Ballad of a Thin Man: Sinners, Saints and Ryan Larkin
That’s right kids, not one, but two news books coming out this Fall.
Here’s the blurb for Ballad, which is part of an unofficial trilogy of books that also includes: Stole This From a Hockey Card (2005) and The Animation Pimp (2007).
Here’s the cover pic (done by Theodore Ushev and his partner, Svetla. Ushev also provided about 25 illustrations for the inside of the book)
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In 1962, at the age of 19 and with no animation experience, art school graduate Ryan Larkin got a job at the National Film Board of Canada, where he became a protegé of legendary animator Norman McLaren. In the space of five years, he made three acclaimed short films, culminating with the Academy Award-nominated “Walking,” one of the most influential animated films of all time. Thirty years later, when the author first meets Larkin, he’s living on welfare and panhandling for change on a Montreal street corner.
Ballad of a Thin Man explores Larkin’s life, work, and times, illuminating both the particularity of his talent as an animator and the self-destructive impulses that led to his precipitous decline—a tragic trajectory that the author relates to the excesses of the 1960s. In the course of chronicling Larkin’s rise and fall, the author makes connections to his own life—in particular his troubled relationship with his biological father, whom he met for the first time the same week he met Larkin—and contemplates what it means to take responsibility for one’s life and actions.
Ballad is published by Cengage and Animation World Network. It will be launched at the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Festival where there will also be an exhibition of Theodore Ushev’s illustrations.