Shamus Culhane

Culhane worked for a number of American animation studios including Fleischer Studios the Ub Iwerks studio Walt Disney Productions and theWalter Lantz studio He began his animation career in 1925 working for JR Bray studios and is known for promoting the animation talents of his inkerassistant at the Fleischer Studios in the early 1930s Lillian Friedman Astor making her the first female studio animator While at the Disney studio he discovered while working on Hawaiian Holidays crab sequence an animation method that involved stewing for multiple days before drawing the entire thing in rough sketches all at once straight ahead without invoking the left side of the brain He was a lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs animating arguably the most wellknown sequence in the film the animation of the dwarves marching home singing HeighHo The scene took Culhane and his assistants six months to complete During this time he developed his Highspeed technique of using only the right side of the brain and animating with quick dashedoff sketches In 1944 he collaborated on The Greatest Man in Siam with the layout artist Art Heinemann In that animation the king of Siam bolts past doorways that are distinctly phallic in shape and peers at another that mimics a vagina3 Later in his career Culhane worked briefly in Chuck Joness unit at Warner Bros before moving on to being a director for Lantz where he helmed Woody Woodpeckers 1944 classic The Barber of Seville the cartoon famous for one of the first uses of fast cutting after taking the idea from Sergei Eisenstein At Lantz he introduced Russian avantgarde influenced experimental art into the cartoons In the late1940s he founded Shamus Culhane Productions Culhane had gone by his birthname of James up until this point before going by its Irish variant Shamus one of the first companies to create animated television commercials It also produced the animation for at least one of the Bell Telephone Science Series films Shamus Culhane Productions folded in the 1960s at which point Culhane became the head of the successor to Fleischer Studios Paramount Cartoon Studios He left the studio in 1967 and went into semiretirement Culhane wrote two highly regarded books on animation the howtotextbook Animation from Script to Screen and his autobiography Talking Animals and Other People Since Culhane worked for a number of major Hollywood animation studios his autobiography gives a balanced general overview of the history of the Golden Age of American Animation At his death on February 2 1996 Culhane was survived by second wife the former Juana Hegarty and by two sons from his first marriage to Maxine Marx the daughter of Chico Marx which ended in divorce Brian Culhane of Seattle and Kevin Marx Culhane of Portland Ore From Wikiepedia