ASIFA Hall of Famer Bill Littlejohn (center) poses with June Foray (counterclockwise) Antran Manoogian and Tom Sito. Courtesy of www.asifa-hollywood.org.

When thinking of animation artists in Hollywood's Golden Age, our image is of a nine-to-five studio employee who stayed his entire career at one dream factory. When thinking of Frank Thomas, one thinks of Disney, and Chuck Jones is forever associated with Warner Bros. But even in that more innocent age, life was never that black and white. The career of William Littlejohn is a case in point. Bill was an animator's animator who worked at MGM, Walter Lantz, Bill Melendez and John Hubley's, yet still had time for alternate careers as a test pilot, engineer, progressive labor leader and mechanic.

Tom Sito: What was your early life like?

Bill Littlejohn: I was born in 1914 in Newark, New Jersey. My father was an engineer for Pitney/Bowes. He pioneered the combining of an adding machine with a typewriter, which became a forerunner of the modern computer. Dad took us on business trips and I recall seeing my first movie -- D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation -- in Liege, Belgium. The first cartoon I saw was a Felix the Cat in Jersey, projected on a tacked-up bed sheet on a hand-crank projector with a kerosene lamp.

TS: You started at the Van Beuren Studio in 1934. What made you choose animation?

BL: (Laughs) It was the Depression and I needed to eat! My aunt was a cameraperson at Van Beuren across from Max Fleischer's. Exposure sheets didn't really come into use until sound pictures. On the silents at Van Beuren, many times they left it up to the cameraperson how long to hold a scene, or how many times to run a cycle, in effect letting them direct. My aunt knew John Foster, the director there, and I started as a cel washer on the Tom & Jerry series [not the famous MGM cat-and-mouse team]. One of my first jobs was to hand out cels to the inkers. They were so slippery in their tissue separators that when I first was handed a stack, I immediately let them drop all over the floor! Soon I was inking, then doing inbetweens, assisting, then animating. I saw the first doings of the union there [in 1935], but I kept my nose clean because many guys were getting in trouble and getting blacklisted.

Animators walk the picket line during the 1941 Disney strike.

TS: When Van Bueren closed its doors in 1936, you left the business for awhile?

BL: I still was undecided in my career and I wanted to fly planes. So I moved out to Los Angeles and completed a degree in aeronautical engineering. I began work at Lockheed, but the people there were so boring! They would talk all night about the qualities of a rivet. I took a job animating at the MGM [animation] studio, because the money was better and it was close to Culver Airport, where I could get my pilot's license.

TS: You animated on the shorts of famed cartoonist Milt Gross. On Jitterbug Follies (1938), you animated the two dancing penguins.

BL: Milt Gross was a great experience, liberating. Instead of all those tight inbetweens, his style was loose, no straight lines. The other animators looked at his designs for Count Screwloose and J.R. the Wonder Dog and doubted they could be animated because of their loose nature. So I took them home that night and animated a scene. When Milt saw it the next day, he was thrilled. "Thank you!" he exclaimed and went to show the other artists. Fred Quimby and the MGM brass never liked Milt Gross's cartoons and fired him. They thought his brand of humor was too crude for a classy operation like MGM, but the animators loved doing them.