Shamus Culhane

Shamus Culhane
Born	James H. Culhane November 12, 1908(1908-11-12) Ware, Massachusetts  United States
Died	February 2, 1996 (aged 87) New York City, New York  United States
Other name(s)	James Culhane Jimmie Culhane Jimmy Culhane
Years active	1930-1996

James "Shamus" Culhane (November 12, 1908—February 2, 1996) was an American animator, film director, and film producer.

Culhane worked for a number of American animation studios, including Fleischer Studios, the Ub Iwerks studio, Walt Disney Productions, and the Walter Lantz studio. He began his animation career in 1925 working for J.R. Bray studios.^[1]

While at the Disney studio, he was a 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 worked briefly in Chuck Jones's unit at Warner Bros, before moving on to being a director for Lantz, where he helmed Woody Woodpecker's 1944 classic, The Barber of Seville. In the late-1940s, he founded Shamus Culhane Productions (Culhane had gone by his birthname of James up until this point, before going by its Irish variant Shamus), 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, Paramount Cartoon Studios. He left the studio in 1967, and went into semi-retirement.

Culhane wrote two highly-regarded books on animation: the how-to/textbook Animation from Script to Screen, and 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.

Married twice, Culhane's first wife was Maxine Marx, Chico Marx's daughter, with whom he had two sons. At his death on February 2, 1996, Culhane is survived by his wife of 35 years, the former Juana Hegarty, and by two sons of his marriage to Maxine Marx, the daughter of Chico Marx, which ended in divorce: Brian Culhane of Seattle and Kevin Marx Culhane of Portland, Ore.^[1]

References

External links

• Shamus Culhane at the Internet Movie Database