Genius, Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth

Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell bring their ambitious 3 volume biographical tribute to Alex Toth to a triumphant conclusion with “Genius, Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth,” a treasure trove of illustrations and insight into the work of this master storyteller. IDW publishing has given lovers of comics and animation a classic work that this reviewer, and I’m sure countless others will cherish for years to come!

As the decade of the 1960s began the years of the lush animated shorts and feature films of the Walt Disney Studio and Warner Brothers were ending. The American animation industry was turning to the growing world of television to sustain itself. A major challenge in providing cartoons to this rapidly expanding new medium was the demand of producing huge amounts of animation at affordable cost for the TV audience.

Veteran animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera would take up the challenge and find great success in creating what has come to be called “limited animation” cartoons with appealing characters for television. This style of animation “reduced the number of drawings required to create a cartoon by simplifying character designs and background elements as well as reusing certain poses and movement sequences.” From this process came such Hanna-Barbera funny animal characters as Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Pixie and Dixie, and Yogi Bear. After producing a plethora of popular comedic cartoons, the Hanna-Barbera Studio chose to move in a different direction and create an animated adventure show for prime time television. From this decision came the 1964 cartoon classic, “Jonny Quest,” created by comic artist Doug Wildey, perhaps Hanna-Barbera’s “crowning achievement” in television animation. Inspired in part by the success of “Jonny Quest,” the Hanna-Barbera Studio decided to produce more adventure oriented shows.

Thankfully…enter Alex Toth.

An especially gifted artist, Mr. Toth (1928-2006) had worked in and out of the comic industry since he was a teenager when his career brought him into the world of television animation with the “Space Angel” adventure series in 1962. Impressed with Mr. Toth’s work as art director on that show, he was hired by Hanna-Barbera, where some of his first work for the studio would be on the “Jonny Quest” series, in which Mr. Toth contributed character, prop and scenic designs for the last 5 episodes of the 26 episode series. For animation fans a fondly remembered era of cartoon adventure was about to begin under the guiding vision of this remarkable artist.

“Genius, Animated” is a wonderful artbook showcasing the immense wealth of drawings Mr. Toth created for the cartoon medium over the decades, from the 1960s to his last animated cartoon work for the 65 episode series, “Bionic 6,” which premiered in 1987. While the tome features biographical text on Mr. Toth’s years in the animation industry, the book is truly an art book with the artist’s work on full display. Page after page of character designs, model sheets, animation layouts, extended storyboard sequences…it’s like the Lost Art of the Covenant for television animation! For those who love such Hanna-Barbera cartoons as “Space Ghost and Dino Boy,” “The Herculoids,” “Birdman and the Galaxy Trio,” “Moby Dick and the Mighty Mightor,” “Shazzan,” “Josie and the Pussycats,” Sealab 2020,” as well as Mr. Toth’s versions of superhero shows, “Fantastic Four” and the “Superfriends; and including his contributions to the “Thundarr the Barbarian” SF/Fantasy adventure series created by Rudy-Spears Productions, plus much, much more…this book will delight with each turn of its over 330 pages.

A special section of this book features artwork Mr. Toth produced for animation projects that never saw the light of day. In these series of pages, called “Presentation Art,” readers will find full color and black and white illustrations for such unrealized concepts as “The Thief of Bagdad,” “Amazon Patrol,” Merlin the Magician,” “Dial H for Heroes (based on a DC Comics series),” “Lupezoids,” and the “Revenge of the Golden Sphinx,” to name a few in the collection.

In 1981, Abbeville Press published master animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston’s seminal book,”DISNEY ANIMATION. THE ILLUSION OF LIFE”. The illusion that classic book’s title refers to is the magic animators create in their ability to bring about the semblance of life through their drawings. The greatest achievement in animation is giving life to a character born in the imagination of an artist and given form on the drawing board. In the collaborative creative process of modern animation, the character given physicality by an artist is then given voice by an actor than finally brought to seeming life by the patient process of multiple drawings created to breathe the “illusion of life” into that character. The genius of Alex Toth was his innate ability to give life to a character just by his artistic talent. Combined with his lifelong personal pursuit of creating purity of storytelling in his art, Mr. Toth provided an ideal template for the creation of character animation. Once an animator was given a character design by Mr. Toth, half the animated battle was over because he imbued the illustrated character with such life, such character on the page the only challenge remained was to retain that Toth inspired sense of character and semblance of life in the final animated cartoon. The result are beloved cartoons still cherished decades after they first aired on television.

