Merry Christmas From Your Friends At ASIFA-Hollywood

Disney Studios Christmas Card 1938

Here's a special Christmas treat from Archive supporter, Eric Graf...
I Was A Teenage Reindeer
Featuring Jim Backus and Daws Butler! / 1.8 MB / MP3
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Illustration: Tenggren's Sing For Christmas

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more jaw dropping examples of classic illustration.


Around 1940, Gustaf Tenggren left the Disney Studios a changed man. It's said that he gathered together the paintings he had created up to that point, piled them up in the street and set fire to them. With this single decisive act, he marked a turning point in his artistic career. He never painted in the classic European book illustrator style again. He had resolved himself to create a new style.

I really don't know what brought him to that point. I'd love to know the full story. But you can clearly see the sharp dividing line between old and new in his work. In the first few years of the 1940s, Tenggren struggled to develop a new way of painting- a simplified style that depended on fundamental qualities like skillful composition, expressive texture and unique color harmonies, rather than photo-realistic detail and modeling techniques derived from classical easel painting. This book, along with its sequel Sing For America and the schoolbook reader Runaway Home would lead to the creation of the very first Little Golden Books... The Pokey Little Puppy, The Tawny Scrawny Lion and The Saggy Baggy Elephant. You know the rest of the story...

This book is far from representing Tenggren's best work, but it's an important example of a decisive turning point in Tenggren's career. I'll post some illustrations from Sing For America and Runaway Home soon.














For more incredible illustration by Gustaf Tenggren, see D'Aulnoy Fairy Tales and The Good Dog Book, Tenggren's Grimms Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two, Heidi, Wonderbook and Juan & Juanita, and Small Fry and the Winged Horse.

See also... Einar Norelius' Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1929 and 1934, John Bauer's Bland Tomtar Och Troll 1917, Arthur Rackham's Grimm's Fairy Tales Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive

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Illustration: Early 50s Disney Christmas Cards

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about 50s children's book illustrators.

1948


No, you're not suffering from some sort of holiday flashback... It's almost Valentine's Day, not Christmas! Today, we digitized a batch of wonderful 1950s Christmas cards from the Disney studio from 1948 through the mid-1950s. The designs on these cards are so much fun, it makes you wish the films themselves looked this cartoony.

You might wonder why I chose today to post Christmas images. This illustrates a point that I need to make every once in a while... The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog is NOT the archive itself. It is only a forum for us to report the progress of the project and show examples of the sorts of things we were working on that particular day. Today, we digitized Christmas cards... tomorrow it might be an illustrated children's book from the 1920s... the next day a clip from an animated cartoon by Paul Terry... there is no order implied or intended. The order comes in the way keyword searches link material within the database itself.

The other thing to keep in mind is that for every image you see here on this blog, there are dozens and dozens that we don't post. Our database has grown into the terabytes. There's no way that we will ever be able to post all of it online. My hope is to eventually syndicate the archive as kiosks at university libraries, studios and ASIFA chapters all over the world. But that's quite a ways in the future!

I want to thank the family of Clair Weeks for sharing these great cards with us. See the bottom of this post for links to more treasures from the Weeks collection.




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Many thanks again to the family of Clair Weeks for sharing these with us.

For more treasures from the collection of Clair Weeks, see... History: Clair Weeks' Goodbye Book and History: 1938 Disney Artists' Tryout Book

See you at the Annies!
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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