Norman Ferguson
Animator, Film director
1902 – 1957
Who was Norman Ferguson?
William Norman "Norm" Ferguson was an animator for Walt Disney Studios and a central contributor to the studio's stylistic development in the 1930s. He is most frequently noted for his contribution to the creation of Pluto, one of the studio's best-known and most enduring characters, and is the artist most closely associated with that character. Ferguson, known at the studio as "Norm" or "Fergy", was also the primary animator of the witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first in a long line of great Disney feature villains. He was also a sequence director on the film.
After starting at the studio in 1929 as a cameraman, Ferguson switched to the animation department and rose rapidly, despite a lack of formal art training. His early animation of the dog who would become Pluto drew strong response at the studio and on-screen for giving the character a personality and apparent inner life that was considered a great step forward for the young art form of animation. Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston paid extensive tribute to Ferguson's work in their 1981 book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, calling his famous "flypaper sequence" from the 1934 short Playful Pluto- in which the dog is stuck to a piece of flypaper- a "milestone in personality animation...through it all, his reaction to his predicament and his thoughts of what to try next are shared with the audience. It was the first time a character seemed to be thinking on the screen, and, though it lasted only 65 seconds, it opened the way for animation of real characters with real problems."
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- Born
- Sep 2, 1902
Manhattan - Also known as
- Norm Ferguson
- William Norman Ferguson
- Norman Fergusan
- Fergy
- Norm
- William Norman "Norm" Ferguson
- Spouses
- Gladys Ferguson
(1924 - )
- Gladys Ferguson
- Nationality
- United States of America
- Profession
- Lived in
- Manhattan
- Died
- Nov 4, 1957
Los Angeles
Submitted
on July 23, 2013
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"Norman Ferguson." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/norman_ferguson>.
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