that in A Charlie Brown Christmas, unlike other times she’s at the booth, it says “The doctor is REAL in”. In Schulz’s strips, it says “The doctor is in”, but in this one shot of the show, it says, “The doctor is REAL in”, which is very of its time and very cute of Lucy and another sign of her confidence and sense of humor.

LC: and lastly, you created a layout of Snoopy decorating his doghouse for Christmas, which is definitely iconic and evocative of the 1965 special. How did you come to the finished image and choose those exact character designs?

LL: This actually was the most challenging for me to arrange and still have it read well. It’s a visually complicated scene.

LL: I eliminated certain elements that are in the original color image on the show. I removed several boxes of decorations and bits of grass and bush in the foreground. I wanted to get those two elements, one of Charlie Brown reading the notice about a that decorating contest, where you win “money, money, money”, and Snoopy standing on a box of decorations and putting up the Christmas tree lights on his doghouse. It’s really all about getting the spirit of the scene and tell the story.

LC: Your layout really captures Snoopy’s determination and out-of-the-box thinking, which is one thing fans love. He’s a winner, even as his human, Charlie Brown, rarely comes out on top. It’s like Charlie should be living vicariously through is dog!

LL: Certainly in this picture, he’s on the side of self doubt and confusion about the spirit of Christmas, while Snoopy is plowing ahead and enjoying it in every way and for all its worth.

ART FOR PEANUTS, CHRISTMAS LOVERS, AND ALL FOLKS SEEKING JOY: 

LC: You create such evocative images, and these layouts and the Tree Lot limited edition are no exception. What are you hoping fans and collectors will get out of it?

LL: The beauty of A Charlie Brown Christmas is that it means something different for almost everybody. I want them to get whatever they want out of seeing or enjoying these images. Those of us who watch the show over and over every year have their memories and nostalgia specific to their own families and friends and lives. For me, it brings back memories of what life was like for me when I was a kid. At the same time I really just enjoy the artwork both in the cartoons and on my walls. I enjoy the simplicity and charm of Schulz’s presentation of these characters and the depth of feeling they have. There’s great wisdom and pointed sarcasm, and also, at the core, they’re just nice and gentle to each other. They’re understanding with each other, but they also stand up for themselves. That’s something to aspire to for kids and adults alike.

IT BEGAN WITH SCHULZ 

Here is Charles Schulz talking about the power of Peanuts, and the importance of joy and kindness:

CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL THE IMAGES FROM THE CHRISTMAS IN JULY SHOW!

Ok, I’m aware that with this blog title, (ahem: Tom and Jerr) I’m giving a huge clue, but do you have any idea which cartoon character has won (by far) the most Oscars in film history? If you said Mickey Mouse, you’d be wrong. Only one cartoon, 1941’s Lend a Paw, a short in which he has Pluto as a co-star, was recognized in that way. So… maybe Bugs Bunny? Nope. He too only won once, for Friz Freleng’s Knighty Knight Bugs. As you may have guessed at this point, it wasn’t a single character, but the duo created by a duo, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s Tom and Jerry that hold the record. That pair of furry frenemies have the most wins at the Oscars for in the animated short film category. What’s even more impressive is they won seven Oscars within only a ten year span!

Needless to say, Hanna and Barbera were a big fluffy feather in MGM’s cap, as all these Oscars came during their tenure at the studio.

A HISTORIC TWO-MAN TEAM

Let’s start with a little background on their creators, two men who ultimately changed the landscape of Saturday morning television, making history along the way. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were partners for over 60 years, longer than most marriages. Among the many things cartoon fans have to thank them for, is basically creating the concept of the “Saturday morning cartoons”.

Say what you like about their many equally beloved and reviled cheesy 70s cartoons. Once Hanna Barbera built their own studio, they were able to create dozens of characters and cartoons studied and sought out to this day. (Right here is where I mention there’s a great animation professor, art historian, and expert, Jerry Beck, who has written a book specifically about Tom and Jerry, but also about all the Hanna Barbera cartoons. To do a deeper dive into Tom and Jerry, or any number of other Hanna Barbera cartoons, you can buy his books HERE.)

As much as they may have built memorable stories and characters in cartoon form, in real life, they were in fact polar opposites. According to Hanna Barbera story artist Tony Benedict, Joe Barbera was a very flashy guy. He loved tailor-made suits, initialed ties, his Bel Air mansion, and keeping his skin bronzed with a great LA tan. In contrast, Bill Hanna was a dedicated outdoorsman with simple tastes, a hard-nosed businessman who held to a tight schedule. In their long career working together, they created many cartoons, including The Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows in the 50s, The Flintstones, The Yogi Bear Show, The Jetsons, Top Cat, Jonny Quest, Space Ghost, and Scooby Doo, Where Are You? in the 60s, and  Josie and the Pussycats, Super Friends, Hong Kong Phooey, Jabberjaw, and SOOOOO many others in the 70s. (Don’t come at me with the ones I haven’t mentioned…the fandom for specific HB cartoons is intense and obsessive!) After they founded their own studio in 1958, Hanna and Barbera won or were nominated for 8 Emmy Awards. MGM and Tom and Jerry was really the beginning of a successful lifelong partnership.

Barbera started his career as a tax accountant, but grew bored with that career, and added working as a commercial artist to feed his artistic soul. After having his illustrations published in Colliers, he quickly got involved in animation (especially after being fired from his tax job during the depression) first working as an in-betweener at Van Beuren Studios, then moving on to Terrytoons, before finding himself at MGM.

In contrast, Bill Hanna worked at the Harmon-Ising Studios, climbing the ladder there from janitor to head of ink and paint to building gags and becoming skilled at timing. When in 1933 Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising signed a deal with MGM to create animation, Hanna continued to work with them, directing his first short with 1936’s To Spring. It’s a bit dated compared to shorts released even a decade later, but a lovely example of animation from that era.

In 1937, Harmon and Ising moved on from MGM, but Hanna stayed on, working with producer Fred Quimby, who was the head of the MGM animation studio.

Cartoons fans will likely recognize his name due to its prominence in the credits of the over 250 shorts he produced. In fact, although he was the head of the MGM animation department, he had no prior experience in the medium, and acted almost exclusively as a liaison between the animation department and studio executives. A humorless guy, after their first appearance in 1940’s Puss Gets the Boot, he believed the characters that would become Tom and Jerry had no future, and Hanna and Barbera had to fight to be allowed to work on more shorts featuring the pair. He was, however, all too happy to accept all the credit and keep any and all Oscar wins Tom and Jerry and any other MGM cartoons received. All the animators loathed him. (See Joe Barbera’s distain for him in an interview HERE.)

THE BIRTH OF JASPER AND JINX aka TOM AND JERRY

Anyway, there Hanna was, at MGM, and now both he and Barbera were working at the same studio. In a story meeting together, Barbera suggested they create their own cartoons. They settled on a cat and mouse. Not yet called Tom and Jerry, they debuted as Jasper and Jinx in the above-mentoned Puss Gets the Boot in 1940. You’ll find their design for the characters very much finished, but it wasn’t until their second cartoon, The Midnight Snack, that they were dubbed Tom and Jerry.

There’s some argument about how they got their final monikers, but the official story is they had a studio contest to rename the characters, and an animator named John Carr won the first place prize of $50 for suggesting Tom and Jerry. Another story lists a long series of influences, starting with a Damon Runyon story from 1932 and tracing it all the way back to the early 1800s and a series written by journalist Pierce Egan in the 19th century tome Life in London, where it referenced young men of disrepute given to gambling and high jinks.

As to script, though supporting characters in Tom and Jerry had lines, the two main characters rarely spoke as part of their cartoons. There were a few notable exceptions, including Puss Gets the Boot. It’s far more often the case that Tom sings, as most memorably exampled by “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” in 1946’s Solid Serenade. (You can watch him perform Louis Jourdan’s hit at the bottom of this blog).

