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James H. " Shamus" Culhane (November 12, 1908 – February 2, 1996) was an American animator, film director, and film producer. He is best known for his work in the Golden age of American animation.
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. He was a lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animating arguably the most well-known sequence in the film, the animation of the dwarves marching home singing "Heigh-Ho". The scene took Culhane and his assistants six months to complete. During this time he developed his "High-speed" technique of animating with quick dashed-off sketches.
He also worked as an animator on Pinocchio, where he worked on Honest John and Gideon. However, he was left uncredited on the film. During the production of the film he left Disney to work at Fleischer Studios. While there, he worked as an animator on several crowd scenes in Gulliver's Travels and as the uncredited co-director on Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Following the completion of Gulliver, Culhane was assigned his own unit, which he attempted to instil with the artistic principles and ethos he had acquired at Disney, yielding shorts such as Popeye Meets William Tell, notable for their unusually fluid and expressive character animation relative to much of Fleischer's previous work.
A year following his departure from Fleischer, Culhane worked briefly in the units of Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin at Leon Schlesinger Productions, before moving on to being a director for Walter Lantz. At Lantz, he collaborated on The Greatest Man in Siam with the layout artist (and former Disney and Chuck Jones alumnus) 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 vagina." Later the same year he helmed Woody Woodpecker's classic The Barber of Seville. The cartoon debuted a new streamlined design for the woodpecker, and is also known for featuring one of the first uses of fast cutting, after taking the idea from Sergei Eisenstein. At Lantz, he sporadically introduced Russian avant-garde influenced experimental art into the cartoons.; one example is briefly visible during an explosion in the Woody Woodpecker short The Loose Nut.
Culhane departed Lantz in October 1945 following a pay dispute. Following a succession of aborted projects, he returned to New York in 1948 to found 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, among them an iconic Muriel Cigars commercial featuring a Mae West caricature stylized as a cigar. 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, Famous Studios. He left the studio in 1967, ceding its creative supervision to a young Ralph Bakshi, and went into semi-retirement.
At his death on February 2, 1996, Culhane was survived by his fourth wife, the former Juana Hegarty, and by two sons from his third marriage,Maxine Marx, Growing Up With Chico, p. 168: "... Shamus, who was twice divorced" when he married Maxine. to Maxine Marx (the daughter of Chico Marx): Brian Culhane of Seattle and Kevin Marx Culhane of Portland, Oregon.
Post-animation career
Culhane wrote two highly regarded books on animation: the how-to/textbook 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.
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Categories: 1908 Births, 1996 Deaths, American Animated Film Directors, American Animated Film Producers, Animators From Massachusetts, Film Producers From Massachusetts, People From Ware, Massachusetts, 20th-century American Businesspeople, Warner Bros. Cartoons People, Film Directors From Massachusetts, Fleischer Studios People, Bray Productions People, Walter Lantz Productions People, Walt Disney Animation Studios People, Famous Studios People
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