What there was in the production was a great first year of production where the art of animation was treated in its highest form. I don’t know about the woman, but I hope she gained a little humility that day 30-something years ago. He continues on, even today, working at a top position in design at Blue Sky. I was able to arrange for him to be switched to the BG department, thus fired by me from doing inbetweens and hired by them, in the same day, to do watercolors.

It was obvious that there was a personality conflict since the guy was a great artist and definitely someone who should have stayed on. The second person to fire was someone I was told (by Dick Williams, himself,) that I had to fire. She felt she could animate the scene better, and she set out to prove that. (That might have been hard to do since everyone was giving it their all.) It so happened that one new inbetweener, on her first scene, ignored my instructions (and her immediate supervisor’s) by erasing all of Jack Schnerk‘s drawings. I was told that we had to give the staff a lesson that they had to work harder. There was the time when I was ordered to fire – that day – two inbetweeners. Those had started off nicely, at the beginning of the film, and went insanely wrong before long. I was in on all the morning production meetings where managers and supervisors and directors would all meet. The decision was slow in growing and fast when it finally fell, that the movie was enormously over budget. In a way, I wish the book were written after the film was completed so that we could read the true story of what happened in those last six months of chaos. Too bad at the last minute the train of a film ran wildly off the tracks. The book was as exciting – in the making – as was the film. (I’m not just saying that because there were photos of me in there – though that would be a good reason, too.) For that reason, the book really is one of the best “Art of. There were no photo decisions by committee it was decided to use a photo if it told the story John was trying to relay. John Canemaker took all the photos, himself, which led to a more intimate look at an animated film. Last week, I posted a stash of photos taken by John Canemaker for the book he wrote called, “ The Animated Raggedy Ann and Andy.”

Raggedy andy images