As you can see by this video, “Puss Gets the Boot” led to the two’s first Oscar nomination, but it suffers from some of the problematic portrayals of the time…

The first Oscar nomination that officially counts is 1941’s The Night Before Christmas, only the second short in which the duo were known as Tom and Jerry. It’s one of my favorite Christmas cartoons, and for good reason. It hits all the warm fuzzy spots of the season:

That’s the year Mickey’s one and only Oscar win happened for Lend a Paw, which is a bit odd, since Pluto is really the star of that short. It’s the one where Mickey finds a kitten and Pluto has a moral conundrum about what to do with it. A fight between the angel and devil on his shoulders ensues. That year saw the beginning of a lot of military and war-related cartoon shorts, including How War Came, in which a famous commentator tries to explain the beginning of the war. You can see that short and read more about it on Jerry Beck’s blog about it, HERE.

A 10-YEAR WINNING STREAK 

1943 started a 10-year streak of wins and nominations for Hanna and Barbera’s Tom and Jerry. The first was for the 11th Tom and Jerry cartoon, The Yankee Doodle Mouse, which represented a technicolor wartime message of strength, resilience, and determination by the MGM animators. Note the fact that although Hanna and Barbera are credited in one of the first opening titles, Fred Quimby gets the final and most dramatic credit. That’s in contrast to many Looney Tunes Warner Brothers shorts, where the director nearly always got the biggest and final credit in the titles. Boooo to Fred!

1944’s Mouse Trouble is Tom and Jerry’s 17th one reel short, and the second consecutive win at the Oscars for Hanna and Barbera. They’re really on a roll here! Bill Hanna supplies Tom’s voice, as he deadpans to the audience, “Don’t you believe it.”. Vaudeville actress Sara Berner voices the mouse toy. It’s one of the shorts from the series in which Tom dies, although he never dies for long, having, as cats do, 9 lives. You can see both the girl mouse toy and Tom’s demise in this video:

The next winner was 1945’s Quiet Please, and features Spike the Bulldog in his 4th appearance. Voice actor Billy Bletcher contributes his voice, in a cartoon in which Tom actually speaks through the voice of Bill Hanna when he says “One custard pie? Let me have it!”.

In 1947, pianist Tom performs Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 by Franz Liszt. It too won an Oscar, but is, in fact, the only Tom and Jerry cartoon to make the Top 50 Cartoons of All Time list, coming in at 42. Oddly, the same year another famous cartoon came out that was extremely similar, Rhapsody Rabbit, even featuring the same classical piece. It may be true that plagiarism played a role, because Rhapsody Rabbit has as an early MPAA copyright, and Technicolor was accused of sending a copy of the Bugs cartoon to MGM. Since Cat Concerto was played first for Oscar contention, when people saw Friz Freleng’s Bugs cartoon, they assumed he was the thief. Friz, known as a bit of a hothead, was quoted as saying, “No, no, no! I never saw your g-damned lousy cartoon!”

The Little Orphan, released in 1949, features Nibbles (also known as Tuffy!) in his second appearance., with Tom and Jerry in a Thanksgiving gambit. Rife with problematic references to indigenous and Black folk, it’s a product of its time. My own experience is I found production cels made for an updated sequence created by Chuck Jones in which the scene was altered, presumably because the moment was so racist…it showed Tom lit on fire and, after burning, is left looking blackened in a way reminiscent of a Black stereotype called a “picaninny”. (click on the word to learn more about that caricature’s history from the Jim Crow Museum page). At the time, it took a LOT of research to figure that out.

With this short, Hanna and Barbera’s series tied with Disney’s Silly Symphonies for the most Oscars. Nibbles/Tuffy appears in two Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry shorts.

1952’s The Two Mouseketeers is a personal favorite, not least because I’m French. Granted, it’s yet another example of Dumas being leveraged for laughs (there are many comedic entries in shorts and feature films that use his story as inspiration) but who doesn’t love Nibbles yelling “En guarde!”? on the other hand, it is a short not shown as often as many other Tom and Jerry cartoons because Tom is guillotined at the end. By the way, my family is related to the executioner of Marie Antoinette, which is far less delightful as sounds, given the number of innocent men, women, and children (and cats, apparently!) killed during the revolution. Still, it’s a truly great example of timing and character.

The last Oscar winner is 1953’s Johann Mouse. It’s particularly interesting for the illustrative aspects included in the short, for the narration, supplied by character actor Hans Conried, and piano playing from Polish pianist Jakob Gimpel included as part of the story. Gimpel had played for many MGM titles, including Gaslight and The Mephisto Waltz, but is also the pianist standing in for Bugs in Rhapsody Rabbit.

**Bear in mind that lthough I’ve tried to supply links to these Oscar-winning shorts (and they may become broken links), they are currently all available as complete cartoons streaming on Max. 

Here is Joe Barbera talking about creating Tom and Jerry with Bill Hanna:

In its original run through MGM, Hanna and Barbera created 114 theatrical shorts. Are the 7 that won Oscars the best of the best?

You’d have to watch all 141 to decide, but certainly they represent a mastery of timing, squash and stretch, and other important aspects that animators in the 50s, 60s, and beyond used as inspiration in their own work.

One such artist, who spent over two decades at Hanna Barbera Studios, is Bob Singer. He studied the early Tom and Jerry cartoons for his own work. It’s for that reason he was inspired to created images from Oscar-winning cartoons of that era for a series of limited editions, all available for purchase on our website!

Of course, Tom and Jerry went through several other permutations over the years. For example, between 1963 and 1967, Chuck Jones produced 34 cartoons starring the cat and mouse team, often working with background and concept artist Maurice Noble. The characters looked a little different, and you can definitely see his style in story, animation, and character design. In those shorts, occasionally the voices of Mel Blanc and June Foray can be heard. There are also several tv shows dedicated to the pair done in the 60s and 70s. There was, (oh the horror!) it must be mentioned, the Filmation Era in the 80s, which is truly an abomination.

Most recently, starting in the early 2000s, Warner Brothers, which owns the MGM library, resurrected the characters. There are a number of newer cartoons featuring Tom and Jerry in which they exist in more modern environments.

Apart from the appearance of Tom and/or Jerry in feature films in the 40s and 50s like Dangerous When Wet (with Esther Williams) and Anchors Aweigh (with Gene Kelly), Tom and Jerry starred several feature films in the 1990s and 2000s. A new series premiered in 2021 on MAX, called Tom and Jerry in New York inspired by one of those features.

Whether better (Chuck Jones) or worse (Filmation), every single short created after Hanna and Barbera’s heyday at MGM show what truly beautiful great examples of animation those historic Oscar-winning shorts from the MGM era are.

—

Speaking of beautiful art, if you love all these Tom and Jerry cartoons, you can always buy a set of all Bob Singer’s images! Click below for more info:

===

Here, as promised, is Tom singing “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”, with lyrics so you can sing along!:

It’s actually officially spring, and so like the bear with very little brain, i was racking mine to think of the best idea for a blog that celebrated a Disney character that exists in a natural world we’d most enjoy in spring, and of COURSE I realized Winnie the Pooh is the perfect subject! Then I went down a “rabbit hole” (although he’s my least favorite character) doing research about the history of Pooh. Everyone knows A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard wrote and illustrated the original stories and Disney created the cartoons starting in 1966, but there’s so much more to know about England’s beloved bear and Disney’s second most successful character (after Mickey). I’m here to meet the challenge of telling you a bit more than you might already know, so let’s dive into the history and art of Winnie the Pooh together, shall we?

A LOT OF BOOK BOTHER ABOUT A GREAT BEAR:

A.A. Milne was a writer who had joined the staff of the British publication Punch in 1906. His son Christopher Robin was born in 1920, and inspired by him, he wrote a collection of poems, When We Were Young, illustrated by Punch staff political cartoonist E.H Shepard, in 1924. They followed that with short stories which included those that became part of the Winnie-the-Pooh books.

The first time Winnie-the-Pooh was mentioned by name was on in a story commissioned by The Evening News for Christmas Eve, 1925. The character was inspired by a stuffed toy Milne had bought for his son, and a female bear named Winnie they’d seen at the London Zoo. That bear has its own story. A Canadian vet and soldier named Harry Colebourn bought a bear cub on a whim and brought her (yes, Winnie, named after his home town of Winnepeg, was a girl cub) from Canada to England, where she became the mascot for his militia cavalry regiment. While he was in France, he kept Winnie at the London Zoo, where she became a star attraction. It was there that Christopher Robin met her. He loved the experience so much that he named his teddy bear after her.

