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Jules Engel

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Jules Engel

Jules Engel (Hungarian: Engel Gyula; March 11, 1909 – September 6, 2003) was an American filmmaker, painter, sculptor, graphic artist, set designer, animator, film director, and teacher of Hungarian origin. He was the founding director of the experimental animation program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught until his death, serving as mentor to several generations of animators.

Engel was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, and immigrated to Chicago when he was thirteen years old. He lived in Oak Park, Illinois, adjacent to Chicago, and attended Evanston Township High School, where he began developing his drawing style.

At the age of 17 Engel moved to Los Angeles seeking an athletic scholarship to either USC or UCLA. He lived in Hollywood while attending the Chouinard Art Institute and started to draw for magazines. He worked in the studio of a local painter sketching landscapes, Ken Strobel. Through his relationship with Strobel, he was referred to work as a background artists and as an inbetweening animator in Mintz Studio, the studio founded by Charles Mintz and his wife Margaret J. Winkler, which later became known as Screen Gems.

In 1938 the painter and art teacher Phil Dike helped him get an opportunity to work at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank.

Fantasia

At Disney Engel worked in the film Fantasia, released in 1940. At the time, Disney intended to integrate "low" art (animation) and "high" art (classical music), and the studio needed someone who was familiar with the timing of dance. Because of his drawing talent and his growing knowledge of dance, Engel was assigned to work on the choreography of the Russian sprites and Chinese mushrooms dance sequences of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, animated by Art Babbitt. For these sequences, Engel emphasized the contrast between the bright figures and dark ground, which critics consider as an important development of modern animation away from naturalism.

Bambi

David Hand, director of Bambi, asked Engel work with him on the film. Engel did the storyboard for the sequence where Bambi first encounters the doe Faline. After completing the sequence, he did color sketches that diverged from the naturalistic color schemes being used in production.

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