It’s the Christmas season again and mychildren have already watched our DVD of the 1964 stop motion animation ofRudolf the Red-NosedReindeer (1964) half a dozen times. Inever tire of watching this Christmas special which was something I lookedforward to watching on TV every year when I was a child. The characters have clearly been lovinglybrought to life by the hand of some animator.
As Ireported last year in my post Rankin/Bass Christmas Specials: Made in Japan,Rudolf and many other animated Christmas specials produced by Rankin/Bass wereanimated in Japan. Rudolf is an earlyexample of an international co-production for television. The production, concept, and screenwritingwere all done by Americans. Apart fromthe star, Burl Ives, the voice acting was all done in Canada. The stop motion “Animagic” was subcontactedto Tadahito “Tad” Mochinaga’s MOM Production studios – a place where manyanimators including the great Tadanari Okamoto got their start. Rick Goldschmidt’s The Enchanted World of Rankin/Bass
tantalizingly offered up a few tidbits about MOM Productions, but I could notafford his book about the making of Rudolph. Fortunately, he released The Making of the Rankin/Bass Holiday Classic: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Kindle edition this year. It gives the answers to a lot of questions Ihad about the production, and provides highly detailed testimonies from former MOMProductions employees.
tantalizingly offered up a few tidbits about MOM Productions, but I could notafford his book about the making of Rudolph. Fortunately, he released The Making of the Rankin/Bass Holiday Classic: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Kindle edition this year. It gives the answers to a lot of questions Ihad about the production, and provides highly detailed testimonies from former MOMProductions employees.A few ofthe nuggets of information about the production:
- ArthurRankin supervised the production in Japan while Jules Bass was responsible forthe production outside of Japan. Thismeant that it was rare for people working on Rudolph to see both men together.
- There aretwo conflicting stories about how Rankin discovered Mochinaga. One is that he saw Mochinaga’s Little BlackSambo at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1958 and contactedMochinaga about making TV series The New Adventures of Pinocchio (130x5 minuteepisodes). The other story Rankin tellsis that he was invited to Tokyo in 1958 by a trade delegate called MinoruKawamoto and one of the studios they visited belonged to Mochinaga. (note: date typo amended 26 Dec 2011)
- I had long wonderedabout the role of Kizo Nagashima, who is listed as a director in the credits ofthe Rudolph. I could not find anyevidence of Nagashima as an animator or a director online. Goldschmidt solves this mystery by reportingthat Nagashima “was an elderly gentleman who supervised the business affairs ofthe Tokyo studio. Perhaps due toJapanese traditions of respect, he was given a prominent creative credit. However, the credit was entirely honorary, asTadahito Mochinaga was undeniably in charge of the entire animation process.”
- Mochinagabegan animation in 1938 at Geijutsu Eigasha (芸術映画社 aka GES/ゲス). [Thisisn’t in Goldschmidt’s book but Mochinaga spent much of the war and the yearsfollowing working for an animation studio in China]. When he returned to Japan after the war (c.1953), Mochinaga started up his own studio. He formed MOM Productions in 1960 with many of his old colleagues fromGES in order to make puppet animation for Rankin/Bass.
- Assistantanimation director Hiroshi Tabata recalls that he and Mochinaga took the 10hour sleeper train from Tokyo to Nara to see the famous sika deer in NaraNational Park. The spent two daysobserving the movements of the deer in order to prepare for the animation ofRudolph. Theanimation studios were housed in a building that had previously been used totest engines for fighter planes.
- Ichiro “Pin-chan”Komuro was the puppet maker for Rudolph. He used the wood of the Katsura tree (カツラ/ Cercidiphyllumjaponicum) for Rudolph’s head and torso. The head was carved out to make it lighter and therefore easier tocontrol during animation. The joints ofthe puppets were made of lead and copper wire which were padded with cotton andpolyurethane. The antlers were formedusing polyurethane. Rudolph’s eyelidsand irises were made using finely shaved leather. Rudolph’s exterior was made of thick-piledwhite wool that they dyed themselves. The hooves were made of wood and had 1mm holes drilled in them in orderto affix the hooves to the sets using pins.
- The biggestproblem during production was the fight to keep the puppets and sets fromcollecting dust and dirt. The animatorsall wore white gloves, and the figures were sprayed with a magnetic spray flockto diffuse reflections for the camera. The most difficult sets and puppets to keep clean were the whiteones.
Goldschmidt’sbook is a must-read for fans of stop motion animation and Rudolf the Red-NosedReindeer. Add the Kindle edition to yourholiday reading:
