Archive for July, 2008

Joseph Barbera

Joseph Roland “Joe” Barbera (March 24, 1911-December 18, 2006) was an animator, cartoon artist, storyboard artist, television director, television producer, and co-founder, together with William Hanna, of Hanna-Barbera. The studio produced popular cartoons such as The Huckleberry Hound Show, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Top Cat and Yogi Bear.

Biography Early years
Joseph Barbera (pronounced bar-BEAR-uh) was born in the Little Italy section of Manhattan, New York, to emmigrants of Lebanese descent.

Career Early career
Barbera started his career as a tailor’s delivery boy. During the Great Depression, he tried unsuccessfully to become a magazine cartoonist for a magazine called The NY Hits Magazine. Additionally, he once told of a letter that he wrote to Walt Disney asking for advice about getting started in the animation industry. Barbera said that Disney wrote back and replied that “its a tough business” and that he (Barbera) should seek another line of work. Undeterred by Disney’s comments, Joe Barbera pressed forward.

In 1932, he joined the Van Beuren Studio as an animator and scriptwriter. He worked on cartoons such as Cubby Bear, and Rainbow Parades and also co-produced Tom and Jerry (a couple of boys, unrelated to his later cat-and-mouse series). When Van Beuren closed down in 1936, Barbera moved over to the MGM studios.

Teaming with William Hanna
Lured by a substantial salary increase, Barbera left Terrytoons and New York for the new MGM cartoon unit in California in 1937. The following year, he teamed up with William Hanna to direct theatrical short cartoons; Barbera was the storyboard/layout artist, and Hanna was in charge of the timing. Their first venture was Puss Gets the Boot (1940), the first Tom and Jerry film, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best (Cartoon) Short Subject.

Hanna-Barbera founders William Hanna and Joseph Barbera pose with several of the Emmy awards the Hanna-Barbera studio has won. Hanna and Barbera’s 17-year partnership on the Tom & Jerry series resulted in 7 Academy Awards for Best (Cartoon) Short Subject, and 14 total nominations, more than any other character-based theatrical animated series. Hanna and Barbera were placed in charge of MGM’s animation division in late 1955; however, this proved short-lived as MGM closed the division in 1957. They subsequently teamed up to produce the series The Ruff & Reddy Show, under the name H-B Enterprises, soon changed to Hanna-Barbera Productions. By using the limited animation techniques, Hanna and Barbera could provide programming for networks at reduced cost.

By the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera Productions had become the most successful television animation studio, producing hit television programs such as The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!.

Later career
Hanna-Barbera had been a subsidiary of Taft Broadcasting (later Great American Communications) since 1967. The studio thrived until 1991, when it was sold to Turner Broadcasting. Hanna and Barbera stayed on as advisors and periodically worked on new Hanna-Barbera shows, including the What-a-Cartoon! series.

He served as creative consultant for the 1993 film, Tom and Jerry: The Movie for Miramax Films, WMG and Film Roman. Hanna-Barbera, received eight Emmys, including the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in 1988.

Their strengths melded perfectly, critic Leonard Maltin wrote in his book Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons. Barbera brought the comic gags and skilled drawing, while Hanna brought warmth and a keen sense of timing. Maltin wrote:

“This writing-directing team may hold a record for producing consistently superior cartoons using the same characters year after year – without a break or change in routine.”
Hanna, who died in 2001, once said he was never a good artist but his partner could “capture mood and expression in a quick sketch better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

After Hanna’s death, Barbera remained active as an executive producer for Warner Bros. Animation on direct-to-video cartoon features as well as television series such as What’s New, Scooby-Doo? and Tom and Jerry Tales. In the Tom and Jerry cartoon “The Mansion Cat” from 2000, Barbera was the houseowner’s voice actor. He also wrote, co-storyboarded, co-directed and co-produced the theatrical Tom and Jerry short The KarateGuard in 2005, thus returning to his and Hanna’s first successful cartoon format. His final animated project was the direct-to-video feature Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale, which came out on DVD in the U.S. on October 2, 2007.

