The Man Behind The Scrappy Scenery

The Little Match Girl is, arguably, one of the finest animated shorts to come out of the Charles Mintz studio for release by Columbia Pictures. Animated in part by Emery Hawkins, it was nominated for an Oscar. The suffering of the child in this cartoon has brought some viewers to tears, while others feel unhappy endings are inappropriate for cartoons (but just fine for live-action feature films).

Credits are maddening incomplete in the first decade of sound cartoons. Hawkins receives nothing on screen for his work in this 1937 release. Art Davis is given the animation credit, Sid Marcus was responsible for the story adaptation and Joe De Nat, as usual, provided the music. And that’s it.

But we do know who painted the backgrounds for this acclaimed short, and others of that period at the Mintz studio, thanks to an article in the Lancaster, Pa. Sunday News of July 17, 1938.

Joe Gavan was a young artist whose career in animation seems to have been brief. Let’s look at the newspaper article about his work on the West Coast, which also goes into other parts of his career. It also describes a title card eliminated when Columbia cartoons were reissued years later.



He Has A Picture Of It
Joe Gavan Pursues His Art For Backgrounds Into Hollywood’s Famous Cartoons
After three and a half years hobnobbing with Hollywood stars—such as Krazy Kat, Scrappy and others—Joe Gavan is still able to talk for three consecutive sentences without saying “terrific” or “colossal.”
That’s quite an accomplishment, even if he hadn’t done anything else. Which he very definitely has.
Joe is one of a growing colony of Lancastrians transplanted to movieland, including comedian Bob Burns, radio announcer Bob Longenecker, of Lititz, and others.
Visiting Relatives
Joe has spent the past several weeks visiting his brother, Frank N. Gavan, and his wife at 61 Cottage avenue in Millersville.
You’d think he’d be glad to get away from the celluloid world for while, if you didn’t know Hollywood and you didn’t know Joe.
Joe’s one constant companion, however, is his notebook. In it you’ll find sketches of just about anything a movie director could ask for. And as Joe will testify, movie directors are likely to ask for anything, including a design for a bench in the Ephrata Cloisters or the "hex" sign on a Lancaster county barn.
Anyway, Joe will be fortified with a lot of Lancaster scenery when he heads back for the cinema center of the universe in a few days.
Watercolors Of County
He’ll be able to impress the Hollywood bigwigs, for instance, with watercolors and sketches of the old covered bridge at Williamson’s park, and with pictures of classic Lancaster barns and farmhouses.
"Everybody’s an expert out there,” he explains, "and you've got to be an expert on everything to get along with them.”
Every one of the tricky titles to animated short subjects produced by the Charles Mintz studios for several years has been the work of Joe Gavan. Maybe you remember “Bluebird’s Baby,” which started out with the title written across a blue-checked baby blanket decorated with safety-pins. Or "The Little Match Girl," the studio's masterpiece to date.
Cartoon Sets Elaborate
"Sets” for the cartoons, although they're only on paper, are just as elaborate to prepare as a full-size movie stage. Joe spent a full week doing just one of the highly-detailed and colorful backgrounds for the “Match Girl."
While he’s still very much involved in the doings of Scrappy and Krazy Kat, Joe is also taking a large interest these days in the more involved careers of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara.
For, like all the rest of Hollywood, he’s got the "Gone With the Wind" bug. His bug, however, is likely to get him farther than most of the boys who are just hoping.
Joe has actually been working on the picture, spending weeks in research on accurate interiors and exteriors for the picture's acts. He hasn’t really landed a job with the show, but with the pages and pages of neatly sketched dropleaf tables and ladderback chairs and pillared mansions he has prepared, he feels ready to go in and corner whoever’s running things and say, "See here—“
Aims At Big Features
That never-falling notebook of Joe’s, crammed with drawings he made years ago and brought up to date with a series of watercolors painted within the past few weeks in a swing around the nation, is the springboard he hopes will take him from the cartoon studios into the art side of big feature pictures.
Not that the cartoons are anybody's snap stuff, though. When Donald Duck cavorts across the street in search of trouble, the picture looks simple enough from where you sit. But back of that little scene is a whole aspirin-box full of headaches for hundreds of people.
Take the average Krazy Kat cartoon, for example. They're the ones on which Joe has been working, among others, for the duration of his stay in Hollywood.
Through Long Process
Krazy starts out as a ghostly critter sketched on an evanescent background in a conference of directors. That fuzzy picture goes from the conference where the theme of the picture and the appearance of the characters are determined, to the head director’s assistant.
He makes the picture a little more distinct—and hands it to HIS assistant. This fellow has the dirty work of actually drawing in the scenes as they ought to be, but the real detail of the intermediate pictures is handled by other subordinate assistants.
The actual artistic end is handled by Joe Gavan and his associates. They do the color backgrounds against which the action takes place, and on which so much of the impression of the picture depends.
The motion of the characters is poured in by another roomful of cooks—girls who draw the thousands of separate pictures which must be made so that the figures will dance or walk or beat each other across the ear in smooth continuity.
1,500,000 Drawings
The average color cartoon which takes only a couple of minutes to show is likely to consist of perhaps 1,500,000 separate drawings. The studios figure about fourteen drawings to the “beat" of music, ninety beats to the foot of film, and 1,200 to 1,400 feet of film. And since each figure has to be done separately, you can do your own arithmetic for a mob scene.

The whole thing is set to music, in the Mintz studios’ case, by Columbia pictures—and then it’s sent back for the preview.
"If three out of the three hundred studio people at the preview applaud, we know we have a success," Joe says.
After working with it for months the studio is generally so heartily sick of the cartoon that the whole staff is ready to pull it into little pieces the minute it flashes on the screen. But they’re their own worst critics, and they can always be sure the movie public Is going to like it a lot better than they do.
Designing backgrounds has been Joe's big job In Hollywood. But the background he's designed for himself is no less interesting.
Has Stage Txperience [sic]
He's a graduate of Lancaster Boys' High school and Franklin and Marshall academy. He's breezed through art schools at Harrisburg, New York, Chicago, and two at Los Angeles. He worked for nine months in New York doing displays for the Chicago World’s Fair, and he and his brother designed and built the scenery for Lancaster’s 1935 Welfare pageant. While working for a scenery building firm in Harrisburg, Joe painted and set up fourteen stages in Pennsylvania, including two In Harrisburg, and as many more in Ohio and several other states.
In Hollywood he's been enlarging his invaluable portfolio with water-colors and sketches made in the great museum of the University of California, where furniture and costumes of all nations and periods are on display.
And Magazine Covers
He's also been doing magazine covers and layouts for a new movie magazine published (at large financial loss, so far) by Hollywood people in search of something other than the dirt-and-scandal type of publication. So Joe's heading back to Colossal-town with a rumbleseat full of Lancaster county on paper, just in case. And if you see a familiar-looking farmhouse or buggy in G. with the W., blame Joe.

Joseph Bernard Gavan was born in Lancaster on October 22, 1910. By 1940, he was out of the animation business. The April 1940 Census gives his occupation as “advertising, motion pictures” (at Cartoon Films, Inc., perhaps?) while his Draft Card the following October states he was employed at the May Co. in downtown Los Angeles. He married in 1942 and again in 1945, and spent part of the late ‘40s living in Hawaii. By 1950, he was divorced again and working in advertising in Los Angeles. His watercolours continued to be exhibited.

He returned to Lancaster for the last four years of his life and died there on March 24, 1974.