Here’s a great piece where Harry’s great grand-daughter, Lindsay Mattick, talks about the legacy of Winnie the bear:

Inspiration for the Hundred Acre Woods for the books and, subsequently, the Disney animated shorts, is based on Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Milne had bought a home a mile away from the Five Hundred Acre Wood, an old beech wood forest that dates from before 1670, and is now part of private land on the Buckhurst Park estate. Here are a few pictures from a part of the woods you CAN acces, photographed by travel blogger & Disney fan Nikki from Traveling With Nikki; (Please read her wonderful article HERE)

Winnie the Pooh would be nothing without the collaboration between Milne and his illustrator on the series, EH Shepard, and the writer knew that, although before they worked together on their first project, neither thought Shepard’s illustrations were a good fit. Realizing the impact Shepard’s images had on the success of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne arranged to have him share in the royalties. You can learn so much more about A.A. Milne in this great British documentary:

Shepard did indeed have a tremendous influence of the beloved series. Not least because while the name of the character came from Christopher Robin’s toy, the look of Winnie was inspired by the toy bear Growler, belonging to Shepard’s son. Although that stuffed bear was destroyed by the family dog, the toy belonging to Milne’s son is housed at the New York Public Library, where it has been since 1987, and seen by thousands of Pooh fans every year.

A success as an illustrator when still in his 20s, E.H. Shepard had created images for editions of Aesop’s Fables and David Copperfield by 1907. He was an officer of note during World War 1, receiving the Military Cross, all while still contributing as Punch’s leading political cartoonist. Both his children, Graham and Mary, were also illustrators. Mary Eleanor Jessie Knox is known for her work as the artist in Mary Poppins, by TJ Travers. Although in 2022, an image by Shepard from Winnie the Pooh broke an all-time record as the highest price paid for an illustration, he had a long and storied career, which you can see in this video:

In 1930, the merchandising and media rights to Winnie-the-Pooh were bought by Stephen Slesinger. It must have been the best business decision he’d ever made! By 1931, it was a $50 million a year business, with Milne retaining 66% of the sales income. Slesinger is credited with showing Winnie in his red shirt for the first time, which you can see here on the 1931 board game: (We’ve gotten used to him in red, but honestly, in retrospect, it looks kind of weird, right?)

After Stephen’s unexpected passing in 1953, it was his widow Shirley that took over all things Winnie. She licensed the rights to Disney at the same time the Milne family did so, in 1961.

WALT DISNEY’S WONDERFUL WINNIE:

Walt was interested in getting the film rights to Pooh as early as 1938, when he saw his daughter Diane was enamored with the books, but it wasn’t until the 60s that he made a deal with both Milne and the Slesinger family. Then Walt was all in. By 1964, Disney was planning to create a featurette based on the books to attach to a live action release. It was Walt who dropped the hyphen in Winnie the Pooh’s name, (so if you’re English, feel free to keep adding them!) Their first release was 1966’s Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, and was included in a double bill with live action feature The Ugly Dachshund. The Honey Tree was based on the first two chapters of the first book. Wolfgang (Woolie) Reitherman was tapped to direct. He was one of the “Nine Old Men” of Disney, and worked on every feature from Snow White through Fox and the Hound, becoming director with 101 Dalmatians in 1960. For Honey Tree, he cast his son Bruce to play Christopher Robin, who also voiced Mowgli in The Jungle Book. In later featurettes, other voice actors were used for the same character.

Meanwhile, some great voice actors were used longterm for other characters and roles in the film. First, of course, is Sebastian Cabot. You would know him as Bagheera in The Jungle Book, but he’s also the narrator for the Winnie the Pooh series. Barbara Luddy, who voiced Lady in Lady and the Tramp, voices Kanga. Clint Howard, brother to actor/director Ron Howard, and someone with over 250 credits starting when he was a toddler, plays Roo.

For much of Winnie’s history at Disney, Sterling Holloway voices Winnie the Pooh. He’s also the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, Kaa in The Jungle Book, but started working with Disney early on as Mr. Stork in Dumbo and as the voice of adult Flower in Bambi. Here’s something I learned in my research for this blog: Ralph Wright, who lends his voice to Eeyore, also wrote not only most of the Winnie the Pooh featurettes, but also helped write Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, and dozens of Disney shorts. I can never forget consummate character actor John Fiedler, who plays Piglet, also plays a key role in an original Star Wars series classic episode, “The Wolf in the Fold”. He plays Jack the Ripper! Most of my friends and clients know I’m not a fan of Rabbit (he’s such a know-it-all!) but I loved learning that the actor that voices him, Junius Matthews, also played Scottie in Lady and the Tramp, and Archimedes in Sword in the Stone.

Although Honey Tree didn’t win nor get nominated for any major awards, 1968’s Winnie the Pooh and a Blustery Day won the Oscar for Best Animated Short, and 1974’s Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too was nominated in the same category.

In addition to those I’ve mentioned, a ton of incredibly talented animators worked on the Winnie the Pooh series, including Dale Baer, Don BLuth , Andy Gaskell, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, who animated Winnie and Piglet, MIlt Kahl, who worked on Tigger, John Lounsbery, who worked on Owl, and John Pomeroy, who animated Rabbit.

The music from Winnie the Pooh was done by the legendary Sherman Brothers, who wrote the songs, and Buddy Baker, who wrote the scores for many live action features and Disney shorts between 1960 and 1981, and, notably, the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.

While I’m not sure how long this link will be good, here’s the very informative Disney documentary on the making of Winnie the Pooh. It has EVERYONE!

POOH IN POP CULTURE:

Pooh in pop culture is represented in the most wonderful to the most bizarre ways, as is often the case with iconic characters and stories. In the wonderful column, we have the fact that they’ve been translated to not only many live languages, but also into Latin, including Winnie ille Pu, which was first published in 1958, and, in 1960, became the only Latin book ever to have been featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Pooh has also been published in books that explain complex philosophy via the character, including the Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet, which explain Taoism. Pooh and the Philosophers by John T Williams considers the teachings Kant, Descartes, Plato, and Nietzsche via the bear with very little brain. Go figure!

There is a sport, Pooh Sticks, created based on the game Pooh plays with his friends where they drop sticks into a stream and see whose stick first crosses the finish line. A World Championship Pooh Sticks race takes place in Oxfordshire every year.

Depending on your perspective, this is either awesome or not. China has banned images and films relating to Winnie the Pooh, because on social media Xi Jinping has been compared unfavorably to the character. In fact, Pooh was featured on a South Park episode Band in China, and in it, Winnie the Pooh is brutally killed. As a result, South Park too was banned in China. More recently, Taiwanese air force pilots have taken to wearing patches depicting a Formosan bear punching Winnie the Pooh, meant to represent the Chinese president, as a defiant symbol of the island’s resistance to Chinese war games.

On the truly darker (and, I’ve gotta say, hilarious) side of Pooh in pop culture, we have the infamous video created that superimposes Pooh with Apocalypse Now. If you’re a fan of both and haven’t seen this, it’s a MUST-SEE. If you aren’t, avoid it. It will make you sad.

And the minute Winnie the Pooh went out of copyright, British filmmaker Rhys Frake-Waterfield created the live action slasher film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, as part of his Twisted Childhood Universe (TCU). Though considered by critics as one of the worst films ever made (that’s a hard title to win, by the way) it has made over 6 million with a budget of only $100,000. Feast your eyes, or maybe don’t, on its trailer:

===

Meanwhile, as always, ArtInsights has some wonderful images of Winnie the Pooh and friends, for fans of the films, books, and characters, and you can find them all HERE.

But of course we should show you some of the great official art of Winnie the Pooh. and Winnie the Pooh Disney fine art, so here are some of our favorites:

TO SEE ALL THE GREAT IMAGES INSPIRED BY MILNE, SHEPARD, AND DISNEY’S INTERPRETATION OF THEIR WORK, GO HERE.

