I’ve been urging Mike Barrier to post his excellent interview with Warner director/”Senior Animator” Bob McKimson for some time, and he finally did. Click here to read it.
Thad’s Books
I’ve been urging Mike Barrier to post his excellent interview with Warner director/”Senior Animator” Bob McKimson for some time, and he finally did. Click here to read it.
Filed under classic animation, people
Me and Don Yomp were talking about this juicy interview. I think the most surprising claim was Mckimson’s model sheet for Bugs pre-dating the Bob Givens one.
Regarding his role in the Clampett unit, I wasn’t surprised he did so much work but he also said that Clampett demanded a lot. I am sure after Mckimson was finished, Clampett told McKimson to make changes.
I suspect the ‘Queer layout man’ McKimson speaks of is Robert Gribbroek.
I’m happy Mike Barrier has gone to the trouble of posting this and am looking forward to his other Warners interviews in full, especially Maltese. Anyone interested in the Davis unit has to read the Lloyd Turner chat that Mike posted ages ago.
I’ve written about the interview elsewhere so I’m not going to be repetitious. But I wonder if McKimson told Manny Gould and Emery Hawkins to “calm down”, too. I can probably imagine Bill Melendez’ reaction to such a request.
Very likely the case, but I wonder who the background artist was? At first it sounds like Richard H. Thomas, but I seem to recall there there was a photo of Bob Clampett’s unit in 1939, which showed Thomas with his wife, and it just seems inconceivable that McKimson would ditch his background painter of ten years just because he didn’t get on with the new layout guy. Doesn’t sound like it’d be William Butler either, since Gribbroek worked with him longer than any of his other background men at WB. That being the case, I get the feeling that the background painter in question may actually have been Bob Majors, who did the backgrounds for three or so of McKimson’s cartoons before vanishing and being replaced by Butler.
Majors (b. about 1913) had been at Disney before the War, working on Fantasia. He won second prize in a Life magazine contest in 1942 for artwork by men in the service and designed sets for a huge USO show in 1944 with George Peed, ex Disney (Bill’s brother, I’d guess).