Animation &Animation Artifacts &Commentary 12 Mar 2011 08:37 am
Interviews
- On his website, Michael Barrier has been offering some of the many interviews he and Milt Gray recorded in preparation for his seminal animation history book, Hollywood Cartoons.
Two of these interviews have recently surfaced: Robert McKimson and John Hubley. Something comes across in these two interviews, something that doesn’t quite make it to the history books that try to include all the facts and figures, statements and theories. Personality is what is evident in these interviews.
I’d read about Robert McKimson for years, but I never felt much about him. To be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of the films he’d directed for Warner Bros. They’ve always seemed a bit overanimated and don’t always take the shortest route to the gags. I’ve felt a flatness in these films, something even Friz Freleng’s films don’t have. There’s a tightness to Friz’ cartoons, a tightness that shows off the director’s mastery of timing.
McKimson, to me, did incredibly beautiful artwork in those early model sheets for Bugs Bunny (well displayed on a sidebar piece on Mike’s site.) His animation certainly stood as strong in those shorts directed by Freleng. There was a bit more of a drive to the scenes he animated.
Reading the interview, I found a distinct personality. There was someone who needed to be in control, who had to take charge, yet never made waves when it didn’t happen. He quietly groused about the problem. A curiously complicated person. Suddenly, I felt more about McKimson the man than I had with all I’d read about him in the past. It makes me want to back up and revisit the shorts he’s directed. (Though not the Foghorn Leghorn films; I just flat out don’t like that character.)
The John Hubley interview is different. I knew Hubley and knew this interview. Mike gave me a copy of it many years ago, and I’ve read it over some half dozen times. However, I can attest to John’s personality being right there.
You get the feeling that it’s tough for Hubley to spare the allotted hour for the interview. He’s answering all the questions, but you feel like he wants to run to do something else. That was definitely John – always on the run. The only time he seemed at peace, to me, was when he was painting. For animation, when I knew him, that meant rushing out the Bgs for whatever piece we were working on. Given the short amount of time planned for each bit of artwork, it’s amazing how masterfully they all turned out.
The couple of times I made a comment to John about his past work – usually UPA, I was stopped. I remember riding high the day after I’d seen ROOTY TOOT TOOT for the first time. There was no doubt in my mind that I’d seen one of the great animated shorts of my lifetime. So I told John. He just looked at me for a couple of seconds, then turned and exited the room. I don’t know what was behind it, but I knew I wouldn’t get much about his past from him.
It’s amazing, then, to see how much and what detail Mike pulled out of Hubley, and it seems so effortless. In so many words, John tells Mike that he wanted no interference from others over his direction. You’re not quite sure he always fought for it, but there’s no doubt he wanted it. Information, I thought I knew, was clarified in the interview. I was and still am impressed by that information gathering.
Read these two interviews. They’re important. These people are the backbones of our industry, and we can only learn from them.
To that end, you should also know that Mike has quite a few more interviews on his site: Hugh Harman, Joe Grant, Brad Bird, Fess Parker, Frank Tashlin, John McGrew, Art Babbitt and Ward Kimball are all there, as are more. Just scroll down toward the bottom of Mike’s blog, and you’ll find quite a few links to the right of the screen. There’s a lot there on this site.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 11:17 am 1.Eric Noble said …
I definitely got that impression from both of the interviews. It seems to give a little more depth to the work of these men. I like the work of Bob McKimson, but only from 1945 to the first shutdown of the studio. That’s when he had good animators and made funny cartoons. I find it interesting to watch Rod Scribner’s animation during that time. It’s much more restrained, but you can still detect it, like in “The Super Snooper”. The Scribner acting is there, but it comes off as melodramatic rather than manic and honest, but the spark is still there. I wish we could have gotten an interview with him. It would have been interesting to see the relationship between the two different artists (Scribner and McKimson).
on 12 Mar 2011 at 2:27 pm 2.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
The McKimson interview was terrific, and I’m so glad that Mike put it up. I didn’t comment about it on Mike’s site because it provoked so many thoughts that I didn’t know where to begin.