Why is Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Adventures in Toontown our first blog of 2024? Why are we talking about the animation/live action hybrid’s history and legacy of art?

The impetus is that I recently got an email from our Disney Fine Art wholesalers announcing that as of January 23rd, they could no longer sell any Who Framed Roger Rabbit art. (This is true at the parks as well!) As it was, they only had a few images available, probably due to the fact that as of June 23rd, 2023, Disney had lost the license to the film. Obviously, the Disney Fine Art folks had some sort of extension that ended in 2024.

It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? Who Framed Roger Rabbit, released in 1988, broke so many rules in terms of studios working together and licensed characters being seen on the same screen that Hollywood folks have repeatedly said it could never happen again. THAT, along with the genius animation and character voicing, is what makes the film such an important one in animation and film history.

The story is based on Gary K. Wolf’s novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? Believe it or not, Terry Gilliam was at one point offered a chance at directing the film, and Daryl Van Citters was attached as animation director, but eventually the live action fell to Robert Zemeckis, with Richard Williams directing the animation. A metric ton of famous actors were offered the role of Eddie Valiant, including Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, and Eddie Murphy, before Bob Hoskins took it on. Roger was, at one point, was being voiced by Paul Reubens before the job went to Charles Fleischer.

Here’s a video showing an early development of the film, featuing Paul Reubens and showing just how much the film noir aspect of the film was already at play:

At the time, the film won Oscars for best editing, best sound effects, and best visual effects, as well as a special achievement award for director Richard Williams for “animation direction and creation of the cartoon characters”. In 2016, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Here’s Robin Williams (as Mickey Mouse!) and Charles Fleischer doing quite the comic bit before giving Richard Williams his Oscar. In his speech, Williams singles out animator (and now Disney Legend) Andreas Deja as being essential to the making of the film:

Andreas talks about his work on the film at the Academy’s 25th anniversary celebration of the film. You can see that HERE. He also references his experience working on the crowd scenes on his own blog HERE.

I also interviewed Andreas about his career, and he talks about Roger, Lilo, the Nine Old Men and more:

As to the voicing, just look at the spectacular talent from the history of animation present for this film. Mel Blanc, who died in 1989, was featured as some of his classic characters, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, and Sylvester. June Foray voiced Toon Patrol member Wheezy and Lena Hyena. She is known for a host of characters, including WB’s Witch Hazel, Granny in the Sylvester and Tweety, Lucifer in Disney’s Cinderalla, and Rocky and Natasha in Jay Ward’s Rocky and Bullwinkle. Mae Questel, born in 1908 and who died only 10 years after the film, played Betty Boop, a character for which she is most know, having voiced over 50 shorts between 1931 to 1939. She also supplied the sass for Popeye’s Olive Oyl starting in 1933 to her hiatus in 1938. Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, known for both voicing Mickey and Minnie Mouse AND being married in real life. Both have since passed away.

Although Charles Fleischer already had done many live action roles on TV, his work as Roger Rabbit became what he was most well-known for in his career. Fleischer was so into the role, that he asked to have a life-sized suit made for him to wear while on-set, and delivered his lines against Bob Hoskins in it throughout the production.

Uncredited stars involved in the film included Kathleen Turner and Amy Irving as the speaking and singing voice of Jessica, respectively, and even the great Little Richard took part, as Bullet #5.

And, as something we can file under the delightful title “You Can Find Everything On the Internet”, here are Tony Anselmo as Donald Duck and Mel Blanc as Daffy Duck in Roger Rabbit:

Roger Rabbit was also a film in which an animation studio co-owned by a woman (Jane Baer) worked on an entire sequence in Toontown.

The list of cameos featured in the film is as wide and as long as the Grand Canyon, and I’m not just talking about the usual Disney suspects. The film featured representative characters from Warner Brothers, (of course), but also MGM, Fleischer Studios, Famous Studios, Terrytoons, Walter Lantz Productions and RKO Pictures as well. You can see the whole list HERE.

Shortly after I started working in the animation field at one of the first galleries exclusively devoted to animation, Sotheby’s had an auction for art from Roger Rabbit. It was on June 28th, 1989. I’d say that was really the moment when cels started going nuts in the marketplace.

It was the first time people started paying high prices for art from newer animation features, and that, over the following few years, propelled a lot of the prices of older features into the stratosphere.

Strange, too, because at the time I was working at the new defunct gallery Artworks, in Old Town Alexandria, and really at the time there were only galleries worldwide that specialized in animation art. There was Howard Lowery, who had auctions, Gallery Lainzburg, who sold through their catalog, Circle Galleries, who were selling art we were selling for 4 times the price, and several other dealers few folks knew about. That was it! Still, the auction was a BIG deal, with most of the high-profile folks from the production in attendance, and prices going crazy almost from the beginning.

I remember being dressed up, wearing vintage black stiletto heels and walking way too far in them, and then sitting in shock as I watched the prices going up and up and up, and seeing famous people holding up their paddles, clearly with the attitude that price was no object. I was able to buy a few pieces for clients I had at the time, and I’m happy to say that either they or their progeny still own them. It was baptism of fire into an industry that expanded incredibly quickly from then on, because I saw the kind of passion some people had for cartoons. I was incredibly lucky to be there at the beginning of such a swell in interest for animation art, and to be able to meet so many voice artists and animation professionals who are now no longer with us.

One couple I have worked with almost from the beginning of my career is the biggest collector of Roger Rabbit art and collectibles in the world. I must have sold them over 50 original production cels from the film, maybe more, but they were at the auction as well, and as of this year, they have, I think, over 300 cels from the movie. They are also the biggest collectors of Nightmare Before Christmas, and have many of the spectacular dioramas and figures used in the film, in case you needed to feel a bit more envy of these folks. I can at least tell you they’re lovely people. The art found a loving home!

As for Jessica Rabbit, images of her were the last thing available from Disney Fine Art, before they pulled all images a few days ago. Fortunately, we have this gorgeous piece available from Disney artist Bill Silvers, and it really captures the fact she really IS “drawn that way”.  You can see that image HERE.

some of you know, we currently have a wonderful original production cel of Jessica Rabbit. It was purchased wayyyyy back in the early 90s, and now we have it for one of you Jessica fans!

Here is a video that shows Jessica and Eddie in the film. Our Jessica cel is 31 seconds into the scene!

I hope you enjoyed my deep dive into Roger Rabbit, and my experiences with the film and art. Those times are an important part of my education in the art of animation! It’s a beautiful thing that so many talented artists no longer with us are captured forever in this animated classic.

We have loved John Rowe since, well, forever. He has the incredible talent befitting a man with his impressive CV. He’s a movie artist with several high profile images including the poster for Miracle, and a screen-used brochure for John Hammond and his company InGen’s Jurassic Park. He’s an illustrator who learned from some greats like the legendary Saul Bass and created murals featured at Disney World, and is a fine artist who finds the layered meaning in whatever he paints. He’s also gentle, deep soul who infuses those qualities in his work, and takes every project to heart, be it a corporate commission, Disney fine art, or the portraits he creates of people he finds compelling.

In the span of time we’ve known John, we’ve become friends, and seen him create some beautiful Disney interpretive art, as well as lean into his fine art portraiture. He’s won some of the major illustration and fine art awards, while always maintaining his realistic yet emotionally evocative style. We’re thrilled to be able to offer the John Rowe Disney Fine Art Archive Editions Collection, all from John’s personal collection of Artist’s Proofs. In honor of the release of this collection, we interviewed the artist about his career, aesthetic, and where he gets the great ideas on which his most popular Disney images are based.

Leslie Combemale: What were the early indications when you were a kid that you wanted to work as an artist?

John Rowe: I used to draw every single day of my life. Even when my friends would come over and want to play, I would have to say, “Well, let me finish my drawing, and then I’ll go play football.” I just always loved drawing. When I was in elementary school, I wouldn’t fill out the papers they kept passing out to me, asking questions about dinosaurs or plants or whatever it was we were studying. Instead, I would draw a picture of them. So I would draw that dinosaur, or shark, or plant, I’d draw them perfectly with every fin and every element exactly. And then instead of turning in the work that the teacher had been passing out, which I thought was very boring, I would walk by her desk, and I would nonchalantly flip my drawing on her desk, because I wanted her to know that I was keeping up.

