April Spencer looks at the career of David Hand, an American who influenced a generation of British animators.
David Hand’s animation career may be divided into two main phases. He held animator and directorial posts at the Walt Disney Studio in Los Angeles from 1930 to 1944. Then he came to England to set up GB Animation for J. Arthur Rank, and worked here until 1950.
Hand learnt ‘cartooning’ at Art School in Chicago and started his life in animation at a local studio at the end of the First World War. He moved on to the Bray Studio in New York where he met Max Fleischer, producer of the Out Of The Inkwell series. It was here Hand learnt about ‘rotoscoping’, a process invented by Fleischer in 1916, and one which came into its own in the making of Snow White at the Disney studio twenty years later.
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