AnimatorBorn: September 3, 1914;
Died: June 2, 2016
WILLIS Pyle, who has died aged 101, was one of the last living links with the early years of Disney’s golden age of traditional animation. He started with the studio in 1937, the year of the first animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and worked as an animator on Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942).
Milt Kahl, one of Disney’s famous “Nine Old Men”, was responsible for the basic design of Pinnochio, opting to make the subject look as much like a boy as a puppet. Pyle had to make Pinnochio walk, talk and express emotion.
“The character had to act,” he said in an interview in 2010, “raise its eyebrows, turn and jump and react to other characters. And the way you could do it was by looking at yourself in a mirror to see what that expression looked like.”
There was a definite chain of command, with Kahl creating the look of the character, the young Pyle creating the movements, and then a whole team of women who were responsible for “colouring in” Pyle’s drawings.
Pyle later worked on Woody Woodpecker, Mr Magoo and Charlie Brown cartoons and latterly had his own company.
Willis Acton Pyle was born on a small farm in Kansas in 1914, though he grew up mainly in Colorado where he went to university to study art. He never finished his degree because he saw a Disney recruitment poster, featuring a picture of Pluto the dog and the invitation “Draw me and earn $25,000 a year.”
Disney had had great success with animated shorts, but there was a lot of scepticism when he announced plans for an animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney gambled on its success and started developing other stories and recruiting more animators.
Pyle joined just before Snow White’s premiere in December 1937. He started basically as a messenger, attended a studio crash-course in animation and was soon working on Disney’s second animated feature Pinocchio, the story of a puppet who wants to be a boy.
He drew the cupids and centaurs for the Pastoral Symphony section of Fantasia (1940), Disney’s grandiose project to provide animation for great pieces of classical music, and he also drew all the main characters for Bambi (1942), the little fawn, his friend Faline, the skunk Flower and Thumper the rabbit.
In 1941 he joined the Disney animators’ strike and after Pearl Harbor, later that same year, he joined a military film unit and worked on animated training and information films. After the war he worked both in the fashion industry and once more in animated films.
At UPA, United Productions of America, he was able to take a more irreverent approach to animation, on the Mr Magoo series, beginning in 1949, and Dr Seuss’s Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950), which won the Oscar for best animated short.
Having established his reputation, Pyle relocated from California to New York and was in high demand for commercials. He also worked on several Charlie Brown cartoons, an association that continued right through to the 1980s.
He painted in his leisure time and his work was featured in several exhibitions. With the passing years he spent more and more time simply painting what he wanted to paint.
“I began painting every day,” he said. “I was done working for producers. I wanted to be able to get up from my desk to walk to the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of the afternoon without somebody looking at me.” He continued searching for new techniques, sometimes opting to paint with chopsticks rather than brushes.
His wife died more than 20 years ago and he did not have children. His younger brother was Denver Pyle, who played Uncle Jesse in The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-85).
BRIAN PENDREIGH
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here