A love of animation and animals took Julie Harvey from painting lampshades to Scooby-Doo to Doris Day.

SITTING IN A DARKENED MOVIE THEATER WITH HER MOTHER IN ENGLAND DURING WORLD WAR II, a young girl named Julie was watching the Walt Disney Productions film Bambi for the first time. She was mesmerized by the animation but horrified by the unseen hunters who brought death and destruction to Bambi’s forest. On the walk home she peppered her mother with questions, mostly asking why anyone would want to kill animals.

The movie would be an important touch point for Julia Harnett Harvey, known as “Julie,” who was shaped by two passions: animation and animals. Now 90 years old, the Carmel Valley resident delights at the chance to reflect on her life that includes escaping Nazi bombers, starting her art career painting lampshades and mannequins, as well as achieving her dream of becoming an animator and bringing to life one of the most famous fictional dogs of all time, Scooby-Doo.

Life had so much in store for young Julie besides becoming an animator in what was once a male-only profession. Her love of animals and a move from Los Angeles to Carmel Valley in the 1980s put her in the orbit of one of the most famous dog lovers of all time, singer and movie star Doris Day. The two teamed up to rescue hundreds of animals over a 30-year friendship.

Unlike the plot of a Scooby-Doo episode, there is no mystery here, just a fascinating tale of a young girl who had a dream and a passion and worked hard to pursue both. Harvey’s story isn’t over yet. She’s still painting, as well as teaching others how to paint. And while she isn’t rescuing quite as many dogs and cats as she used to, she keeps busy caring for three rescue dogs and one cat, as well as enjoying the birds who flit around outside her studio window.

HARVEY WELCOMES A VISITOR INTO HER HOME, apologizing for the barking dogs secured in another room. The dogs came from someone who could no longer take care of them, a terrier named Shia LeWoof and two white chihuahuas, Bella and Casper. Harvey is aware of the Shia LeBouf/LeWoof pun, but admits with a laugh she doesn’t know who the actor is.

Shia, the biggest dog, is the father, Bella is the mother, and tiny Casper is “the baby," Harvey says. There’s also a cat who as a stray emerged from the bushes in her front yard covered in twigs – Harvey decided “Twigs” would make a good name.

The home, built in 1989, has wood-paneled walls covered with paintings, many by her late husband Maurice. There are also her own paintings – there’s a watercolor of some flowers, and still lifes on dark backgrounds. Harvey sits down on a floral couch underneath a portrait of herself as a young woman with dark hair dressed in a black gown with gold accents, painted by a friend in 1963.

Harvey’s short hair is now gray and her smile is broad, her cheeks a rosy pink. She’s a friendly woman with a ready laugh and a self-deprecating sense of humor. At first she’s not sure anyone would want to hear about her life, but relents when reminded how excited people become when they learn she animated Scooby-Doo, as well as characters for other Hanna-Barbera shows and movies, including Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Charlotte, the spider from Charlotte’s Web.

There are so many ways to begin Harvey’s story: growing up in England during World War II; her animation career; art career; the decades of rescuing animals, including her years teamed up with Day.

“Yes, I’ve done so many different things,” she says, referring more to her career. “An artist’s life, you can’t just say, ‘Oh I want to do this or that.’ No, that doesn’t happen. You just take the jobs as they come.”

She points to a book on the coffee table, a photo of a smiling Day on the cover. “Did I tell you I worked with this lady here? That was half my focus – since I’ve been here, anyway.”

SINCE BOTH PASSIONS, ART AND ANIMAL RESCUE, were launched during her childhood in England, it seems a good place to start: Harvey was born in the town of Westcliff-On-Sea, in Essex, about 45 miles east of London, in the fall of 1933.

The family included her mother – the first important Doris in her life – and her artist father, Charles. Harvey was the baby of the family, with a brother and two sisters. Her father taught art, woodworking and engineering drawing; he was Harvey’s first art teacher.

Harvey’s life as a very young child felt stable and secure, but across the channel, trouble was brewing. On Sept. 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, France and Britain declared war on Germany. World War II had officially begun.

Air-raid sirens could be heard blaring through London that day according to historical reports, although German bombs did not begin to fall on England until June 1940, continuing until the end of the war in 1945. During a sustained 57-day attack in 1940-1941 called The Blitz, German bombers killed an estimated 43,000 residents and destroyed over 1.1 million homes.

