Gene Deitch.

This is the final excerpt from Gene Deitch’s How to Succeed in Animation (Don’t Let a Little Thing Like Failure Stop You!).

Well, no one is perfect.

Hundreds of happy messages have come to me since the time AWN began publishing this book online, and only one piece of hate mail. In that one the anonymous (natch) writer ranted in heavily bleepable language — that ALL of my films sucked, and wished I would promptly die.

Well, no one is perfect. I don’t think that I’ve achieved 100% rotten filmmaking, and I’m happy to say that all the other writers felt that I do have something positive to say about animation. I thank you all for your 99.9% praiseful letters.

Most of the writers wanted to know three things:

1. How did I get started.

2. What animation schools should they go to.

3. How can they get started. (i.e., get a job)

After my earliest smelly beginnings as a cartoonist, as delicately described in Chapter 10, “My Talent Discovered,” I did go on to drawing on actual paper. Growing up in Hollywood, I soon came into the thrall of the local animation studios, and developed movie mania. My parents could not afford to buy me what I yearned for, a real motor driven 16mm movie projector, so I started out at the age of eight by making my own projector out of a shoebox.

This is a photo of it; a reconstruction of my original handmade projector. A small mirror was inserted inside, behind the clear glass light bulb, in hopes of increasing its intensity. And ordinary magnifying glass was glued to the end of a cardboard toilet paper tube, which could be moved in an out in an effort to focus on a white bedsheet, pinned to my bedroom wall. Thus I obtained a dim projected image of colored ink drawings I made on a strip of what we called “onion-skin” paper, slowly drawn through a slot in the box by that handle, rescued from one of my mother’s flour sifters.

Well, you know there were no ready-made high-tech plastic toys available in the ancient times of my childhood. But my lucky day arrived when my mother took me to downtown L.A. Christmas shopping at The May Company. In their toyland, I spotted a device that made me wet my little pants all over again.

It was this pressed metal, green crackle enamel finished wonder toy that brought me into the world of animation! For no apparent reason, it had a decal of a little dark-skinned boy riding on an elephant, and the name Kim. It was, I supposed, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, a book I had actually read. So this became my “Kim Projector,” and in fact, my “Rosebud!” Many years later, when my first toy projector was long lost but not forgotten, I named my first son Kim. I suppose he is the only person in the world named after a cartoon projector! Today, Kim Deitch is a famous cartoonist himself, and bears the name Kim with pride.