The McKimsons Go North

Golden Age directors and animators never got residuals for the cartoons they made, any more than 1940s newsreel narrators, trombonists in musical shorts, or uncredited supporting actors in the ten-minute Joe McDoakes comedies.

But a few of them lived long enough to make a bit of money when the limited-edition cel business took off in the late ‘80s. Some were hired to draw them, then travelled around the continent, meeting fans, talking with reporters and promoting their wares.

Tom and Chuck McKimson were among them. Their more well-known brother Bob didn’t have the chance; he died in 1977. (In the photo, the order is Bob, Tom, Chuck). Among the stops were the two major cities in Alberta.

The Calgary Herald interviewed them for its edition of October 23, 1994, where there was a bit of reminiscing.

Animators Draw on Rich Talent
By FRED HAESEKER
Animator Tom McKimson won't reveal his exact age, but he began his career as a trainee at the Disney studios in 1928.
“I'm over 39,” is all he'll say. “Older than you think.”
In Calgary over the weekend with his brother Charles -- also an animator -- to promote their limited-edition cels and drawings at a local gallery, McKimson looks back fondly to the golden age of movie cartoons.
There were three talented McKimson brothers, and Tom was hired by Disney along with his late brother Bob. They worked there for two years before moving on to a new cartoon studio founded by Romer Grey, the son of western novelist Zane Grey.
Around 1930 the Disney studios were producing the Silly Symphony cartoon series, in which the action on the screen was made to match the rhythm of a pre-recorded music track, reversing what had until then been the customary production sequence.
Disney was also pioneering the use of color in animation.
“Color was new then,” McKimson said.
“Disney at that time had an exclusive on the three-strip Technicolor process. Warner Bros., and the others weren't able to use it till later.”
Walt Disney is known in Hollywood history as a hard taskmaster, but McKimson just says he was “real great” to work for.
“I played polo with Walt later on,” he said.
Bob and Tom eventually moved from the Romer Grey studios to Warner Bros., where they were joined in 1937 by their younger brother Charles.
Warner Bros., was the studio that spawned the most distinctive cartoon characters of the '40s and '50s, among them Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner and Daffy Duck. The McKimsons personally were responsible for the bombastic rooster Foghorn J. Leghorn, the manic Mexican mouse Speedy Gonzales, the slobbering Tasmanian Devil and Tweety, the baby-voiced canary perpetually pursued by the slow-witted puddy tat Sylvester.
“At the storyboard sessions we'd all pitch in” said McKimson. “The whole studio was divided into several animation units. Each unit would consist of a director, four or five animators, four or five assistant animators and four or five ‘in-betweeners.’ Then came the painting and the inking.”
The actual story was created on the storyboards.
“We'd make rough sketches of the action till we got a good setup,” McKimson said.
The dialogue was pre-recorded, and the sound man would mark the animation sheets so that the animators could synchronize the speech, music and sound effects with their drawings.
In the 1930s, when the McKimsons began working there, the Warner Bros., studio was still located in the heart of Hollywood.
“It took up most of two or three blocks along Sunset Boulevard,” McKimson said. “The Hollywood Freeway now cuts through there.”
The animation units were housed in an old two-storey wooden building in a corner of Warner's live-action lot -- a building that became known as “Termite Terrace” when it was discovered to be infested with the insects.
Tom McKimson worked at Warner Bros., from 1932 to 1939 and again from 1942 to 1947 after putting in a stint producing training films for the U.S. armed forces. He took an “indefinitive [sic] leave of absence” in 1947 -- a leave that turned into a career of more than 30 years at Western Printing and Lithographing. There McKimson supervised a staff of more than 100 illustrating comic books, comic strips and coloring books that featured characters from Disney, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbera cartoons as well as Warner Bros.,' Looney Tunes.
Comic books featuring such live-action movie heroes as Tarzan, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were also produced, with each being assigned to a specialist, McKimson said.
In recent years, Tom and Charles have been working on a book about the careers of all three McKimson brothers, but catering to a booming market in animation art has kept them very busy.
“We're travelling all the time,” said McKimson. “Last year we made 15 personal appearances, in New York, Denver, North Carolina, Seattle -- all over the place.”

Tom McKimson was a little more forthright to one of the Edmonton papers covering his visit. This was published two days earlier.

