A great animator and an old friend of mine, Berny Wolf, has just passed away at the age of 95. Berny had a long career in cartoons that included stints with Paramount, Max Fleischer, Ub Iwerks, Disney, Tex Avery and Hanna-Barbera. Historian Mark Kausler lays out the broad strokes of Berny's animating years in this piece over at Cartoon Brew and I don't think it's even close to complete. I seem to recall Berny telling me, for instance, that he worked for Van Beuren and (briefly) for Paul Terry. It would probably take less time to list the great cartoon studios where Berny never worked.
His credits are, of course, amazing. Just having animated on Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo puts you up there in a rarefied strata of cartoon history. But you'll notice Mark's quick bio jumps from the fifties to the eighties and I can fill in a few of the missing years there. For instance, Bern worked closely with Walt Disney designing attractions for Disneyland, most notably some of the first walkaround character costumes. Through a series of companies he set up, Berny made those and produced industrial cartoons and educational materials for a wide array of clients.
In the seventies, his firm was called Animedia and it was located over on Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake, doing art services — some, animation-related, some not. Among many other projects, he produced hundreds of employee training films for the Toyota company and also handled all the graphics and design work for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. When I edited and wrote Tarzan comic books back then, I did so through Berny's company. I also worked with him on some cartoon mascots for the Olympics, some educational materials involving the Woodsy Owl character, and a couple of animated commercials. He couldn't find anyone else to storyboard one of the commercials before the deadline so, though admittedly rusty, he sat down and drew it himself. It showed he still had it. Even though he'd been away from the drawing board for years, he was still a terrific cartoonist.
He proved it again a decade later when he folded Animedia and went back to animation where (he said) he was happier in every way except financial. Along with the shows Kausler mentions, Berny produced a series for Hanna-Barbera called The Paw-Paws. In the nineties, when he himself was in his eighties, he did some directing work on Garfield and Friends and other shows for Film Roman.
We had a brief e-mail correspondence a few years back and then he suddenly stopped writing. Soon after, his website disappeared and I heard no more from him. The last message he wrote me said he was "…working on some drawings and limited-edition cels." I hope he got some of them done for he really was a great artist. He told me more than once that he'd always regretted he couldn't make the same kind of living as a cartoonist that he made when he produced those training films for Toyota.
Here's a classic cartoon Berny worked on in 1933, when he was a mere lad of 22. In fact, you'll even see his name in the opening credits. It's "The Old Man of the Mountain," one of the Betty Boop cartoons made at the Max Fleischer Studios that utilized the skills of the great Cab Calloway. As you watch it, please think of Berny Wolf…a helluva talent and a true gentleman.
