Tamás Patrovits (aka “Patro”) is a 40 year-old Hungarian animator and illustrator - and also the president of ASIFA Hungary. Six months ago he started an online Flash cartoon series for one of Hungary’s biggest news sites. Says Patro:

I make these alone, sometimes with a musician. All the shorts are made in 5-10 days, and are about our Hungarian public life and political bullshit - created with with old-style graphic design mixed with Flash animation. The series becomes more popular every month. Please take a look my blog site. Unfortunately its in Hungarian, but I plan English subtitles in the future.

If you enjoyed this one, here are 9 reasons not to ride a bike in Hungary.

(photo from Paint Monster blog)

The holidays just got a little less jolly for NY animation artists. I’m hearing reports that among the casualties of yesterday’s massive 850-person layoffs at Viacom is the entire Nick Digital Animation Studios division. If word on the street is accurate, they’re shutting down the whole shop; from top to bottom, everybody is out the door. This would be a big blow to the New York animation community: Nick is not only one of the largest animation employers in the city but also the last network animation studio remaining on the East Coast. Among the affected shows are Dora the Explorer, The Backyardigans, Go Diego Go, Bubble Guppies, and the forthcoming Umi Zumi, the latter being the only show animated in-house. No word yet on how they’re going to continue producing these shows or when everybody is getting laid off. Feel free to add details in the comments.

UPDATE: Nick employee Linda Beck has written a lengthy post on the ASIFA-East blog about the current situation. Here are a few excerpts from her post, “The End of an Era, Nickelodeon Digital Animation Studio Closes Shop”:

Wednesday morning, a large portion of your community crowded unsuspectingly into conference room 4-110, and were given the news that 1633 Broadway would no longer be the home of the Nick Digital Animation studio.

The crushing blow was that, after a long and difficult deliberation, the Network had made the decision not to rebuild the studio in a new location. After a decade of producing ground-breaking, award-winning pre-school animated television, an Era was given an end date.

The studio itself and the production units, or shows, are two different things. There are four remaining production units on the 4th Floor of 1633. “Dora the Explorer”/”Go, Diego, Go!”, “Backyardigans,” and the yet to premiere “Bubble Guppies,” and “Team Umizoomi.” The former three stay mostly intact and will simply move to other locations. “Team Umizoomi” has a full team that includes Designers, Animators, and Editors. Those are the people who no longer have a Network studio to call home.

But if you’re looking for a villain in all this, you’re not going to find one, at least not on the Network level. In a move that, in my knowledge, is unprecedented, the artists who are being dismissed early are not only being paid through the end dates on their contracts, but are being given severance packages on top based on the years they’ve worked with Nick Animation. It was a classy way to handle it.

Contrary to what most animation histories would lead one to believe, the creative workforce during the Golden Age of animation in the 1930s and 1940s was not comprised entirely of white males. There were also women who worked in creative capacities, as well as artists of different ethnicities, particularly Mexican, Chinese and Japanese. Sadly their contributions have been obscured throughout the years and rarely acknowledged in any meaningful way by our art form’s historians.

The history of Japanese artists is particularly interesting because most of them were interned during WWII. In one of the stupider moments in American history, the US government decided to forcibly remove tens of thousands of Japanese-American citizens from their homes and confine them in internment camps, an action that the government later admittted was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Recently while browsing through this UC Library digital image archive, I stumbled across some rare photos that help to flesh out the story of Japanese-American animation artists.

To start off, here’s a shot of Scooby-Doo designer Iwao Takamoto (also posted below) from 1945. Iwao was too young to work in animation prior to the war. He was recruited to work at Disney in 1945 at the age of 20. In an interview I did with him in 1999, he spoke about his experience being interned and how he entered the animation industry afterwards. By the early-1950s, he had became one of the most trusted clean-up artists at Disney and worked closely with both Milt Kahl and Marc Davis before beginning his illustrious H-B career in 1961.

Next is a photo of Bennie Nobori, who had worked at Disney prior to being interned. I’ve never heard of him but examples of his work from an internment camp newspaper—here and here—reflect a strong Freddie Moore influence.

Other Disney artists who were interned during WWII were veteran animator and writer Bob Kuwahara and Chris Ishii. According to Michael Barrier, Kuwahara was “the first Disney artist whose job was just to draw story sketches.” Kuwahara left Disney in 1937 to go to MGM, which is where he was working when he was taken away by the government. After the war, he moved to NY where, among other things, he created the theatrical cartoon character Hashimoto-san for Terrytoons. Read a short bio written by Kuwahara himself here.