Cartoon Creators Still Laugh About Their Characters
By HELEN METELLA
Journal Entertainment Writer
Is there anyone raised on Saturday morning cartoons who doesn't break into a grin at the sound of Tweety's immortal line, “I tot I taw a puddy cat?”
Tom and Charles McKimson do, but for reasons different than yours or mine. The two brothers were animators at Warner Brothers studios during the golden age of cartoons.
In fact, Tom created the character of an adorable baby bird who mercilessly teases arch-enemy Sylvester the cat.
“But when Tom did the original model she [sic] was a pink, naked little bird,” chuckles his younger brother Charles.
“The censors wouldn't allow us to show a naked bird, so that's why they gave him feathers and colored him yellow.”
Despite being 87 and 85 years of age respectively, Tom and Charles McKimson clearly remember such anecdotal details of the cartoon era, an era whose artistic details have been largely lost to the junkyard.
Each second of a classic cartoon required the sketching and painting of 24 separate acetate cels, all meticulously done by hand. For a feature-length animated movie such as Snow White, that meant 300,000 individual cels.
The McKimsons personally produced thousands of cels to animate dozens of characters, many of which (Tasmanian Devil, Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzales and Sylvester Jr.) were created by their late brother Robert, who died in 1977.
However major studios such as Warners and Disney destroyed 95 per cent of these cels in the first 50 years of film animation's history. They didn't regard them as valuable original art and during the war years, they also needed to recycle the petroleum-based celluloid on which the images were painted, said Christina Van Dam, co-owner of the Edmonton gallery called The Art of Animation.
“It makes me just sick,” said Charles McKimson, who with his brothers, managed to save a great number of original drawings and cels.
Parts of that private collection will be on sale Sunday, when Charles and Tom appear at the gallery to sign Warner Brothers cels owned by local art connoisseurs.
The current boom in animation art began in 1984, when a former Disney animator named John Basmajian took 400 cels he'd preserved, to Christie's Auction House in New York City. The resulting excitement from buyers convinced both the studios and other private collectors that the curiosities they owned were worth big bucks.
Van Dam and her husband Christopher Reeves were in-the-know even earlier. The Edmonton natives began collecting cels in 1982, while they were living in Southern California, running a computer business. When they sold it a few years later, they began investing in earnest.
In 1992, the duo opened their first animation art gallery, here in Edmonton. Since then they've expanded to Calgary and Vancouver, with locations in Victoria, Kelowna and Winnipeg opening before the end of the year.
Annual sales are now over $4 million and the duo has ambitious plans for a 25-store franchise by the end of 1996.
An original production cel from a movie appreciates an average of 51 per cent a year, says Clay Stam, assistant manager at The Art of Animation.
“Two or three years ago you could have bought Der Fuhrer's Face (from the cartoon Donald Duck in Nutzi Land) for $4,200. Now it's $10,000.”
The world's most expensive cel -- a black and white Mickey Mouse -- recently sold at auction for an unbelievable $1.2 million.
There's nothing that pricey in the Edmonton gallery, but vintage cels (from the '30s, '40s and '50s) have tags of $15,000 and up and many are sold. Last week someone paid $29,000 for a cel of Snow White, which is possibly a bargain, considering less than 130 cels exist from that movie.
Stam says novice collectors should remember these guidelines when buying animation art:
* Original production cels were created for and used in the actual cartoon. They were hand-drawn by a team of animators (usually four or five) working to an individual director's interpretation of a character (which is why Bugs Bunny looks a bit different in cartoons directed by different people.) OPCs were then hand-painted by another set of technicians, usually on both sides of the cel. These are the most expensive cels to collect.
* Limited edition series cels were created by the studios after 1984. Using the original animator's drawings, they authorized another 200 to 500 pieces to be hand-painted, numbered and authenticated.
* Series cells are computer-generated reproductions produced by the studios after 1989. They are not hand-painted, although they are limited in number. They're the least expensive cels.
* The most valuable cels feature major cartoon characters (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny). They should show full bodies, centred in the frame and with eyes open. Signatures of the directors and animators increase the value.

People still collect animation cels (real and reproduced) and drawings, though they’re perhaps not as hot as they were at one time. And, fortunately, a book on the McKimsons did come out in 2012 authored by Bob’s son Bob, Jr. By then, all the senior McKimsons were gone. Tom passed away in 1998, Chuck in 1999.