CalArts celebrates the 100th birthday of animation pioneer Jules Engel

Todd James Pierce

16 years ago

This past Saturday, film directors and animators gathered to
pay tribute to Hungarian-born artist Jules Engel, a man whose work combined a
modernist orientation of serious art with the commercial leanings of animated
films. This year marks the 100-year
anniversary of his birth. A small man, usually photographed in a chapeau and ascot, with black-rimmed
glasses as though he needed to study the world in detail, Engel is not one of
the celebrated character animators from the Golden Age of animation. No, he did not favor realistic
representation of characters or scenery. His personal films are mostly abstract—a series of shapes and colors
gracing the silver screen.Though
his work is relatively unknown in the animation community, his influence can be
seen in everything from flash animation to afternoon cartoons, from “The
Simpsons” to big budget Hollywood films, such as “Coraline.”

In 1937, Engel moved to Los Angeles with the intention of attending either USC or UCLA, hopefully with the aid of a track scholarship. He had a range of interests: art,
athletics and dance. But instead
of attending USC or UCLA, he enrolled at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he
met many artists employed by Disney. His first studio job was with the Charles Mintz Studio,
where he worked as an inbetweener—that is, as an entry-level animator who
creates drawings that are inserted “inbetween” the more significant pose
drawings produced by senior animators. He worked there for a
year. In 1938, after learning that
Walt Disney needed an animator who also understood ballet, he quit his current
job, where the low-grade animation was entirely commercial, and took a desk at the
Disney Studios, where he choreographed sequences for “Fantasia.”

Engel paired the
movements of classical dance with the whimsy and color of animation.Commercial art combined with high
art. He composed storyboard drawings that, pose-by-pose, defined
the dance sequences for much of the film. His work can clearly be observed in the Chinese Mushroom Dance and the
Russian Thistle Dance.

By
the mid-1940s, Engel had grown tired of the Disney style, with its leanings
toward classical representation, and found work at UPA, where studio executives
were more open to experimentation. There, he worked on the Mr. Magoo cartoons, as well as Gerald McBoing
Boing and Madeline.

By the 1960s, Engel’s interests were moving beyond the world of
commercial animation entirely. He spent time in Paris, where he discussed post-modern
trends with artists such as Man Ray. He developed a stage play that incorporated elements of animation into
its narrative. By now, his
personal art was almost entirely focused on abstraction, shapes and colors, as
though he had completely absorbed the artistic leanings of the age.

After returning to
California, Engel created animation from abstract art. His new aesthetic can be observed in
the films, “Train Landscape” and “CMobile,” both of which use only shapes and
lines to create a visual experience.

But his new aesthetic can be best illustrated in the
film, “Accident,” which features the silhouette of a greyhound running across
the track. “Accident” contains
only 20 individual drawings, but when looped, the drawings present continuous
action: the dog forever running. With
each subsequent loop, Engel begins to erase or unmake the figure of the
dog. At first, a smudge. Then a smear. Then the ghosting of the torso. Until the figure is nothing more than a series of erasure
marks beautifully whispering across the screen.From figure to abstraction in under three minutes.

For the final thirty years of his life, he directed the CalArt’s program
in Experimental Animation.Separate from the school’s program in character animation, Engel’s
program encouraged students to create short animated films with strong personal
meaning. These films often relied
on images and artistic styles that were not
commonly employed in studio
animation. His students included Tim
Burton (producer of “The Nightmare Before Christmas“), Mark Kirkland (director of over 60 episodes of “The Simpsons“), John Lasseter (director
of “Toy Story“), Henry Selick (director
of “James and the Giant Peach” and
“Coraline”), and Stephen Hillenburg
(creator of “SpongeBob Squarepants”).

During this week’s tribute, six graduates of CalArt’s experimental
program explained how Engel’s influenced their later work. Interestingly, in every single example,
these animators explained that Engel’s influence did not direct them toward
abstraction, but rather toward creative experimentation. They remembered him as exacting
yet encouraging, caring yet honest.

The youngest of the animators, Jorge Gutierrez, told the story of Engel
reviewing his audition portfolio for CalArts. By now, well over 80 years old, Engel expressed open
hostility for bland commercial drawing, art that wasn’t tied to personal
expression.“You know what this
is?” Engel asked, pointing to Gutierrez’s cartoon drawing of a barbarian.

“A barbarian?” Guitterez ventured.

“No,” Engel said. “It’s crap.”

Then Engel turned to a different page, where he started to chuckle at
one of the images. “Is this
supposed to be funny?”

“I don’t know.”

Engel stopped laughing then deadpanned the young artist. “Cause it’s not.”

Engel was about to direct Gutierrez to apply for the Character Animation
program, but then he noticed a set of paintings inspired by Mexican folk
art. He looked at them and asked about the clear influence of
Mexican muralists on Gutierrez’s work. “If you can make this move, and if you make this into a film, then you
can make magic,” he said. “Because
this,” he added, pointing to the painting, “this is who you are. And this is where you’re from. All the other crappy stuff you showed me
is what you like. But this is who
you are.”

A few years after graduating, Gutierrez developed the show “El Tigre” for Nickelodeon, a show that combined commercial animation with images inspired by Mexican folk art.

Mark Kirkland, director of “The
Simpsons,” explained that Engel’s influence could be found in the show’s
inventiveness. As an example, he
explained the development of one of the show’s more famous “sofa gags.” In this particular sequence,
Homer begins life as a single cell organism before evolving into a fish, a
lizard, a rat, an ape, and finally a man. The entire gag last roughly a minute and concludes when Homer arrives
home to find his family sitting on the sofa, with Marge asking: “What took you
so long?”

Lastly, Henry Selick, director of “The
Nightmare Before Christmas” “Coraline,”
explained that it was Jules Engel who showed him that narrative could be
expressed with images outside of the traditions of commercial animation. “It was actually the puppet animated films that Jules showed me,” he said, “that got me hooked on puppet
animation.” To showcase Engel’s
influence, Selick presented clips from his work, including his student films
and “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” But the most direct influence could be
seen in “Coraline.” As Coraline explores the boundaries of
her “Other Mother’s domain,” toward the film’s climax, the world begins to
unmake itself, disintegrating into a collection of lines and boxes, shapes and
colors, the background images briefly unraveling into the abstract.

Henry Selick (R) waits his turn to speak at Saturday night’s roundtable discussion Photo by Todd James Pierce

The presentation concluded with a reception, where individuals were
invited to view easel displays of Engel’s art—pieces pointedly arranged to demonstrate
that current trends in animation have roots far deeper than the traditions of
Disney, Warner Brothers and UPA. They extend into experimentation and abstraction, the type of art Engel once
constructed into film.

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