Colin Cantwell and the UCLA Animation Workshop in the 1950s and 60s

As I dig into Colin’s life and learn more, a fertile period in his timeline (one of many, of course) can be found during his days at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he majored in engineering and managed to convince the school to add an animation major, of which he was the first graduate. In 1948, Disney animator William Shull, who also went by Bill Shull, founded the UCLA Animation Workshop as a group of animation classes.

During his time at UCLA, both as an undergrad and when he returned to the workshop later in the 1950s and 60s, Colin produced five animated movies that I’m aware of: Who Bravely Dares, The Indian Was Alone, His, His & His, If I Die Before I Wake, and Three Views From an Ivory Tower. The last one toured the country as part of an animation festival; I’ve found several mentions of it in various newspaper articles during the 1960s.

Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to view any of his films, since none of them seem to exist online. However, Three Views From an Ivory Tower is supposed to be in the archives at UCLA, so I hope to see it when I make a trip to southern California. Maybe I will be able to view some of his other films too.

In the meantime, I recently had the chance to chat with three folks who were part of the UCLA Animation Workshop after Colin graduated but while he was still returning as an alumnus to work on films: Bob Swarthe, who went on to an illustrious career as a special effects artist on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination, and Richard Bohn and his wife, Frances Karz, who wasn’t part of the workshop but joined the group on a frequent basis.

“Every evening after the regular Monday night class, Bill Shull, Richard, Frances, Dan McLaughlin, Colin Cantwell and others would head down to the Village Deli (which we called ‘The VD”‘ to shoot the breeze about anything at all,” Bob Swarthe remembers. “The VD was located right next to the Village Theater. Bill would sometimes give us a ride there in his Edsel!”

He adds: “Colin had already graduated from UCLA when I arrived, but he often came to participate in our class Storyboard presentations. His comments and suggestions were alway incredibly useful. In the past, in addition to being a student, he had been the animation workshop’s cameraman.”

Bill Shull worked on many classic Disney films, including Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi. However, Bob recalls that Bill “was very reluctant to talk about what he was working on. He wanted to keep all the attention on his students. I have a copy of a letter he wrote in 1980 to an old friend of his in which he mentions that Colin had been his layout man on the end title sequence for Around the World in 80 Days.  I assume they were working for Saul Bass on this.”

He concludes: “During class, I remember Colin explaining his own personal method for figuring complicated animation camera movements to me. Bill laughed when he heard what Colin was saying. It was way too esoteric for him. I didn’t know at that time that they were working together on 80 Days. They were working on the minutes-long animation sequence at the end of the film. It involved a continuous horizontal pan with all kinds of elements moving across the screen at different rates of speed. Later, in my professional career, I loved doing this kind of camera planning myself, but I never was able to understand Colin’s technique. It had something to do with plotting numbers and curves on graph paper. Typical Colin.”

“Typical Colin,” indeed. I’ve heard many variations on that theme the past few months (always in a positive light, of course). Bob, Richard, Frances, and I spoke about many other things that will be part of the book I’m writing about Colin’s life, including a fun story involving a dinner with the UCLA Animation Workshop group and Harlan Ellison, who was, shall we say, never shy in social settings. Stay tuned!