The Unknown VIP

See this book cover? It belongs to Virgil Partch's collection of WWII cartoons, published in 1945. Water on the Brain has some of VIP's funniest drawings. But it doesn't have this:

This drawing is on the fly leaf of the copy of Brain that's been in the family for sixty-plus years. It shows Partch on the left, Ralph Hulett (the artist with a mission) in the middle, and a naked woman -- apparently a willing canvas -- on the right.

Hulett and Virgil Partch were buddies at Chouinard's, and went to Disney's at around the same time (the late '30s.) Partch left in the early 1940s to become a major print cartoonist, Hulett remained at Disney.

I don't know what Partch was getting at in drawing this 'toon for my father, but I think it had something to do with Hulett's tendency to paint during every waking moment.

Maybe there's more to it than that, but it's better if I don't travel there.

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Vip on Ollie Johnston: The good and the less good

In the late 1930s, Virgil "Vip" Partch (1916-1984) worked as Ollie Johnston's assistant. (Ollie, of course, was one of Disney's "Nine Old Men.") Above, Vip shows how Ollie felt after a director complimented him on a scene ... And here, Ollie's reaction to a scene that maybe wasn't met with the same euphoria. My father had several well-worn volumes of Partch cartoons around the house when I grew up. In the front of one of them was a cartoon Vip had drawn in it saying "To Roof from Vip." Above the inscription was a picture of Virgil watching my father paint palm trees on a voluptuous woman's backside. Pure Virgil Partch. I only wish I knew where the book...and that drawing...were today. Vip left Disney after the 1941 and went on to fame and fortune as a comic artist, contributing to Collier's, True, The Saturday Evening Post, and the newspaper panel comic Big George. More of VIP's work here. Click here to read entire post

Studies of a polo player, by Virgil "Vip" Partch

Below, studies of a polo player by esteemed cartoon artist Virgil "Vip" Partch, probably dating from the late 1930s. Were these perhaps studies of his then-boss?

These studies, owned by my dad and now by his family, were most likely done when Vip was in traffic at Disney, or possibly while he was an in-betweener. Unlike many of his figure drawings from the period, these are undated. Click here to read entire post

Toonistic Links

Another weekend, another round of hot, summery 'toon links, starting with:

Where's my Springfield? And will the real hometown of Homer pleeaase stand up!

A tiny New England hamlet called Springfield has won a competition to host the premiere of The Simpsons Movie, seeing off bids from 13 other Springfields in the US which share the name with Homer Simpson’s cartoon hometown.

The 100-seat cinema in Springfield, Vermont, will host the premiere of the new film on July 21 – six days before it opens to the general public – after winning a competition against Springfields from Oregon on the west coast to Massachusetts in the east...

DreamWorks Animation's Shrek the Third continues to tear up the wickets in overseas venues:

In France, Gallic distribbers are among the only folks happy about the sodden, chilly weather across most of the country...

"Shrek the Third," in its fourth frame, remains a colossal hit nationwide, still on as many screens (850) as its first week and to date cuming some $35 million for Paramount.

Indeed, "Shrek the Third" has continued its stellar box office performance around the globe...

And Ratatouille is also doing well in foreign markets:

"Ratatouille" cooked up a respectable $9.3 million at 1,835 from a dozen markets, led by a solid Mexican opening of $4.2 million -- more than the combined grosses of the next three pics -- and a Russian soph sesh of $1.7 million, down 51% for a cume of $6.6 million for the top Pixar gross in that market. BVI opted to wait for "Shrek the Third" and "Order of the Phoenix" to play out and won't launch "Ratatouille" elsewhere until late July with openings in South Korea and Japan.

Various comic book titles have a worldwide audience. It's not just American super heroes travelling overseas, but foreign titles gaining footholds in the U.S. of A.:

Animation and comics have gone truly global. Just look at Spider-Man 3's global box office sales as an example. Last month, the wall crawling superhero broke box office records in India, earning the most that any Hollywood movie has in that country to date...

