November 30 - Dick Huemer

On this day, in 1979, Richard Martin Huemer passed away in Burbank, California. Dick is one of those animators who was around for the early days of cartoons, did almost every job connected to cartoons and helped make the genre what it is. I would also wager that no one outside of real animation aficionados has any idea who he is.

Born January 2, 1898 in New York, New York, Dick was a student at P.S. 158 in Brooklyn. After graduating from high school, he attended the National Academy of Design and the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, both in New York City. His first job in animation was at Raoul Barre's Studio in 1916. Seven years later, he'd moved over to the Max Fleischer Studio as an animation director where he also helped develop the character of Koko the Clown. By 1930, Dick had moved to Hollywood and taken a position at the Charles Mintz Studio, pumping out Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons. Three years later, Dick joined Oswald's original studio, Disney, and stayed there for the next four decades.

Image copyright Disney

In his early years with Disney, Dick worked as an animator on Silly Symphonies like The Tortoise and the Hare and Mickey Mouse shorts like Lonesome Ghosts. Fellow animator Ward Kimball said his favorite piece of Dick's animation was Donald Duck in The Band Concert. Dick then directed a few shorts including 1938's The Whalers and 1939's Goofy and Wilbur. He moved on as a story director for features starting with Fantasia. Kimball, only partially tongue in cheek, credits Dick with introducing Walt to music that wasn't Sousa marches and therefore giving Fantasia some quiet, sophisticated moments it might not have had otherwise.

Image copyright Disney

Dick's writing skills came in handy on several of the features the studio produced during the Forties and early Fifties. The Reluctant Dragon, Saludos Amigos, Make Mine Music, Peter and the Wolf, and Alice in Wonderland all benefited from his talents. The technique he employed while co-writing Dumbo may have been instrumental in getting the picture made. Instead of submitting a completed storyboard like typically happened, Dick and his writing partner, Joe Grant, kept giving Walt storyboard chapters that usually ended in a cliff hanger. Walt enjoyed them so much, his enthusiasm for the project just kept growing.

In 1948, Dick left the Disney company to draw a comic strip called The Adventures of Buck O'Rue and create animated commercials for the new medium of television. After three years of freelancing, he returned to Disney to elevate the studios television projects and help with its burgeoning publishing division. Dick's creation of a number of episodes breaking down and explaining the animation process for the Disneyland series rank among the finest work he ever did. He also adapted 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and the Tru-Life Adventure movies into books (or into a new book version in 20K's case). He began writing a Tru-Life comic strip in 1955 and continued it until he retired in 1973.

In 1978, Dick received the Windsor McCay Award for lifetime achievement at that year's Annie Awards. A year later, the man who was there for the birth of animation, suffered through the medium's growing pains and helped shape it into what we all know and love today, passed away at the age of 81. In 2007, Dick was made an official Disney Legend.