Freddie Moore

Born: Robert Fred Moore
Birthday: September 7, 1911
Location: Los Angeles, CA, U.S.
Occupation: Animator
Years active: 1930-1952
Died: November 23, 1952

Robert Fred “Freddie” Moore was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Growing up, Fred often submitted drawings to a youth magazine, the Los Angeles Junior Times while he attended L.A.’s Polytechnic High School. Although a natural draftsman, he had no formal art training except for a handful of night classes at Chouinard Art Institute he earned in trade for janitorial work. However, when a friend with a toothache couldn’t make a scheduled interview with Walt Disney in 1931, Moore went in his place and won the job.

19-year-old Fred Moore began as an assistant animator for the Walt Disney studio and became a full-fledged animator by 1933 due to the natural appeal of his drawings. His first major assignment was the Silly Symphony short The Three Little Pigs, for which he also earned Walt’s praise. Fred worked on nearly 35 shorts, including Pluto’s Judgement Day, another Oscar-winner Three Orphan Kittens, and the Academy Award nominated Brave Little Tailor.

His meteoric rise at Disney in the early 1930s, saw him named directing animator of the Dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Walt in 1934. Moore was brought in to make the dwarfs’ designs more appealing and easier to animate. His refinement of the Dwarfs represented a generational shift in the Disney style between Ub Iwerks’ 1930 departure and the rise of Walt’s Nine Old Men.

Moore’s next assignment was as Lampwick’s lead animator in Pinocchio for the poolroom scene and up to halfway through the transformation into a donkey. Fred’s character designs are believed to be a self-caricature. He and fellow animators Ward Kimball and Walt Kelly were close friends during this time, though Fred was quieter and more reserved than the other two.

Moore became the studio expert on Mickey Mouse. He transformed the look of Mickey Mouse from the traditional rubber hose and round circle style to a pear-shaped body in Pluto’s Judgement Day, giving him a more elastic “squash and stretch” anatomy. He scrapped the “pie-eyed” Mickey the 1938 short Brave Little Tailor in exchange for fixed white eyes with black pupils debuted in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of Fantasia.

Fantasia also showcased some of his girl designs in the form of the centaurettes. Moore was held in high regard around the studio for his often nude drawings of innocently sexy women known as “Freddie Moore Girls.”

Moore had a short unspeaking live-action appearance in the 1941 feature The Reluctant Dragon, along with animators Norm Ferguson and Ward Kimball during one of the studio tour sequences. Ward assisted Fred on some of the animated scenes in the same film.

Moore and Kimball voiced and animated likenesses of themselves as the vaudeville duo “Ward and Fred” in the Mickey Mouse short The Nifty Nineties. Freddie also animated Timothy the mouse in Dumbo.

His “Freddie Moore Girls” make another appearance in Make Mine Music. Fred alone animated the sequence at the beginning of the All the Cats Join In segment, when the girl answers the telephone and then quickly showers and dresses, through to her scene putting on lipstick in front of her mirror while her little sister follows her.

In 1946 Fred Moore was fired from the Disney Studios due to his accelerating alcoholism which had been affecting his work. He freelanced for several months, until his former Disney colleague Dick Lundy hired him as an animator at Walter Lantz Productions, where he redesigned the Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda characters in shorts such as Wet Blanket Policy and Wild and Woody! The Lantz studio temporarily closed two years later due to financial issues, prompting Fred’s return to Disney.

Back again at Disney, Moore animated a few scenes of the Cinderella mice, some oysters as well as some of the White Rabbit scenes in Alice In Wonderland, and Casey’s daughters in Casey Bats Again. He animated Mickey again in The Simple Things.

Fred was in the midst of the assignment to animate the lost boys and the mermaids of Mermaid Lagoon for Peter Pan when he and his second wife, Virginia, died following an auto accident in 1952.

Moore posthumously received the animation industry’s Winsor McCay Award in 1983. His influence continues on, as he is prominently described in The Illusion of Life, the book written by two of Moore’s former assistant animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, and a model sheet for 1989’s The Little Mermaid drew specific distinctions between the design of Ariel and a “Freddie Moore Girl.”

Fred Moore was named a Disney Legend by the studio in 1995.

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Lavalle Lee

Lavalle Lee

Lavalle Lee has been creating animated cartoons online since 1999/2000 for his website flashcartoons.org. Many cartoons on the site have gained viral video status reaching millions of viewers online. In 2009, Lavalle started learning hand drawn animation from Don Bluth in his animation classes, as well as attending his Masterclasses in Arizona. He has also personally studied animation and visual effects from Veteran Disney animators in Orlando, FL.

Lavalle is widely known in the animation industry as the creator of the TraditionalAnimation.com website. After seeing that most animation sites were about all types of animation, not any specific to classical hand drawn animation, Lavalle knew Traditional Animation needed to be represented online. TraditionalAnimation.com has become the leading website and social media account for all things 2D. The website served as inspiration for “The Traditional Animation Show” in which Lavalle was both producer and host.

His partnership with Don Bluth began when he championed the Dragon's Lair Indiegogo campaign as lead project manager, editor, voice actor and in-betweener. The campaign reached $730,000 dollars to produce a 7-minute pitch video. In 2017, Lavalle brought the idea of creating a school to Don Bluth, and Don Bluth University was born. After a decade of learning from Don Bluth and working together on multiple pitches and business ventures, Lavalle accepted the position as Vice President of Don Bluth's new company Don Bluth Studios.

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