Morton Schindel

Morton Schindel (April 23, 1918 – August 20, 2016) was an American educator, producer, and founder of Weston Woods Studios, which specializes in adapting children's books into animated films. He named the company after the wooded area outside his home in Weston, Connecticut. The Weston Woods Studios business address was 143 Main Street in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Born and raised in Orange, New Jersey, Schindel went to the University of Pennsylvania, earning a bachelor's degree in 1939 from the Wharton School of Finance. In 1941 he married Ellen Bamberger (of the family famed for the Bamberger's department store chain); the couple had two daughters and one son. In 1948, he worked with Teaching Films Inc. After it declared bankruptcy, he opened his own company, Key Productions, but found film distributors uninterested in his ideas to create animated films of children’s picture books.

In 1949, Schindel received a master's degree in curriculum from Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1953, he founded Weston Woods Studios, which has since produced more than 500 films and film strips, beginning with Andy and the Lion (1954), adapted from the 1939 Caldecott Honor book by James Daugherty. Weston Woods films were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, and that same year the films had their CBS television premiere on Captain Kangaroo. In 1963, the studio released its first animated film, The Snowy Day, adapted from the 1962 Caldecott Medal book by Ezra Jack Keats, and the following year, it produced a documentary. The Lively Art of Picture Books, for the American Library Association. The Doughnuts (1963) was a 28-minute live-action comedy based on a chapter from Robert McCloskey's Homer Price (1943). Beginning in 1968, Gene Deitch became the leading animation director for Weston Woods, working from his studio in Czechoslovakia with his wife, Zdenka Deitchova.

...
Wikipedia