“Animation Pioneer” Out Now

A new autobiography called “Animation Pioneer”,  which has been written by David Dodd Hand, has been released this week.

Here is the official description for this book:

Like Walt Disney, David Hand started as an animator. Also like Walt Disney, he didn’t stay an animator for long. Hand rose as high in the Disney studio as he could without the last name of Disney. And then he left, his life as an animation pioneer just begun.

In 1930, Walt Disney hired David Hand as an animator, one of a handful of employees at the fledgling Disney studio. Before long, Walt recognized that Hand’s talents were not so much in creating animation, but in directing animated shorts and features. So he promoted him, and then gave him the plummest assignment of all: directing the film that would either make or break the studio: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Working for Walt, as a perennial number-two man, held no appeal for Hand, and so when wealthy Englishman J. Arthur Rank invited him to launch an animation industry in England, he took the offer, likely with the intent to duplicate there what Walt had created in America.

David Hand tells his own story in Animation Pioneer, his candid, entertaining autobiography, with additional biographical material by his son, former Imagineer David Hale Hand. Starting with his wild youth in New Jersey and his exploits in New York during the 1920s, Hand traces his life in animation, from the J.R. Bray Studio and Max Fleischer, to Walt Disney and beyond. It’s a story every animation fan will enjoy.

You can purchase this book now from Amazon on Paperback.