The first series where I could immediately see the difference in animator styles when I first started seeing them was Tom & Jerry (this would be around age nine). At that age, I had no way of knowing the actual name of each animator, but I had them down fairly well: the ‘furrowy/pouty’ guy (Ray Patterson), the ‘perfect’ guy (Ken Muse), the ‘flying shit’ guy (Irv Spence), the ‘pop/bounce to pose’ guy (Pete Burness), and the ’roundish/oval-ly’ guy (Ed Barge).
The earlier cartoons also had two very distinct styles that disappeared as the cartoons started to get faster: the ‘cute, baby-walk’ guy and the ‘rubbery’ guy. For years I thought that the former was Jack Zander and the latter was George Gordon.
Thanks to brilliant historian and animator Mark Kausler, we now know better. He posted IDs from his animator’s draft for The Night Before Christmas (click here and here to see them, and for Mark Mayerson’s mosaic, click here), and apparently it’s the other way around. The scenes in the early Tom & Jerrys we assumed were Zander’s are really Gordon’s, and the scenes we assumed Gordon’s are Zander’s.
So the lesson learned here is:
‘cute, baby-walk’ guy = Gordon;
‘rubbery’ guy = Zander.
But where did this misinformation come from? I don’t have my copy handy (or a scanner – so a scan would be welcome) but there is a drawing from this scene (from The Lonesome Mouse) labeled as “one of Jack Zander’s early expressive drawings of Jerry” in Leonard Maltin’s still-invaluable Of Mice and Magic. I’m not sure if anyone is keeping a list of errors in Maltin’s book, but it would be prudent to take note of this one. (UPDATE: Thanks to reader Oswald Iten for submitting a scan!)
Mark has also ID’ed a few other early T&J animators, Cecil Surry and Bill Littlejohn (who actually received a screen credit on Fine Feathered Friend, but it was omitted in the 1949 reissue). More on them later.
I was blown away by this revelation too, Thad. And it’s nice to know the name of another T&J animator I had never identified before (Surry).
If you’re still looking for that scan of page 290, take a look here:
http://www.oswalditen.ch/Maltin_p290.jpg
So, the guy who provided such cutesy animation of Jerry, was the guy who did such strange cartoons as “The Tree Surgeon”? My brain hurts…
Thanks for the correction, Thad. This site of yours is invaluable to me. It’s too bad Zander couldn’t get (correct) credit for his animation when he was still living. He only died two years ago at the VERY old age of 99 but, even then, he still took most of his animation for being George Gordon’s! Incidentally, that scene in “Night Before Xmas” of Zander’s where Tom does that effiminate kiss under the mistletoe has to be one of my favorite pieces of animation ever.
Mike – I don’t think Cecil Surry was at MGM very long. He did do a fair amount of work in the Tom & Jerry comic book series, I think, though (He worked as a comic book artist for many years). Surry mostly seems to have worked at the UPA Studio on the Mr. Magoo series (in the 1950’s, anyway) until his premature death (at age 49) of a heart attack in 1956 when he was still animating at UPA (his last animation credit appears on “Magoo Breaks Par”, released a year after his death in 1957).
It’s a little odd that this is getting play on message boards and the like now because Mark Kausler revealed this months ago. I asked him about Cecil Surry because I had no idea Surry went to MGM after he left the Avery unit at Warners.
Surry died at a comparatively young age (49) in 1956. He came from Washington State; his father and uncle were orchardists (a safe bet is they were growing apples) in Chelan.
At any rate, it’s nice to see the mystery solved.
Something occured to me though. It could be that Kausler had them the wrong way around. I’m beginning to wonder if the animator IDs are actually Kausler’s educated guesswork and that the rest of us misunderstood that he was actually taking them from the draft. Remember, he called his animator IDs for “Salt Water Tabby” a “draft” as well, and made it clear that he was only trying to identify the different styles. Maybe we picked him up the wrong way?
From Mark K’s blog:
“This picture is a great showcase for Jack Zander. It remains the highpoint of personality animation for Tom and Jerry. You can probably tell that my notes this time came from the original draft. The working title was “Not Even A Mouse”, the draft was made on July 9th, 1941, most Hollywood Christmas movies were done in the summertime.”
I know, and actually Mark emailed me to confirm that the info *does* come from the draft, but I was wondering if it was just the scene descriptions that came from the draft. We’ve seen a few T&J scene breakdowns that look like animator drafts but with no animators mentioned (e.g. Yankee Doodle Mouse).
My apologies for being a bit overcome by the troll when last I commented and stunk up the place. This site, and particularly posts such as these, prove an invaluable source of interest to me. The analysis not only of yourself but of your commentators enlarges me.
I should steer clear of partisan divides within the animation community, clearly.
Don’t beat yourself up over it, Thad – b4 I enrolled in an Animation class in college (way back in the mid-1980s!!!), I used to mistake Virgil Ross’s animation style for that of Art Davis and vice versa. Then we screened a few of Frank Tashlin’s cartoons when he returned to Warners after his Columbia/Screen Gems stint and I saw the differences in style. When Davis went to animate for Friz Freleng after his own unit was shut down by Warners, the differences became more apparent now that I could see both styles in the same short.
In short – you are forgiven 8)
it’d be cool if you did an identify VIDEO for T & J as well. Always love when you do those