The fact that an idea stemming from a 1960s superhero thought up by two American writers holds such strong appeal cross-culturally is simply testimony to the extent to which vastly different cultures are increasingly intermingling with one another. Within this context, acknowledging that anime and manga have gained significant ground with comic book and animation aficionados far beyond the geographical confines of Japan lacks the element of surprise that it might have engendered some years ago.

"If you told parents ten years ago in America that their children would know characters named Yu Gi Oh! and Pokemon as well as they would Spider-Man, those parents would have thought you were crazy — yet in America today an estimated 30% of major children's animated programming is now Japanese animation," states Sharad Devarajan, CEO of the New York headquartered Virgin Comics and Animation.

As we have featured various Virgil Partch cartoons, so the ASIFA Animation Archive today features the puckish artwork of Vip in its virtual display cases.

Almost all of Ratouille's reviews have been strongly positive. But here's a piece from Atlantic Online that carps about the picture and...all the positive reviews:

...the script is not superbly witty, the human leads are frankly unappealing (Owen Gleiberman called Linguine, the kitchen boy, "a one-note stumblebum," which I think is too kind by half) and the villain is cardboard and lamer-than-lame. Technically, Ratatouille is a great advance on The Incredibles. As a complete work of art, though, it's nowhere close.

(To be fair and balanced, here is Jenny's BlackWing Diaries take...)

DreamWorks sees its stock rise as analysts smile kindly upon it:

Shares of DreamWorks Animation SKG, the animation film studio behind "Shrek," rose on Friday after an analyst began coverage of the company with a "Buy" rating, predicting gains from upcoming films.

The stock gained 96 cents, or 3.3 percent, to $30 in afternoon trading.

In a note to clients, Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Drew E. Crum said DeamWorks has produced some of the most successful animated features in motion picture history.

Being a blogmaster has it's many rewards. Did you know (I'll bet you didn't) that this year of 2007 marks a momentous anniversary for animation?

Georgia (the Georgia that was formerly part of the U.S.S.R.) has its own date to celebrate: this year, Georgian animation turns 75...

It was Georgian animator Vladimer Mujiri who brought the first Georgian animated films to life at the start of 20th century. His 1936 short animation “The Argonauts” was the first notable breakthrough...

By the mid-fifties, Georgian animators were taking their cue from Disney’s productions. The style is exemplified in Arkadi Khintibidze’s 25-minute animated film “The Wedding of the Jays,” released in 1957. Based on the story by prominent Georgian writer Vazha-Pshavela, this film and Khintibidze’s other major works—“Tsuna and Tsrustuna” and “Hostility”—were acclaimed as Georgian animation classics.

Speaking of all the converging media (as we were), the Brits are rolling out their first masters program in video game development:

The UK’s first ‘game academy’ has been created by some of the country’s top video games developers and universities for computer games training.

The University of Bradford has teamed up with the University of Hull and Sheffield Hallam University to create the Game Republic Academy (GRA) in collaboration with games industry leaders including Rockstar (famed for the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto series), Team17 and Sumo.

“We are exceptionally placed to offer students the kind of training the industry is crying out for," [said Peter Cowling, professor of computer science.] "With high profile industry figures pointing towards AI (Artificial Intelligence) as the next big thing for commercial games, we are able to offer our new AI for Games Masters programme - the first of its kind in the world..."

Then there is this review from Variety about a new animated docu-tragicomedy:

Colonialism, capitalism and the West's abrasive association with Islam are densely compressed into a partially animated, mostly satisfying history lesson in satirical fable cum docu-essay "Global Haywire: A Short History of Planet Malfunction." Directed, drawn and conceived by Oz political cartoonist and 1976 Oscar-winning animator ("Leisure") Bruce Petty, ambitious pic occasionally creaks under the weight of strained metaphors, but intelligent talking heads and engagingly shambolic cartoons conquer unwieldy narrative and sporadic glibness.

Lastly, we'll conclude with political 'toonists who have turned to the wonderous world of animation:

Known for his quick wit and even sharper pen, nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsman took home his second Pulitzer Prize in a decade this spring, but the win is not notable for its frequency, but for the technology used to produce his winning submissions.