Westcliff-On-Sea was in the range of German planes, so her father dug out and built a small air-raid shelter in the garden. Harvey remembers the shelter was constructed of wood struts surrounded by soil.

Harvey only remembers heading into the shelter once for a drill. The sirens sounded and the family hurried down a ladder into the shelter, along with the nextdoor neighbors who had three dogs. A little dog named Jill was carried down into the shelter, but the two larger dogs were left up top in a nearby garden shed.

“It seemed wrong, to say the least,” Harvey says. She believes that may be where her desire to help animals was formed. Rescuing animals is “something in you that you can’t fight. It’s just in you. You’ve got to do it,” she says.

At that point, “all the children were shipped off to Northern England,” she says. Harvey found herself on a train headed north. She has a clear memory of holding an orange in her hands while sitting on the train. Then someone stole the orange. “That was like my mother, gone again. It was horrifying,” she remembers.

Her father would ride the train every couple of weeks to visit his children, who were staying with different families in Furness Vail in Derbyshire. Harvey’s father later purchased a home in a nearby town of Spondon and the family was reunited for the rest of the war. And although they were in the north, German planes did reach them. When the sirens blared, the entire family of six would crowd into a small space under the stairs. She remembers hearing a “whistling like crazy and then an explosion.”

After the war ended, Harvey attended and graduated from the Southend College of Art. She remembers taking classes in a quonset hut leftover from the war. It was a very happy time, she remembers. “It was the best time going to that art school,” she says.

WITH AN ART DEGREE IN HAND, it was time to find a job, but Harvey couldn’t bring up the courage to pursue one. “My mother had to find my first job – I was too shy to ask for one,” Harvey recalls with a laugh. The job was in a factory painting images on plastic panels used to make lampshades. “It was lovely really. I learned hand control, as well,” she says.

From there Harvey got a job making fine silver jewelry, which she did for several years until she decided to immigrate to Toronto, Canada for the prospect of better job opportunities. Immigration officials sent her to another jewelry company to work, but she was unhappy there. She thought the jewelry ugly and the employees cold – Harvey found out the owners had fired a German girl to hire her, which upset the other employees. She left.

All the while Harvey was painting lampshades and making jewelry, what she really wanted to do was become an animator. At the time she saw Bambi as a child, “I didn’t know what [animation] was. At the time I didn’t think there was any way I could be with such a job,” she says. The more animated movies she saw, the more she loved it. “It grew on me.”

While Harvey didn’t know right away she wanted to draw animation when she watched Bambi, she did get the problem of the hunters sorted with the innocent logic of a child. “In the front row of the theater there were 25 seats, not more than 30,” she remembers noticing. Her idea was to invite imaginary hunters to sit in the seats around her: “I would sit [the hunters] in the front row. And of course if they saw the movie, they would never hunt again!”

IT WAS ANOTHER FACTORY JOB AND A FRIENDSHIP FORMED THERE that paved the way to Harvey’s animation career. The job was painting faces on dolls and mannequins, and Harvey was seated across from a woman who came from what was then Yugoslavia. The woman spoke little English at the time.

Despite their language barrier, the two shared a laugh over the sing-song way their supervisor assigned work and they became friends. It became a critical connection for Harvey’s career and a lifelong friendship.

The friend was Marija Miletic Dail, the first woman to earn the position of animator at the world-famous Zagreb Film, in what is now Croatia. She and her brother had to escape the communist country, landing in Canada, where Dail took whatever small job she could find – including painting mannequin faces – according to her 2022 obituary.

Dail left the doll and mannequin factory for an animation company, but she did not forget her friend Harvey. She recommended Harvey to the owner of the company, and Harvey began freelancing at night drawing frames of animation, sometimes until 2am, while still working at the factory during the day. She had finally achieved her dream.

Thanks to that work, Harvey went on to work full time in a Toronto animation studio, where she was an assistant animator. She would take whatever projects she could to advance to animator, but the environment was not always welcoming. She remembers one of the male animators, originally from New York, came up to her workspace, sat down and put his feet up on her desk, and huffed: “In New York we don’t have women animators.”

Her boss tried to fire her after becoming angry that a lowly female assistant animator had dared to check some completed animation work. As soon as the other animators found out, they protested – she was the only person willing to take on jobs no one else wanted to do and had become an invaluable member of the team. The boss relented.