“Genius, Animated: The Cartoon Art of Alex Toth” is a hardbound book containing the lasting legacy of an amazing comic and animation storyteller. This reviewer gives it my very highest recommendation.

Satisfeito com o pedido. Gosto muito dos desemhos do Alex Toth. Valeu a pena comprar.

Well after a LONG WAIT I finally have all 3 Alex Toth Genius Books!! After GENIUS ILLUSTRATED had so many delays before I got it at Barnes and Noble I am glad that GENIUS ANIMATED had less delay problems, but it was STILL hard to wait! I was so glad to get the email telling me that the book shipped out on May 21, 2014 and was thrilled to get it on the 23rd!! But wait a minute, there is no slipcase!! After a LONG wait to get all 3 books I was told by one of the authors on the amazon.com website that when you order the 3rd book you would get the slipcase! I,m hoping that the cases will eventually be sent to the buyers of the 3rd book soon! UPDATE:Good news and Bad news! I just pre-ordered the slipcase from IDW shop online, but I’ll have to wait till Oct 2014 for the slipcase to ship out to my address! So after all the waiting to get all 3 books we’ll have to wait a few more months for the slipcase that we were told would automatically come with the 3rd book!!! Oh well! So go to IDW store online to pre- order your Alex Toth Slipcase! It cost me $20.00 for the case plus $18.79 for ground shipping which totaled $38.79.

UPDATE: I have the slipcase at last!! After waiting until late Nov the slipcase was delivered to my house on Nov 26, 2014 just before Thanksgiving! It was originally supposed to come on the late Oct but was changed to Nov near the last week. The slipcase is a little snug but otherwise it’s a fine slipcase! The black and white drawings by Toth look good on both sides of the case and Space Ghost is handsome on the binder! Is it worth the wait? Well, I wanted the complete set so I got it! I think my case is more attactive then the one that just has Alex Toth’s self portrait!

Anyway GENIUS ANIMATED is one cool artbook that completes the picture on Alex Toth’s career or at least comes as close to it as any books can possibly do! One thing I like about this book is that it is proof possitive that there was more to Hanna Barberra then SCOOBY DOO cartoons! I know SCOOBY has his fans, but to me those cartoons do not hold up and were HB’s answer to Action for Children’s Television! Starring bland teenagers and a silly dog they became a formula that HB studios would repeat adnauseum over the years with such clones as GOOBER AND THE GHOST CHASERS, JABBERJAW( bland teenagers and a silly shark), SPEED BUGGY(bland teenagers and a silly talking car) and many more!

Fortunatly this book shows off artwork by Toth that mostly shows off my favorites of the 1960’s action adventure cartoons by HB with great model sheets, colour marker earlysketches, and storyboard sketches that show Toth’s ability to visually take the script and depict it in great drawings with clear camera angles for the characters and great staging! Look at the story sketches for DINO BOY IN THE LOST VALLEY episode: The Sacrifice on pages 46 to 61! I just watched that cartoon again with the 1960s SPACE GHOST a few days ago! It has good suspense as caveman Ugh was tied up waiting to meet his fate at the hands of the high priest whose gold hawk statue would have run down the caveman if it were not for brave Dino boy! The cartoon with it’s threat of sacrifice on the alter, child endangerment and genuine menace would surely tick off Peggy Charren and her band of unmerry censors!

It’s because of these people that SUPERFRIENDS in the 1970s is a bland superhero cartoon series! Notice that the title is SUPER “FRIENDS” not SUPER “HEROES”! The FRIENDS is there to assure parents that these super guys won’t do any violence like punching the bad guys, nor will the villains strike back at our “friends”! Peggy Charren was one nemesis that the Super”friends” were NOT able to defeat! It was up to Bruce W. Timm to make the Justice league “heroic” in his JUSTICE LEAGUE cartoons in the 1990s! Toth’s designs on the classic superheroes are great though! My favorites that I have on DVD from the sixties are the 1960s JONNY QUEST, SPACE GHOST AND DINO BOY, BIRDMAN AND THE GALAXY TRIO, MOBY DICK AND MIGHTY MIGHTOR, HERCULOIDS, SHAZZAN and YOUNG SAMSON! Check out Toth’s drawing of the Black Widow villainess for the Space Ghost episode “The Web” on page 35 before it was inked! his character model designs are so dynamic and expressive that must have been inspiring for the animaters! Toth preferred the thick to thin inking of the 1960s JONNY QUEST episodes over the later zerox outlines of later cartoons.See Toth’s model sheets on JONNY QUEST on pages 18 to 21 for ” The Quetong Missile Mystery”! The 1960s JONNY QUEST is full of action, dramatic tension and suspense, in other words EVERYTHING that Action for Children’s Television HATES!! I’m glad my DVD RAM recorder is able to both play back and record the DVD-R format so I can playback the Warner Archive DVDs of these titles!

