Storybook illustrations would become a large part of Dick Kelsey’s career throughout the remainder of the 1940s and early 1950s. Little Golden Books born from this time period benefited from the Disney name, as Kelsey – along with many other talented artists from the studio – contributed their skills to many of them. Kelsey’s first break came in 1947 with a Little Golden Books edition of the “Peter and the Wolf” segment from Disney's packaged film, Make Mine Music (1946). Working on this book fueled Kelsey to finish his own original story about the adventures of a little bug named Gismo, who lived on the Island of Goodenough in the Southwest Pacific, which Kelsey later entitled, Goodenough Gismo (1948).
In the opening of his thirty-seven page story Kelsey wrote, “In the southwestern part of the Pacific, among thousands of tiny islands, is the island of New Guinea. Just off the southern tip of New Guinea lies a very small island named ‘Goodenough (64)." As mentioned, the island was designated as the area to prepare staging for the Battle of Cape Gloucester, and other combat that followed on New Britain for the First Marine Division.
It was also the home of two landing strips for both fighter and bomber planes. These specific facts about the island correlate perfectly with what Kelsey illustrated and wrote about in Goodenough Gismo, and assist in warranting the credibility of the backdrop in which the little bug’s encounters were staged.
The significance of Richmond I. Kelsey’s Goodenough Gismo cannot be stressed enough. Unlike the Disney Little Golden Books he would go on to illustrate, Gismo was his brainchild, solely written and illustrated by him alone. A summary and brief review of the story was written in the April 1948 volume of the University of Chicago’s Center for Instructional Materials publication, and here’s what the librarian, Alice R. Brooks, had to say:
Even as man once contemplated the flights of birds and insects and learned from them to fly, so here is the pattern reversed. Gismo, an isolated bug of the South Pacific, models his flight on a helicopter and is successful. We can’t discover that Gismo, who resembles a prehistoric animal, is etymologically authentic, but an artist from the Disney Studio has written an amusing fantasy about him and illustrated it charmingly (65).
In the Saturday, November 13, 1948 publication of the Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram, a columnist wrote:
Goodenough Gismo is a strange little bug with a lot of determination. Kelsey met him when he was stationed on Goodenough Island in the Pacific. And to say that Gismo has personality, in addition to his determination, would be putting it mildly, for Kelsey, who drew the pictures and wrote the brief text accompanying them, is an artist at the Walt Disney Studio. He shows how Gismo learns to fly by keeping eternally at it. The kids will simply love Gismo (66).
The flora and fauna of the surrounding jungle environments Kelsey saw were inhabited by many different species of insects, and one could presume that Gismo was born out of the Captain’s collective experiences with them. As Brooks described, Gismo, oddly enough, seems partially prehistoric in nature, like a cross between a dinosaur and bird. The cylindrical shape of his legs, elongated neck, pointed tail (yet stout in size), and solid frame almost seem to hint at the brontosaurus, where his translucent wings and pointed beak are similar to that of a hummingbird. As the inspiration for Gismo’s catfish-like whiskers and a single strand of plumage on his head, one can only imagine. Gismo’s lightness in mass is noticeable when comfortably perched on the edge of a tropical flower, and his daintiness in size is brought to true scale when standing on the stem of a low-lying leaf, reminding us that he is indeed an insect after all, and a cute one at that.
To gaze upon each page of this storybook is to see a master storyboard artist utilizing his skills in animation to bring this fictional tale to visual life. The illustrations of Gismo are small in frame, sketch-like in fashion, and lackluster in color, yet are filled with an abundance of feeling, emotion, and movement. Kelsey’s experiences in the art-direction end of animation spilled over into storyboard work on films like Make Mine Music and Melody Time (1948) with time, and it is most apparent in Gismo. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine Kelsey’s illustrations from the book tacked horizontally in order on a corked bulletin board of the Walt Disney Studio for fellow storymen to consider. The illustrations are in fact so strong that the story alone could be told with or without the presence of its wonderful text.
The storyline is fairly basic: a little bug on a Southwest Pacific island yearns to fly like his fellow bugs and the planes that depart from a local landing strip. Try as he might, he continues to fail in his endeavors; his tiny wings are simply not enough. Although his attempts are pitiful, the effort he puts into them truly entertain the reader. The gags Kelsey incorporates are reminiscent of Disney shorts of the time, and would have made fellow storymen proud. On one particular page, little Gismo is pictured with mushrooms on his tail, considering whether or not he could use them as parachutes. After rejecting the idea, a flower is used as a substitute, though the outcome still ends with a crash landing. It is illustrations like these that reveal Kelsey’s skill as an artist in the cartoon medium. As Gismo holds on desperately to the stem of a flower as he plummets through the air, his eyes look downward, filling with the hope of success and the fear of failure. As many an animator will tell you, the eyes of a character are of paramount importance, or they alone transmit the character’s feelings. We witness this continuously in Gismo’s eyes until he finally finds success, and Kelsey captures it beautifully throughout the entirety of the book.
By the late 1940s, the Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company of Boston, Massachusetts was enjoying successful collaborations with many children’s book authors, one of whom being Virginia Lee Burton. Burton’s heartfelt books oozed warmth through her beautiful illustrations, bringing inanimate objects to life through clever usage of personification, typified by characters found in stories such as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) and The Little House (1942). Kelsey’s Goodenough Gismo follows a similar approach, and the publishing company no doubt recognized this. His illustrations of insects and helicopters that mimic human life, on top of a solid story, must have been too good for Houghton Mifflin to pass up, and Kelsey’s employment at the Walt Disney Studio certainly did not hurt. Goodenough Gismo was eventually released on March 18, 1948.
64 Richmond I. Kelsey, Goodenough Gismo, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 4-5.
65 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, "Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books." Last modified 2007. Accessed June 1, 2011.
66 "Books for Children, Teen-agers Varied." Long Beach (Calif.) Press-Telegram, November 13, 1948.
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