Gerald Potterton Biography
Gerald Potterton was born in London in 1931, a student at Hammersmith Art School, he emigrated to Canada in 1954 to work alongside the animation pioneers NFB. He created animation for NFB films in the 1950s before directing his classic shorts, including the Stephen Leacock adaptation My Financial Career (1962) and Christmas Cracker (1963, co-directed with Norman McLaren, Jeff Hale and Grant Munro), both nominated for Academy Awards. Gerald also made his mark in live-action comedy with The Ride (1963) and the award-winning wordless film The Railrodder (1965), starring the great Buster Keaton in one of his last film roles.
Gerald returned to England to work on the Beatles' animated film Yellow Submarine (1968), followed by a collaboration with Harold Pinter on the groundbreaking NBC television special Pinter People, during which he began a lifelong friendship and collaboration life with actor Donald Pleasence. Returning to Canada, he formed Potterton Productions, a prolific independent production company for film and television projects, including his Oscar Wilde adaptation The Selfish Giant (1972), an animated short which earned him his third Academy Award nomination Oscar.
Gerald directed the cult animated classic Heavy Metal (1981) for Columbia Pictures, supervising the work of over 65 animators in Canada, England and the United States. He also collaborated again with the NFB on its second Leacock adaptation, The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones (1983) and co-created the animated children's series Smoggies (1987–1990). In later years, he took up painting and was known for his historically accurate aviation paintings and stunning skies. He has remained active and prolific into the 21st century, continuing to develop film and television projects, as well as pursuing other artistic endeavors from his farm in Knowlton, Quebec. In 2020 he wrote and illustrated a popular children's book about Joseph-Armand Bombardier, L'homme des neiges, published by Éditions Québec Amérique.
A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Gerald was selected by the World Animation Celebration in 1998 as one of the "Ten Men Who Shook the World of Animation." There have been more than a dozen retrospectives and honors for his work in recent years, including the Ottawa Animation Film Festival (1994) and the Seattle Film Festival (1997), as well as in India (2000).
