Bruce Petty, cartoonist, sculptor and Oscar winner, dies aged 93

Bruce Petty, the legendary animator whose 1976 film Leisure won an Academy Award and whose illustrations were published in many of Australia’s major mastheads including The Age as well as Punch in the UK and The New Yorker and Esquire in the US, has died after a long illness. He was 93.

Petty, who was born in Melbourne and raised on a small farm in Doncaster, landed work in the Owen brothers’ animation studio in Box Hill when he was 19 after deciding a life as an orchardist was not for him.

Bruce Petty with one of his sculptural works.Credit: Mike Bowers

His first project was writing the script for Careful Koala, a film designed to encourage safety awareness in kids. “It was a pretty terrible film,” he told an interviewer some years ago. “But that’s how I got interested in animation.”

Though he described himself as being “more interested in humour than drawing”, he took night classes at RMIT, where he discovered the work of Polish illustrator Feliks Topolski. That work would have a major influence on his own distinctive style.

“I had never seen anything like it,” Petty said. “Just scribble. A child of 10 could do it … except that it was stunningly evocative … I did a lot of scribbling, sort of parodies of Topolski.”

After a stint in the art department at Melbourne’s Herald newspaper, Petty relocated to London in 1954, aged 25. There he worked in theatre design and had his work published in the satirical magazine Punch. “Every week I tried to submit 10 drawings,” he said. “They might take one or might take none, or might take three.”

A Petty cartoon from November 2013. Credit: Bruce Petty

He returned to Australia via New York, where sold his work to a number of publications, including The New Yorker and Esquire. But that cut no mustard back home where, according to Philip Adams, editors would greet his trademark scratchy style with the dismissive “my kid can draw better than that”. So, instead he found part-time work in an advertising agency, just as the new medium of television was building a head of steam.

Even when the newspapers woke up to his potential as a political cartoonist, the moving image remained a fascination for Petty. With Adams, he made the film Hearts and Minds in 1970. Two years later he created his first animated film, Australian History.

In 1976, he “devised and directed” Leisure, a 13-minute short for the Commonwealth department of environment, housing and community development. It won the Academy Award for best animated short the following year, but Petty did not receive an Oscar because, as was custom, the statuette was awarded to the producer of the film, Suzanne Baker, instead. “We got a picture of it,” he said. “A very nice gold-framed picture.”

He did, however, win the Australian Directors Guild Outstanding achievement award in 2008 and the Australian Film Institute (now AACTA) award for best direction in a documentary in 2007 for his feature Global Haywire. He also had success as a sculptor.

But it was the cartoons that remained his stock in trade.

Petty joined Sydney’s Daily Mirror in 1961, crossed over to The Australian when it launched in 1964, and moved to The Age in 1976. His illustrations would appear in this masthead for the next 40 years, though he crafted them from his home in Sydney, only occasionally dropping in to the Melbourne office. Always the innovator, he opted to hot desk when he did so, long before the term had been invented.

Petty’s style was much admired by fellow cartoonists, but rarely imitated. His “wild thicket of lines”, John Spooner wrote when Petty was inducted into the Melbourne Press Club Hall of Fame, “is ideally suited to the chaotic reality of modern economics”.

His work has been described as being “characterised by his depiction of multiple interconnected concepts rather than a single idea”.

Petty won the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award in 2002, was inducted into the Australian Cartoonists’ Association Hall of Fame in 2014, and received the Walkley for most outstanding contribution to journalism in 2016.

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