Career Offers Animated Look at Enchanted Artist
by Lane Page
The Howard County Times, September 1, 2005

Edward Hilbert’s business card says “graphic designer”, but it could just as well say painter, sculptor, cartoonist/animator, them park display designer, computer system developer, art teacher, furniture designer or all of the above.

The 50th anniversary of the opening of Ellicott City’s Enchanted Forest theme park provides an occasion for Hilbert to reminisce about his part in the park’s entertainment and how it led to a career.

Trained in his native Budapest, Hungary, in painting, sculpture, basic design and graphic arts, Edward Hilbert and Judy, his wife of three months, were newly arrived (indeed escaped) in 1957 after the Hungarian Revolution the previous year. In Baltimore, his ability as a sculptor working in media from paper to celastic to brass got him a job with Adler Display Studio, which had produced the park’s original displays.

Enchanted Forest owner-operator Howard Harrison, Sr. was continually adding to the park’s attractions. Adler hired Hilbert (at a dollar a day before taxes, he says, shaking his head at the recollection) to work on two of the men in the “Rub-a-Dub-Dub” display in the same pond that was home to Willie the Whale.

Within two years, Hilbert founded his own company, Unique Design, Inc. The next year, Harrison asked him to come over again.

“When I got there, we were seated in a small boat, and because the water channel wasn’t operated, we pushed our boat through a large pitch-dark area under a man-made mountain,” Hilbert recalled. Harrison showed him four large caves he wanted to fill with scenes from “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

Hilbert’s photos of the results he produced are as colorful as some folks’ memories of the beloved fairy tale theme park.

But his magnum opus there was in the 1981 “Enchanted Days” musical show, featuring The Chicken Little Trio. The computer-operated mechanical act in Robin Hood’s Barn delighted visitors of all ages until the park closed in 1988. It was destroyed along with the barn by an arsonist in 1990.

Meanwhile, though, the Enchanted Forest had put Hilbert into the amusement industry and the success of Enchanted Days “placed my company and me on the map,” he says. He went on to produce similar acts for theme parks and restaurants from Long Island to Long Beach, Calif. “But I never duplicate anything,” he says. “That would be too boring.”

Hilbert’s photo album is filled with faces, all right: realistic and expressionist “talking heads� (which his company was first in the nation to produce, he says) including Dracula, a jazz singer, the Abe Lincoln at Gettysburg and the Jimmy Carter at Gatlinburg, plus various animals, both imaginary and an actual bear and moose mechanized for a taxidermist.

Hilbert built a demon with a 40-foot wingspan and put it together on site at Hunt’s Pier in Wildwood, N.J. He designed and built collapsible, transportable haunted mansions for carnivals.

“I’ve done everything but Disney,â€? he says. “I didn’t want to work for a large company. I wanted to do the whole process, not just design or pin hair on the heads.”

In 1982, he threw in his lot with a Pennsylvania pizza restaurant chain to provide animatronic entertainment unique to each venue, but the company discontinued the plan after only two were built. “Everyone makes mistakes, and that was mine,” Hilbert admits.

That parting of ways took him into the custom cabinetry business, from which he retired in 1993.

But creativity doesn’t take retirement. Hilbert spent the next decade painting, sculpting, teaching and exhibiting in the Baltimore-Washington area. In the last year, while “fooling around with animation” on his computer, he got the notion of turning “Der Fremdentanz” (The Freedom Dance), the cartoon journal he had made while waiting for permission to enter the United States into an animated short film.

He showed the little book to computer animator Craig Herron, who brought in writer Steven Fischer. The Telly Award-winning duo has worked together on various projects; now Hilbert is part of the team. His role in the production as character and layout designer involves doing the backgrounds and black-and-white outlines of his characters for “2-and-a-half-D” animation, a process he explains as separate layers being moved around on the computer, instead of producing cells with one drawing per frame. The trio hopes to release “Freedom Dance” next year in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution.

To get a DVD of “Enchanted Days” from a video Hilbert made, e-mail nan@nanalee.com to be placed on the list. To follow the progress of the “Freedom Dance” Production, log onto www.freedomdancethemovie.com.

E-mail Lane Page at lpage@patuxent.com.