Eventually her good friend Dail went on to work for Bill Hanna at Hanna-Barbera Studios in Los Angeles. When Harvey’s studio shuttered, Dail suggested to Hanna that he hire Harvey and her colleagues. Within a week they were in Los Angeles. Harvey remembers sitting in Hanna’s boardroom in the beginning of her time there, drawing frames for the series Scooby-Doo, Where are You? She was one of the first people to draw Scooby, designed by Iwao Takamoto.

Harvey produced frames of animation for other Hanna-Barbera shows, including The Flintstones, and says she later worked as an animator on the animated series Jeannie, inspired by the TV show I Dream of Jeannie. Back then, animation was done by hand by artists like Harvey. Today animation is created through computers. (Harvey is a self-proclaimed luddite.)

Harvey also worked on films by Hanna-Barbera Productions: She animated Charlotte the spider in Charlotte’s Web (1973), and worked on the film Heidi’s Song (1982). Dail is also credited on the film as a layout artist.

HARVEY AND HER HUSBAND MAURICE had met each other in art school in England, then again in Toronto, where they dated. Maurice made it to Los Angeles before she did. In fact, she says she thought the relationship might be over, not knowing that he had spent a year looking for a job for her so she could join him. They married after she moved to Los Angeles.

At the beginning of her time in L.A. there was little money. Animators lived in little studio apartments in North Hollywood with no televisions to view their work. “We would get up on Saturday morning and go down to The May Company (a now-defunct department store) and walk across to the televisions, 20 different kinds of televisions for you to look at. We would see the shows we hadn’t had a chance to see,” she says. “It was a wonderful period of my life.”

Working for animation studios isn’t steady – there are breaks between TV seasons and movie productions. So the two artists, Harvey and her husband, opened their own art studio and gallery in North Hollywood. They taught classes in painting, while simultaneously taking any work they could find. They did the design and illustrations for magazines, including for Disney. Harvey edited an art instruction book, Landscape/Seascape in Acrylics, by Maurice.

She and Maurice also began rescuing animals during this time. “I started picking up poor little things that were going to be put down,” Harvey says. She would find homes for them, but “when you can’t find a home for this one, you keep them. We had a house full of animals, eventually,” she says with a laugh.

In the early ’80s, Harvey and Maurice decided they wanted to focus on their fine art careers exclusively. Maurice had paintings showing in Carmel, and they eventually moved to Carmel Valley. Harvey taught classes at the Carmel Foundation for years, while doing her own painting and taking on various projects, including illustrating a children’s book called Find the Magic.

Harvey continued her habit of picking up “poor little things” after moving to Carmel Valley. (One of the first dogs she rescued there was named Scooby-Doo.) She placed small advertisements in the newspaper about her rescue efforts and the need for homes for the dogs and cats she was rescuing. The ads included her home phone number.

One night the phone rang, and Harvey picked it to find it was Doris Day calling. Harvey didn’t believe it at first. Day said she knew someone wanted a golden retriever and she heard Harvey might have one available. The more Day spoke, the more Harvey came to realize it was the famous singer and movie star. “I was so surprised it was her,” she says.

The two became a team, with Harvey finding dogs that needed new homes and Day paying for veterinary services and finding the homes. They worked together for over 30 years. “We were the best of friends,” Harvey says. They would meet every Monday at the Crossroads for lunch, discussing their rescue operations.

“I could find more dogs, but she could find more homes,” Harvey says. “It all worked very nicely.”

MAURICE PASSED AWAY IN 2019 AT AGE 91, leaving Harvey in her 80s bereft after decades of marriage. Just a few weeks later Day died at age 97, but Harvey could hardly think about it as she was mourning Maurice. Her friend of over 70 years, Dail, died in 2022, another hard loss.

After Maurice died, Harvey worried she would have to move and give up her animals, but friends came to her rescue helping her to remain in her home, and continue supporting her today. She’s planning on teaching another painting class at the Sunny Bakery Cafe in Carmel Valley Village soon, and she continues to create her own work. (Harvey goes to Sunny Bakery daily for lunch, where they specially prepare vegetarian dishes for her.)

As Harvey reflects back on her animation career, she marvels at the staying power of the most famous of all the characters she helped bring to life, Scooby-Doo. The TV series spawned many more shows and films, including live-action movies. A live-action drama series is reportedly in the works for Netflix, to premiere next year.

“He still lives. I see him on packages in the supermarket,” Harvey says. “It’s amazing to me.”