Wednesday, February 09, 2011

The Megacollector's Ken Muse (and Fred Moore)

UPDATE: We've updated the above graphic to a less blurry version.

Our first Megacollector post for 2011 starts off with a Fantasia model sheet by Fred Moore. The other images below the fold are by Ken Muse (1910-1987).

Muse started his professional career as an assistant on Fantasia, then graduated to animator on several Mickey and Donald shorts. He left Disney after the 1941 strike and signed on at MGM, where he spent seventeen years in the Hanna-Barbera unit, working on over one hundred and twenty shorts.

After MGM closed he followed his mentors to the new Hanna-Barbera studio, where he animated the pilot episode of a new show called "The Flagstones," and eventually worked on pretty much every show at the studio until he retired. (Little known fact: late in his life he did some uncredited assisting on The Fox and the Hound.)

And here is Ken Muse's best-known animation: the Gene Kelly meets Jerry Mouse sequence from Anchors Aweigh (1945):

7 comments:

Mike said...

One of many of my all time favorite animators.
A NICE post!
Thank you.

One time Borge Ring asked me who my all time favorite animator was......I said," There are too many to just pick one.", but Kenny Muse is RIGHT up there.

Anonymous said...

I always heard the Jerry/Gene dance as credited to Irv Spence...

Jeff Massie said...

I'm going to stay neutral on the attribution ... here's my source (yeah, it's Wikipedia, for what's it's worth).

Mark Mayerson said...

To my eye, and I don't claim to be the Tom and Jerry expert that either Mark Kausler or Thad Komorowski are, the opening dialogue between Kelly and Jerry is by Muse as is the final shot. I see some Spence in the dance sequence.

Anonymous said...

I see some Ray Patterson from 3:02 to 3:40.

Anonymous said...

There is another younger Ken Muse who is a comic strip artist, I'm sure he assisted on Fox and Hound not the Kenny Muse I knew a HB.

Steven Hartley said...

I enjoy Ken Muse's work - his Tom and Jerry stuff is fun and his Mickey's were ok - but I noticed that he did some crude stuff while at Hanna-Barbera.

I thought the dance sequence was only animated by Ken Muse and Ray Patterson.

I'm not sure but I think he was Preston Blair's assistant on "Pinocchio" and "Fantasia".

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