Animation Artifacts 22 Feb 2006 07:56 am
Casper
– This is a storyboard drawing/layout I. Klein gave me back in 1980 (that’s when he signed it). Klein was a good solid animator through a very long and ripe career.
He started in animation in NY, moved on to Disney where he was a journeyman animator in a world of stars. (He never worked on a feature while the “A” team did.) He eventually came back to NY to be a star, himself.
(Click image to enlarge it.)
His best work, for me, was the animation he did on a couple of the Disney shorts in the late thirties. He was a principal animator on the Silly Symphony, The Moth and The Flame.
Izzy liked to take credit for creating Casper the Ghost, as did many people, and was certainly part of the team that did the first work on Casper. He was a very nice guy, and it was a pleasure to have met him the few times I did.
My nightmare when I was a kid was that I would end up drawing Popeye or Casper for the rest of my life. No wonder I fell in love with Hubley’s work when I came upon it at the ripe old age of 15. That’s when I made it my goal to seek them out and work for them – damn the torpedoes.
- Happy Birthday, George Washington. Time to check Tom Sito‘s blog to see what he has to say about it. As I expected, there’s a lot of entertaining reading about it.
on 23 Feb 2006 at 1:12 am 1.Amid said …
It’s almost understandable why so many of the old animators were borderline alcoholics. So many of them had 30-40 year careers drawing essentially the same formula characters, like Popeye and Casper, over and over. After a couple decades, that’s got to become pretty depressing.