George Goepper started at Disney in 1933, a time of great expansion and
growth for the staff at the Disney studios. Snow White was going full
swing into production and tons of talent the studio didn’t already have
was needed to make such a daring production. Artists were recruited
around the country to work on this once-in-a-lifetime project that would
change the medium of animation and even the film industry in general
forever. However hard work was nothing short of expected from everyone
working in the studio. Years later George Goepper told Milt Gray that
when inbetweening back then “We all worked our little fannies off
because you never knew when you were going to be fired.” He became an
assistant on the one and only Norman Ferguson, oftentimes called
“Fergy”. Fergy was the first animator to put in great showmanship and
thought process into his characters, most famously in his animation of
the flypaper sequence in Playful Pluto. He wasn’t a great draftsman and
drew very rough despite his great understanding of staging and accuracy
in his drawings. This required Fergy to have many assistants. Among
these assistants besides Goepper were Jack Hannah, later the director of
many Donald Duck cartoons, and most notably John Lousnbery, who would
later go on to be one of the best personality directing animators at the
studio for decades. “Although Fergy put more work into held poses, he
cared less about action extremes and therefore would leave them to his
assistants to finish,” explained Goepper to Milt Gray in the same
interview used above. Among the notable projects George worked on with
Fergy included Pluto in the famous short the Pointer and the Dance of
the Hours segment in Fantasia.
In the mid 40s leading Goepper to become the longtime assistant of Eric
Larson, one of the humblest of the great Disney animators. According to
Burny Mattinson in his interview on Animation Podcast Larson was
relatively easy to follow up because he worked on fours and his
structure wasn’t too complicated unlike the very particular demands and
scenes on threes done with the assistants of Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl.
Among the films George Goepper worked under him on included Bambi, Lady
and the Tramp, and Sleeping Beauty.
He is my 305th pic to be named a Disney Legend.
No comments:
Post a Comment