Word: geisel
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...right, enough with the galloping anapests that Geisel twisted into a million similes and smiles. The rest of the tribute, to the all-time best-selling children's book author (200 million copies in print; take that, J.K. Rowling), will be in prose. Ted Geisel's centenary - the Seussentennial, his publishers call it - is being celebrated with a U.S. postage stamp in his honor, a cross-country caravan of books and playlets and (my favorite) Charles D. Cohen's "The Seuss the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel." It's a trove...
...That's fine with me. I missed the Seuss books when I was a lad; my literary companions Babar, Bugs Bunny and the Little Prince (and a lot of junk that I have elevated to the pop-cultural Pantheon in this column). I'm glad that Cohen has honored Geisel as a full-service wit: the humor-magazine work, the political cartoons, his cunning ad campaigns and Ted's creation of one of the most enduring, least endearing antiheroes in Hollywood cartoon history. What follows comes from studying the Cohen book, rerunning my favorites from Geisel's mid-period film...
...Jones joined the cheerful gang of animator-anarchists at Termite Terrace, as the Warner Bros. cartoonists called their dilapidated digs. He directed his first short, The Night Watchman, in 1938. But it took a wartime assignment to bring out the comic fatalist in Jones. With Theodor (Dr. Seuss) Geisel, he hatched the Private Snafu shorts--irreverent sketches of an Army recruit whose laziness and general bad attitude forever threaten to hand victory to Hitler and Tojo. By war's end, Jones was infusing the brisk sauciness of these cartoons into his civilian work...
...Jones, a tall, genial charmer who sported the goatee and floppy bow tie of a small-town art teacher, had plenty of career left. He reunited with Geisel and directed two Dr. Seuss half-hours, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Horton Hears a Who! He wrote two delightful memoirs, Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks. And for a 1985 Museum of Modern Art tribute to Warner Bros. animation, he drew new Bugses and Daffys on the Manhattan museum's walls--a tacit acknowledgment from the world of high culture that this cartoon man was a significant creator of modern...
...multi-award-winning animation designer: in La Crescenta, Calif. Noble worked on some of the country's best-loved animated features, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, Bambi and Snow White, as well as many of the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny cartoons. With two World War II buddies, Theodore Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, and director Chuck Jones, he helped create the original TV movie version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas...