Gene Deitch

Gene Deitch
Born	August 8, 1924 (1924-08-08) Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation	Illustrator, animator, director
Years active	1945–2006
Spouse	Marie Deitch (?-1960) Zdenka Deitch (1960-present)
Children	Kim Deitch, Simon Deitch, Seth Deitch
Website
http://www.genedeitch.com/

Eugene Merril "Gene" Deitch (born August 8, 1924) is an American illustrator, animator and film director. He has been based in Prague, capital of Czechoslovakia and the present-day Czech Republic, since 1959. Since 1968, Deitch has been the leading animation director for the Connecticut organization Weston Woods/Scholastic, adapting children's picture books. His studio is located in Prague near the Barrandov studios where many major films were recorded. In 2003, he was awarded the "Annie" by ASIFA Hollywood for a lifetime contribution to the art of animation.

Deitch married his wife Zdenka in 1960. His sons Kim Deitch and Simon Deitch are prominent artists in the underground comix and alternative comics movements. He currently resides with his wife in Prague, where he works as an independent animation scenarist/director. He wrote a memoir, For the Love of Prague, based on the experience of being "the only free American in Prague during 30 years of Communism."

Career

From 1945 to 1951 Deitch was primary graphics contributor, and eventually art director, for The Record Changer, a jazz magazine. He was also an amateur recording engineer, who made tape recordings of artists like John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger. He made recordings of Connie Converse in the mid-1950s, which led to her rediscovery forty years later.

Deitch has produced animated cartoons for studios such as UPA/Columbia Pictures, Terrytoons/20th Century Fox (Tom Terrific), MGM (Tom and Jerry), and Paramount Pictures (Nudnik. Popeye). He directed, with producer William L. Snyder, a series of made for TV shorts of Krazy Kat for King Features Television from 1962 to 1964. The Bluffers, which was based on one of Deitch's ideas, was also co-produced by him. He directed the 1966 film Alice of Wonderland in Paris.

Tom and Jerry

Side-by-side comparison of Part Time Pal (1947), a Tom and Jerry short directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and High Steaks (1961), a Tom and Jerry short directed by Gene Deitch. Note the simplified textures, thicker outline, and grainier picture quality (bottom).

In 1960, Deitch and Rembrandt Films, after collaborating in a pool of producers that made the Popeye 1960's season for television by King Features, arranged a deal with MGM to revive the Tom and Jerry franchise overseas in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Deitch states that, being a member of the UPA, he has always had a personal dislike of Tom and Jerry, citing them as the "primary bad example of senseless violence - humor based on pain - attack and revenge - to say nothing of the tasteless use of a headless black woman stereotype house servant." Štěpán Koníček, a student of Karel Ančerl and conductor of the Film Symphony Orchestra, and Václav Lídl provided the musical score for the Deitch short, while Larz Bourne, Chris Jenkyns, and Eli Bauer wrote the cartoons. The majority of vocal effects and voices in Deitch's films were provided by Allen Swift.

Since the Deitch/Snyder team had seen only a handful of the original Tom and Jerry shorts, and since Deitch and Snyder produced their cartoons on a tighter budget of $10,000, the resulting films were considered unusual, and, in many ways, bizarre. The characters' gestures were often performed at high speed, frequently causing heavy motion blur. As a result, the animation of the characters looked choppy and sickly. The soundtracks featured sparse music, futuristic sound effects, dialogue that was mumbled rather than spoken, and heavy use of reverb. Fans that typically rooted for Tom criticized Deitch's cartoons for never having tom become a threat to Jerry. Most of the time, Tom only attempts to hurt him when he gets in his way. Tom's new owner, a corpulent and grumpy middle-aged white man (with serious temper problems, often going red in the face similar to Deitch's earlier "Clint Clobber" character at Terrytoons), was also more graphically brutal in punishing Tom's mistakes as compared to Mammy Two-Shoes, such as beating and thrashing Tom repeatedly, searing his face with a grill and forcing Tom to drink an entire carbonated beverage.

However, all thirteen shorts were commercial successes; in 1961, the Tom and Jerry series became the highest-grossing film series of all-time, dethroning the Looney Tunes series which had held the position for sixteen years; this success was repeated once more in 1962. However, unlike the Hanna and Barbera shorts, none of Deitch's films were nominated nor did they win an Academy Award. The episodes created by Deitch have generally been less favorably received by the general audience and are often labeled as "very disappointing" compared to the rest of the series. In his review for Tom and Jerry: The Chuck Jones Collection, Paul Kupperberg of Comicmix called the shorts "perfectly dreadful" and "too often released", as well as a result of "cheap labor".

Deitch has frequently defended his films; in an interview with the New York Times, when asked about working on the Tom and Jerry series, Deitch responded "All the experts say [my shorts are] the worst of the 'Tom and Jerry's, [...] I was a UPA man -- my whole background was much closer to the Czechs. 'Tom and Jerry' I always considered dreck, but they had great timing, facial expressions, double takes, squash and stretch," all of which the interviewer stated were "techniques the Czechs had to learn," negatively adding "The Czech style had nothing in common with these gag-driven cartoons."

External links

• Gene Deitch official site
• Gene Deitch at the Internet Movie Database
• Howdy Doody lost work
• "How to succeed in animation" - a long article by Gene Deitch
• Biography of Gene Deitch from the Cartoon Hall of Fame of ASIFA-Hollywood