Remem­ber­ing Jules Bass, stop-motion pio­neer and cre­ator of Christ­mas wonder

On Tues­day night ear­li­er this week, Jules Bass passed away at a retire­ment home in Rye, New York, at the age of eighty-sev­en. An upstart ad-man who sold Amer­i­ca on the cozi­ness of the Christ­mas sea­son in his main career as ani­ma­tor and film­mak­er, he leaves behind a lega­cy renewed as a mat­ter of tra­di­tion at the end of each year.

Fol­low­ing a Philadel­phia child­hood marred briefly by a life-threat­en­ing case of scar­let fever, a young Jules Bass moved to Man­hat­tan to attend New York Uni­ver­si­ty, and after his grad­u­a­tion, work at an ad agency in the thick of the Mad Men era. He moved on to a posi­tion as copy­writer in the com­mer­cial depart­ment of US tele­vi­sion net­work ABC, where he made the acquain­tance of an art direc­tor named Arthur Rankin, Jr. The ambi­tious young men hit it off, and formed their own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny called Videocraft Inter­na­tion­al in 1960.

They cranked out over one hun­dred episodes of a TV series based on The Wiz­ard of Oz, but the pair drew more inter­est for The New Adven­tures of Pinoc­chio, their first project ren­dered in the stop-motion tech­nique they termed ​“Ani­mag­ic.” Brought to life by a fleet of ani­ma­tors out­sourced in Japan, the visu­al style dis­tinct for its round­ed fig­urines and pow­dery snow­lands got a more vis­i­ble plat­form in Videocraft’s first TV spe­cial, 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

With its kind­ly Burl Ives-voiced nar­ra­tor, cozy vision of win­ter­time fan­ta­sy, and whole­some Chris­t­ian mor­al­iz­ing, their adap­ta­tion of the pop­u­lar sea­son­al stan­dard was a sweep­ing suc­cess, peren­ni­al­ly air­ing on TV for the rest of Bass and Rankin’s lives. The pub­lic demand­ed more, and the com­pa­ny renamed Rankin/​Bass glad­ly gave it to them, erect­ing a cot­tage indus­try of Yule­tide cheer that includ­ed The Lit­tle Drum­mer Boy, Frosty the Snow­man, San­ta Claus Is Comin’ to Town, Jack Frost, and The Year With­out a San­ta Claus.

Gen­er­a­tions of chil­dren latched onto indeli­ble char­ac­ters like the leder­ho­sen-clad grump Burg­er­meis­ter Meis­ter­burg­er, the mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal ven­tril­o­quist Kubla Khan, and the bick­er­ing Snow Miser/​Heat Miser broth­ers, along with the catchy tunes Rankin and Bass wrote for them. While their work is remem­bered chiefly as squeaky-clean fun for the whole fam­i­ly, there’s more fla­vor to their inter­ests than most of the fruit­cake served around Decem­ber; inspired by Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen and the bygone cul­tures of West­ern Europe, they wove Ger­man Expres­sion­ist influ­ence and cut­ting-edge tech­no­log­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion into what the can­ny pro­mot­ers billed as kid stuff.

Though Christ­mas would always be the home and domain of Rankin/​Bass, they expand­ed their reper­toire as the ​’60s rolled on, even­tu­al­ly ven­tur­ing into the mul­ti­plex. Spooky-movie binges dur­ing the lead­up to Hal­loween are incom­plete with­out 1967’s delight­ful Mad Mon­ster Par­ty?, in which a mad sci­en­tist invites all his most vil­lain­ous pals over for a swingin’ soirée (includ­ing a razor-sharp Phyl­lis Diller as the Bride of Franken­stein). Out­side of stop-motion, back in the realm of 2‑D ani­ma­tion, Rankin and Bass com­mand­ed respect for their grown-up fea­ture-length take on The Last Uni­corn in 1982.

Bass stepped away from film­mak­ing in 1987, though he bus­ied him­self with writ­ing in qua­si-retire­ment, pen­ning a series of kids’ books fea­tur­ing a veg­e­tar­i­an drag­on as well as a cou­ple adult-geared paper­back nov­els (one of which became the Sele­na Gomez vehi­cle Monte Car­lo). But his name will remem­bered as syn­ony­mous with the stop-motion form he pop­u­lar­ized, a metonymic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with an entire aes­thet­ic that few artists can claim with such total­i­ty. Every time some­one feels Christ­mas cheer, it’s because they were taught how by Jules Bass.