You were like an illustrator and training! Did you get good grades?

No! I was failing. And I was going to fail second grade. Then we went to a meeting with the teacher and my mom, and it wasn’t until then I figured out those papers are what they care about in school. I thought, “That is so weird.”

So you’ve always gone your own way, which is so important for an artist.

You have to kind of have your own agenda and your own vision of what you want to do, and then how you want to live your life.

How did you wind up at one of the most prestigious art schools in the world, Art Center?

I was going to become a history teacher, because I tested really high in history. But when I got up to Cal State, I couldn’t go through with it. So I told them I wanted to be an art major, and they told me I had to have a professor in the art building sign off, so I went to the building, and it was five stories tall, but there were no professors there because the semester hasn’t started. So I’m wandering around, and I run into Al Fiore, and he says, “I’ll sign this for you If you take my class.” I said, “Well, I can’t take your class, it’s an upper division class, and I’m just starting.” He said, “Just take my class.” So I take his class, and he also teaches at Art Center. He’s also a designer designing the new interior for the L 1011 airplane and the cockpit for some new Boeing airplanes. I turned on my first project and he says, “If you graduate, after four years here, they will never teach you to be better than you are. Let me help you get into a real art school.” And then he helped me get into Art Center.

Explain who Al Fiori is, explain the importance of him as an artist.

He was a designer, and he taught at Cal State, LA. He was the head of the design department there, and he also taught at Art Center. He mentored so many people.  I hooked up again with him years and years later, just about 15 years ago. He said he got asked to take a sabbatical from Cal State LA because he was cherry picking all of their very best students out of the school art and sending them to Art Center. He said, “I had just been offered a job at NBC to do some design work for them, and as part of the job, they gave me a Ferrari. So I parked my Ferrari out at the loading dock, and I was interviewing with the dean of the school, who told him to take the sabbatical, and to reconsider not pinching students, and he could come back later. They said they’d pay for my year off. And I said i’m out of here,  Just then the guy from the loading dock came in and said, ‘Hey, somebody’s Ferrari is blocking the loading docks. Anyone know who’s that is?’ And I said ‘That’s mine. Gotta go!'” He said that was the best exit he ever made in his life.

That’s a great lesson that it’s possible to be an artist and make money at the same time. You worked with one of the greatest illustrators in film history, Saul Bass. Can you talk about that experience and what it taught you?

I learned a great deal from him. He was incredibly meticulous. Everything had to be perfect. I had worked for months on the color for the Japan Energies logo, and he had done hundreds of drawings, and I was just painting color. I had two 8 x 8 inch pieces of art that I had made, and each one had to be identical. So the Japanese CEO would come in with his entourage, there’s about 15 people in the studio. And Saul and everyone is there, and they have my art, and they’re dropping a jeweler’s loop on it, and going over every every part of both pieces. They found a difference between the two. And they’re freaking out. “One piece has to go to Japan, and one has to be here. We need to be able to print worldwide from these two things.” They were busy on the phone trying to get a first class ticket to fly my art, because the CEO of Japan Energy was leaving in a few minutes, and it had to be fixed. My art couldn’t go by FedEx or any other way, it  had to be hand-carried to Japan.  So I hear them on the phone, and they’re asking if I can fix it in the few minutes before the CEO leaves. Yes! Yes, I can fix it!” And I’m in my mind, I’m thinking that first class ticket is the same price and the fee they’re paying me!.

He didn’t deal directly with you, right?

Normally, no. One thing about Saul is,  I did 30 projects for him. I would go in with the team of designers.  I would be sitting there, and he never talked to me directly. He always told the designers all the notes and fixes needing to be done. I was just the hired help. Then one day, I had messengered a little oil painting over there, and he was sitting there, again with the designers there too, ripping my newest assignment to shreds, saying how pedestrian it was, and how it looked like what some shlock illustrator would do, then he looked directly at me. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me, and he said, “Nice painting yesterday.” He ripped the one I was there for to shreds, but the one from the day before he liked enough to compliment me.

That’s when you know they mean it!

When Saul did pass away. all Hollywood was going there because he had done so many film projects and so many things, and Walter Matthau was speaking at the eulogy and stuff like that. And Nancy, his project manager, called me up personally and said, “Hey John, I know Saul would have liked it if you were there, so your name will be at the door. Just come. It would be good.”

You’ve worked on some pretty high profile projects some folks don’t even know about. You’re full of stories!

I have a story about the day I didn’t meet Steven Spielberg. I was working for a designer friend of mine, and I was painting these gates, and I was up all night doing it. I have a story about the day I didn’t meet Steven Spielberg. I was working for a designer friend of mine, and I was painting these gates, and I was up all night doing it. I mean, literally, I got the assignment and I had to stay up all night. So I came in with no sleep to the Universal to a place I didn’t know, because I don’t follow movies, called Amblin Entertainment. I delivered this thing, and the guy at the desk says, “This is great. It’s wonderful. This is really cool. Steven will love this. Steven will think this is really nice. I can go back and show Steven, do you want to meet Steven?” I’m like, “No, man. Just show him the work. I’m so tired.” He goes  and comes back and says, “Steven loves this. Steven wants another one tomorrow.”  I go back home, and I tell my wife, “This guy I work for is just obsessed with his boss. He must have said the name Steven 100 times.” and she asks, “Where were you? Do you have a card?” I pulled out a card and I gave it to her and it said “Jurassic Park”.  She said, “Do you know what the biggest movie next year is going to be? Jurassic Park.” I did a brochure for him for that, and it was used in the movie.

So in terms of projects that you’ve done that had a huge impact on your forward movement as an illustrator, what are a few? I know creating the covers for the reprinted Marguerite Henry books Misty of Chincoteague, that was a big deal.

I think those books were really important. Also one of the high points of my career was when I got a commission to do 12 stamps for the United Nations. Once you get a commission from them, they let you do anything you want. They don’t give you any direction, they just trust. Then once I delivered them I was able to go to New York and speak at Madison Square Garden and signed my autograph to hundreds of people’s first edition stamps. I was able to take my daughter, who was 17 years old at the time, and she got to see her dad do something cool.

You’ve also done a lot of images for Disney, some of which people see every day.

There’s a big mural in Animal Kingdom Park at the entrance. It’s 80 x 20 feet tall. When I did that mural, the director called me in, and she had a beautiful little drawing she’d made of all these animals. She said, “I hired two artists and both did a terrible job. We didn’t go forward with them. I’d like to do the same with with you. I’m gonna blow this up to eight feet and then you can paint on top of that.” I looked at it and it was a nice drawing but not the kind I’d need to do a photorealistic painting, so I told her “I’d love to do that, but I can’t work on paper, so I’ll transfer it to canvas myself and then I’ll do a sample of that.” Then I corrected all the things that needed to be fixed and perfected and did the sample and she loved it. You can see those murals today at Disney World.

You’ve done some really beautiful images in your partnership with Disney fine art. What was the inspiration for kind of that aesthetic?

The stories that Disney tells, I think they touch us. We’re influenced by them because they really relate to real life. When I painted a Disney story, that’s what inspired me. I had one that’s really personal to me, The Little Mermaid piece called “Fathoms Deep”, and when I painted that, Ariel is dreaming about a better life like a real person would, and just below her I had the good fish, and deep below I had the monstrous fish.

I painted them looking very realistic, but very evil. And I met a young woman who was 20-something who had that image tattooed on her leg. She came to me and she said, “This is my life. I grew up in gang violence, my parents were murdered when I was young, and I was raised around some bad people. And I’m that little girl wishing on the star, and wishing for a better life. And below are represented all of the gang violence and all of the things that I came through and I got out of in my life. That really made me understand how these stories, although they’re animated cartoons, have a real life story, a resonance within them that’s deeper than that. So I wanted to paint realistic figures, realistic people, and realistic scenes, because I think our emotional experience of these animated films is not the experience of a cartoon, our emotional experience is experience of how real people live life.

