Veteran animator who contributed to every aspect of Disney's output for 42 years
When the veteran animator Bill Justice, who has died aged 97, applied for a job at the Disney studio in 1937, it was on the basis of a 30-day "try-out"; he remained there for the next 42 years, contributing to every facet of Disney's output, from feature films and short cartoons to TV shows and theme park attractions.
Justice was born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he attended the John Herron Art Institute (now a school of Indiana University) to study portrait painting. In 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, he responded to a Disney recruiting advertisement in Esquire magazine and gave up the weekly income of $65 he was then earning in order to work at Hollywood's most famous cartoon studio, for $12 a week. He began as an "in-betweener" on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), providing the intermediary drawings between the key images produced by the studio's lead animators, but, a quick learner, he was rapidly promoted to be a full animator, contributing scenes to Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940). "It's a very exacting art," he once reflected."It takes everything you've got and more."
On Bambi (1942), he assisted with the animation of Thumper in the winter sequence in which the rabbit joins Bambi on the ice. Describing how animators were "cast", like actors, for their skills with particular character types, Justice said that his talents were characterised as being best suited to the "cute", as a result of which he worked on "all the little bunnies, kittens and cuddly things". However, he also animated the killing of Bambi's mother, a scene that was later dropped, leaving her death as implied, rather than shown, by the sound of an off-screen gunshot. "It was cut from the film," Justice later said. "I didn't miss it."
During the second world war, he animated on such films as Saludos Amigos (1942), Victory Through Air Power (1943), The Three Caballeros (1944) and Make Mine Music (1946), as well as a planned film based on Roald Dahl's first children's story, The Gremlins. The project was eventually abandoned, but Justice's drawings of the troublesome creatures blamed for aviation malfunctions illustrated the story when, in 1943, it was published as a book.
With the studio's postwar revival, Justice worked on Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953) as well as animating most of the screen appearances of Chip'n'Dale, the mischievous chipmunk duo who were the long-running nemeses of the short-tempered Donald Duck.
When Disney moved into television, Justice directed the opening titles for The Mickey Mouse Club that premiered in October 1955 and was screened every weekday for four seasons and for far longer in syndication. With its infectious theme song, The Mickey Mouse Club March, and an animated parade of well-known Disney characters led by Mickey as drum major, the sequence became an indelible childhood memory for a generation of youngsters.
Although Justice said that he preferred animating to directing, he had several other successful directorial credits, among them the short films A Cowboy Needs a Horse (1956) and the Oscar-nominated The Truth About Mother Goose (1957), both of which used the more economic "limited animation" techniques pioneered by Disney's rivals in the 1950s. In partnership with a Disney colleague, Xavier Atencio, Justice experimented with stop-frame animation in the short film Noah's Ark (1959), featuring characters and animals created out of various household and office objects. The film received an Academy Award nomination, as did their later collaboration, A Symposium on Popular Songs (1962).
Justice and Atencio were also responsible for innovative stop-frame titles to the live-action pictures The Shaggy Dog (1959), The Parent Trap (1961), Bon Voyage! (1962) and The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964), as well as creating the celebrated special-effects sequence in Mary Poppins (1964), during which the magical nanny uses her unique talents to tidy up the children's nursery while singing A Spoonful of Sugar.
Shortly afterwards, like a number of Disney's most versatile artists, Justice found himself seconded to work with the self-styled "Imagineers" who were responsible for creating environments and attractions for the Disneyland theme park. Justice applied his animation skills to bringing to life the computer-programmed audio-animatronic figures in such shows as Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion. The challenges, he discovered, were not dissimilar to those faced in film animation. "You have to analyse every movement you animate," he once said, "You're the actor. You have to put yourself into it and get a feel for what you are doing, and then you put it on paper or turn the knob."
Other work at Disneyland included designs for parades (among them the much-loved Main Street Electrical Parade) as well as more than 100 costumes for the cartoon characters that inhabit the park. Following his retirement in 1979, Justice maintained his Disney associations, giving ebulliently enthusiastic talks to fans (at which he would draw his famous characters on paper plates and send them flying into the audience) and, in 1992, publishing his memoirs, aptly entitled Justice for Disney.
Summing up his career in 1997, he said: "Walt Disney and the people I worked with at the studio wrote the book on quality animation. I'd like to think that I helped with a page here and there."
Justice is survived by his wife, Kim, daughter, Melissa, and a granddaughter.
? William Justice, animator, born 9 February 1914; died 10 February 2011
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/14/bill-justice-obituary
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