Arthur Rankin Jr’s name will forever be synonymous with Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. The Bermudian producer and director’s evergreen 1964 TV special based on the popular song launched his career and introduced his trademark story arcs about non-comformists who learn to withstand peer pressure, bullying and teasing and embrace their inner misfits.

There were some autobiographical elements to this recurring theme. Stage- and movie-struck from childhood and fascinated with the mechanics of filmmaking, Arthur Rankin’s interests were always out of step with those of his contemporaries. He wasn’t born in the trunk his actor parents really did travel with when they were working the American vaudeville circuit in the Roaring ’20s, but he might as well have been.

Mr Rankin spent his earliest years at his grandparents’ farm in Maryland. However, he sometimes accompanied his mother and father as they toured the US, appearing on the same bills as comedians, clowns, dancers, magicians, jugglers, trapeze artists and performing dogs at venues ranging from gilded Art Deco theatres to burlesque houses and saloons.

The smell of greasepaint and the roar of the crowds were among his most abiding memories. And the course of his life was likely set the very first time he stood in the wings at some nondescript mid-Western playhouse and watched a vibrant parade of acts take to the stage, transforming a bare proscenium into an arena for entertainment, imagination and wonderment.

With cinema and radio still in their infancy and television purely the stuff of what were then called “scientifiction” magazines, vaudeville was still the heart of American show business in the 1920s. During the ’20s Mr Rankin’s parents appeared alongside such diverse talents as the Marx Brothers, James Cagney and George Burns, all of whom started out playing vaudeville houses before becoming big draws in other fields. Decades later their son worked with all of them when he embarked on his own celebrated show business career.

When he joined his mother to live in New York City, he earned pocket money as a page boy at Radio City Music Hall. And he was as transfixed by movies as he had been by the stage acts he had been exposed to as a toddler. Seventy years on he could still effortlessly recite the long opening monologue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Oscar-winning Rebecca (“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again …”) which he eagerly sat through dozens of times during its original run. And when he saw 1933’s King Kong at that legendary entertainment palace he became fixated on the little known technique which brought the “Eighth Wonder of the World” to life and made the mighty ape one of the most sympathetic and enduring characters in the history of cinema.

He built his later career and reputation on that lasting obsession with what is called stop-motion animation — the process in which articulated puppets are moved in small increments between individually photographed frames of film. When the film is played back at the normal speed of 24 frames per second, the illusion of continuous motion is created. A time-consuming, exacting and labour-intensive process, stop-motion productions exert a certain quirky charm and possess a near universal appeal. The hands-on and handmade nature of stop-motion imbues the art form with a sense of intimacy other special effects techniques entirely lack. Widely regarded as some of the field’s masterpieces, the lasting hold of Mr Rankin’s “Animagic” specials on the popular imagination provide ample evidence of the magical appeal this painstaking process still holds even for audiences raised on an endless series of soulless CGI spectacles.

Accurately described as “an animation legend” by the Hollywood Reporter trade paper when he died at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in January, Arthur Rankin’s full calendar’s worth of stop-motion holiday specials and films, including Rudolph, the Easter-themed Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail to Hallowe’en’s Mad Monster Party, are likely to be his most long-lasting legacy. He and creative partner Jules Bass were also responsible for scripting, producing and directing hundreds of hours of TV cartoon series as well as live and animated feature-length material made for both television and cinemas including a Peabody Award-winning adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The acting talent recruited for Rankin-Bass’ animated productions may have been the most impressive since the days MGM used to boast it had more stars than there were in the heavens under contract: Fred Astaire, James Earl Jones, Andy Griffith, Mia Farrow, Burl Ives, Danny Kaye, Boris Karloff, Angela Lansbury, Gregory Hines, Vincent Price, Zero Mostel, Sir Christopher Lee, John Huston, Patti La Belle, Greer Garson, James Cagney and Mickey Rooney were among the stars who loaned their voices and distinctive personalities to its stop-motion and hand-drawn features and specials.

Today would have been Arthur Rankin’s 90th birthday and his life and achievements will be celebrated with the opening of a new exhibit at the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.

A Bermudian by “choice rather than chance,” as he put it, Mr Rankin lived and worked on the Island for more than 40 years. He had led an itinerant, somewhat lonely existence throughout most of the ’60s when his work required him to commute between his New York offices and the production facilities he used in Japan to make his TV shows and films (stop-motion, always a niche field, was very much a lost art in Hollywood by that stage). When he arrived in Bermuda on a stopover flight while en route to London he decided he had arrived home at last.

He was a Bermudian by adoption rather than by birth but his love of country and his fellow countrymen was second to none. Famously accessible and hospitable, the door of his Harrington Sound home was always open to young Bermudians who sought his counsel about pursuing careers in the performing arts. Mr Rankin also gave master classes on show business for Bermuda College students and produced and directed a number of stage plays in his later years which spotlighted local talent. His storied body of work and occasional forays into the public eye made Arthur Rankin something close to a household name in Bermuda. Entirely less well known was the scope of his private generosity to any number of Bermuda charities and cultural organisations over the years.

The Masterworks tribute is both a well-deserved tribute and an altogether fitting farewell to one of Bermuda’s favourite adopted sons who, like his most famous character, has gone down in history.