Milt kahl biography of michael barrier

Year Title Credits Characters Notes 1934Servants' EntranceAnimatoruncredited 1935Mickey's Fire Brigade (Short)Animatoruncredited On Ice (short)Animatoruncredited 1936Orphans' Picnic (Short)Animatoruncredited Elmer Elephant (short)Animatoruncredited Mickey's Circus (short)Animatoruncredited Toby Tortoise Returns (short)Animatoruncredited 1937Snow White and the Seven DwarfsAnimatorForest animalsCredited as Milton Kahl Lonesome Ghosts (short)Animatoruncredited 1938Ferdinand the BullAnimatorFerdinand (voice; uncredited) Farmyard Symphony (short)Animatoruncredited 1939Ugly Duckling (short)Animatoruncredited 1940PinocchioAnimation DirectorPinocchio,Template:Sfn GeppettoCredited as Milton Kahl 1942BambiSupervising AnimatorBambi, ThumperCredited as Milton Kahl 1943Saludos Amigos (Short)AnimatorDonald Duck riding the llama sequence The Grain That Built a Hemisphere (Documentary short)Animatoruncredited Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi (Short)Animatoruncredited Reason and Emotion (Short)Animatoruncredited The Winged Scourge (Documentary short)Animatoruncredited Chicken Little (short)Animatoruncredited 1944How to Play FootballAnimatorCredited as Milton Kahl 1945The Three CaballerosAnimatorCredited as Milton Kahl Tiger Trouble (Short)Animatoruncredited Duck Pimples (Short)Animatoruncredited Hockey Homicide (short)Animatoruncredited 1946Make Mine MusicAnimatorSong of the SouthDirecting AnimatorBr'er Rabbit, Br'er Bear, and Br'er Fox1947Fun & Fancy FreeDirecting AnimatorBongo1948Melody TimeDirecting AnimatorJohnny Appleseed, Slue Foot Sue1949So Dear to My HeartAnimatorThe Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. ToadDirecting Anim

I'd not noticed til this morning that Michael Barrier had graciously noted the existence of the Blackwing Diaries over on his site, in his December 19th entry. An honor!
While I have never spoken personally to Mr. Barrier(we've exchanged a few emails over the last year or so), his Funnyworldwas, and remains, the finest magazine I know devoted to cartoon animation. Amid Amidi's Animation Blastis also excellent, and catching up fast to that distinction, but Barrier owns the award for writing on animation at a time that couldn't have been less encouraging, the mid-late 1970s. Long before the Illusion of Life, long before Of Mice and Magic, Barrier was devoting space in his magazine to both Disney andWarner Bros. animation, taking the styles of both Milt Kahl and Rob Scribner seriously as performance(the only other attention paid across the spectrum to the arts of animation was in Danny and Gerald Peary's 1980 The American Animated Cartoon, an anthology with priceless essays and interviews).

The most refreshing thing in Funnyworldwas how honest and opinionated its various viewpoints could be, particularly Barrier's, without ever--in my opinion at least--descending into the kind of snideness of a John Simon or a Richard Schickel. I still disagree heartily with some of Barrier's opinions, but he expresses them so well that even a viewpoint quite opposite to my own is a pleasure to read--sometimes a slightly infuriating pleasure, but always laced with respect. And often extremely funny, in a dry vein. I made one particular trip to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Motion Picture Academy simply to be able to read out-of-print back issues of Funnyworld; one reviewed both the film and book detailing the production (by the aforementioned John Canemaker--he too a pioneer in animation scholarship) of "Raggedy Ann and Andy". I burst out laughing at one dead-on description(by Barrier)of the design of Raggedy Ann, and its limitations:" ...there are times when