Jules Engel, the dapper founding director of the experimental animation program at CalArts in Valencia, will be honored tonight for contributions to animation that began 55 years ago with "Fantasia."
The occasion will be the 23rd Annual Annie Awards--the animation world's highest honor--at the Television Academy Theatre in North Hollywood. The 77-year-old artist and educator will be one of three recipients of the Winsor McCay Award, the highest honor awarded by the International Animated Film Society's Hollywood branch. The prize is named for the legendary creator of "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914), America's first great animated film.
Disney veteran Vance Gerry, and Dan McLaughlin of the UCLA animation department, also will be honored for lifetime contributions to the field.
CalArts has two quite different animation tracks: one in character animation, which prepares students for careers at Disney and other mainstream studios, and Engel's program in experimental animation.
"The people I get are the artists who have a strong personal vision," Engel said recently in the Valencia studio he shares with several dozen students who have managed to get into the highly competitive program. Student work hangs on the walls, and Engel points to such state-of-the-art amenities as imported bulletin boards that spontaneously close up the holes made by push pins, the animators' ubiquitous tool, within 24 hours.
In Engel, the students have a mentor who is an artist in his own right and a man who has participated in several of the major milestones in animation history.
Consider "Fantasia," for instance, the 1940 film that many critics regard as Walt Disney's masterpiece.
The Hungarian-born Engel was a young man when he joined Disney's new studio in Burbank in the heady days after feature animation was invented with "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937). An abstract painter, Engel was hired to do choreography and color-keying for one of the most famous sequences in "Fantasia," the Chinese dance that is performed by mushrooms to music from Tchaikovsky's the "Nutcracker Suite." (He also choreographed the Russian dance, performed by thistle boys and orchid girls.)
A lover of both ballet and abstract art, Engel was called an egghead by some of his Disney colleagues, a longhair. But, he said, "I brought what they didn't have. Dancing and movement were in my gut, so for me, it was a piece of cake."
He emphasized that he was the choreographer, not the animator, of those winning mushrooms and agile thistles. "I was the Balanchine, and the man who animated it [Art Babbitt] was the dancer."
From "Snow White" on, one of the signatures of a Disney film was its detailed background. But the mushroom dancers appear silhouetted against simple black.
"I fought for this idea," Engel said. An elaborate background was superfluous, he argued: "You don't need that crap. You just bring the group together and let them move."
Engel has always suspected that Disney approved the unprecedented black background because the movie had grown so expensive. Whatever the reason, the decision is seen by many critics as a crucial step in the development of modern, non-naturalistic animation.
Later, while working on "Bambi" (1942), Engel did the storyboard, the visual script that the animators followed, for the meeting between Bambi and the lovely doe Faline.
"Bambi's" art director, Thomas H. Codrick, had been impressed by the purples, reds and other colors Engel used in the Chinese and Russian dances, a palette that was influenced by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Dufy and other modern artists whom Engel admired. The men working on "Bambi" had largely limited themselves to tawny browns and other real-life tones for their forest tale.
"They didn't realize they could use all those colors on the deer," Engel said. "Once they did, it exploded."
Although his own 49 abstract films couldn't be less Disneyesque, Engel believes Disney was a giant. "Only two people came out of Hollywood so far of large consequence--Disney and Chaplin," Engel said. "Disney died in 1966, and he's still with us."
Engel's tenure at Disney ended when he was drafted during World War II and assigned to the Army's First Animation Unit in Culver City. The Army needed animators to get out such patriotic messages as "Loose lips sink ships and also bring down airplanes." As Leonard Maltin and other historians of animation point out, the Army didn't care how innovative the animators were, as long as they got the job done.
The Army animation unit was full of talented artists, Engel said. It was also relatively collegial. Everybody there was in the entertainment industry, and so nobody paid much attention to rank. Everybody knew the war would be over eventually, and then the people who had had pre-war clout, whatever their present rank, would be deciding who worked and who didn't.