That desire to connect, to speak to real life experience, extends to your other fine art.

I do feel the same way about fine art. I don’t want to just do a nice, pleasant painting, I want to do something that speaks to something deeper about the model I’m painting. Almost all the models I use are people that I meet, and then I photograph them and talk to them, and find out something about them. That way, the painting can have some relation to the kinds of experiences they’ve had in their lives, but also that the viewer can relate to and find inspiring in some way.

You can see all of his Disney work on our website HERE. You can see his fine art on his website HERE.

Who doesn’t love a Top Ten Halloween Cartoons list? Something about classic scary cartoons stirs up nostalgia more than the average every day animation. Is there something about being scared at the same time as entertained that we hold on to from childhood?

Every year at ArtInsights, October has offered the opportunity to play all the best classic Halloween cartoons over and over, since they’re a gallery favorite. This year seemed like the perfect opportunity to list the best creepy cartoons ever made. None of these are too scary for most kids, and perfect for playing on a family night at home.

Our experience in the gallery, however, is adults are far more likely to sit and watch them over and over than their kids are. Of course, no one needs an excuse to play The Nightmare Before Christmas one more time, a movie we have the soundtrack to in three languages … (English, French, and German). It is, however, an opportunity to educate our friends about it’s greatness, as well as the greatness of other creepy classics. And with that in mind, here is my list of the top 10 Halloween cartoons of all time:

No. 10 — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949):
Packaged as part of the post-war Disney featurette The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Legend has a terrifying and great scene of Ichabod being chased by the headless horseman, not to mention narration by Bing Crosby and a great song. It is loyal to the original story by Washington Irving, which means it leaves some doubt as to the survival of Ichabod at the end. Enjoy the music and one of the best villains in Disney history, who “achieves his aim” with the least amount of airtime.

No. 9 — Lonesome Ghosts (1937):
Four green phantoms invite Mickey, Donald, and Goofy who are “Ghost Exterminators” over to their haunted house to drive them crazy—a gorgeous piece of vintage animation, with classic characters we all love. Note the detail in the backgrounds. Goofy’s quote “I ain’t afraid a’ no ghosts!” was used in some movie later.

No. 8 — Broom-stick Bunny (1956):
The first cartoon to use June Foray’s voice for Witch Hazel in a Warner Brothers cartoon, and it is widely considered the best of the WB cartoons featuring the character. The backgrounds are highly stylized in the tradition of the best of the Chuck Jones directed cartoons, and critics gave high praise to the witty dialogue written by Tedd Pierce.

No. 7 — Hyde and Go Tweet (1960):
This Friz Freleng directed cartoon is arguably the best featuring characters Sylvester and Tweety. It brings knuckle-dragging into your dreams at night! Tweety accidentally drinks a formula that makes him a huge yellow monster with bulging eyes and he terrorizes Sylvester—as he still terrorizes Tweety lovers whenever they watched the cartoon. Notice how “monster Tweety” breathes. Hilarious!

No. 6 — The Skeleton Dance (1929):
Black and white Silly Symphonies cartoon with skeletons rattling their bones joyously. It’s like the perfect Halloween Busby Berkeley cartoon. Creepy! A very early Disney cartoon before many experiments lead to advancements in animation, and yet still plays as one of the most beautiful cartoons ever made.

No. 5 — Water Water Every Hare (1952):
Bugs as a beautician, fixing the tennis-shoe wearing monster Gossamer’s hair—who doesn’t remember that classic cartoon moment? “Monsters are such interesting people!” And the big-headed evil scientist as he floats in an ether induced haze, while edited from more recent versions of the cartoon, is a classic example of “anything goes” in classic Looney Tunes!

No. 4 — Trick or Treat (1952):
Another result of legendary Donald Duck cartoon director Jack Hanna, but this one is many a Disney aficionado’s favorite. It introduced Witch Hazel, who was voiced by famed voice artist June Foray (who we mentioned in No. 8, Broom-stick Bunny). With Huey Dewey and Louie’s costumes and the stylized backgrounds, it showed just how vibrantly colorful a Disney short can be.

No. 3 — Night on Bald Mountain (1940):
Horror fans will point to Fantasia as their favorite movie not because of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but because of the dark and emotionally intense segment with the demon Chernabog, and at one point, bare breasted redheaded harpies! …and in a Disney cartoon! Leave it to Disney animation genius Bill Tytla!

No. 2 — It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966):
Some will argue for this Peanuts classic, and the third special, to be No. 1. Linus as the eternally hopeful optimist does inspire fierce loyalty in fans, and rightly so. It also makes subtle reference to open-mindedness and tolerance towards less traditional beliefs. Linus waits with the sign “Welcome Great Pumpkin” for him to appear in the pumpkin patch on Halloween. We have all the usual delightful suspects to enjoy, and Linus’s philosophizing to deepen our and our children’s thinking.

No. 1 — The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993):
Back when it was released, this was a sad little bomb, but it was MY sad little bomb and I have the original underwear, tie and watch to prove it. It has traveled in time and become a colossal cult classic, helping to keep teengoth store Hot Topic in business. The songs, the love story, the diverse cast of lovable secondary characters, the amazing world created in the mind of Tim Burton, and directed by Henry Selick, all come together into a Halloween masterpiece.

*This blog is reposted from my site Cinema Siren, written in 2011- I’m happy to say these ten are still my top ten!

To see some images based on these great cartoons and other Halloween frights, you can go to our

VERY EVIL VILLAINS COLLECTION,

NOT SO SCARY HALLOWEEN PARTY,

HAUNTED MANSION, or

IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN pages!

As I recently mentioned (in my latest blog, about the museum show “Ink Tributes” by Marlon West) I’m going to include blog posts about new films, animation and film art news, and other subjects that are not about art in ArtInsights. I’m hoping these (fascinating!) posts will have you coming back when you ARE looking for art. In the meantime, let me tell you about the new film The Peasants, by the filmmaking wife and husband duo DK and Hugh Welchman, who brought the Oscar-nominated film Loving Vincent.

Here’s the trailer for the movie, so you get a sense of what it looks like, and why it’s a big deal:

Before I get into all of this, I want to tell you why you want to read the whole article:

FIRST: the story of this production includes these filmmakers literally saving artists..they were working on The Peasants in the recently opened studio in Kyiv, Ukraine, when Russia invaded and started an unprovoked war. DK, Hugh and all the folks at BreakThru (the production company making The Peasants) had to get the artists out of the country, and they did. You can read all about their rescue in The Guardian newspaper HERE.

SECOND: as with Loving Vincent, art from The Peasants is available for purchase, and DK and Hugh gave me a discount code for readers of this blog, in case they want to buy any of the oil paintings created for the movie. The art is going fast, especially the art priced at $250 and $500 — although so far they’ve been adding more art every few days… (and yeah, we’re talking about oil paintings that are around 20 x 26 inches, so that’s quite a deal for production art from such a gorgeous and inventive film)…you can see all the art for sale HERE.

You can read my 5-star review of The Peasants on the Alliance of Women Film Journalists site HERE.

Now. On with the blog:

Loving Vincent featured an animation technique in which live action is filmed, then oil paintings are created based on that footage. It was a way of celebrating the art and live of Vincent Van Gogh, and was appropriately lauded for its laborious yet gorgeous style. I interviewed them about the movie for the AWFJ, and you can read it HERE.

A more technical explanation, taken from their press notes:

“The over 100 painting animators who worked on the film did so on specially designed PAWS units (Painting Animation Work Stations), which Breakthru developed for Loving Vincent, in four studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. The experienced film crew shot live action footage, then footage from the live-action shoot becomes the reference footage for the painting animators. They then use this reference footage and paint over this with reference to the style (brushstrokes, colors, level of detail) set by the design paintings to paint the first frame of their shot on canvas, sized 67cm by 49cm. They then animate the shot by painting the subsequent keyframe, matching the brushstrokes, color, and impasto of their previous frame, for all parts of the shot that are moving. At the end, they are left with a painting of the last frame of the shot. Each frame is recorded with a Canon 6D digital stills camera at 6k resolution.

