EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 28 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

81 Heinrich Kley Possibly one of the best draughtsman of all time, Kley’s pen and ink drawings would inspire everyone from illustrators to Disney’s animators. His art encompased everything from animals behaving like human beings to industrial demons, as we discover in Diego Cordoba tells us about this artist’s extraordinary career. Although Kley never visited America, his pen drawings would have a huge influence on various American illustrators and animators, especially within the team working for Walt Disney. In the late 1930s, Joe Grant and Albert Hurter, two co-workers of Disney’s, drew his attention to Kley’s drawings, whose potential as a source of inspiration he immediately recognized for his own filmprojects.This was particularly evident in the 1940 animated film ‘Fantasia’, with the dancing alligators and hippopotamuses, among others. Numerous figures and motifs appearing in the scenes from ‘Pastoral’, ‘The Dance of the Hours’ and ‘A Night on Bald Mountain’ were unthinkable without the influence of Kley’s drawings. His influence wasn’t only felt on that particular Disney film alone, but on others as well, as in 1941’s ‘Dumbo’ and 1967’s ‘The Jungle Book’. Disney himself confessed in a television interview in 1964: “Without the wonderful drawings of Henry Kley I could not conduct my art-school classes for my animators.” Moreover, you need look no further than the “doodles” that fantasy artist Frank Frazetta did to see the influence this German artist had on his work as well. FACING PAGE: Sea Monster , oil on canvas, ca. 1920. One of Kley’s more whimsical oil paintings done during the Weimar Republic period. The illustrations he produced during this period were mostly alimentary. BELOW: Das Kränzchen (The Wreath) , pen and ink sketch, ca. 1900s. One of the many sketches from his first book of sketches, Sketchbook 1 , from 1909. In a way his animals behaving like human beings were a great influence on the early Walt Disney cartoons. Kley pretty much chose animals that were the least likely to resemble a human being, such as lizards, frogs, elephants and alligators.