![]() I must have been around 10 years old, and I spent the afternoon drawing pictures and fishing for bluegills in a nearby lake. Dad went to see him there and, once, I went along too, visiting Ken in his trailer home near Ojai, in the foothills of the moutains north west of Los Angeles. He moved back to California but still kept working on scenes from The Thief. In fact, Harris himself looked a bit like the Coyote - kind of.Īs the 1970s wore on Ken's health began to deteriorate. Though some of his shots of Ebenezer Scrooge, if you look closely, seem at times oddly reminiscent of Wile E Coyote. He was a workhorse, still doing fifteen feet a week of finished animation, as he had been trained to do in his days at Warner Bros. Ken did a ton of work on A Christmas Carol in 1971. In the end, after many years of collaboration, Ken said finally "you are an animator". In a documentary interview made in the early 1980s titled "The Animator Who Never Gave Up" (which you can find at YouTube), Dad describes the long, slow process of earning Ken's respect. It was a very special and flexible collaboration, one which I have never really seen replicated anywhere else. Dad would always defer to Ken as a master animator, and yet he would go over Ken's drawings as well, refining his key poses. He and Dad had a very unusual relationship, since Ken was both my father's mentor as well as his employee. Which is how he came to be in London, working on commercials at No 13 Soho Square and, when time allowed, working on The Thief. Soho Square in the 1970s: Ken is in the back row, to the left of Grim Natwick, creator of Betty Boopīut when Warners closed down their shorts division in the 1960's, Ken found himself out of work. No wonder he got really good, and really fast. Working at Warners, Ken put in his 10,000 hours - and more. Animators had to do 15 feet a week of finished animation to keep up. Warner shorts were made on a shoestring budget, with hardly any time for revisions. ![]() Ken's comic timing was always spot on.Īnd he was fast too. When I was a child, and a WB cartoon would come on the TV, Dad would say "look in the credits at the front (credits were always at the front) - see if it's a Ken Harris cartoon - it'll be a good one". Among them, my personal favourite - "What's Opera, Doc?". Check out his IMDB page - he animated literally hundreds of shorts at Warners. Think of your favourite Bugs Bunny or Road Runner cartoons, and the chances are, Ken animated them. Cartoons under the supervision of director Chuck Jones an association which began in 1936 and lasted until 1962. It was the mid-1970s, and Ken had come over from LA to London to work with my father at his Soho Square studio.īy the time he came to London, Ken had already had an extraordinary career in Hollywood. ![]() I met him when I was just a kid, and he was already a very old man, but still doing some of the very best work of his career. Were he still alive, today would be his 115th birthday. I don’t think the situation has changed since but I’ll be happy if I’m wrong.Ken Harris was born on July 31st 1898. So what happened to these great little cartoons? Jerry Beck talked about it in 2013. Maurice Noble (layout) and Phil De Guard (background)?ĭaffy is called to the producer’s office for a job. Not the later dome-headed Bugs that Jones tried to foist upon the masses. His animation skills leave much to be desired.ĭoes anyone know who animated this? Bugs’ head is very round here. Daffy Duck then barges in to demonstrate his clean-up skills. Next comes the flipping of the animation drawings, rough and cleaned-up versions. He plays a disc of Mel Blanc’s voice and confidentially tells us that he supplies Mel’s voice. It’s really a lot of fun.īugs shows off a storyboard for Transylvania 6-5000. Here are some frames from one of them, where Bugs walks off stage and into the adjacent animation studio to show us how cartoons are made. They were classy-looking and always amusing. ![]() One of the real treats of the original Bugs Bunny Show in prime time was the little cartoons with a running story that ran between the old theatrical cartoons. ![]()
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