First “Who’s Who” Tells the Inside-Stories of Film and Television’s Award-Winning and Legendary Animators

Noted author and animation historian Jeff Lenburg profiles the amazing careers over 300 award-winning and legendary animators from around the world in the first-ever, "Who's Who in Animated Cartoons." Publication coincides with this year's 100th anniversary of the first American animated cartoon.

(PRWEB) October 8, 2006 -- Animation’s most tantalizing tales of film and television’s most noted animators from around the world are chronicled in one fascinating volume, thanks to one man who has dug deep into its illustrious 100-year history.

Drawing on extensive research and interviews with animators and his own vast archives of cartoon research conducted over the past 25 years, noted author and animation historian Jeff Lenburg profiles more than 300 award-winning and legendary animators in his new book, “Who’s Who in Animated Cartoons” (Applause, $19.95). Publication coincides with this year’s centennial celebration of the first American animated cartoon, James Stuart Blackton’s “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces.”

Lenburg’s copiously illustrated history covers nearly every Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning and nominated animator, ASIFA Hollywood Winsor McCay lifetime achievement award-winner and other noteworthy award-winning, world-renowned and up-and-coming animators worthy of inclusion as well. The result is a richly detailed reference work, brimming with many more colorful stories, fascinating facts and titillating tidbits about the animators and their art.

Much like film and television celebrities, Lenburg says animators have endured their share tragedies. “Mutt and Jeff” creator Harry “Bud” Fisher, whose popular comic-strip became one of the silent cartoon era’s longest running cartoon series, was paid a whopping $1,000 a week at the height of the strip’s popularity, money he squandered on horses, a Rolls Royce, and going to nightclubs flanked by pretty girls. “He died desolate and alone in 1954,” Lenburg says, “among the remnants of his cartoon achievements.”

“Family Guy” and “American Dad” creator Seth MacFarlane was one of the lucky ones who averted disaster, Lenburg says. “He was scheduled to fly back to Los Angeles on American Airlines Flight 11 after being a keynote speaker at his alma mater but missed his flight at Boston’s Logan Airport. He ended up taking the next available flight while his original flight was hijacked by terrorists on September 11, crashing it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”

Throughout history, animators also have lost out greatly in retaining ownership and financial interests in their world-famous creations, Lenburg says. Pioneer movie animator Otto Messer, who invented the international sensation, Felix the Cat, for Pat Sullivan Studios in the late 1900s, remained virtually unknown as its father largely because Sullivan owned the property rights to the character and subsequently attached his name in the credits of every cartoon he produced, giving the impression Sullivan was Felix’s real creator.

“It’s really a shame,” Lenburg says, “He [Messmer} lost considerable revenue from licensing and merchandising that rightfully was his.”

Lenburg’s book chronicles many other animators who suffered the same plight as Messmer, like Paramount Pictures animator Joseph Oriolo, who created the sweet, non-threatening Casper the Friendly Ghost. As Lenburg says, “The studio offered him a one-shot deal that included a separate contract for ten percent of the merchandising, a copy of which Oriolo never received from the studio’s general manager. Consequently, they paid him a meager $175 for the rights, and he lost out on millions in merchandising revenue.

In other cases, Lenburg’s book offers many amazing behind-the-scenes stories about the origins of the industry’s most beloved cartoon characters and most popular films and television programs. For instance, Lenburg writes that Betty Boop’s creator, animator Grim Natwick, who redesigned the character from a half dog, half woman into a voluptuous beauty for New York’s Fleischer Studios, attributed her phenomenal worldwide appeal with moviegoers to three letters: “S-E-X.”

“She was all girl,” added Natwick, who credited his realistic creation of 'toondom’s sexy siren with her trademark tiny pouty mouth, spit-curl hairdo and popular phrase, “Boop-oop-a-doop,” to spending eights years at art school drawing “thousands of naked models” and to knowing all their “sexy angles and shapes.”

Not every creation was met enthusiastically upon completion. As Lenburg writes, network executives initially gave television’s first half-hour prime-time special and perennial holiday favorite, “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” an unenthusiastic thumbs-down before premiering it.

“After viewing the finished show," Lenburg explains, “both CBS vice presidents were unimpressed. They deemed it ‘too slow’ and ‘too simplistic.’”

Lenburg adds that one of legendary animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s most memorable animated creations was produced in 1951. That year, unbeknownst to their bosses at MGM, where they were under exclusive contract to direct their Oscar-winning Tom and Jerry cartoon series, and to fans of CBS’s “I Love Lucy” show, the animation greats produced under a shroud of secrecy the program’s original title sequence, featuring cartoon stick figures of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

“Because they were afraid they’d lose their jobs if the studio’s powers-that-be ever found it, since they hated the competition posed by the thriving medium of television,” Lenburg says, “their work went largely uncredited.”

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