Rudy Zingler

Many, many people who worked on Warner Bros. cartoons never got credit on the screen in the 1930s—even animators.

Painter Martha Sigall wrote a wonderful autobiography with her memories working for Leon Schlesinger and mentions names of artists who were unknowns to the public. They include Harold Soldinger, Murray Hudson (who had worked at Iwerks), Lewis Cavett (who we profiled in this post) and Rudy Zingler, who you see on the right in a photo from Martha’s book.

Let’s hear from Zingler.

The Olympian of Olympia, Washington interviewed him about his animation career in a feature story published November 27, 1983.

Rudolf Alfred Zingler returned to the Pacific Northwest after getting out of the cartoon business. He was born in Germany in 1905, grew up near Kendall, Washington and graduated with brother Hans from Columbia Valley Elementary in 1922. The two attended Whatcom High in Bellingham and received diplomas in January 1926. During his time at high school, his car bashed into another one carrying students and he ended up paying $25 bail when police discovered he didn’t have a license. His car ran over him on a farm somewhere east of Ferndale in 1930 (whether it was the same car is unknown). He got married in Everett in August 1927. In August 1928, he filed for divorce, claiming his wife was addicted to alcohol and cigarettes and had deserted him. She counter-sued. (He won his case).

When Zingler arrived in Los Angeles isn’t quite clear. The Everett Directory for 1926-27 shows he was working in the Great Northern Railway shops; his father had a sewing machine business there. In 1928, the store moved to Bellingham as Rudy was assistant manager of it. In 1930, he was crossing the border into Vancouver and listed as his employer “F. Miller.” Zingler was a bellhop in the 1933 San Francisco Directory. He was living in San Francisco when he re-married in May 1936, and apparently graduated from art school that year. An interview in the Tacoma News Tribune in 1983 said he was hired by Disney in 1937 for $14 a week. He was gone from California by 1948, as he appears in the Directory for Kelso, Washington that year.

Zingler has misremembered a few dates. The Disney strike was not in 1939, and Hollywood Steps Out was released in 1941, not 1947. He takes credit for the caricatures in that cartoon which I always thought were created by Ben Shenkman. How he met Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at either Warners or Disney is a mystery. The first Roadrunner-Coyote cartoon was released in Sept. 1949 and though Zingler was back in Washington State a year before then, it could take two years for a Chuck Jones-unit cartoon to go from a story session to a theatrical release. And while Zingler says he “drew” characters in Snow White, it doesn’t say whether he was animating, assistant animating or in-betweening. However, it’s an interesting, first-hand perspective of that period of animation.

He drew our favorite cartoon characters
But life in Hollywood was not a pretty picture to Rudy Zingler
Story by Glenda Helbert
Photos by Brian Saunders
Bugs Bunny and Snow White. Porky Pig and the Roadrunner.
Rudy Zingler helped build our favorite childhood cartoon memories.
As an animator for Walt Disney Studios and later for Warner Brothers, he worked during the golden age of animation in the 1930s and 40s, when every move was captured with painstaking detail, and cartoon characters swaggered and breathed and glided across the film like living creatures.
But that was years ago. Rudy Zingler moved from the smog of Los Angeles to the green grass of his home state. He's retired now, and spends his days doing odd job construction work for friends and trying his hand at sculpture, an art form beloved by him, but one for which he has not had time since he was a young art student.
It’s a life that’s worlds away from the life he led as an animator, who knew and worked with Walt Disney and many other best and bright talents that ventured to California to get into glittery movie business.
The first step on Rudy's road to Hollywood began with horses, wild horses that once galloped free on the deserts of Eastern Washington.
“I was born with a pencil in my hand,” Rudy said, but it was those horses that roamed near Soap Lake where his family settled in 1914 that inspired his pencil to draw with furious intensity, capturing every beautiful move.
“We children loved it, but Dad hated it,” he said of the place they lived where there were not only wild horses to draw, but Indians too, and coyotes and wide open spaces in which to play, roam and dream.
It’s not suprising [sic] that his father, Alfons Zingler, hated the life. Rudy was born in Breslau, Germany, in 1905, and the Zinglers came to America in 1913 so his father, an agricultural professor, could study irrigation systems in Eastern Washington for a year and then return to prepare a paper on his findings.
But World War I broke out, the Zinglers could not return hom, and they found themselves stranded in a peach orchard near Soap Lake. His father was reduced to manual labor, a man who was a well-to-do member of the respected professional class in German society, who spoke seven languages and was used to being waited on by a house full of servants. That however did not stop him from doing what needed to be done. He put in a grim year working in the peach orchard. When work grew hard to find he built a covered wagon and in the winter of 1915 moved the family to Deming, Wash. lt was a 350-mile trip that required a trek over Snoqualmie Pass, on road then little more than a cow trail.
Rudy still has a drawing he sketched at age 10 of that trip, the family huddled together on the wagon buckboard, his father’s hands steadying the reins. They arrived at their destination in a snowstorm.

