Walt Kelly Animation Drawing

Click to enlarge.

I haven't bought much original artwork in recent years, but I couldn't resist this drawing that I purchased on eBay recently. It's from the film We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us, made by Walt and Selby Kelly.

Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, was reportedly unhappy with the TV special made of the strip, The Pogo Special Birthday Special, which was directed by Chuck Jones. Following that, Kelly and his wife Selby decided to make an animated film on their own. Both of them had worked at Disney on the pre-war features and Selby had continued to work in animation after Walt left it to work in comic books and strips.

The film was to be a half hour, but it ended up being only 15 minutes or so. It also suffered from poor distribution, never playing TV and rarely screening anywhere. VHS copies were for sale several years ago, though I have no idea if that offer is still good.

The drawing above is of the pig villain in Kelly's film, a polluter who is happy to point out that he is no more guilty than those who think of themselves as innocent. Kelly's environmental view was that we were all responsible, not just the large companies who were known to pollute.

The drawing above is typical of Kelly's work in many ways. It is dimensional and Kelly's line varies its thickness to sculpt the forms of the character. The face is expressive; Kelly was a master of the pose that communicates.

I'm looking forward to having this drawing framed.

Prehysterical Pogo

Updated with a new link at the bottom.

Walt Kelly started his career on the east coast in early comic books, pre-Superman. He then shifted to working at Disney, where he was initially in the story department and later moved to being an animator. His credits include features like Pinocchio, Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon and shorts like The Nifty Nineties.

He left Disney at the time of the strike and returned to the east coast, where he spent the bulk of the 1940s creating comic book stories for Dell comics of various kinds. One of his strips in Animal Comics developed into Pogo. Starting in 1948, Kelly went to work for the New York Star as an illustrator and art director. He took Pogo along with him as a comic strip. When the Star folded, Pogo found a home in syndication and continued beyond Kelly's death.

In 1966, something happened to Kelly to cause him to send his characters to Mars (though it turned out to be the Australian outback). Perhaps it was boredom or perhaps Kelly was inspired by something, but the 14 month sequence in Prehysteria became the artistic highlight of his time drawing Pogo. The setting allowed him to create fantasy characters and landscapes more elaborate than anything he'd previously done in the strip.

Thomas Haller Buchanan, with the help of Ger Apeldoorn, has created a blog that intends to reprint the entire sequence (with some related sidetrips). The place to start is at the bottom of this page and continue upwards.

Kelly is not to everyone's taste. However, even if you don't share his sense of humour or interest in politics, you have to admire his cartooning chops. His use of the brush is universally admired by cartoonists and his poses are highly influenced by animation, using a character's whole body to communicate the character's emotional state. If you are unfamiliar with Kelly's work, I urge you to take a look.

(Specifically, look at this Sunday page. If that isn't a thing of cartoon beauty, I don't know what is.)

When Walt Kelly Met Chuck Jones

I'm back from Ottawa, but it's going to take a few days to pull myself together and collect my thoughts. In the meantime, here is the 1969 Pogo Special Birthday Special, written by Walt Kelly and directed by Chuck Jones. Kelly and Jones also provided several voices for this.

I know from talking to Kelly's widow Selby that Kelly was disappointed in the results of the collaboration. It was because of this TV special that Kelly and Selby started their own animated short, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.