McKimson was a brilliant animator, the kind of guy any director would kill to have on his staff, but he was not a brilliant director. He made some good films, especially in the period just after Clampet left and he inherited the Clampett crew, but his own two dimensional personality soon asserted itself and buggered everything up.
I just don’t have it in me to forgive what he did to Rod Scribner, one of the greatest comedic animators ever. McKimson obsessively leaned on Scribner to change his style, and the result (I believe, but can’t prove) was that Scribner had a nervous breakdown and eventually a lobotomy. That was a crime against comedy and cartooning but McKimson was too stupid to realize it.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 4:03 pm 3.Charles Brubaker said …
A while back I interviewed animator Dale Case for a project. For a brief time did some animation for McKimson on those awful Daffy & Speedy cartoons he directed, so I asked some questions about it.
From what he told me it was clear Bob McKimson didn’t allow his animators much input. Bob would draw the character layouts, tell the animators to follow it directly, and when he met his quota he would just grab his coat and go home.
True, by then this was 1960s, not exactly a great decade for cartoons, but I wonder if McKimson held this attitude long before that…
on 12 Mar 2011 at 4:23 pm 4.Michael said …
From what I understand, Scribner got TB and took several years off from the WB studio. He came back a quieter animator perfect for McKimson’s demands to make Scribner work in a “quieter” mode.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 6:00 pm 5.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Michael, I really wish i knew the truth about this. I checked with a friend and he said Scribner never had a lobotomy, so I was wrong about that. What he had was electrical shock treatments.
So far as I can tell he did have a problem with TB but he also had a nervous breakdown, and I beleieve his trouble with McKimson was the cause. I say “believe” because I don’t know what was going on in his personal life at the time.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 7:23 pm 6.Thad said …
Jones was originally supposed to have Scribner in his unit, but he flat out refused to have him. He did some footage for McKimson’s One Meat Brawl and Birth of a Notion before he left for three years due to TB (from what I’ve been told, heroin-related TB, but I have no way of confirming that).
Nobody from the old McKimson unit rejoined him when the studio reopened after the 1953 shutdown, and quite a few great animators left for greener pastures well before that (Manny Gould, Pete Burness, Bill Melendez, Emery Hawkins). I think it’s obvious from the collected information we have today that: A) Scribner was probably the greatest animator the studio ever had, and it is a shame what happened to him; B) animating for McKimson was a trying and unrewarding experience; and C) McKimson really didn’t appreciate his many animators’ special gifts. But to suggest that Scribner’s mental health issues (which happened years after he left the studio and was doing his thing at UPA and commercial houses) were caused by McKimson’s direction is nothing short of ludicrous.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 8:07 pm 7.Michael said …
Thad, Alluding to “heroin-related TB” isn’t ok unless you can back it up. Even then, I’m not sure why you’d want to say it.
on 12 Mar 2011 at 10:44 pm 8.Tom Minton said …
In 1987 I spoke with Don Selders, who was Scribner’s next-to-last assistant animator, about what allegedly happened to him. Selders told me little of consequence but did say that Scribner’s final assistant, Charlotte Huffine, would probably know. I never got the chance to meet her and Ms. Huffine has long since departed this earth. Whatever happened to Scribner, it was devastating and no one seems to be able to pinpoint it with certainty. When I met and briefly worked with Maurice Noble in 1988 at Bakshi’s the first thing he said to me was “So what the hell happened to Scribner?” Apparently even the Jones unit alumni remained in the dark about the details. I did ask Selders and Noble if they thought the shift from fluid 1940′s animation to restrained UPA style 1950′s stuff played a role in Scribner’s mental breakdown and both agreed that it did not.
on 13 Mar 2011 at 6:10 pm 9.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Tom: I knew Don Selders. He claimed to have lots of good Scribner stories, but was reluctant to tell them. I assumed that he was saving them for a book, but maybe I was wrong.