In late 2005, when faced with gloomy forecasts for the future of his craft, the Newsday editorial columnist and several of his cartoonist colleagues...decided to try their hand at something a little different.

Handelsman began experimenting with new material and a new medium, locking himself in his home office for hours on end, giving up golf for a year, and exchanging his pen for a mouse...

"Animated editorial cartoons are completely different from static editorial cartoons," Handelsman said in an interview with ABC News. "With a standard editorial cartoon, you're taking tons of information and synthesizing it down to a single bite -- a single moment in time. With animated editorial cartoons, it's more storytelling..."

Addendum: So call me obsessive, label me compulsive. It's late but here's a fine Vanity Fair piece on The Yellow Family, offered kaliedescopically through various participants:

Barry Diller: I remember when we screened the first episode, for a number of Fox executives, we all went down to their bungalows over at The Simpsons, and not a single person in the room was laughing, except for me and Jim Brooks. No one had done an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, and it was just like, "What is this?" But we put it on, and it became more and more successful every week.

Have a fabulous weekend.

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Chouinard: An Overture

* Nelbert Murphy Chouinard pictured above

On Wednesday, February 8 at 8:30 pm the REDCAT Theater in downtown Los Angeles will present Chouinard: An Overture, an evening devoted to a discussion of the Chouinard Institute, its history and its influence. Tickets can be purchased from the REDCAT website:

http://www.redcat.org/event/chouinard-overture.

Founded in 1921 by Nelbert M. Chouinard (approximately pronounced "shuh - nard"), Chouinard Art Institute remains one of the most influential art schools ever to have existed in this country. The impressive faculty and alumni attests to the school's rightful place on the short list of great art schools of 20th Century America. Giants of the art world studied and taught there and many went on to fame, fortune and great respect in the categories of animation, film, fine art, architecture, ceramics, costume design, illustration and photography.

Students and faculty included such luminaries as Mary Blair, Preston Blair, Millard Sheets, Pruett Carter, Corny Cole, Phil Dike, Phil Paradise, Emerson Woelffer, David Siqueiros, Edith Head, Theadora Van Runkle, John Altoon, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Otto Heino, Terry Gilliam, John Van Hamersveld, Rick Griffin, Bob Foster, Terry Allen, Chuck Jones, Bob Kurtz, Pete Alvarado, Dave Brain, Joe Goode, Hardie Gramatky, Karl Hubenthal, John Hench, Robert Irwin, Ollie Johnston, Bob Mackie, Bill Melendez, Jimmy Murakami, Maurice Noble, Virgil Partch, Woolie Reitherman, Dan Spieigle, William Stout, Frank Thomas and Alan Zaslove, to name a few. Chouinard graduates were readily employed by many of the major animation studios in the greater Los Angeles area and to this day many of those graduates are still working in the industry.

In 1969 Chouinard Art Institute merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to form The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) with its campus in Valencia, CA.

The number of artists employed in the animation business who attended Chouinard and, in more recent years, CalArts, is staggering. The Animation Guild is proud to represent almost all of those highly skilled artists who work in the animation business.

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Dancing To and From...and To...Disney Feature Animation

Right: Another Degas study from Virgil Partch's Disney traffic boy period; February 1938.

Multiple trips to Disney Feature Animation for Yours Truly, one on Monday, and one with the IA Rep today. What's obvious: everybody on "Meet the Robinsons" is going at high revs... "Robinsons" layout staff finished most of its heavy overtime last week. "Robinsons" animators still have pedal to the metal, and the finaling department -- down on the first floor -- still has months of work ahead of it... There continues to be some nervousness about the end of Personal Service Contracts. A number of Disneyites are now being carried on overhead charge numbers (instead of production charge numbers) while their productions are re-worked in story. As a result, some staffers have shorter hours (11 a.m. to 5 p.m.) and minimal workloads. They're being carried now, but as one of them mentioned: "What if the company decides to put some of us on four-month layoff? There's no Personal Service Contracts to backstop us anymore." Nervousness on this count will probably dissipate when the development/production pipleline gets unkinked, and employees swing from the end of one show onto the start of another. Shorts: As we've said before, Lasseter and Catmull want to put a bunch of new animated shorts into production, the idea being that a new one* will be up in front of each new animated feature as it lifts off at the box office. The thought originally was (we're told) to get a new one produced for "Meet the Robinsons," but its release schedule is too tight for that to happen. So, a Golden Oldie will be dusted off for "Robinsons," and new one-reelers created for the animated features sitting further down the tarmac ("American Dog," "Joe Jump," "Rapunzel," etc.) *As at Pixar, ideas for shorts are pitched to a "brain trust" of Disney directors and story supervisors. One storyman related: "Execs sometime sit in, but it's the directors and story leads making the decisions." Click here to read entire post

