Chuck Menville

Chuck Menville (April 17, 1940 – June 15, 1992) was an American animator and writer for television. His credits included Batman: The Animated Series, Land of the Lost, The Real Ghostbusters, The Smurfs, Star Trek: The Animated Series, and Tiny Toon Adventures. Pixilation: career in 1960s and 1970s Menville was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19 with aspirations of becoming an animator. There, he got a job with Walt Disney Productions and served as an assistant on the 1967 film The Jungle Book. Unhappy with the climate at Disney, Menville soon branched out into writing, and began a long working partnership with his friend Len Janson. During the mid-1960s, Menville and Janson co-produced a series of short live-action films, among them the Academy Award-nominated Stop Look and Listen, an innovative stop-motion pixilation experiment in which the main characters "drive" down city streets in invisible cars. Disney and other Hollywood studios saw little use for the technique, and so the pixilation technique became largely forgotten after McLaren moved on to using other animation techniques for later films. But Menville and Janson revived the all-but-forgotten technique, introducing it to a new generation.