British-Canadian director and animator Gerald Potterton, whose credits range from the animated Beatles feature Yellow Submarine (1968) to the animated cult classic Heavy Metal (1981), has died.

Potterton died at the Brome-Missisquoi-Perkins Hospital in Cowansville, Que., on Tuesday (Aug. 23), according to a news release from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), where Potterton got his start in Canada. He was 91.

A student of the Hammersmith Art School who was born in London, England, Potterton emigrated to Canada in 1954 and began his career working with the NFB’s pioneering animation team. He moved on to directing his own animated NFB shorts, including My Financial Career (1962), adapted from the Stephen Leacock story, and Christmas Cracker (1963), which was co-directed with Norman McLaren, Jeff Hale and Grant Munro. Both films were nominated for Oscars.

Potterton also helmed live-action comedy shorts for the NFB, including The Ride (1963) and The Railrodder (1965), starring Buster Keaton in one of his final film roles.

“We had the entire … Canadian Pacific railroad, one of the biggest on the planet from ocean to ocean, at our disposal. And the great thing with Buster was that he loved the railway,” Potterton said about the making of The Railrodder in the 2014 NFB short Making Movie History: Gerald Potterton by Joanne Robertson. “We were sort of really making things up as we went along. I’d storyboarded a couple of the gags but Buster loaded some great stuff on it.”

Potterton’s work on Yellow Submarine took place in England and was followed by direction on the Harold Pinter NBC TV special Pinter People.

He collaborated with the NFB again in the ’80s and ’90s — on his second Leacock adaptation, The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones (1983), and the animated children’s series Smoggies (1987–1990), which aired on Global.

Potterton also created film and TV projects under his banner Potterton Productions in Montreal, such as The Selfish Giant (1972), a short film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s story that was also nominated for an Oscar. For Columbia Pictures’ Heavy Metal, Potterton oversaw the work of more than 65 animators in Canada, England and the U.S.

Potterton excelled in a number of fields, including creating historically accurate aviation paintings. He also wrote and illustrated the 2020 children’s book L’homme des neiges, published by Éditions Québec Amérique. He continued to develop film and TV projects later in life as well as pursuing other artistic endeavours from his farm in Knowlton, Que.

Potterson was lauded with over a dozen retrospectives and lifetime honours for his work. A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, he was also named one of “Ten Men Who Have Rocked the Animation World” by the World Animation Celebration in 1998.

“Gerald came to Canada and the NFB to be part of a new wave of storytelling, one that was fresh and irreverent, and he brought great wit and creativity to every project,” said Claude Joli-Coeur, NFB chairperson and government film commissioner, in a statement.

“He was also a builder, helping to lay the foundation for today’s independent Canadian animation industry with Potterton Productions. I was lucky to have been able to spend an evening with Gerald in 2017 when the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal presented a special screening of The Railrodder. He was an exceptional artist and a truly nice man.”

Photo courtesy of the NFB: Buster Keaton and Gerald Potterton during the production of The Railrodder in 1965.