Degas in the traffic department

In 1938, working as a traffic boy at Disney, Virgil "Vip" Partch was inspired by Edgar Degas ... This drawing is a considerable ways from the Partch style that was used for a thousand cartoons in a thousand magazines...but it gives you an idea about where Virp was in his early twenties. (To be a traffic boy at Disney in the Hyperion days was to be an artist aspiring to get into the animation department. More on Partch later in the week.) Click here to read entire post

Old inbetweeners refuse to fade away

By Virgil "Vip" Partch. Left to right: Sam Cobean, Tony Rivera, Bill McIntyre, Vip Partch, Reg Massie (foreground), Dick Shaw.

This probably dates from late 1941 or 1942, after the Disney strike in which they all participated. Along with Reg Massie and Walt Kelly (later of Pogo fame), Sam Cobean was in charge of publicity for the 1941 Disney strike. He was a frequent cartoon contributor to The New Yorker, and published several books. He was killed in a car crash in 1951. Tony Rivera was Grim Natwick's assistant on Snow White. He worked for UPA, John Sutherland and DePatie-Freleng. He was one of the original Flintstones layout artists, and continued working for Hanna-Barbera until shortly before his death in 1986. Bill McIntyre was in and out of the animation business for many years; at one time he also ran a bookstore in Laguna Beach. During WWII, Reg Massie was in charge of special effects at the Army Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, L.I. In the late 1940s he worked for George Pal, designing several of the Puppettoons such as "John Henry and the Inky-Poo" and "Rome-Owww and Julie-Cat". He went on to be an art director for such magazines as Stage, The Reporter and Gourmet; he died in 1989. (His son, Jeff, has been the Guild's Recording Secretary and Assistant Business Rep for longer than he would care to admit.) A close friend of Vip Partch with whom he shared a love of boating, Dick Shaw is the only one of this group who returned to Disney, as a storyman on Make Mine Music and Donald Duck shorts. Later he went to UPA where he wrote dozens of Magoo shorts. None of them ever exactly faded away, but they never went back to inbetweening, either ... Click here to read entire post

The Weekend 'Toon Linkage

Another end-of-week linkfest to animation you can use! (or maybe not).

Animation Magazine details DreamWorks's and Paramount's plans for the next Shrektacular:

DreamWorks Animation and Paramount Pictures have already staked out a release date for the next installment in the hugely successful Shrek series. Currently in development under the working title The Next Shrek, the pic is currently slated to hit theaters on May 21, 2010. A mid-may opening served Shrek the Third quite well as it opened to $121 million on its way to a worldwide gross exceeding $718 million.

Given the tremendous box-office success of the last three CG-animated fractured fairytales, it comes as no surprise that the DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg has confirmed that there will be a fifth Shrek installment as well. Shrek the Third proved critic-proof as it raked in the dough despite lukewarm reviews...

From Animation World Network comes this sad story (no link; the whole story is below):

Growing production costs in India have forced Japan's billion-dollar animation industry to look elsewhere for outsourcing cartoons, including Thailand, reports THE ECONOMIC TIMES.

Shuzo Shiota, ceo of Polygo Pictures, one of Japan's largest computer-animation studios, was in Bangkok last week to brief Thai entrepreneurs on the outsourcing opportunities awaiting them in Japan's 3D cartoon industry, which reported revenues of 1.4 billion yen (around $2 billion) in 2005, according to THE NATION.

