![]() Mostly he preferred to freelance out of “my own little shop at the Abbey Victoria Hotel near Rockefeller Center for thirty years. Blechman (commercials), Bill Melendez (Charlie Brown TV specials), and Richard Willams (the 1977 feature Raggedy Ann & Andy). His services as an animator were sought by both east and west coast studios, including Shamus Culhane, R.O. His reputation as a fine Disney and UPA artist brought him steady work in New York for more than three decades. They sold their house, he canceled his studio contract, and they drove their Studebacker convertible cross country. “My wife and I read that and we just couldn’t wait to get here,” Willis says of White’s powerful love letter to the Big Apple. Willis did not know White, but he was dazzled by the remarkably descriptive 1949 booklet, Here is New York. Pyle had moved to New York City, encouraged by two New Yorker magazine contributors: Willis’ good friend and cartoonist Sam Cobean and the writer E.B. Like one big family.” By the time Gerald became famous, however, Mr. “The atmosphere at UPA was very free,” he told me. Willis’s sequence occurs from the 5:25 – 6:25 minute mark. Magoo short), and the Oscar-winning Gerald McBoing Boing (above, 1951), which contained Willis’s sequence of Gerald performing sound effects for a nationwide radio audience, a model of pared-down, to-the-point performance and charm. ![]() “Willis” and sometimes “Willy” Pyle is credited as an animator on several important UPA films, including the Oscar-nominated The Magic Fluke (1949), Ragtime Bear (1949, the first Mr. UPA revolutionized the animation industry with modernist designs far removed from Disney’s “illusion of life” naturalism. veterans called United Productions of America. That same year, Willis married and began animating at a new studio formed by Disney strikers and F.M.P.U. He spent the war years in military service with Disney alumnae at the First Motion Picture Unit film unit at the Hal Roach Studio in Culver City, California, animating training and propaganda films, such as Flathatting, a brilliant John Hubley-directed short released in 1946. While waiting to enter the service, he worked briefly at Walter Lantz’s studio on Woody Woodpecker shorts. Afterward, he returned to finish Bambi before joining the US Army Air Corp. “All my friends were on strike, and I couldn’t pass them in the picket line,” he explains. We got along great!”įantasia and Bambi followed, then Willis joined the strike line in 1941, though he had no beef with Disney management. “That’s the thing that got me in good with Milt. “He complimented me after I did it,” Willis remembers proudly. And it’d be his own work!”Įasy-going Willis, however, did a great job on the very first scene Kahl handed him: Jiminy Cricket, late on his first day at work as Pinocchio’s conscience, dressing on the run, a scene that is a Milt Kahl tour de force of personality, clarity of action and superb timing. Kahl was “a “tough master,” he recalls, “who’d grab a piece of film out of the moviola cause he didn’t like it. Willis made drawings in between Kahl’s main pose drawings, cleaned up them up, and added details. Soon his excellent draftsmanship landed him in the Pinocchio unit assisting top animator Milt Kahl, who was also Pinocchio’s designer. At night, he studied drawing under Rico Le Brun and Donald Graham at Disney’s art school on the studio lot. Willis worked as a 23-year old “traffic boy” for six months, delivering art supplies to the animators for $16 a week. ![]() His nearly 40-year career in animation began in 1937, when he dropped out of his senior year at the University at Boulder, Colorado, to join the Disney studio. Willis Pyle, the son of a farmer, was born in Kansas in 1914. Willis Pyle animating at the UPA Studio in the late 1940s They both hold a joyful and a positive approach to living in general, and the creative life in particular, that we all would be wise (or lucky) to emulate. I have been privileged to be a friend to both artists for many years, and they are wonders because, even in advanced age, they remain inspiringly active physically, as well as sharply engaged with the world mentally. ![]() This month marks the birth dates of two nonagenarian wonders who happen to be among the very few remaining participants in the Golden Age of Hollywood Animation of the 1930s: dancer Marge Champion, who turns 91 today, and animator Willis Pyle, who turns 96 tomorrow. ![]()
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