Jim Smith, veteran animation artist and co-founder of animation studio Spümcø, died on May 2. He was 70. The cause of death is being reported online as a heart attack, though that has not been confirmed.
Born James Carl Jobb in Lubbock, Texas, Smith started his animation career in the late 1970s at a small commercial animation studio in Houston, Texas, and later worked as a technical illustrator. His first professional project in the L.A. animation industry was the CBS Saturday morning series The Get Along Gang (1984). He was working on another syndicated Eighties tv series Defenders of the Earth when a chance meeting with another artist changed the trajectory of his career.
That artist was John Kricfalusi, who in his unpublished autobiography remembered the first time he met Smith. “The cartoons [Smith] worked on were horrendous,” he wrote, “but his walls were plastered with his own drawings—fantastic caricatures of manly men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, and Lee Marvin—and powerful scenes of Conan the Barbarian, which he drew even more exaggerated than Frank Frazetta or John Buscema.”
Kricfalusi hired Smith to draw backgrounds layouts on the “Harlem Shuffle” music video for The Rolling Stones, and that was the beginning of a decades-long working relationship. In the Eighties, Smith worked with Kricfalusi on projects like Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and The New Adventures of Beany and Cecil, while they also developed personal projects on the side.
In the late Eighties, Smith, Kricfalusi, Lynne Naylor, and Bob Camp banded together to form the studio Spümcø, which would revolutionize the tv animation industry with Nickelodeon’s The Ren & Stimpy Show (1991). Smith was a key part of the show’s success from playing the guitar on the show’s opening theme song to designing characters like Powdered Toast Man and the Fire Chief from the episode “Fire Dogs.”
Bob Camp recently recalled that Smith was “the best draftman out of all of us.” Smith provided countless storyboards, layouts, and designs for the series, and played a key role in numerous episodes, from conceiving “Space Madness” to co-directing “Fake Dad” and storyboarding and designing “Untamed World.”
Smith’s influences were generally from outside of the animation world, and he drew inspiration from illustrators like Frank Frazetta, comic book artists like Jack Kirby, and caricaturists like Miguel Covarrubias. His skill, according to Kricfalusi, was how he melded those influences into his own unique style. “[W]hen he puts them all together, it’s totally, uniquely him,” Kricfalusi said in an interview. “And that is the kind of art I love, when somebody has a lot of influences behind him, a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge, but somehow churns it all up into a new statement. It’s Jim, it’s Elvis, very few people.”
Smith continued working closely with Kricfalusi post-Ren & Stimpy, making key contributions to projects like Spümcø Comic Book, the webseries Weekend Pussy Hunt, and the revival series Ren & Stimpy: Adult Party Cartoon (Spike TV, 2003). Smith also played a key role in developing another project for the studio, the superhero satire The Ripping Friends, which was turned into a Fox Kids animated series in 2001.
Outside of Spümcø, Smith worked as a storyboard artist, layout artist, and character designer on numerous projects including Samurai Jack, Monsters vs. Aliens, The Oblongs, The X’s, and Teh Mighty Bee, among many other titles.
More of Smith’s artwork can be seen on his blog and Instagram.