Shiota said, "a huge number of Japanese animators," were now outsourcing work to India, but rising costs were forcing the industry to look elsewhere.

"With the higher production costs there, between 25-30% more expensive every year, Japan is looking for other possibilities," said Shiota. Thailand and China were among the most likely options, he said.

Daily Variety reviews the new documentary on Pixar:

Leslie Iwerks' "The Pixar Story" charts the company's rise to infinity and beyond, so to speak, and who better to chronicle the journey than the Oscar-nominated granddaughter of animation pioneer Ub Iwerks? Though a talking-heads retrospective by nature, pic boasts not only all the right heads (from the three Pixar principals -- John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs -- to Michael Eisner and honorary godfather George Lucas) but also plenty of animated eye candy from Pixar itself, including early shorts and concept art...

...In retrospect, it's easy to mistake Pixar's success as savvy planning on the part of Lasseter ("talented artist"), Catmull ("creative scientist") and Jobs ("visionary entrepreneur"), but the docu goes a long way to remind just how remarkable the meeting of these three minds proved. After all, even Lucas, who developed Pixar as the computer-graphics arm of his own filmmaking operation, decided to cut it loose before the division had revealed its true promise.

Speaking of Pixar, IGN.com has an interview with the Emryville studio's Andrew Stanton up and on-line:

"...I've watched people watch Luxo, Jr. for almost 15 years now again and again when they come to Pixar, it fascinates me that I still get caught up in it. There's something about the fact that it doesn't have a face; you treat it as an appliance first, not as a character with gloves and hands and stuff, that just makes you really invest even more in it than you would a different kind of character..."

Then there is this interesting summary of new animated shorts shown at the Animation Showcase at Free Cinema Orange, located at the Orange County of Museum of Art.

Forbes Magazine had a preview of Disney corporate earnings that came out last Wednesday (August 1):

Wall Street expects Disney to earn 55 cents per share on revenue of $9.04 billion for the quarter ended in June, according to a Thomson Financial analyst survey. Disney did not issue specific guidance.

ANALYST TAKE: Logsdon estimates profit of 52 cents per share and revenue of $9.1 billion.

He said the relative poor performance by "Ratatouille" is caused by a glut of computer-generated animation movies.* "A flood of output is saturating the market," he said in a note to investors.

(* Which means what? Given the success of the hand-drawn Simpsons Movie, that it's back to 2-D?)

And here's the Reuters report on Disney's financials report after the rollout:

Disney, which runs broadcast, movie entertainment, theme parks and consumer products businesses, said its fiscal third quarter net income from continuing operations rose to $1.2 billion, or 58 cents per share from $1.1 billion, or 51 cents per share a year earlier.

So Disney beat forecasts...and Iger gave praise to Ratatouille, probably because the stock analyst above dissed it...

TAG toots it own horn by linking to the Variety story about its new contract with Imagi USA.

ASIFA's Animation Archive has some great Virgil Partch cartoons up...

Warner Bros. Animation rolled out some of its new product at the recent Comic-con...

Warner Brothers animation had a lot to show on Friday at Comic-con, with clips from new seasons of both the Emmy-winning "The Batman" and a revamped "Legion of Super Heroes," all moderated by TV Guide's Rich Sands...

Finally, Bill Mauldin's WWII cartoons of Willie and Joe are being collected in a two volume set:

More than 600 of Bill Mauldin's World War II cartoons -- many never reprinted before -- will be collected in a two-volume set that Fantagraphics Books is publishing this February.

"Willie & Joe: The WWII Years" totals 650 hardcover pages. It's edited by Todd DePastino, whose biography of the cartoonist -- "Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front" -- is also slated to be published this February by W.W. Norton.

Have yourself a vigorous and robust weekend.

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Tom Sito's Month in History

Focused, as always, on cartoons and other types of movies. (Note: A few items below have earlier appeared as single items, for which apologies. )

Oct. 1, 1945 - Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin leaves the cartoon business to work full time at Paramount doing live action movies. There, he writes for the Marx Brothers and later directs the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedies.

Oct. 1, 1992 - Cartoon Network first goes on the air.

