Animation Magazine reports Sir Børge Ring, a Danish animator and comic book artist, died on December 27, 2018. He was 97. An Academy Award-winning short film director, Ring also worked on projects like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), various Asterix movies from 1968 to 1994, The Smurfs and the Magic Flute (1976), Heavy Metal (1981), and We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993).
Ring was born in Ribe, Denmark, on February 17, 1921. Among his earliest projects was The Tinder Box, a 1946 adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale that was the first Danish animated feature film. He and his friend Arne Rønde Christensen opened up a cartoon studio in Copenhagen the following year, primarily working on commercials and animated segments for documentaries. Ring moved to the Netherlands in 1952 to work for Toonder Studios, and then to London to work for Disney in 1973.
Ring married concert pianist Nanny Wegener in 1944: she died in 1958. He met his second wife, Joanika (b. April 3, 1946), a Dutch sculptor, painter and inker at Toonder. According to Ring’s autobiography, they worked together on a comic strip around Christmas 1969, and were married by May 1970. The couple ventured further into comics during the 1970s and ’80s with writers Hartog van Banda and Patty Klein, creating “Distel,” a fantasy jungle strip that ran in Sjors magazine from 1970 to 1974. Klein and the Rings also created the gag strip “Fleurtje,” about a madcap office girl, for girls’ magazine Tina. The Rings created over forty stories for Dutch Disney magazines from 1977 to 1986, many of which starred Chip ‘n’ Dale.
He received the Best Short Film award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival for Oh My Darling, and the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Anna & Bella (1984), a cartoon which chronicled the lives of two elderly sisters. His 1999 short film Run of the Mill, which focused on the effects of taking drugs, won a UNICEF Children’s Award. In 2003, he received his title when he was named a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In 2012, the main award at the Odense International Film Festival was renamed the Børge Ring award, and he also received the Winsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award.
He is survived by his wife and their two children. For more on Ring, please visit the official website. Special thanks to Lambiek Comiclopedia, whose comprehensive entry on his life story made this report possible.
