Mel Shaw, one of the most versatile and talented visual-development artists, designers, and storymen ever to work at The Walt Disney Studios, has died at age 97. A contributor to numerous Disney animated favorites from Bambi through The Lion King, he passed away at Woodland Care Center in Reseda, California, on Thanksgiving Day (Thursday, November 22) from congestive heart failure.
Mel’s career at Disney included several tours of duty, starting in 1937 with early story and character design work on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which started as a short film and became the genesis for the feature Fantasia. He went on to work on story and visual development for Bambi and for “The Wind in the Willows” segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. He left the studio in 1941 but returned 33 years later to help influence the look and story for such beloved and modern-day Disney films as The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King.
Animation historian and author Charles Solomon (Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation; The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey) observes, “Mel Shaw’s influence as an animation design artist extended over many decades and many studios. He worked with Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising in the early days of both the Warner Bros. and MGM cartoon studios. At the beginning of World War II, he contributed designs to Orson Welles’ never-realized film of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. His best-known artwork is the series of dramatic pastels in the title sequence of The Rescuers (1977), showing the bottle containing Penny’s call for help riding stormy seas. Shaw said the drawings were originally just preliminary studies for an animated sequence, but when director Woolie Reitherman saw them, he said, ‘they didn’t need to be animated—they could carry the sequence as they were.’”
Disney producer and documentary filmmaker Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Frankenweenie, High Ground) adds, “Mel was on a short list of vanguard artists who would jump into a new film when it was still a blank piece of paper, and with his stunning work he’d show us all the visual possibilities of the idea. I knew him as an artist first, but one day at lunch he started telling stories about playing polo with Walt and Spencer Tracy, followed by some amazing tales of shooting on Lord Mountbatten’s film crew during the war. He lived large, and his contribution to film and animation is immeasurable.”
Art director and layout supervisor Ed Ghertner (The Great Mouse Detective, Beauty and the Beast) recalled, “Mel Shaw taught me a lot about presentation. I remember walking into his office one time with a number of drawings, and he explained to me that in presentation you have a very short time period to get your point across, so pick the most clear, dynamic compositions and then punch the compositions with color that will keep the attention of the person you’re showing it to. Mel used pastels to render his artwork. He felt that pastels appeared like a rendered piece of artwork, with the tightness of a finished painting. It left the feeling that there was more to be told, and wanted the imagination of the viewer to complete the image and become involved with the artwork in that way. Mel showed me how to use color and simplicity of color with pastels to tell a full story with a minimal amount of drawing.”
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 19, 1914, Melvin Schwartzman (later Mel Shaw) discovered his artistic bent at age 10, when he was selected as one of only 30 children from the state of New York to participate in the Student Art League Society. Two years later, his soap sculpture of a Latino with a pack mule won second prize in a Procter & Gamble soap-carving contest, earning the young artist national attention.
In 1928, his family moved to Los Angeles, where Mel attended high school and entered a scholarship class at Otis Art Institute. But the restless teen had an itch to become a cowboy and ran away from home to work on a Utah ranch.
After four months of backbreaking work, he returned home and took a job creating title cards for silent movies at Pacific Titles, owned by cartoon producer Leon Schlesinger. With help from Schlesinger, two former Disney animators—Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising—made a deal with Warner Bros., and Mel joined Harman-Ising Studios as animator, character designer, storyman, and director. While there, he worked with Orson Welles storyboarding a proposed live-action/animated version of The Little Prince.
In 1937, Mel Shaw arrived at The Walt Disney Studios, where he contributed to such Disney classics as Fantasia, Bambi, and The Wind in the Willows.
Mel’s Disney career was interrupted by World War II, when he served the U.S. Army Signal Corp. as a filmmaker under Lord Louis Mountbatten, helping produce films including a live-action/animated documentary about the Burma Campaign. He also served as art director and cartoonist for the Stars and Stripes newspaper in Shanghai.
After the war, he ventured into business with Bob Allen, a former MGM Studios animator. With Allen-Shaw Productions, Mel helped design and create the original Howdy Doody marionette puppet for NBC, as well as children’s toys, dishes and figurines for Metlox, architecture, and even master plans for cities including Century City, California. In 1974, Walt Disney Animation Studios called Mel in to help with the transition from the retiring animation team of Disney’s first Golden Age to the next generation. He lent his skill and knowledge to such Disney animated favorites as The Rescuers (1977), The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Lion King (1994). Some of his other feature projects were never realized, including Musicana, a sequel to Fantasia comprised of stories and music from around the world.
Mel completed an autobiography, Animator on Horseback, detailing his years as a polo-playing animator for Disney and his numerous adventures as a pioneering artist in the industry. The family is proceeding with plans to publish it posthumously.
Prepared by Howard Green
