Monday, July 12, 2010

Tom and Jerry, from your MegaCollector ...

... and mine.

Herewith a couple of animation drawings by animator Ray Patterson, for the short Flirty Birdy (circa 1945).

Ray Patterson began his career at Charles Mintz in the late 1920s. (You can view some of Ray's Mintz-era artwork here, courtesy of ASIFA.) In 1940, he went to work at Disney, where he animated on Fantasia, Dumbo and a clutch of shorts.

In 1941, Ray departed Disney after a job action that unionized the studio. He spent the next twenty years working at M-G-M, then another thirty animating and directing television cartoons. He retired as a Hanna-Barbera Vice-President in 1993.

(Ordinarily we would crop and tweak the images above, but ordinarily our Photoshop software works. Apologies for the raw pictures, but the hungry blog must be servied.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mmmmmm....eat blog!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing these, Jeff!

Wow -- would the assistant have been asked to shade in every drawing of Tom like this one?!?

Anonymous said...

Are there any ROUGHS by Ray Patterson available for posting??

Steve Hulett said...

If and when we get them, we'll post them.

Floyd Norman said...

I loved chatting with Ray about the famous Disney strike. Boy, the stories he could tell.

Steven Hartley said...

I love the Tom and Jerry cartoons, Steve: I wrote an article in June on my new website, Blabbing on Arts and Culture, and I review and admire Tom and Jerry, and I believe I have a animation drawing of Ray Patterson in the cartoon Flirty Birdy posted on my blog website!

Check ;)

I just love the cartoons, they're just funny and well-animated and the story lines are just simple to follow on! However, I have heard some stories about the producer Fred Quimby who knew nothing about cartoons and had rather a suspect humour, pity for a cartoon producer!

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