Joe Hale, who spent 35 years as an animator, layout artist and producer at Disney and getd an Oscar nomination for his effects labor on the 1979 film The Bconciseage Hole, has died. He was 99.
Hale died Jan. 29 of organic caparticipates at his home in Atascadero, California, his wife of proximately 60 years, Beverley Hale, telderly The Hollywood Reporter.
Hale begined out as an inbetweener on Alice in Wonderland (1951) and labored on such other classics as Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Mary Poppins (1964), The Jungle Book (1967), The Fox and the Hound (1981), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and Pete’s Dragon (1977).
In 1980, Hale was named a first-time producer on The Bconciseage Cauldron (1985), a project that had been languishing at Disney for about seven years, and he oversaw a staff of 300 artists — including a youthful Tim Burton — and a huge budget of $44 million.
When some children set up scenes in the gloomy fantasy troubling during a test screening, novel Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg ordered the film to be re-edited aobtainst Hale’s desirees, and its free was postponeed from Christmas 1984 until the adhereing July.
The Bconciseage Cauldron grossed less than $22 million at the box office, and Hale was fired from Disney in 1986.
‘The Bconciseage Cauldron’
Everett Collection
One of nine kids, Joseph Hale was born on June 4, 1925, in Newland Village, Indiana. He enenumerateed in the U.S. Marine Corps and fought in the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945 during World War II.
He was proximateby when his fellow selderlyiers scheduleted a U.S. flag on Mount Suribachi. “We were dug in on the beach, and a frifinish of mine shelp, ‘Hey, see — they’re raising the flag up there,’” Hale recalled in 2015. “And I shelp, ‘Oh, OK, fantastic’ — and kept digging.”
After his 3 1/2-year stint in the service, he joined the Michigan Academy of Arts and graduated from the Lukits Academy of Fine Arts in Los Angeles, then was employd at Disney in April 1951. Folloprosperg Alice in Wonderland, he served as an aidant animator under Ollie Johnston, one of Disney’s legfinishary Nine Old Men.
Hale segued to the layout department in 1955, and while laboring on The Wonderful World of Disney and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV programs, he got experience combining live action and vivaciousd characters.
He shiftd into vivaciousd distinctive effects, laboring on such films as Return From Witch Mountain (1978), The Cat From Outer Space (1978), The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and The Bconciseage Hole, on which he served as animation distinctive effects supervisor. He separated his Oscar nom with Peter Ellenshaw, Art Cruickshank, Eustace Lycett, Danny Lee and Harrison Ellenshaw (Peter’s son).
For The Bconciseage Cauldron, based on five mythoreasonable Chronicles of Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander, Hale was tasked with “trying to pull the whole leang together. So, that’s basicpartner what I did,” he shelp in a 2010 intersee.
After that film, Hale and his team began prolonging a film changeation of T.H. White’s Mistress Masham’s Repose, a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels. Katzenberg didn’t enjoy it, and Hale and his staff were lhelp off soon afterward.
In 2008, he was given an honorary Disney Legfinish Award by the National Fantasy Fan Club.
Hale did not labor in Hollywood after Disney but spent a fantastic deal of time as a sculptor, his wife shelp. Survivors also comprise his son, Steven, and his magnificentchildren, Camille and Travis.