There Alfons Zingler found a job building railroad beds, and after a few years he moved the family to a farm near Sumas, and in 1921 to Bellingham so that the children could attend high school [photo to left]. When Rudy graduated, his parents, who were delighted with his drawing talent, encouraged him to attend art school.
Rudy moved to San Francisco, where he studied fine art and sculpture at the California School of Fine Arts. He also picked up a teaching certificate at the University of California, in case he couldn’t find a job in the field of his choice.
But even in those Depression times, Rudy found California truly to be his land of opportunity. His first wife Frances, who he met and married there, had a brother who invited him to join the staff of Foster-Kleiser Ad Agency, one of the most prestigious ad agencies in the country at that time.
But Rudy had other ideas. He had heard that the Disney Studios in Hollywood were growing like fury. Disney was in the midst of producing a feature-length animated film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and he was advertising for animators.
Rudy had one thing going for him to get that job. He had an art degree, and Disney required his animators to have art degrees. But it was one thing to be an fine artist and quite another to be an animator.
“You’ve got to be an actor yourself,” Rudy said. “You can jump a rabbit over a fence many ways.” You had to feel the moves before you could draw the moves.
“A lot of people told me I’d never make it as an animator,” Rudy said, and a lot of artists tried and failed during a grueling three-week trial period that Disney animators went through to prove their stuff. Rudy didn’t know the first thing about animating, but in those three weeks he watched and listened and learned enough to land the job.
He started out doing backgrounds for Mickey Mouse film shorts, but was soon was drawing the characters who bounced through those backgrounds.
“I had to. Disney was so far behind on the Snow White project, that if you couldn’t produce, you were out,” Rudy said.
Rudy drew the prince, Dopey the dwarf and some of Snow White's scenes for the film which went on to become an international success. It represented one of the biggest gambles in the career of Walt Disney, an artist with some ad agency experience who had gone bankrupt trying to start his own film ad company in Kansas City. Disney began his cartoon-making career by moving to Hollywood in 1923 and going into partnership with his brother Roy.
Before the project was finished Disney, was heavily in debt, the film which was to have taken two years to complete took four because of Disney’s mania for perfection. Not such a good artist himself (the primitive, early Mickey Mouse cartoons are from Disney's own hand), he hired top flight animators to put his ideas into motion, and he wanted them done exactly as he envisioned them, Rudy said.
Many a drawing was rejected before it suited Disney’s tastes, and for the animators that often meant working day and night to keep up. To make a cartoon character move effortlessly on the screen requires thousands of drawings depicting every subtlety of those walking movements.
Put together and run at high speed on film they produce the walking motion. It took 16 drawings to make Mickey Mouse take one simple step, 24 drawings for each second of a cartoon character’s movement.
Animators were expected to draw 25 feet of drawings a week, Rudy said. One second, or 24 drawings, represents a foot.
To meet standards meant doing many more drawings to animate a character. For example, when a character took a step, not only his feet moved, but the body moved up and down, the coat flapped in the breeze, arms moved, facial expressions fluctuated and the grass the character was walking through waved around him.
It was a far cry from today’s cartoons in which the only part of the character’s body that is moving is his feet.
Rising costs forced the frozen images of cartoons, Rudy said. It became too expensive to pay for the thousands of extra drawings and hours of work needed to add all the extra movements that resulted in a better quality cartoon. If an work was rejected at Disney’s studio he was expected to redo it plus keep up with the regular workload demand. Sometimes those rejections came not because the work wasn’t first rate, but because Walt Disney was having a bad day.
“He was not consistent with his criticism,” Rudy said.
He recalls the struggle of his friend Paul Smith, one of most talented animators, to get the dancing Hippo in the cartoon film “Fantasia” to move to Disney’s requirements.
Smith created the hippo over and over again, her ballet-shoed hooves moving to the strains of classical music. He worked on the hippo for a year, his work rejected over and over by Disney.
