(Source: www.thestar.com)
Ryan Larkin, the troubled animator whose story became an Oscar-winning short, died Wednesday in St-Hyacinthe, Quebec. He was 63.
Larkin was born July 31, 1943 in Montreal. He received his initial training at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts art school, where he studied under Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer. In 1963, at the age of 19, he joined the National Film Board of Canada as an animator. His abilities were quickly recognized by NFB animation guru Norman McLaren who gave Larkin the resources to create his first short, Syrinx, in 1965.
"He had one of the most amazing natural instincts for depicting movement that I have ever seen,” observed David Verrall, the executive producer at the NFB's english studio.
“The works that he created here in his the at time at the NFB are, I think, considered still to this day important references for the art of animating.”
Larkin quickly followed Syrinx up with 1966's Citérama (Cityscapes), but it was 1969's En Marchant (Walking) that catapulted Larkin into the international spotlight. Nominated for an Oscar, and winning at the Cracow Film Festival, the short made Larkin an animation celebrity. He was profiled in Time magazine and the Montreal Gazette called him the Frank Zappa or George Harrison of animation."
His next film, 1972's Street Musique, kept him in the spotlight when it won the Grand Prix at the Melbourne International Film Festival. However, that would also mark the beginning of a slow decline as Larkin's well of inspiration dried up.
The product of a dysfunctional childhood (his father was an abusive alcoholic), Larkin eventually succumbed to alcohol and cocaine addiction. By 1978, he was no longer working at the NFB and he ended up homeless, begging for change in front of Schwartz's Deli in Montreal.
In 2004, a friend and fellow animator named Chris Landreth made a 14-minute CGI documentary of Larkin's life, named Ryan. The piece won numerous international awards (including the Oscar for Best Animated Short) and put Larkin back in the spotlight.
Kicking his various dependencies, Larkin had slowly rediscovered his animation skills, animating three 5-second bumpers for MTV Canada. He laboriously hand-drew every single frame of the bumpers, which showed the station identification between commercial breaks.
“It’s a poetic statement that I was trying to develop (with the bumpers)," he said in an interview. "And I think I’ve succeeded too.”
With his manager, musician Laurie Gordon, Larkin was also working on a new animated short, Spare Change, about his life on the streets.
“He was not only an artistic inspiration but he was very charming — he captivated a room; he was always the centre of attention,” Gordon said about him. “He just had that magnetism. He really had something; he had the `it’ factor. He could have been a rock ’n’ roll singer.”
