Faculty

Home > Faculty > Charles Solomon

Charles Solomon

Lecturer

About Charles SolomonCharles Solomon is a lecturer in animation at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. An internationally respected animation critic and historian, Solomon has written on the subject for The New York Times, TV Guide, Newsweek (Japan), Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, The International Herald Tribune, Amazon.com, Variety, Modern Maturity, Télérama, Film Comment, The Hollywood Reporter, the Manchester Guardian, and National Public Radio. His work has also appeared in publications in Canada, France, Russia, Britain, India, Taiwan, Germany, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands and Japan. He is the author of numerous books including The Art and Making of Peanuts Animation: Celebrating Fifty Years of Television Specials (2012), The Toy Story Films: An Animated Journey (2012), Tale as Old as Time: The Art and Making of Disney's Animated Classic Beauty and the Beast (Disney Editions, 2010), The Art of Toy Story 3 (Chronicle, 2010), Disney Lost and Found (Disney Press, 2008), The Prince of Egypt: A New Vision in Animation (Abrams, 1999), The Disney That Never Was (Hyperion, 1995), Les Pionniers du Dessin Animé Américain (Dreamland, Paris, 1996) and Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation (Knopf, 1989; reprinted, Wings, 1994). Enchanted Drawings was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the first film book to be nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. In 2008, he received the L.A. Press Club Award for radio feature reporting.

Solomon contributed the animation article to The International Encyclopedia of Communications (Oxford University Press, 1989) and essays to the exhibit catalogues of Japanese Animated Films: A Complete View from their Birth to ‘Spirited Away’ and Beyond (Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), Il était une fois: Walt Disney (Grand Palais Museum, Paris, September 2006), and The Colors of Mary Blair (Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009).

Solomon has also done animation programming for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Annecy, Ottawa and Sundance international film festivals. He has lectured on animation history and aesthetics at USC, CalArts, NYU, the School of Visual Arts, La Cinématheque Quebécoise, CSU San Bernardino, the California Academy of Science, Turner Animation, Pixar, The Walt Disney Studios (Los Angeles, Orlando and Paris) and DreamWorks Animation.