Chernabog strides atop a seething volcano of green magma. A demon of Mephistophelian measure, his eyes are slits of light carved into a dark-hued visage, craggy horns and teeth curling up into a twisted grimace of netherworldly glee. He plays upon the lesser beings below like a puppeteer, the whole of it set before a backdrop of massive leathery black wings and flowing to the ominous strains of Moussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.”
The scene is from the movie Fantasia. It is an image on a silver screen, and yet it is all too real. More than a half-century old, this smoky vision of Hell has lost none of its power to spark fantastical dreams.
Mike Glad, IE '68, is in the business of gathering these dreams. In just the past 15 years, this former Georgia Tech football player has amassed the most diverse collection of animation art in the world, encompassing more than 35,000 images from films produced in all corners of the globe. The features and shorts from which he owns images include titles like Snow White and the Seven Dwarjs, Yellow Submarine, Superman, Gerald McBoing Boing, Gulliver’s Travels and Felix the Cat, just to name a fraction.
Far more than just a gallery of cels, Glad‘s collection is an amalgamation of the art itself, a study in each phase of animated feature
production, from the initial idea to the finished product. “In an animated film, the process goes from conception to camera, and there are lots and lots of steps,” Glad says. “Inspirational artists are probably the people I enjoy the most, or the color stylists – the people who are working on the styling and the mood."
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