I’ve previously written about about Ishii’s WWII experience on the Brew. In that earlier blogpost, there’s a photo of Ishii working on the camp’s newspaper comic. Below is another photo from December 12, 1942, the day he was inducted into the US military. It has the following caption: “Chris Ishii two years ago worked as an artist for Walt Disney, he tried to join the army but was turned down for slightly flat feet, then his draft board classed him 1-A but before his hopes were realized he was evacuated from California and his new draft number said 4-C, undesirable alien. In the center Chris created, for center newspapers, a cartoon character “Little Neebo”, humorously depicting the trials and tribulations of a little Nisei boy in evacuation centers. Here Chris realizes his deepest ambition as he is finger printed by an army sergeant after having been sworn into the Army of the United States, to be sent to Camp Savage, Minnesota.”

After the war, Ishii became a top East Coast designer and eventually served as the creative director of UPA-NY in the late-1950s as well as co-owner of Focus Productions in the 1960s and 1970s. In the UC image archive, I found a photo of a wooden pin created by Chris Ishii featuring his character Lil’ Neebo.

Ishii, who had become an assistant to Ward Kimball in November 1940, went out on stike at Disney in 1941 along with the other Japanese-American artists who worked at the studio including Tom Okamoto, Masao Kawaguchi and James Tanaka. This is a 1943 photo of James Tanaka working at Famous Studios in New York. The caption accompanying his photo says, “James worked for five years in the studios of Walt Disney and secured his present position [at Famous] while at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas.”

The archive also has a photo of Tom Inada working at Famous. The photo caption says: “He had just finished a commercial art course at the Sacramento Junior College in California when all persons of Japanese ancestry were evacuated from the west coast. He lived for a year at the Tule Lake Relocation Center.”

And here’s a pic of Tom Inada and James Tanaka working together at Famous.

Below is a 1945 image of Michiko Kataoka (second from left), who had been interned at Manzanar and was attending UCLA at the time of this photo. Judging from her age in the photo and the uniqueness of the name, I’d harbor a guess that she is the artist who went by the name of Michi Kataoka and who worked at UPA as a background painter for a brief period in the early-1950s.

Another female Japanese artist of note, Gyo Fujikawa, who had worked at Disney in the early-1940s, managed to escape internment. This excerpt from her LA Times obituary explains why:

It was Disney who Fujikawa said changed the way she handled bigots during World War II. Unlike her parents and younger brother, she escaped internment because she was living in New York; only Japanese residing on the West Coast were sent to the camps. But Fujikawa traveled frequently, and when people became suspicious of her, she often told them she was really Anna May Wong, the Chinese American actress. According to her nephew, Fujikawa took secret delight in this masquerade.

But when she told Disney that she often lied about her heritage, he exploded. “Damn it! Why should you say that? You’re an American citizen,” he said.

“From that moment on,” Fujikawa recounted recently, “that’s exactly what I did tell them.”

If anybody can add more details about these artists or other Golden Age Japanese artists, please share. It’d be nice to have a comprehensive list available somewhere online.

The voice of Donald Duck was a guest on the December 12, 1954 broadcast:

If you are reading this blog and didn’t purchase Volume 1 of Woody Woodpecker and Friends last year… well shame on you! You still can still order it here. If cost was an issue, or if Walter Lantz cartunes aren’t your thing, I urge you to seek out this special “spotlight collection”, Woody Woodpecker Favorites (box art above center) which goes on sale March 10th, 2009.

The disc contains 15 Woody Woodpecker Cartoons (Knock Knock, Pantry Panic, The Barber of Seville, Ski for Two, Chew-Chew Baby, The Dippy Diplomat, The Loose Nut, Who’s Cookin’ Who?, Bathing Buddies, Fair Weather Fiends, Musical Moments from Chopin, Banquet Busters, Wet Blanket Policy, Sleep Happy, The Redwood Sap), plus bonus cartoons: Fish Fry with Andy Panda, Pied Piper of Basin Street a Swing Symphony, and these Tex Avery classics: The Legend of Rockabye Point (with Chilly Willy), Sh-h-h-h-h-h and Crazy Mixed Up Pup. If that isn’t enough, the disc includes two bonus episodes of The Woody Woodpecker Show: Episode #53 (Featuring Kiddie League, Charlie’s Mother-in-Law, The Bird Who Came to Dinner, Fish & Chips) and Episode #56 (Featuring Billion Dollar Boner, Coming Out Party, Romp in a Swamp, Pest of Show).

Sounds like a bargain at $19.98 (it’s going for $13.99 on Amazon.com). Now you have no excuse not to try some classic cartoon goodness from Universal Pictures.