Death
Barbera died at the age of 95 of natural causes at his home in Studio City, Los Angeles on December 18, 2006, ending a seventy-year career in animation. His wife Sheila was at his side when he died, and three children by a previous marriage also survived him: Jayne (who worked for Hanna-Barbera), Neal and Lynn. Cartoon Network put up a bumper in late December 2006 that showed Barbera in a black marker portrait. In the next scene, the words “We’ll miss you” were written above the Cartoon Network logo. Adult Swim had a banner that said Joseph Barbera [1911-2006] with the banner fading out without showing the [adult swim] logo at the end, something they only do when a person they consider important passes away and something they’d only done twice before; for Harry Goz in 2003 and Sam Loeb in 2005.

Winsor McCay

Winsor McCay (September 26, 1867(?) – July 26, 1934) was an American cartoonist and animator.

A prolific artist, McCay’s pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades. His two best-known creations are the newspaper comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1914, and the animated cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur, which he created in 1914.

His comic strip work has influenced generations of artists, including creators such as Moebius, Chris Ware, William Joyce, and Maurice Sendak.

Biography
McCay was the son of Robert McKay (later changed to McCay) and Janet Murray McKay; Robert at various times worked as a teamster, a grocer, and a real estate agent. Winsor’s exact place and year of birth are uncertain – he claimed to have been born in Spring Lake, Michigan in 1871, but his gravestone says 1869, and census reports state that he was born in Canada in 1867. He was originally named Zenas Winsor McKay, in honor of his father’s employer, Zenas G. Winsor. He later dropped the name Zenas.

In 1886, McCay’s parents sent him to Cleary’s Business College in Ypsilant, Michigan to learn to be a businessman. While in Ypsilanti, he also received his only formal art training, from John Goodison of Michigan State Normal College (now known as Eastern Michigan University). Goodison taught him the strict application of the fundamentals of perspective, which he put to significant use later in his career. Goodison, formerly a glass stainer, also influenced McCay’s bold use of color.

In 1889, McCay moved to Chicago, intending to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, but due to lack of money had to find employment instead. He worked for the National Printing and Engraving Company, producing woodcuts for circus and theatrical posters. Two years later, he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio and went to work as an artist for Kohl and Middleton’s Vine Street Dime Museum. While in Cincinnati he married Maude Leonore Dufour.

Works

McCay’s first major comic strip series was Tales of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle. Forty-three installments were published from January to November of 1903, in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The strip was based on poems by George Randolph Chester, then a reporter and editor at the Enquirer. The stories concerned jungle creatures and the ways that they adapted to a hostile world, with individual titles such as How the Elephant Got His Trunk and How the Ostrich Got So Tall.

His strips Little Nemo and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend were both set in the dreams of their characters and featured fantasy art that attempted to capture the look and feel of dreams. McCay’s cartoons were never overwhelmingly popular, but always had a strong following because of his expressive graphic style. Newspaper pages were physically much larger in that time and McCay usually had a half a page to work with. For fantasy art in comics, his only rival was Lyonel Feininger, who went on to have a career in the fine arts after his comics days were over.

McCay also created a number of animated short films, in which every single frame of each cartoon (with each film requiring thousands of frames) was hand-drawn by McCay and his assistant which he occasionally had. McCay went on vaudeville tours with his films. He presented lectures and did drawings; then he interacted with his animated films, performing such tricks as holding his hand out to “pet” his animated creations.

Laid out with exquisite detail in a manner that would only be matched during the heights of Walt Disney’s cartoons of the 1930s, the star of McCay’s groundbreaking animated film Gertie the Dinosaur is classified by film and animation historians as the first cartoon character created especially for film to display a unique, realistic “personality”. In the film, Gertie causes trouble and cries when she is scolded, and finally she gives McCay himself a ride on her back as he steps into the movie picture.

World War I poster by Winsor McCay, urging Americans to buy Liberty Bonds
In addition to a series of cartoons based on his popular “rarebit” gags, McCay also created The Sinking of the Lusitania, a depiction of the attack on the maritime ship. The cartoon contained a message that was meant to inspire America into joining World War I.