Famous animators

[Frank]

I can spot some of Al Eugster's animation in some of the later Popeyes but I can't spot any before 1956 in his Popeye cartoons. What did his animation style look like before 1956?

Is there any way to spot the animation styles of John Gent, Tom Johnson, George Germanetti, and Dave Tendlar?

[J Lee]

Famous' desire for both clean and uniform animation under Seymour Kneitel really makes defining animators styles rough from about 1949 until Eugster's UPA influenced styles started appearing four years later. But there are a few hints here and there on at least what the head animator's preferences were, if not the others in the unit.

Eugster didn't go to extremes on the angles before 1956 on the Popeye series, but his style always featured well-defined lines. Going way back, Eugster was the one who first redesigned the round and lumpy Bluto into the more muscular and well-defined straighter lines of the Famous era, in 1942's "A Hull of a Mess", and going even further back than that, James Culhane gave Eugster credit for being the first animator to really create the "perspective" animation that the studio later used by Kneitel in "A Dream Walking" and Eugster used himself in the final Fliescher Popeye, "Baby Wants a Bottleship".

[mayerson]

Hi Fred. If you go to http://www.apatoons.com and go to the link "Stuff from Apatoons," you'll see an article I wrote, "Animators and their Scenes," that identifies scenes by Johnny Gent as well as Fred Moore's Lantz animation and Tom and Jerry work by Ken Muse and Irv Spence.

If you go to http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/3131/scenes.html, you'll see a list of scenes animated by Al Eugster. The cartoons which mention specific shots came from Al's records and the others come from talking to Al.

Hope this helps.

-Mark Mayerson

[Ray Pointer]

That's an interesting account of Al's work. However, his "animating" the scenes in STOPPING THE SHOW were based largely on Rotoscope references. It may be more accurate to say that he was assigned the scenes of the Fanny Brice and Maurice Chevalier imitations and transformed the live action references into the figure of Betty Boop. This was the case in many other Rotoscope applications at this time, where they were used as a reference, and the character, which was larger in proportion to the real figure would be drawn to match the position in the reference. Generally, key frames were selected, and the animator would make the animation drawings, and establishe the timing based on the refernce footage, then pass on the Inbetweening to Assistants and Inbetweeners. This was the case when Berny Wolf made roto tracings to animate The Old Man form THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN.