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Walt Kelly Animation Drawing

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Click to enlarge. I haven't bought much original artwork in recent years, but I couldn't resist this drawing that I purchased on eBay recently. It's from the film We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us , made by Walt and Selby Kelly. Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, was reportedly unhappy with the TV special made of the strip, The Pogo Special Birthday Special , which was directed by Chuck Jones. Following that, Kelly and his wife Selby decided to make an animated film on their own. Both of them had worked at Disney on the pre-war features and Selby had continued to work in animation after Walt left it to work in comic books and strips. The film was to be a half hour, but it ended up being only 15 minutes or so. It also suffered from poor distribution, never playing TV and rarely screening anywhere. VHS copies were for sale several years ago, though I have no idea if that offer is still good. The drawing above is of the pig villain in Kelly's film, a poll...

Dumbo Part 10

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Another frustrating entry, due to the lack of credits in the second half. While Woolie Reitherman and Fred Moore have long been credited for their work on Timothy, here we have Milt Neil doing an excellent job. His Timothy is more flexible than Reitherman's and also is timed more quickly. Is Neil responsible for Timothy whispering into the ringmaster's ear? The animation does not suffer compared to either Reitherman or Moore, so if it is Neil it is evidence of another great performer brushed under the carpet. In particular, I'd love to know who animated Timothy in shot 30. The shape of the character under the sheet doesn't resemble Timothy at all; the body shape is different and the muzzle has disappeared. It's only at the end of the shot, when Timothy's rump and tail are visible, that the character's model is taken into account. And what about Walt Kelly? Kelly, in his post-Disney comic book and comic strip work ( Pogo being the most famous) was one ...

Miscellaneous Links

Kris Graft of Gamasutra writes that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will be opening a gaming studio in Montreal that will gradually grow t0 300 employees by 2015. Bhob Stewart writes about The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air , a 1938 radio series which initially featured Walt Disney himself as host and the voice of Mickey Mouse. Stewart provides a player for seven episodes of the series. Fantagraphics will soon publish the fourth volume of Our Gang comics by Walt Kelly. A complete 14 page story from the book in PDF format can be found here . Farhad Manjoo of Slate reviews Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, about creating an online business with minimal start-up costs. You can read excerpts from the book here . (Gamasutra link via James Caswell .)

Prehysterical Pogo

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Updated with a new link at the bottom. Walt Kelly started his career on the east coast in early comic books, pre- Superman . He then shifted to working at Disney, where he was initially in the story department and later moved to being an animator. His credits include features like Pinocchio , Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon and shorts like The Nifty Nineties . He left Disney at the time of the strike and returned to the east coast, where he spent the bulk of the 1940s creating comic book stories for Dell comics of various kinds. One of his strips in Animal Comics developed into Pogo . Starting in 1948, Kelly went to work for the New York Star as an illustrator and art director. He took Pogo along with him as a comic strip. When the Star folded, Pogo found a home in syndication and continued beyond Kelly's death. In 1966, something happened to Kelly to cause him to send his characters to Mars (though it turned out to be the Australian outback). Perhaps it was boredom or ...