Boy, this one is sad: Joe Ranft, part of the creative team at the computer animation film company Pixar, died yesterday in a horrific accident (he was a passenger in a car that went off a Southern California cliff into the ocean). He was only 45.<\/p>\n
Most people have probably never heard of Ranft unless they’re major animation buffs, but he was a big-time force behind four of Pixar’s amazing raft of hits — Toy Story<\/i> and its sequel, A Bug’s Life<\/i>, and Monsters, Inc.<\/i> all benefited from his writing talents. He also provided character voices for several other Pixar films, most notably Heimlich, the overweight and food-obsessed caterpillar, in A Bug’s Life<\/i>. If you’ve watched the DVD supplements on any of those films, you’ll likely recognize his face.<\/p>\n
In addition, a check of his filmography<\/a> reveals that he had a hand in several other significant animated films of recent years, including Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas<\/i>, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast<\/i> and The Lion King<\/i>, and the film that, as much as anything, is responsible for the modern renaissance of film animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?<\/i>. I myself am not a big fan of animated movies, but looking over this list I realize that I am<\/i> a fan of most everything Joe Ranft worked on. What a bummer…<\/p>\n If you’re interested in reading more, The Hollywood Reporter<\/i> obituary is here<\/a>, and the blog Cartoon Brew has remembrances and links to other relevant material here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Boy, this one is sad: Joe Ranft, part of the creative team at the computer animation film company Pixar, died yesterday in a horrific accident (he was a passenger in a car that went off a Southern California cliff into the ocean). He was only 45. Most people have probably never heard of Ranft unless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}