Oct. 2, 2004 - Dreamworks film "Sharktale" opens in theaters.

Oct. 2, 1950 - Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip debuts. Schulz’s strip “Little Folks” was initially rejected by all major comic syndicates. Three months before the strip was accepted, his fiancée breaks off their engagement. He had left his job at the post office and she was convinced he would never amount to anything. Good ol’ Charlie Brown was the name of a fellow post office worker all the guy’s liked to play jokes on. At the time of his death Charles Schulz had mountains on the moon named for his characters, and he was arguably the richest visual artist on earth.

Oct. 2, 1958 - Hanna & Barbera’s "The Huckleberry Hound Show" debuts.

Oct. 3, 1955 - The Mickey Mouse Club TV Show premiers. “Who’s the leader of
the Band that’s made for you and me...?”

Oct. 3, 1957 - Walter Lantz’s "The Woody Woodpecker T.V. Show" debuts.

Oct. 3, 1964 – “There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!” Underdog debuts on NBC.

Oct. 5, 1969 - "Monty Python’s Flying Circus" debuts on British television BBC-1.

Oct. 7, 1993 - Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” with CG dinosaurs earned $712 million dollars in North American box office alone. A feat not equaled until "Titanic" five years later.

Oct. 8, 1933 - HOLLYWOOD ACTOR’S FIRST MASS PROTEST- When Franklin Roosevelt created the NRA to fix wages and prices to try and solve the Depression, he even went as far as to try to regulate Motion Picture rates and fees. The catch was the rates were drafted with the advice of friends of the studio heads in Washington. The actors went ballistic when they saw new rules such as a ceiling cap on actors salaries of $100,000 a year (the producers had no such cap), restriction of actors independent agents, and terms of an old salary contract would stay in effect even after the contract expired until it was renegotiated.

This night, at the El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Blvd., hundreds of movie stars met to draft a petition calling for rewriting of the codes. The activists included Paul Muni, Frederic March, Jeanette MacDonald, Groucho Marx and Boris Karloff. SAG president Frank Morgan (the Wizard of Oz) was considered politically too far left to face Roosevelt, so he stepped down in favor of comedian Eddie Cantor, who had helped Vaudeville acts unionize. Cantor went to the president’s retreat at Warm Springs Georgia with the petition and had the hated articles taken out of the code.

Oct 11, 1960 - "The Bugs Bunny Show" premiers on TV. “Overture, hit the lights! This is it, we’ll hit the heights, and oh what heights we’ll hit.....etc..”

Oct. 11, 1967 - The NY Times prints an image of a nude female by Bell Lab artist-in-residence Ken Knowlton. The image was rendered on a computer as a mosaic of thousands of numbers was a breakthrough for CGI.

Oct. 12, 1937 - Under pressure from parent Paramount Studio, Max Fleischer signs the first animation union contract and settles the Cartoonist strike begun May 8th. The following year, Fleischer tries to escape the union by moving his studio to Right-To-Work State Florida. The additional expenses and poor box office ruin his studio.

Oct 12, 1994 - Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg announce the partnership named Dreamworks SKG.

Oct. 13, 1978 - Mickey Mouse gets his star on Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame.

Oct. 15, 1946 - Walt Disney’s film "Make Mine Music" premieres.

Oct. 16, 1923 - Walt Disney Studios Born. 22-year-old Walt and his older brother Roy sign a deal with M.J.Winkler for six “Alice in Cartoonland” short cartoons. Budget - $1,500 each.

Oct. 17, 1990 - IMDB.com, the Internet Movie Data Base, debuts.

Oct. 18, 1967 - Walt Disney’s last cartoon done under his supervision “The Jungle Book.” premieres. Disney had died the previous December.

Oct. 20, 1955 - J.R.R. Tolkein’s last book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy,
The Return of the King, publishes.

Oct. 22, 1941 - Walt Disney’s "Dumbo" premieres.

Oct. 24, 1947 - Walt Disney testifies to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) as a friendly witness. He accuses members of the Cartoonists Guild and the League of Women Voters, which he mistakenly calles the “League of Women Shoppers”, as being infiltrated by Communists “Seeking to subvert the Spirit of Mickey Mouse’.

