A 1958 graduate of the UCLA Theater Arts Department, McLaughlin served as head of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Animation Workshop from 1970 until his retirement in 2007.
Dan McLaughlin
AWN was saddened to learn that independent filmmaker and former head of the UCLA Animation Workshop Dan McLaughlin has passed away at the age of 84. According to his son, who is the third-generation bearer of the family name, McLaughlin died in his sleep early in the morning of Tuesday, March 15, 2016 in West Hills, CA.
McLaughlin served as the area head of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s Animation Workshop, considered one of the finest animation programs in the country, from 1970 until his retirement in 2007.
Born in 1932, McLaughlin’s connection to Hollywood began before he could even speak when he played the illegitimate love child of Irene Dunn in Ann Vickers (1933). Thus McLaughlin paid for his own birth, and received one of the first social security cards ever issued. His mother, Annabelle, was a studio hairdresser who worked for many years as Marion Davies’ personal hairdresser alongside stints for other actresses such as Betty Grable. His father, also named Dan McLaughlin, owned an auto body and fender shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.
McLaughlin attended Hollywood High School, where he played football, ran track, and founded the Celts social club and the Latin Club. Following graduation, he served in the Korean War -- where he did not see active combat but was nonetheless stationed on the peninsula -- and upon his return enrolled for a brief stint as a student at Columbia in New York City. There in New York, McLaughlin met his first wife, Mary, and together they had three children, a boy they named Dan, and two girls named Loren and Maura. The family moved shortly thereafter to Los Angeles, where McLaughlin enrolled at UCLA and took his first course in animation.
A 1958 graduate of the UCLA Theater Arts Department (now the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television), McLaughlin began working that same year at the Animation Workshop, founded in 1948 by former Disney animator Bill Shull. When Shull retired in 1970, McLaughlin assumed his post, and in 1971, founded the School’s M.F.A. Animation Program.
As an independent filmmaker, McLaughlin made more than 20 animated films, ranging from the traditional to the experimental, which have earned both national and international recognition. His kinestasis student film God is Dog Spelled Backwards (1967) featured 3,000 years of art in three minutes and was set to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It achieved national fame in June 1968 on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when the imagery was accompanied by composer Mason Williams’ composition Classical Gas. His film Claude (1963) was a winner at the Chicago International Film Festival. Other credits include animation for Sesame Street, the Amnesty International Human Rights Now 1988 world tour, and numerous title sequences for feature films.
McLaughlin published many seminal articles on animation during his career, including Animation and Modernism; Independent Animation in the Land of the Magic Kingdom: Between a Rock and Hollywood; Animation, Aesthetics and the Computer; Robert Mitchell, A Profile; Animation Before Film; and A Short History of Interactive Animation.
McLaughlin was also a pioneer in the fields of computer animation and interactive media. He introduced computer animation to the Workshop in 1968, and interactive animation in 1988; in 1991 he developed AIA, a laser disk multimedia critical analysis system for animation.
McLaughlin has had retrospective screenings and lectured at many conferences, film festivals and universities including Yale, MIT and LMU; and around the world from North of the Arctic circle in Norway, to Jos, Nigeria, where he designed and directed a national animation studio for the Nigerian government.
A member of the ASIFA Hollywood board of directors, McLaughlin also served as a consultant to other schools setting up courses and programs in animation, both traditional and digital. He organized and presented programs in animation both locally and internationally, and was a sponsor of the Animation Workshop’s ANIMATRIX, the only published graduate student journal about animation. In 1992, he was on the steering committee for the first International Animation Teaching Symposium held at Urbino, Italy.
In 1995, McLaughlin was the recipient of ASIFA Hollywood’s Winsor McCay Award, presented at the Annie Awards, for lifetime achievement in animation. Past recipients of the award include Walt Disney, Chuck Jones, Max Fleischer, Walter Lantz, Tex Avery, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
