George Dunning

George Garnett Dunning (1920–1979) was a Canadian filmmaker and animator. He is best known for producing and directing the 1968 film Yellow Submarine. Biography Dunning was born in Toronto and studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design, then worked as a freelance illustrator. In 1943, he became the second artist to be recruited by the National Film Board of Canada's Norman McLaren. Between 1944 and 1950, he co-created ten films, including the award-winning Cadet Rousselle, and developed his skills at animating articulated, painted, metal cut-outs. In 1948, Dunning traveled to Paris and spent a year working for UNESCO under the mentorship of the Czech animator Berthold Bartosch and furthering his experiments with painting on glass. He returned to Canada in 1949, and he and colleague Colin Low took a leave of absence to work on an adaptation of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the production was too ambitious and the film was abandoned). Dunning made one more film for the NFB–Family Tree, which he animated and co-directed with Evelyn Lambart. It won two international awards, and a special Canadian Film Award for "outstanding animation". In 1950, Dunning and colleague Jim MacKay left the NFB to found Toronto's first private animation studio, Graphic Associates, which produced commercials (including the first colour commercial produced in Canada), design work and educational film-strips. It also gave first jobs to budding artists such as Michael Snow, Joyce Wieland and Richard Williams. But the company was not profitable. In 1955, Dunning left for New York; McKay turned Graphic Associates into the successful production company Film Design Ltd. Dunning moved to New York to accept a post with United Productions of America (UPA) and spent a year as an animator on the series The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show. In 1956, UPA sent him to London to manage its office there, but UPA was in financial trouble and the London office was soon shut down. Dunning decided to start his own production company; he had met John Coates, a London producer who was the nephew of film mogul J. Arthur Rank. Dunning needed someone to manage the business side of his company and the two went into partnership, founding TV Cartoons Ltd. in 1957. By 1961, TVC was producing about one hundred commercials a year, but Dunning also made many personal short films noted for their surrealistic atmosphere and Kafkaesque themes.