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On this day, in 1998, A. Kendall O'Connor passed away in Burbank,
California. Born on June 7, 1908 in
Perth, Australia, Ken began his professional career at the age of 16 as a
reporter for the newspaper his father owned. At some point, someone died (he
can’t remember who) and no one had a picture of them for their obituary. Ken
drew a better than passing portrait of them and became the paper’s resident
artist as well. As his interest in art grew, he began taking classes, selling
the cartoons and oil paintings his studies produced for spending money. In
1930, Ken’s father started working for the Australian National Travel
Association and the whole O’Connor clan moved to San Francisco, California to
promote tourism to the Land Down Under. Ken continued his art education at the
California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute)
and earned money by becoming the art director for a local poster company.
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In 1935, the Walt Disney Studio was desperately
hiring artists in order to have a staff that could actually create a feature
length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Ken’s father encouraged his reluctant son to apply. He was quickly hired as an
inbetweener and just as quickly moved into the special effects department. His
main job was to be a rotoscoper. Rotoscoping is a process where you make a live
action movie of something you want your animated character to do (like dancing)
and then make rough tracings of each frame of film. Those rough drawings then
get handed off to animators, overdrawn with the character and cleaned up,
giving you a much more realistic representation of action than freeforming
would. It’s a very tedious process but was probably the best way young Ken
could have ever learned about how the process of animation differs from a still
life painting. And learn he did.
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Following the release of Snow White, Ken became an assistant in the layout
department. His first project was the 1937 short
Clock Cleaners. Because a Mickey Mouse short can be a lot less
realistic than Walt wanted his features to look, Ken could take a lot of
artistic license to achieve the effects he wanted. Or as he put it, having
learned the rules of perspective at art school, he could violate all of them to
make the picture much more dramatic. So he did and everyone noticed. Ken’s incredible
work on
Clock Cleaners marked the
beginning of a brilliantly long career in layout, an area of animation most
people don’t even know exists.
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A layout artist is quite literally in charge of how you will see everything
in an animated movie. They create the backgrounds, or sets, that the action
will take place in. They also work with directors to decide what angle the
audience will see things from. In live action, a scene can be shot from
multiple angles and then cut differently if the first take isn’t something the
production team likes. Animation is completely different. If the angle of a
scene doesn’t work for some reason, there isn’t different footage that can be
spliced in to fix it. What you have is the only thing that was painstakingly
drawn. If you look at it and decide it would be better to, say, see a character
from the side view instead of dead on, you have to restart the scene from
scratch. In the days of hand drawn animation, it was cost prohibitive to do even
a small amount of redraws. Determining all that beforehand is the only way to do it. It’s better now with computers and 3D rendering and
all that, but even now, better is a relative term. A good layout artist was and
is crucial to creating successful animated movies. It turned out that Ken wasn’t
just good, he was one of the best.
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For
Pinocchio, Ken crafted the overhead shot of the puppet being led
astray by Foulfellow and Gideon, parading through the streets of the town. He
filmed some live action reference footage to help with that one. For
Cinderella, he designed and built a
detailed model of the pumpkin coach, which was approved by Walt with zero (that’s
right zero) changes, becoming the coach that’s seen in the film. Having the
model improved the action of those scenes immensely. For
Lady and the Tramp, Ken knew it was going to be important to be
able to show things from Lady’s perspective and shot all sorts of reference film
from about a foot and a half off the ground. For
Alice in Wonderland, he spent hours working out the proper horizons
and vanishing points and multiple perspectives for all the scenes featuring
playing cards, knowing that if just one of them was off, the whole scene would
look wonky. All told, Ken would work on 13 of the 21 animated features that
were released during his years with Disney, making invaluable contributions to
each and every one of them.
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Ken wasn’t only good at camera angles, he was good at coming up with new
techniques as well. For the
Trees
segment of
Melody Time, he suggested
using pastels on the cels and then coating them with lacquer to keep them from
smudging to get the unique look of that scene. In
Dumbo, when Timothy and Dumbo get drunk, he knew it would be nearly
impossible to keep the colors of the pink elephants consistent. What you are
actually seeing there is the color of the background. Each individual cel is
painted all black except for an elephant shaped clear spot. A simple but highly
effective solution. For the
Dance of the
Hours segment in
Fantasia, he
deliberately changed the general motifs of the animation each time the music
entered a new movement, going from vertical shapes to elipses to diagonals.
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The Shorts Department didn’t let Feature Animation hog all of Ken’s talents
over the years. He was part of the teams that created classics like
Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom,
The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met
and several of the educational shorts like 1946’s
The Story of Menstruation.
Ken officially retired in 1974, but would continue to consult on a variety
of projects. He contributed to the films that became part of the World of
Motion and Universe of Energy pavilions at Epcot and the short
Back to Neverland, starring Robin
Williams and Walter Cronkite, that was a staple of the animation tour at the
Disney-MGM Studios for many years. He also spent time as a professor at
CalArts, teaching the next generation of animation giants, including Brad Bird,
John Lasseter and John Musker. In 1992, for his nearly four decades of making
Disney animation the best in the world, Ken was declared a true Disney Legend.
Six years later, the Australian reporter who reluctantly turned into an artistic
heavyweight would pass away at home from natural causes. He was 90 years old.
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