Thad: Nervous breakdowns don’t happen overnight. They’re cumulative and often have deep roots. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that major career events like Clampett’s encouragement of Scribner’s breakthroughs and McKimson’s discouragement of them would have been major influences on the man. But this is an inference. As I said, I don’t know much about Scribner’s personal life.
on 13 Mar 2011 at 7:30 pm 10.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
While I’m at the keyboard, I should correct something I said in my first comment. McKimson didn’t exactly take over Clampett’s unit. Tashlin left before Clampett and McKimson actually inherited Tashlin’s unit.
Art Davis was the one who inherited the Clampett people, but then his unit was soon dissolved by the studio to cut costs, and his ex-Clampett artists bailed into the McKimson unit, displacing some of the artists there. Davis himself became an animator for Friz.
It’s not exactly wrong to say that McKimson inherited the Clampett unit, it just took a number of steps for that to happen.
on 13 Mar 2011 at 11:47 pm 11.Michael said …
Thanks, Eddie, for the breakdown of what happened. I actrually went back to Mike Barrier’s great book, Hollywood Cartoons, where he has it all in detail. Scribner seemed to have a hard time after his TB leave of absence. It’s obvious McKimson handcuffed him, but a job is a job. His animation continued to be excellent, if different.
on 14 Mar 2011 at 1:18 pm 12.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Michael, forgive me for obssessing over this. I’ll make this my last comment, i promise.
It’s true that a job is a job, and I feel that if you take an employer’s money you’re morally obligated to do the job his way to the best of your ability. The problem comes when someone comes along who carries within him the seed of a whole new industry, or of a fruitful revolution within an industry. When someone like that deviates the moral dimension becomes muddier.
Scribner was a rare combination of gifted cartoonist, gifted animator, and gifted stylist. Nobody knew it in the mid-forties, but cartooning (in the broad sense, which includes print cartooning) as a whole was on the verge of a steep decline. The era of Herrimann, Milt Gross, Rube Goldberg, Feinenger, Max Fleischer, DeBeck, Seeger, Capp, Kelly (I’d even include Hearst and Pulitzer) and the like was giving way to formulaic cartooning like the kind found in Beetle Baily, Hi and Louis, and Hanna Barbera. It was a time when the medium needed its best people to appear on the battlefield, ready to engage. McKimson took one of our best warriors and shot him in the foot just before the battle.
As you said, Scribner did some excellent work in the post Warner years, but he was one of a few that could work at that level, and wasn’t exactly unique at that time. The work he did for Clampett was unique. Films that Scribner helped to make possible like “Coal Black” and “Great Piggy Bank Robbery” were pioneering efforts that might have pointed the industry in a new direction. Animation might have embraced Rock and Roll. Imagine the impact THAT would have had!!!!
For the sake of brevity I left out references to Tex, UPA, Crumb, the early Mad Magazine crew and a bunch of other creative people. It’s hard to talk about subjects like this without simplifying.
on 14 Mar 2011 at 1:29 pm 13.Michael said …
I just wrote a really long piece about this for tomorrow’s blog. I think Tytla, Scribner and Tyer all had something in common at the same time.
on 15 Mar 2011 at 8:04 am 14.The Gee said …
While I’ll admit I don’t frequent his blog as much as I used to (it just happened for no particular reason) I do appreciate Eddie’s Big Picture perspective when he writes about animation.
So, it is cool to see any discussion or explanation on animation that takes the broader view of what cartoons are into consideration. Sometimes, it is an important thing for context and sometimes when it is needed, some animation blogs and sites seem to miss that Bigger Picture. Or, there’s talk about animation or comics/art as if it each is separate vacuums/places, if that makes sense. Granted and fortunately, that only happens sometimes with some people, mostly in the comments sections of blogs. (is that last part ironic?)
Anyway, looking forward to reading the follow up piece.