March 28-April 3, 2002

mixpicks

John Canemaker

It's the animator's lot to toil in the shadows -- how many of millions who saw Shrek or Monsters, Inc. can name even those films' directors, let alone any of the hundreds of individual artists who slaved on them? Of course, it's traditional animation's goal to make audiences forget that they're watching hundreds of thousands of individual drawings flit by 24 times a second, so the animator's anonymity might almost be seen as a perverse kind of compliment. Don't tell John Canemaker that, though. An animator himself, Canemaker is the nation's leading animation historian and the author of biographies on Tex Avery and Winsor McCay (the cartoonist best known for Little Nemo in Slumberland, who drew some of the earliest animation entirely by hand, and entirely by himself). His most-recent biography Walt Disney's Nine Old Men (Disney Press) is about those who collectively defined the look and feel of Disney animation from the 1930s through the 1970s, yet forever toiled in their figurehead's shadow. Canemaker will screen and discuss his own films, then move on to the work of Milt Kahl, one of the nine, a small selection of whose works include The Jungle Book, The Sword in the Stone, One Hundred and One Dalmations, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Bambi and Pinocchio.

Thu., March 28, 7 p.m., $5, CBS Auditorium, University of the Arts, 320 S. Broad St.

—Sam Adams

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