As I mentioned, I interviewed DK and Hugh about The Peasants talking to them from their home in Poland. Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

=======

There’s a new animated feature from writer/director wife and husband team Dorota Kobiela (DK) and Hugh Welchman known for the Oscar-nominated film Loving Vincent, called The Peasants. It’s based on a novel of the same name by Polish 1924 Nobel laureate Wladyslaw Reymont, a thousand-page tome so well-known in Poland that it’s taught in schools, and considered one of the classics of world literature.

The novel’s story is meant to deliver a complete and evocative look at the customs, behaviors, culture, and daily life of people in Lipce, a small Polish village, and unfolds over the four seasons. Although the original book follows multiple characters, including Boryna, the village’s richest farmer, his son Antak, Antak’s wife Hanka, and young, beautiful dreamer Jagna, The Peasants centers on Jagna. She is an optimistic artist, and quite a beauty, and all the men of the village want her, including Boryna. Against her wishes, Jagna’s mother makes a deal for a marriage to the old farmer. Jagna is guileless, and chooses her own lovers and interests, which include the married Antak. This causes judgment and hatred from the religious women of the village. This feature film shows the devolution of Jagna’s life resulting from her determination for independence and autonomy.

Created in the same style as Loving Vincent, The Peasants was filmed in a technique in which live action is shot, and then used as reference and interpreted through oil paintings, each created by hand at four studios in Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, and Ukraine. Those oil paintings then are shot and become the images seen as the finished film. Women made up 75 to 80% of the artists working on the film.

Not only did the pandemic prove a challenge for the production, but so too did the war in Ukraine. Female artists in the Kyiv studio in Ukraine (most men were not allowed to leave the country) were evacuated to the safety of the Polish studio. The Kyiv studio was reopened after the fighting in Kyiv eased, but bombing plunged the space into darkness, so the producers started a Kickstarter campaign to buy a generator.

The film, in keeping with the novel, is often very serious and sometimes emotionally oppressive, but every frame is nothing short of gorgeous, and really demonstrates the level of artistry animation can reach as an art form. It takes the work DK and Hugh Welchman did on Loving Vincent and expands upon it, showing the possibilities of their technique through this worthy interpretation of a classic novel.

Leslie Combemale of AWFJ spoke to filmmakers DK and Hugh Welchman about their latest project in this exclusive interview:

Leslie Combemale: Can you talk about how the visual language of The Peasants reflects the artistic style of the Young Poland period? I know Wladyslaw Reymont was part of the literature of the time. You use symbolism in the paintings, like, for example, the use of red with Jagna, and that’s part of the movement. Can you talk about that, what other aspects of the Young Poland period are represented, and in what way?

Dorota Kobieka (DK): Yes, we definitely reference aspects of that movement, using it as inspiration, more often than quoting the paintings, although we do have particular pieces that we quote. Mostly it is in elements like the composition and colors. There are a number we do use, like the painting Indian Summer, where Jagna is lying on the grass playing with the bit of fluff in the air, which is by Jozef Chelmonski, one of the main painters of that period. There’s another, with flying storks, when the farmhand and the boy are in the fields looking at the storks, that’s called Bociany, or Storks, also by Chelmonski.

Hugh Welchman: We have 42 direct quotes in the film, and actually 15 of them are Chelmonski, so he became our main guiding light, although we took inspiration from around 30 different Polish painters, and also more broadly across European realism. For example, we have a direct quote from the French painter Jean-Francois Millet. We wanted to draw on that whole movement. The Young Poland painters were particularly appropriate, because they were presenting this view of Polish culture trying to keep Polish identity and national spirit alive during the partitions, and the period that Poland had been wiped off the map by the three empires. They’re showing Polish life and Polish culture, and were presenting a positive image as well as trying to show how life was really like. That seems really appropriate for Reymont, because he presents his characters, warts and all, with their failings, but at the same time, he has a very affectionate view towards his characters. Even though they can be awful sometimes, you still love them, feel for them, and can understand them, even if they sometimes do some terrible things. Also, his descriptions are so beautiful, very often it’s magical realism rather than straight realism, because of his poetic descriptions, and his bucolic portrayal of nature and the peasant world. The Young Poland movement and the realist movement seemed to be the best ways to bring his prose alive.

LC: The transitions into each of the four seasons are a particular opportunity for stylization. DK you were part of the editing team, which was an important aspect of those transitions, but what were the discussions around that with production designer Elwira Pluta and director of animation Piotr Dominiak? Were each of the four sections of the film, in each seasons, separated stylistically?

DK: That was very big part of the development process, there’s a divisions of the story by the seasons, because that’s how it is in the book. It’s actually divided, originally, into four books, each book for a different season. We thought them really good for representing a certain mood and part of the film, so we tried to design around them. Mainly the colors represent the seasons, and we tried to find the mood of each season that is represented in the story.

HW: It was a big part of it actually, from when we wrote the script, because in the Reymond novel, the transition to a new season, he has these long descriptions at the beginning of each novel, so it was an opportunity for us to be visually quite flashy. We wrote these very long camera moves at the script stage. For example, when we went from autumn to winter, we always wanted to have a continuous pullback to represent the change of the season. Then with spring to summer, we wanted to have the 360 degree camera move. I think those transitions were always going to be set pieces for us, which reflected the fact that they’re set pieces in the book. One of the things that attracted us about making this into an oil painting animation is if you take three pages of his description of the winter storms coming in, we can do that in one twenty second shot.

LC: It also offered you the opportunity to advance from the style of Loving Vincent, and show many other ways in which you can utilize the techniques you use.

DK: It was absolutely more liberating to be able to do more camera movement and more challenging animation.

HW: We didn’t want to do Loving Vincent 2. A lot of people were asking what artist we would be doing next, and it was really important for us that we found something that would show that oil painting animation can be more than that, so that we can show the many possibilities of the technique. DK was very clear not to repeat the restrictions that we had with Loving Vincent. Part of the concept was was bringing portraits to life, so it was a talking heads concept. She wanted us to do something that was much more free, and have dynamic camera movement. The story of the ever-changing seasons and landscape, and the very volatile, dramatic story of the characters lended itself to this dynamic approach. In the novel, you have these amazing celebrations, and we saw that as a great opportunity, and you can see that in the dances, the battle scenes, and the wedding.

LC: The Peasants feels like a mixture, in terms of paintings, of portraiture, landscapes, and paintings of people in nature, like the one we discussed of Jean-Francois Millet. Was that intentional, and how did you determine the composition of the shots?

DK: Yes. exactly. In the book itself, Reymont uses different styles, which is very interesting. It’s very unusual for one novel to mix so many styles. He uses realism, Impressionism, and symbolism, depending on who is speaking, because sometimes he uses inner monologue of a character, and sometimes it’s the external narrator, who is very objective. Sometimes it’s the village itself telling the story. So it’s very interesting, and we thought it would be great to find the way to represent that in the painting styles.

HW: DK and Piotr put together an enormous file referencing nearly 400 paintings, and so while we only directly reference 45 paintings, there were over 300 elements of paintings that went into the film, like the clouds from a Ferdynand Ruszczyc painting, or the trees from another painting, so we not only had landscapes and these peasant portrait paintings, but we also had elements from lots of other paintings as well, like skies and sunsets.

DK: It was also something that we discussed a lot with our cinematographer, who was very sensitive to the painting style and he also didn’t want to shoot this like a movie. He was always thinking, “How would a painter sitting at an easel paint that?” We wanted to be true to that.

You can read the entire interview by going to AWFJ.org HERE.

====

As a lovely gesture to me, knowing I own an art gallery, Hugh and DK offered my clients a discount on art when they buy it on The Peasants website. ArtInsights doesn’t make any money on this, and that’s 100% fine with us! The money goes to maintaining their studios, including the one in Ukraine, supporting their artists, and helping them in both promoting The Peasants and allowing them to move forward with their next project!