Oct. 24, 1994 - Walt Disney TVA’s "Gargoyles" premieres.

Oct. 27, 1954 - Walt Disney breaks with other Hollywood movie studios, who feel television will cut into feature revenues, and debuted their TV show “Disneyland” today.

Oct. 27, 1966 - Bill Melendez "Peanuts" TV special “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” premieres.

Oct. 28, 1726 - Johnathan Swift publishes “Gulliver’s Travels” - “To Vex the World rather than divert it.”

Oct. 28, 1892 - Pauvre Pierrot, the first cartoon to be projected in France, premieres.

Oct. 29, 1969- THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET- In the basement of UCLA’s Boelter Hall, Lick Licklider, Vincent Cerf, Robert Kahn, Lawrence Roberts and Bob Taylor set up the first call to Stanford. “We typed the ‘L’ and we asked on thephone‘Didyouseethe‘L’?’ ‘Yes,weseethe‘L’,wastheresponse.Thenwe typed O and asked ‘Did you see the O?’ ‘Yes, we see the O’, was the response. Then we typed G, and then the system crashed!” They called it ARPANET- Advanced Research Projects Agency-NET, a few years later, it became the Internet.

Oct. 30, 1994 - Nickelodeon premieres "Aaah! Real Monsters!"

Birthdays: Julie Andrews, Zack Galifianakis, Satoshi Kon, Harvey Kurtzman, Bill Keane, Art Babbitt, Guillermo Del Toro, Pete Doctor, Jodie Benson (voice of Ariel - Little Mermaid), Rod Scribner, Mike Judge, Virgil Partch, Jerry Siegel, Auguste Lumiere, Trey Parker, Jerry Ohrbach (voice of Lumiere – "Beauty and the Beast"), Mary Blair, Preston Blair, Bob Kane, Picasso, Bill Tytla, Seth McFarlane, Bernie Wrightson, Ralph Bakshi, Bill Mauldin, Ollie Johnston.

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Currently at Gallery 839 ...

Gallery 839 features an all-new show (new to the Gallery, that is) with reproductions of caricatures by John Sparey, Christmas card art by Ralph Hulett, and polo sketches by Virgil "Vip" Partch (above).

Above: Paliwoda In Hi-Fi, by John Sparey; below, Home For Christmas, by Ralph Hulett.

This show will be open Monday through Friday from 8:30 am to 5 pm.

---

The next Gallery 839 show, opening September 10, will be the work of the A. Muse Salon, consisting of artists RITA JOYCE, STEPHANIE PYREN, BARBARA SCHRADE and GWEN WETZLER. More details as the opening draws nearer.

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Farewell Ollie

Virgil "VIP" Partch, one of Johnston's assistants, depicts Ollie receiving a compliment from a director on a well-done scene.

Word reaches us that Ollie Johnston passed away yesterday. He was the last of the Disney animation pillars, and he crossed the big river at age 95 ...

I knew Ollie for years, working with him on The Fox and the Hound before his retirement at the tail end of the 1970s.

Ollie was, first and foremost, a tyro animator. When Woolie Reitherman tried to drag him up to one of Woolie's patented, all-day story meetings around the big director's desk in Woolfgang's office, half the time Ollie would not show up. Ollie once told me:

"Gee, those meetings. They go on and on, and we argue over dialogue, and I've got a scene I should be doing down in my office. You guys can do all that without me ..."

Ollie was gentle, gentlemanly, considerate of other people's feelings. I never knew him to utter an unkind word to a co-worker. When he and Frank retired from their first-floor animation duties and moved to a big third-floor office to write "The Illusion of Life," Ollie asked me to read an early draft. I did, and thought it was terrific. He expressed gratitude that I had taken the time. In reality, I was the grateful one, being allowed to read it at all.

He was the last of nine charmed lives that made magic on movie screens for a half-century, and now he's gone. Thanks for everything, Ollie. All of us are the richer because you graced the planet.

Addendum: The Disney press release lionizing Mr. Johnston is here.

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