In June 1939, Charlie Thorson broke a five-year contract with Leon Schlesinger's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Studio and moved on to work for Dave and Max Fleischer at their new operation in Miami, Florida. Thorson was only one of many workers lured away from Hollywood to help the Fleischers complete their first animated feature film, Gulliver's Travels. His contribution, however, was immediate and not insignificant. He designed a wacky bird named Twinkletoes and cooked up some comic business so that the character could be shoe-horned, at the last minute, into the finished film.

Self-portrait by Charlie Thorson. Courtesy of Dr. Stephen Thorson.

Thorson, however, was not all that impressed with the movie when it was finally rushed into theaters less than a year later. So he withdrew his name from the credits. It was an odd and uncharacteristic gesture for Thorson.

For the rest of his life, Thorson would fly into a jaw-clenching rage at the mere mention of Walt Disney's name because of the anonymity Walt imposed on his workers. He was especially furious that Disney left his name out of the endless credits for Snow White, evidently because Thorson had quit the studio before the movie was finished. When Thorson ventured into children's book publishing, he was so thirsty for recognition that he often signed every single illustration in his books. As it turns out, Gulliver's Travels would prove to be Thorson's last chance to see his name up on the silver screen. He worked in the animation business from 1935 to 1946, but his contribution to the golden age of animation has gone virtually unrecorded.

The Character Designer
Charlie Thorson was a character designer or, as Schlesinger termed it, a character model man. In the assembly-line method of cartoon production refined by Disney Studios in the early 1930s, and later copied by all its competitors, the position of character designer was of utmost importance.

Combining the talents of a casting director, a costume designer and a make-up artist from live-action movies with the precision of a portrait painter and the imagination of a sculptor, the character designer created distinctive anthropomorphized animals or familiar caricatures that would star in animated movies. Sometimes the design of the characters was determined by studio competitions; several employees would submit drafts of the proposed characters for a story, and the final design would be chosen by formal or informal voting. Usually the character designer simply consulted the animation supervisors or directors or took his cue from notes or rough sketches.

After the look of the cast of characters was determined, it was the character designer's job to provide model sheets or action sheets for the film's animators and in-betweeners. These model sheets showed the characters in the film's significant poses and provided front-views, side-views, and back-views, if necessary. Model sheets also delineated the underlying geometries of circles and lines that defined a character's size and shape and proportions. They could also include close-ups and written instructions for the precise details of costume and expression.

With so many different people involved in drawing as many as 5,000 cels for each seven minute cartoon, the character designer had to draw enough precise reference points so that even the clumsiest and least observant artists could work together. Along with the storyboard, a series of vivid, careful model sheets provide the indispensable blueprints behind each animated cartoon, even today. For the kind of personality animation that Disney emphasized, and especially at studios trying to create animation stars to compete with the likes of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto, the character designer took on a special importance. As with John Wayne or Shirley Temple, the look of a cartoon character was central to the success of a film.