Norm Ferguson

Born: William Norman Ferguson
Birthday: September 2, 1902
Location: Manhattan, NY, U.S.
Alma mater: Pratt Institute
Occupation: Animator, Director
Years active: 1920-1953
Died: November 4, 1953

William Norman “Norm” Ferguson, called “Fergy” by his peers, attended Brooklyn’s Heffley Institute for stenography and typing, but he was inspired by the new medium of animation and enrolled at the Pratt Institute to study commercial art. He was hired as a cameraman at Paul Terry’s Fables Pictures Inc. in 1920 and rapidly rose in the animation department over the next nine years despite his lack of formal art training.

He joined The Walt Disney Studios in 1929, serving as an animator for over 75 shorts, including the Academy Award-winning Three Little Pigs.

Besides being a fast artist, churning out 40 feet of animation a week when the average was only 10 to 15 feet, Norm was known as the discoverer of the overlapping action principle of animation and the creator of the moving hold technique.

At Disney, he developed characters like Peg-Leg Pete, the Big Bad Wolf, and his made contributions to the creation of Pluto. He drew inspiration from the old vaudeville comedians when he animated the landmark flypaper sequence in Disney’s 1934 short Playful Pluto in which the dog is stuck to a piece of flypaper and every attempt to free himself only makes his predicament worse. Over the sequence’s 65 seconds, Pluto’s reactions to changing situation reveal his personality and thinking, a first for onscreen animation.

When Walt Disney took up the challenge of producing the Studio’s first full-length animated feature, he selected Fergy to serve as supervising animator for the evil witch. She was the first of several Disney feature villains he’d supervise as he oversaw the conniving J. Worthington Foulfellow in Pinocchio next.

Norm would serve as sequence director on Fantasia and Dumbo, production supervisor on Saludos Amigos, both production supervisor and director on The Three Caballeros, and as directing animator for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. He even had a cameo appearance in 1941’s The Reluctant Dragon.

His health failing, Ferguson left Disney Studios in 1953. Later, he worked briefly at Shamus Culhane Productions just before passing away in in 1957.

Norm Ferguson was posthumously awarded the animation industry’s 1987 Winsor McCay Award, and he was inducted as a Disney Legend in 1999.

The Author

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.