Shamus Culhane Productions
At the Lantz studio, Culhane began to animate instructional films for the war effort. With the end of hostilities, following a couple of abortive efforts to enter educational filmmaking and children's television programming, he established his own company, Shamus Culhane Productions. Within a short period of time, it became a major force in the creation of animated commercials, and Culhane became known as a pioneer of this new form. Among Culhane's creations were the Ajax Elves and the Muriel "Come up and smoke me sometime" Cigar. With operations on the East and West Coasts, Culhane's company moved into the animation of educational films with the Bell Science series, produced by Frank Capra, utilizing animation by such talents as Bill Hurtz and Bill Baird. For Culhane, Hurtz and Saul Bass devised the opening credits for the feature film Around the World in Eighty Days.

"Wolf speaks to Woody and tells him which way they should go." Storyboard frames from Shamus Culhane's Fairweather Friends (Walter Lanz, 1946), courtesy of Mark Kausler © Walter Lanz Productions

Shamus Culhane Productions collapsed along with virtually every other New York animation studio in the recession of 1959-60. Culhane turned to animating for other companies, most notably on the Out of the Inkwell and Milton the Monster television series for Hal Seeger or on the film The Hat for John and Faith Hubley's Storyboard Productions. From 1966 to 1967, he headed Paramount's animation studio, guiding it through a period of renewed creativity that resulted in such films as My Daddy the Astronaut before studio beancounters stopped animation production.

Later, with Martin Grieve, Culhane created a series of educational movies for children. As the filmmaker later recalled, "This was one of the happiest experiences of my life. I had the freedom to develop stories. I was the producer, director, writer, research person and did some of the layouts. I used every sort of talent I had in the process. This was the beginning of my career as a writer."

Toward the end of his life, Culhane completed two books -- an autobiography Talking Animals and Other People (1986) and the instructional Animation: From Script to Screen (1988). As a writer, lecturer and educator, Culhane hailed technical advances in the medium and became a passionate proponent of independent production and the promotion of animation as a fine art. Although plagued with ill health, Culhane continued to write and draw until his death at his home in New York.