The discount code is artinsights_peasants_10. You can use it only once, and for a maximum of 2 paintings. (Paintings are between 250 and 2000 Euros) Be advised that shipping to the US is $300 via DHL. The paintings that feature Janga (the story’s protagonist) go very fast, but they seem to be adding paintings every few days. I do know it’s the studio manager doing the adding, and they’re pretty focused on getting US distribution for the film and promoting it wherever and whenever they can, so they’ll show up when they show up!  

You can see all the art HERE.

I’m aware that many or most of you will want to see the movie before you buy any art! That’s fine! Hopefully it will be playing at a theater near you soon enough. In the meantime, let’s just celebrate the creativity, compassion, inventiveness, and badassery that it took and takes for these folks to keep moving animation forward as they are doing!

It’s not all about ArtInsights, sometimes it’s about someone really cool doing something inspiring…It isn’t often that my work with ArtInsights and my work amplifying movie artists below the line collide, but here we are! As I move into my the new phase of ArtInsights online, I want to cover some artists and their work that goes beyond the work our site carries, because animators and film artists do so much more than the work they create in their careers in animation. It seems perfect, given my own passion for activism, that the first “Artist Insights” is Disney artist Marlon West.

Disney special effects artist Marlon West’s collection of comic book illustration-styled portraits are being featured in an exhibit called Ink Tributes. Formerly shown at the Museum of Social Justice, they are now at the Saint. Louis University Museum of Art, at an exhibit that opened on August 25th, and will run through December 30th, 2023.

The series is a collection of portraits of victims of police brutality and racial discrimination, as well as heroes and icons of Black excellence. Speaking about the images upon the opening in St. Louis, West explained, “For many of us Black nerds, Marvel’s characters are particularly relatable. They are often hated and hunted by the powers that be. They are aliens, or born different, or having to deal with harsh cards dealt to them. They are feared, despised, shunned, and misunderstood. There isn’t a more American form of portraiture than black ‘inks’ over white, to honor those that faced this nation’s fear and loathing of the Black body.”

A St. Louis native, West is known as an award-winning animator, Head of Effects, and Special Effects Supervisor at Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios. Some of his most recent credits include Encanto, Frozen and Frozen II, and Moana. With a career that has spanned over 25 years, he also worked on classics like The Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, Mulan, Meet the Robinsons, and The Princess and the Frog. You can watch Marlon talk about his career on this official interview with Disney Plus:

I became “friends” with Marlon on Facebook after I interviewed him about Frozen II for The Credits, which was shortly before the pandemic.

(You can read the interview I did with Marlon HERE.)

By the time the pandemic was in full swing, Marlon was already posting his drawings on social media, and I noticed them right away. Some of my favorites were of John Lewis, who I met at San Diego Comic-Con when he was doing a panel before mine. I got seriously tongue-tied, because Representative Lewis was a major hero of mine. He was called “the conscience of the Congress”, and was famous for what he called “good trouble”. If you don’t know about John Lewis, you can learn about him in this documentary:

Many of the Ink Tributes are of victims of police brutality, some during the pandemic, like George Floyd, Bryanna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbury, which sparked the historic Black Lives Matter movement, others are of lives lost throughout recent American history, like Emmett Till. Till’s portrait is a positive representation of the young man before he was brutalized, bringing humanity to an American citizen who could have made an important difference in society.  West created over 40 images of important figures in the Black Lives Matter movement, including allies like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Kamala Harris.

Marlon also spearheaded a black and white photo of Black animation professionals at Disney, “A Great Day in Animation”, as inspired by “A Great Day in Harlem”, a photograph of 57 jazz musicians taken in 1957 by Art Kane. “A Great Day in Animation” was taken by Randy Shropshire, with Jeff Vespa as production lead. Marlon envisioned the photograph to feature Disney Legend and all around wonderful guy Floyd Norman in the center of the picture, surrounded by Black Disney professionals.

You can read more about it on the great website Good Black News, HERE  as well as on Variety HERE, where there’s a video of the day they took the photograph, and includes Marlon talking about his inspiration to get these animation professionals together for it.

You can watch Floyd talk about his experience in animation on one of the San Diego Comic-Con panels I have moderated for ArtInsights and ASIFA Hollywood, and on which I have had the honor to celebrate him:

To read about each tribute in Marlon West’s Ink Tributes, you can go to the Museum of Social Justice page about the exhibit, which includes images and short biographies about each person illustrated HERE.

You can visit the Ink Tributes exhibit at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art anytime between now and December 30th. The museum is free of charge, and open between 11am and 4pm Wednesday and Sunday.

Of course I love it when my clients buy art from ArtInsights, but there are many ways to celebrate art. Here are a few ways to support artists of color, from the folks at The Charmed Studio.

Follow Marlon on: FB: marlon.west1 and IG: stlmarlonwest 

Not many people know just how impressive and historic the career of Ed Levitt was. He not only worked on some of the most beloved classic Disney animated features, he also had a huge impact on the design, look, and story of a diverse collection of cartoons released in the 50s and 60s. He was considered by his peers to be one of the best layout, background, and storyboard artists in the history of animation. He started at Disney at the age of 21 during the making of Snow White, doing rotoscope tracings. Disney quickly moved him to working on backgrounds, which he did for Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi.

Ed Levitt is actually quite in step with what’s happening right now in that he was very pro-union, and picketed during the 1941 strike. He did return to Disney to work on the propaganda film Victory Through Air Power, which had a huge impact on turning the tide of World War II. You can read about just how important that film was on this Walt Disney Family Museum blog post. Shortly thereafter, Levitt enlisted in the Marines, creating training films as part of the Marine Corps Photographic Section, in Quantico, Virginia.  His liberal politics drove him to make several anti-war films considered very much ahead of their time, including “Where Will You Hide”, a 1948 short about the risk and perils of nuclear war. Jim Bacchus was one of the narrators, and it was only his second film.!

You know that famous Peacock logo used by NBC? Levitt chose the colors for the technicolor version when the studio switched from black and white in 1956.

Levitt went on to work in animation in both advertising and pop culture, including mid-century styled cartoons like Crusader Rabbit and Gerald Mac Boing Boing, which had a story by Dr Seuss, and during which he worked under none other than Bill Melendez. He also worked with Melendez at Playhouse Pictures, creating commercial spots for Ford. Then in 1964 Melendez opened his own studio, and immediately hired Levitt to join him there.

As for his part in the Peanuts cartoons many of us know and love, Levitt worked on 12 Charlie Brown tv specials, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965.  Beyond having created some of the best backgrounds for that great classic (like the famously stylized and hyper-colorized Christmas tree lot), one of his greatest claims to fame was that he alone predicted the cartoon would become a classic in the future, and be played every single year.

When everyone else thought they had a flop on their hands, Levitt said, “Don’t be silly. This film will be shown for a hundred years!”

He also coined the term “graphic blandishment”, which was what Melendez used to allow credits for the various artists and animators who worked on the Peanuts cartoons.

As we all know now, A Charlie Brown Christmas became a huge classic, even winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Programming. It also won a Peabody Award!

It was during the long stint working with Melendez Studios that Levitt created the cover for the storybook version of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. He really captured Snoopy’s joy, and the fun of the Halloween special:

He also provided, as he said, “graphic blandishment”, for Snoopy Come Home, so we thought it was right and fitting that we had some great pieces from that full length feature in our Peanuts show! (You can see all the production cels available at ArtInsights from Snoopy Come Home HERE)

Levitt was very involved in the support and recognition of workers in the animation business. He was a 2-time president of the Screen Cartoonist Guild and an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

During the 60s, he worked on 12 of the Peanuts TV specials that have become classics, but also contributed to many other TV shows, as well as movies like It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (on which he worked with famed titles designer Saul Bass) and The Incredible Mr. Limpet.

Meanwhile, in the mid-60s, Levitt bought a ranch in Lake Hughes, and commuted an hour to work at Melendez Studios, growing fruit and raising cattle in his spare time. He ultimately retired from the film business in 1973, and committed himself to ranching full-time. He lived a long, happy life and died at the age of 96.

We at ArtInsights sold the original art of Ed Levitt’s cover art for the 1967 It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown book. This image not only captures Snoopy at his most joyful, it’s also a testament to Ed Levitt’s lasting impact on the history of animation.