In 1962, at the age of 19 and with no animation experience, Ryan Larkin got a job at the National Film Board of Canada. In the space of five years, he made three acclaimed short films, including the Academy Award®- nominated Walking, one of the most influential animated films of all time. Yet, what started as an extraordinarily promising career quickly unraveled and, when the author finds Larkin thirty years later, he?s living on welfare and panhandling for change on a Montreal street corner. In Ballad of a Thin Man, acclaimed animation writer Chris Robinson explores Larkin?s life, work and times, examining both his remarkable gifts as an animator and the self-destructive impulses that led to his precipitous decline. At the same time, in a kind of dual biography, Robinson looks at his own life?his troubled family history, his alcoholism and search for redemption?which in many ways mirrors the story of the troubled animator. At once sad, hopeful, and at times excruciatingly funny,...