Cartoon Modern

I was saddened to hear of the recent passing of Charles McElmurry, a character designer/layout artist who did a lot of excellent work throughout his career, but especially during the 1950s and 60s. I had the chance to visit him last December in Santa Rosa and spent a delightful afternoon interviewing him for the book. Every so often I do an interview where afterwards I feel that I’ve scratched only the surface, and McElmurry was one of those interviews. Even though there was still a lot that I wanted to learn about his work, I’m glad to have had the chance to meet him, and done one of the few, if not only, interviews that he’d ever given.

During the 1950s and 1960s, McElmurry worked as a designer at many studios including Storyboard, Quartet, Pelican, Filmfair, John Sutherland Productions, Jay Ward Productions and Bill Melendez Productions. He was especially popular at ad agencies and was frequently called upon to help streamline and redesign existing advertising characters. McElmurry is among those designers whose work isn’t as well represented in the book as I would have hoped. That is due largely to the difficult (and nearly impossible) task of finding 50s-era commercial artwork to represent specific artists. He had saved many of his drawings from the 60s and 70s, but we didn’t run across his early work that would have been appropriate for the book.

McElmurry is survived by his wife Rosemary (O’Connor), daughters Jill and Jennifer, and nephews Jim and Gary Wakeman. Memorial donations may be made to the Earle Baum Center of the Blind, 4539 Occidental Road, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. For more details about McElmurry’s life and work, check out these terrific blog posts by his daughter Jill:
Charles McElmurry: The Early Years
Charles McElmurry: The Dad
Charles McElmurry: The Artist
Memories of Charles McElmurry

Here are a few things that he designed.
First, a Philip Morris spot (ca. 1955) designed at John Hubley’s Storyboard.

Stills from a 1960 Quartet ad for Budweiser

Quartet character designs by McElmurry for Marlboro, Budweiser and Bank of America

Two beautiful model sheets by McElmurry for UPA’s 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS. The expressive drawings here really reflect his extensive fine arts training. He studied for a number of years at Chouinard and Jepson Art Institute, and he told me that his teacher Rico LeBrun was a big influence.

(click on image for larger version)

Archive.org is an excellent source for public domain films of all kinds. Among them are a handful of well designed 1950s shorts produced by John Sutherland Productions. Sutherland was one of the busiest producers of animated industrials during the 1950s and his studio’s work is discussed in greater depth in my book. I’ve never found a good filmography of exactly how many films Sutherland produced, but from what I’ve been able to gather, he produced well over one hundred corporate/educational animated shorts between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, which was his studio’s ‘golden age’ period. The working conditions at Sutherland were ideal for artists: he paid top dollar so he always attracted A-list designers and animators, and he was very hands-off when it came to the visuals, so artists were free to do as they pleased. These four films at Archive.org offer a good sense of the type of films Sutherland produced, though they are only the tip of the iceberg.

IT’S EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS (1954): Featuring Maurice Noble in one of his rare forays outside of Warner Bros. during the 1950s. Dynamic layouts and beautiful color styling can be found throughout this film. Noble worked again for Sutherland in the late-1950s on RHAPSODY OF STEEL, but that film’s designer was Eyvind Earle, and the end results are much more noticeably Earle than Noble.

DESTINATION EARTH (1956): Jointly designed by Tom Oreb and Victor Haboush, this is among at least two films that I know Oreb designed at Sutherland. The other film is THE LITTLEST GIANT, which is not available online. Oreb likely did others too, but I haven’t been able to track them down. One thing that DESTINATION EARTH proves is that Oreb was equally adept at designing backgrounds as he was designing characters. Vic Haboush also provided great layouts in this film. I think Vic did mostly the Mars layouts, and Oreb dealt with the Earth scenes. (The image at the top of this post is a character layout by Oreb from DESTINATION EARTH.)

YOUR SAFETY FIRST (1956): This film has the weakest design of the four films here. The character designs are really poor, and though the layouts are much better, they’re nothing extraordinary. The film was designed by Gerald Nevius (a veteran who had also worked on DUMBO and FANTASIA) and Charles McElmurry, a designer who did plenty of excellent TV commercial design at Storyboard and Quartet in the mid-1950s.

WORKING DOLLARS (1957): The characters in this film have really nice appealing shapes. They were designed by Bernie Gruver, who also worked as a designer at other commercial studios including John Wilson’s Fine Arts Films and Playhouse Pictures. There’s a great Gruver model sheet in my book for Friskies Dog Food, a series of commercials that he designed for Playhouse in the late 1950s.