Shamus Culhane
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
James "Shamus" Culhane was an Irish-American animator, film director, and film producer, regarded as one of the greatest animators of all time.
He worked for a number of American animation studios, including Fleischer Studios, the Ub Iwerks studio, Walt Disney Productions, and the Walter Lantz studio. While at the Disney studio, he was an lead animator on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animating arguably the most well-known sequence in the film: the animation of the dwarves marching home singing "Heigh-Ho". The scene took Culhane and his assistants six months to complete.
Later in his career, Culhane was a director at Walter Lantz, where he helmed Woody Woodpecker's 1944 classic, Barber of Seville. In the late-1940s, he founded Shamus Culhane Productions, one of the first companies to create animated television commercials.
Shamus Culhane Productions folded in the 1960s, at which point Culhane became the head of the successor to Fleischer Studios, Famous Studios. He left the studio in 1967, and went into semi-retirement.
Culhane wrote two well-reguarded books on animation: the how-to/textbook Animation from Script to Screen, his autobiography Talking Animals and other people. Since Culhane worked for a number of major Hollywood animation studios, his autobiography gives a balanced general overview of the history of the Golden Age of American Animation.
Culhane died in 1996.
