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Animation legend Floyd Norman to receive honorary Oscar
He is best known as a Disney animator, but he also worked on many Hanna-Barbera classics!
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that Floyd Norman will receive an Honorary Oscar. Norman is an animator, writer, and cartoonist, but he is best known as a Disney legend, beginning as Disney's first African American animator as an in-betweener on Sleeping Beauty in 1957. He was then drafted and, after his service, returned to Disney to work on One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone before Walt Disney promoted him to the story department, where he worked on The Jungle Book.
Norman left the studio after Disney died in 1966 and cofounded Vignette Films with Leo Sullivan, where they produced animated segments for Sesame Street, the television special of Hey, Hey, Hey, It's Fat Albert!, and animated documentaries about black history. In the 1970's, Norman began working at Hanna-Barbera, animating on shows like Josie and the Pussycats, Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics, Yogi's Space Race, The Smurfs, Super Friends, and many more. He also animated several direct-to-video Hanna-Barbera movies, including A Flintstones Christmas Carol.
Working as an animator, storyboard artist, layout artist, and character designer, Hanna and Barbera saw the same thing Walt Disney saw in Norman: his excellent storytelling and writing abilities. They asked Norman to become a story director first on The Kwicky Koala Show, but then on a significantly larger series, The Smurfs. Norman was the story director on 112 episodes of The Smurfs, joining the series team in season 6. In an interview with The Funtastic World of Hanna & Barbera with Greg Ehrbar, Norman fondly remembered his time at Hanna-Barbera, saying, "I think I probably stayed at Hanna-Barbera for seven years, going from show to show to show, having a great time and doing the kind of work that was totally different from Disney. For a Disney film, you're on it for years, and Hanna-Barbera, you would be lucky if you were on a film for a couple of weeks. That's how fast we did it."
After Hanna-Barbera, Norman returned to Disney and continued animating classics like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mulan, and also worked with Pixar on Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. After an impressive and extensive animated career and ten years of serving on the Academy's education and outreach committee, Norman will receive his Honorary Oscar at the Governor's Ball on November 15.