Smith was sick of the whole project, and after a final rejection decided to submit the very first drawings that he had made of the hippo for approval. They were accepted, and he was asked why he didn’t do this quality of work in the first place.
“I did,” Smith said.
There were lots of red faces in the studio that day, Rudy recalled.
Working with talented people like Smith made the frenetic work bearable.
At Disney and later at Warner Brothers studios he rubbed elbows with the likes of Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck; with Bugs Hardaway, the originator of the Bugs Bunny character; Mike Maltese, creator of cartoon character Pepe le Pew; and William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, animators who later founded their own successful cartoon production company.
His move to Warners in 1939 was prompted by a strike of Disney Studio workers. Everyone walked out, the studio closed down for three months, and some of the reasons were Disney’s harsh ways of handling employees.
Those were the days of the yellow dog contracts, Rudy said, a worker hired for six months, working till his pay scale reached a certain level, then his contract was torn up and he was fired.
Zingler was incensed enough seeing this sort of treatment take place to become one of the founders of the Screen Cartoon Guild.
At Warners Zingler went on to create some of his most memorable cartoon characters.
He helped originate the Roadrunner, that speedy cartoon character who was always leaving Wiley Coyote in the dust.
“I laughed myself sick doing it," he said. The writers in the gag department, whose job it was to think up the funny lines of the characters, kept the place in stitches. They would climb on chairs and fake an eagle swoop, or trip a tumbling fall, spitting out the lines and honing them to match the movements of the characters.
Rudy also drew caricatures of famous movie stars for the Warners animated film “Hollywood Steps Out,” released in 1947. The exaggerated likes of stars such as Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, and Joe Brown flowed from his pen, and for each one he had to obtain an approval from the star before it could be used. Most liked what they saw, even though sane of the drawings harshly exaggerated the stars most prominent facial features.
Bing Crosby was the only one who didn’t take to Rudy’s caricatures. “I practically had to do a portait [sic] of him to get his approval,” Rudy said.
The death of his father prompted Rudy to give up the life of a Hollywood animator. Alfons Zingler had established a sewing machine retail store in Longview, and mother Eleanor wanted him to take over the business.
It was the opportunity he needed to follow through on his plan forming in his mind for some time. The plan was to move home.
“I hated Los Angeles with a passion,” he said.
The smog and the crowds and the stressful fast pace of life were becoming too much for him. Divorced now and ready for a change, he took his mother’s offer.
It didn’t work out though. After a year of running the business he found he was no good at selling sewing machines, and so he sold the store and went to work for his brother who ran an appliance business in Tacoma. But Rudy still was where he wanted to be, back in Washington, and there was an added bonus. While running the sewing machine store, he met his present wife Delores, who ran a barbershop next door. [They married in 1951].
When Rudy retired they built a home on Mason Lake, and lived there for 14 years, and started a home security patrol business. They moved to Olympia two years ago when they decided the property tax on their lakefront property was too high.

Rudy said he doesn’t miss his Hollywood life one bit. It was nice to be associated with such talented people, but the fast-moving life that went with it wasn’t worth it.
He’s always enjoyed the outdoors and now he spend[s] as much time working and playing out in the fresh air as his heart desires.
He stays in touch with his old animator buddies in California, although there aren’t many still alive. The ones that are alive wear thick glasses, the result of eye damage caused by years of staring into bright light tables as they drew cartoons on transparent sheets of celluloid.
“I got out just in time,” Rudy said, his unlensed clear gray eyes crinkling around the edges with a smile.
(Glenda Helbert is a staff writer for The Olympian)

The biography skips the fact that after he and Dolores were married in Washington State, they moved back to California for a few years where he taught art at the Folsom Prison. It also missed out on his UFO sighting, reported to the News Tribune in September 1950. He also drove a school bus and piloted the Mason Lake fireboat.

Zingler was in a nursing home in Olympia when he died of heart problems on January 10, 1985 at age 79.