Show #2: Mark Kausler
Mark Kausler is an artist, animator, collector, and historian. He’s worked on “Yellow Submarine”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, and more … read on, or just go right to the interview.
Mark Kausler grew up watching “Scrappy”, “Krazy Kat”, “Flip the Frog”, “Betty Boop”, “Ko-Ko the Clown”, “Felix the Cat”, “Tom and Jerry”, “Casper” and “The Mickey Mouse Club” on his father’s television, and in theaters. He started animating his own characters from the age of eight, making a dozen different animated 8mm cartoons, right up until high school graduation, using a camera stand that his father built for him. The first films were in black and white, and had to be sent to Germany for processing. In two years as a fine arts major at the Kansas City Art Institute, he almost lost sight of animation until the irresistible lure of California cartoon culture drew him to Los Angeles.
He received the Bobe Cannon scholarship to Chouinard Art Institute, thanks, in part to T. Hee. He was able to cobble together enough money from other students, who weren’t using their funds, to produce several relatively high budget films, before his graduation in 1970. Through a couple of fortunate strokes of luck, and his obvious talent, he was able to work on “Yellow Submarine”, followed by “Shinbone Alley” and numerous commercials and special projects.
Riding out many boom and bust cycles in the business, a dream of making short personal cartoons, featuring 1920’s pop recordings, formed at the back of his mind. During a lull on Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”, what became Scene three of “It’s ‘The Cat’” started to come to life on Mark’s drawing board, in his home studio. Through “Oliver and Company”, “Prince and the Pauper”, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, “The Lion King”, “Fantasia 2000″ and “Osmosis Jones”, the Cat waited patiently for Mark to complete each new scene.
By the time we conducted our first interview with Mark (see Show #8 for our second interview), has had completed, and released, “It’s ‘The Cat’” with the invaluable assistance by producer Greg Ford. Kausler had begun working on another three minute cartoon with the working title of “There Must Be Somebody Else”.
Mark also loves to paint water colors outdoors, with his wife, Cathy.
This episode is sponsored by The UPA Legacy Project.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:00 am
[...] a Duck site, featuring the early comic, Joe Penner, and of course, they pitched Mark Kausler’s Episode #2, which talks about Penner, and Kausler’s Episode #8, which also plays one of Joe Penner’s [...]