THE LABOURS OF GERALD SCARFE

 

For many years the work of the concept artist in animated filmmaking (and, indeed, in the of movies movies in general) was untold – or, more accurately, ignored. The focus was on the animators, the cartoon equivalent of the movie actors, and quite often (and pretty much always in the case of the Disney studio) on the Boss. 

 

Walt Disney was canny: early on in his business career he changed the studio name from The Disney Brothers Studio to Walt Disney Productions. He understood the important of personalising the films he produced by providing a single creative focus for all responses to the rapidly developing universe of mice, ducks, pigs and a fantastical pageant of fable and fairy-tale characters whose stories were brought to life in pen and ink.

 

I first became aware of ‘concept art’ in the pages of R. D. Field’s The Art of Walt Disney (1942) and in Bob Thomas’ Walt Disney: The Art of Animation (1958) and, then, again, in Christopher Finch’s The Art of Walt Disney from Mickey Mouse to the Magic Kingdoms (1973) and Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation (1981). Since the publication of these progressively revealing volumes we are now able to access any number of books devoted to the masterworks of such prolific concept artists as Gustav Tenggren, Kay Nielsen, David Hall, Mary Blair and Eyvind Earle.

 

Books on the art and design of several of the more recent Disney films have mapped the progress of a film’s look from sketch to screen and now we have a huge and truly astonishing volume, Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe, Insight Editions (7 January 2025) £60.

 

The decision to engage perhaps the most savage and unforgiving of Britain’s political caricaturists and hand him the job of setting the style for a movie about an ancient Greek hero-figure can’t have been easily reached. Gerald Scarfe’s routinely brutal – often shocking and, as result, controversial – cartoons might not have been the obvious choice for a studio whose output has almost always favoured the comfortable rather than the challenging, but then one only has to look at Scarfe’s drawings of British and American politicians in the guise of monsters and grotesques to realise how suited he would be to illustrate such beings as Cerberus, Medusa, Hades, the Hydra, the Furies and the Minotaur; or how his keen sense of humour might amusingly interpret the congregation of Gods or Hercules’ sidekick, Philoctetes the satyr; and, again, how his elegant sweeping penmanship might give flight to the  hero's mighty steed, Pegasus.

 

 

 

Scarfe was no no stranger to film or animation: a passionate lover of Disney since childhood, he had created his own award-winning animated film, Long Drawn-Out Trip, in 1973 and, in 1982, he had contributed electrifying animations to Alan Parker’s film Pink Floyd: The Wall that provided some of the most iconic images of ‘80s pop culture which are no less arresting and provocative in a new century.

 

Despite those known credentials, this book is a revelation, not just in revealing how Scarfe developed, modified and, frequently, radically re-defined his various concepts as he worked with Disney’s artists, but also in showing the startling diversity of media in which he worked: pen and ink, full-bloodied watercolour paintings of creatures and landscapes whether Olympian or Underwordly; dramatic moments rendered in chalk or a limited palette of red or white on black.

 

 

 

 

The giant size of this book (a lectern would be a useful aid to reading!) allows Scarfe’s art to make the fullest dramatic impact, giving his winged horses space to fly and permitting his multi-headed creatures and tempestuous Titans to rage unrestrained.

Disney's HERCULES – The Art of Gerald Scarfe is witness to the willingness of the Disney Studio to, as its founder expressed it, ‘dream and diversify’, to experiment with art just as Walt himself had done with FANTASIA and several other visionary concepts that either made it to screen or were lost along the way. 

 

More than that, this book is a glorious testimony to the breadth and depth of Gerald Scarfe’s artistry: inspiring in its imaginative inspiration, dynamically dramatic in its realisation and, repeatedly, featuring a hint of his wicked wit that is as sharp as his often angular characterisations.

 

Anyone interested in Scarfe, Disney, film, the art of animation or the craft of the caricaturist needs to own this book. I can't put more plainly than that!