Jules Engel

Jules Engel (March 11, 1909 – September 6, 2003) was an American filmmaker, painter, sculptor, graphic artist, set designer, animator, film director, and teacher. He is the founding director of the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught until his death, serving as mentor to several generations of animators.

Engel was born in Budapest, Hungary and immigrated to Chicago at the age of thirteen, where he grew up in Oak Park, Illinois and attended Evanston Township High School. In 1937, Engel traveled to Los Angeles originally to gain an athletic scholarship to either the USC, or the UCLA, as he was on the track team while in high school. He would eventually settle in Hollywood and study at the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles. It was during his studies at Chouinard that he met many artists who would go on to work for Disney Studios, and later recommend him to Disney Studios. In the meantime, he worked for Charles Mintz Studios as an inbetweener.

A year later, he was asked by Disney Studios to work on the now classic film Fantasia. At the time, Disney Studios was doing something innovative, integrating "low" art (animation) and "high" art (classical music), and the studio needed someone who was familiar with the timing of dance. Because of his drawing talent and his growing knowledge of dance, Engel was assigned to storyboard the Russian sprites and Chinese mushrooms dance sequences of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

For the Russian sprite sequence, Engel emphasized the contrast between the bright figures and dark ground. The last dance, Chinese Mushrooms, has brought much debate in the animation community surrounding Engel, Art Babbit, and Elmer Pummer over who can claim responsibility for the sequence. Engel could claim responsibility for the choreography (timing) for the final sequence, but to this day, animation scholars and former students alike continue to debate the issue.

The director of Bambi, David Hand, asked Engel to do color work for his film. He worked on the timing for the sequence where Bambi first encounters his childhood playmate, Faline, which required a lot of movement analysis. After completing the sequence, he became committed to the entirety of the project after hearing the score for the film, which he thought had a lot of abstraction and movement. He began doing color sketches because he felt that the color schemes they were using during production was too naturalistic. Engel's time at Disney would come to an end with the development of the Disney animators' strike. While the union won the case over the studio, Engel didn't go back, largely because while he enjoyed the place, he felt uncomfortable being surrounded by colleagues that he felt didn't share his passion for the aesthetics of animation.

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