The animation community is reeling from the news of the passing of Oscar-winning director Mark Gustafson of a heart attack on Thursday. The much-loved 64-year-old animation veteran is best known for directing last year’s Oscar-winning feature Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
Del Toro paid tribute to his friend and animation collaborator shortly after the news was reported.
“He leaves behind a Titanic legacy of animation that goes back to the very origins of Claymation and that shaped the career and craft of countless animators,” wrote del Toro. “He leaves friends and colleagues and a historic filmography. Prayers and thoughts go to his beloved wife, Jennifer. They say, “Never meet your heroes …” I disagree. You cannot be disappointed by someone being human … I am as glad to have met Mark, the human as I was honored to have met the artist. As I said, I admired him before I met him. I loved having had the chance to share time and space with him during the highs and the lows. Always and for ever.”
The Portland-born animator began his career at Will Vinton’s Studio when he was only 20 years old. “When I got that job and I was just sweeping floors and running errands, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve made it! This is it,” he said in an interview with the Academy’s A.Frame website. “And then you work there and you wind up helping somebody do something, and you do a decent job at that, so they see you differently. Like, ‘Oh, you can sculpt!’ Or, ‘You can help us build armatures. Then they would move me up into that and I was like, ‘I’ve made it, now I’m sculpting! This is great. I know what my career is.’ It just marches along and you just keep getting different things and, all of a sudden, I found myself animating, and then, directing.”
During the ‘80s, Gustafson worked as a claymator on acclaimed features such as The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985) and Return to Oz. Claymation Christmas (1987). He was the lead animator on the 1988 Emmy-nominated Meet the Raisins! (features the famous California raisins). Gustafson won an Emmy for the 1992 stop-motion special, Claymation Easter.
In 1994, he received much acclaim for his innovative Annie Award-nominated short Mr. Resistor, which became part of the popular International Tournee of Animation anthology. He also wrote and directed the sequel to the short The Bride of Resistor which was released in 1997. Then, in 1999, he directed episodes of Eddie Murphy’s stop-motion FOX series The PJs.
He was the animation director on Wes Anderson’s Oscar-nominated 2009 feature Fantastic Mr. Fox and head of animation on A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas (2011).
Gustafson had been working on a new animated series called Milepost 88 with ShadowMachine, the company co-founded by Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio producers Alex Bulkley and Corey Campodonico. “In addition to being an absolute legend in stop-motion animation, Mark Gustafson is one of the greatest storytellers working in cinema today,” Bulkley told Deadline when the project was announced.
Gustafson was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen’s movie, and often cited “Jason and the Argonauts” as an all-time favorite. In interviews, he always expressed a sense of wonder and admiration for the magic of stop-motion animation. Discussing the making of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, he told The Oregonian, “We’re not just proud of the movie, I think we’re proud of the process. This was the most fun and the most challenging thing that I’ve ever worked on. It was a joy every day to work on it. It’s a really fun process, that’s why I’ve done it my whole life! It’s like playing with toys — very expensive toys — with all your friends. And five years later, you’ve got a movie.”
Our condolences go to Gustafson’s wife Jennifer, and all his family, friends and colleagues.
You can watch an early 1996 interview with Gustafson below:
