
Born: Ubbe Ert Iwwerks
Birthday: March 24, 1901
Location: Kansas City, MO, U.S.
Occupation: Animator
Years active: 1919–1971
Died: July 7, 1971
Ubbe Ert Iwerks was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He dropped out of school and began working to support his mother and siblings after his father abandoned the family.
Iwerks was working at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City when he met Walt Disney in 1919. The two started their own commercial art business and got work illustrating for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company. While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Walt was inspired to take up animation starting with the Laugh-O-Gram cartoon series in 1922. Ub joined Disney as his chief animator defining the distinctive style of the earliest Disney animated cartoons.
Bankruptcy would prompt Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923, and Iwerks followed to work on a new series of cartoons known as The Alice Comedies, combining live-action with animation. As the Alice series wound down, Disney asked Iwerks to design a new character who would become Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first Oswald cartoon was entirely animated by Iwerks.
Disney was removed from the Oswald series in 1928, and most of his staff was hired out from under him by Winkler Pictures, but Iwerks remained loyal. Walt Disney came up with an original sketch of a mouse character and asked Ub to redesign it. Iwerks cleaned up and refined the mouse while still maintaining the intent of the original sketch, drawing inspiration from some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney Hugh Harman made three years earlier. Mickey Mouse was born.
The earliest Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons were animated almost entirely by Iwerks, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House. However, he grew to feel he was not receiving the credit he deserved for animating each of Disney’s cartoons. Iwerks’ final Mickey Mouse cartoons were Wild Waves and The Cactus Kid before friction with Walt came to a head. Ub resigned from the Disney studio and entered a contract with Pat Powers to start a new animation studio, the Iwerks Studio.
At Iwerks Studio, he created the Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper characters for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer beginning in 1930. He also produced an independently distributed series of shorts called the ComiColor Cartoons from 1933 to 1936. The series focused mainly on fairy tales with no ongoing characters or stars. During this same period Ub made a short called The Toy Parade as an experiment with stop-motion animation combined with the multiplane camera.
His studio was never a major challenge to rivals Disney or Fleischer Studios, and considered a commercial failure. Financial backers withdrew their support In 1936, and the Iwerks Studio closed its doors for good soon after.
Ub was picked up by Leon Schlesinger Productions to directed Looney Tunes shorts starring Porky Pig and Gabby Goat In 1937. Iwerks moved on to direct several Color Rhapsody cartoons for Screen Gems before rejoining Disney in 1940.
Iwerks worked on special visual effects for Disney; combining live-action and animation in Song of the South, and developing the xerographic process in cel animation for 101 Dalmatians. He came up with several Disney theme park attractions throughout the ‘60s like the Disneyland Hall of Presidents. He even performed special effects work outside the studio, including the birds for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, earning an Academy Award nomination. Ub’s final credit was for perfecting the travel matte system for the Mary Poppins’ Feed the Birds sequence.
Over his lifetime, Ub Iwerks earned three Academy Award nominations; winning one. He received the Winsor McCay Award posthumously at the 1978 Annie Awards and their Ub Iwerks Award for Technical Achievement is named in his honor. He was named a Disney legend in 1989 and received the Hall of Fame award at the 2017 Visual Effects Society Awards.
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