Yeah Alex Toth made it tough on the clean up artists for the animation drawings! Look at pages 30 to 33 to see how refined the drawings of Jan and Jace look before cell paint was added! The pencil lines had to be clean for the xerox to make good looking copies onto the cells while hand inking would not trace any rough lines! Sometimes a shortcut can cause problems that the earlier way did not have. Colour sketches in marker by Toth of MOBY DICK with companions Tom and Tub show their playfulness and affection for their whale friend! Colour sketches of SHAZZAN along with black and white model sheets reveal a mean looking Shazzan before the final design shows him looking jolly and friendly! The model sheets with their desciptive details on the measurements of character height and props are just fasinating to look at! Both the model sheets of the “Khan of the North Wind” and “Forest of Fear” episodes of SHAZZAN are fun to look at especially after I watch the episodes. Bruce W. Timm said that he looked at many Alex Toth model sheets when he was coming up with the look for BATMAN the animated series. One can see why he looked at Toth for inspiration!

Alex’s colour sketches for THE HERCULOIDS on pages 97 to 101 are so cool one can wish that this colour marker look would reach the screen instead of the vinal paint cell look! Not bad at all for a guy who admitted to having a colour blindness problem! I can relate to that since I have red green colour blindness that I have had to adapt to! Tundro, the many legged rhinosaurus might not have made it to the screen if an armoured giant armadillo drawn by Toth was chosen to be with Zandor instead!

Pages 108 to 109 show story sketches introducing the “Temple of Trax” episode of HERCULOIDS.These story sketches were drawn by his friend and colleague Doug Wildey who was the top designer of the 1960s JONNY QUEST! James Romberger, who wrote a critical, unflattering review of GENIUS ANIMATED, pointed that out. Both Doug Wildey and Alex Toth names are in the end credits of Ruby Spears’ action adventure 1980-81 cartoon series THUNDARR THE BARBARIAN! Model sheets of THUNDARR by TOTH are on pages 292 to 294. So they had a long working relationship! While it would have been better if the authors pointed out that this storyboard was by Wildey and not Toth I’m still glad they included it in this book.

Model sheets of THE THREE MUSKETEERS along with Toth story sketches on pages 133 to 141 show how detailed and informative Alex could be on the subject of fencing. HB animator Robert Alvarez said there just wasn’t the time for all that fencing to be animated on a tight saturday morning schedule! Not to mention the censorship of Action for Chidrens Television! So Alex Toth had a reason to be so angry and frustrated with the industry!! Finally the pages on Toth’s presentation art on projects that never got off the ground in full colour marker are wondrous to behold! Such shows as AMAZON PATROL that looked like it combined DAKTARI with weird sci fi and ATTACK OF THE SPACE with an Errol Flyn like hero in outer space do stimulate the imagination!

The funniest drawing has to be of a super hero called FARRAH FANTASTIC with Farrah Fawsett as the costumed heroine with REALLY BIG HAIR! Colour drawings of DIAL H FOR HEROES showing teenagers summoning super heroes from their wrist bands looks a lot more fun then any SCOOBY DOO episode! Other artwork reminds me of AMAZING STORIES sci fi covers! If only the networks showed more support for ideas like this! Sigh! I also like the colour presentation pictures by Toth of early rendorings of the Butler famlily in THE VALLEY OF THE DINOSAURS! I can feel the appealing aspects of this family surviving in a prehistoric valley that appeared in the cartoon on my DVD-R discs! If you have ordered this cool book but not the earlier two I recommend you get the previous 2, GENIUS ISOLATED AND GENIUS ILLUSTRATED to get the complete story on Alex Toth! The last book makes the 2 previous books feel fully complete! Highly recommended! I just uploaded a video I made of this book to give a better idea of it’s quality! I wish Amazon.com would allow for a larger file size then 100 MB! How about 120 MB?!

My childhood of Saturday Morning cartoons designed by perhaps the greatest animation designer of all time. Toth initially thought all this work was trash, but we all knew it was a highpoint in superhero design and simplicity. Any comics creator or reader has to add this book to their library.