Lifelong Lincoln fan discovers rare image of the president at Gettysburg

A childhood obsession with Abraham Lincoln fueled Christopher Oakley's Super 8 stop-action film depicting the president's assassination with his G.I. Joe as Lincoln and a Lone Ranger doll as John Wilkes Booth.

The suburban native's adult obsession with our 16th president led to a 2013 discovery that Smithsonian Magazine hailed as "the most provocative, Abraham Lincoln photo find of the last 60 years."

Now the animator, whose eclectic career includes working for Disney, Pee-wee Herman and Madonna, is about to produce another pivotal Lincoln moment.

"I've always wanted to reproduce the Gettysburg Address," says Oakley, 52, now a professor who has spent years with student teams at the University of North Carolina at Asheville crafting "The Virtual Lincoln Project." The team completed a realistic final rendering of Lincoln on Friday, and by early in 2016 it should release a groundbreaking animated film of the president delivering the famous speech.

"My life has been leading to this," Oakley says. "This is what I'm supposed to be doing."

His first clue came as a 5-year-old when he walked into his Crystal Lake kindergarten and spotted a familiar face.

"In those days, you had photographs of a painting of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hanging in every classroom," Oakley says. "I remember staring at the photograph of Lincoln and thinking I knew him, and he was a nice man. I'm not sure when the fixation and obsession with Lincoln started, but it was there."

His private obsession became a public matter in March 2013. While researching his Virtual Lincoln project, Oakley noticed something in a Gettysburg photograph by Alexander Gardner that no one had seen.

The only confirmed photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg was discovered in 1952. But in 2007, amateur historian John Richter claimed to have found Lincoln on a horse in the background of the Gardner photo.

Controversial at the time, the discovery was accepted by some historians and rejected by others. Oakley said the blurry figure's beard was too bushy and the hair was too long to be Lincoln. The jacket had epaulets and the figure was saluting, something presidents didn't start doing until Ronald Reagan.

Ordering a digitally scanned copy of the badly damaged Gardner negative, the animator with an eye for detail found the distinctive profile of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who was known to have been with Lincoln that day. Next to Seward was the blurry image of a bearded man wearing a stovepipe hat.

Using software unavailable in the past, Oakley superimposed over the blurry face a photograph Gardner had taken of Lincoln 11 days earlier. The president's jaw line, his beard, his hair, his ears, everything matched.

"I did a little historian's happy dance," Oakley says, recalling the private celebration in his studio in the wee hours of the morning. "It is a stretch for an animator to make a discovery, but then again it isn't. Animators pay attention to small details and understand movement."

Oakley's find was hailed around the globe, but some historians still question whether his Lincoln is honestly Abe. Such doubts do not reside in Oakley, who has known Lincoln's face since that first day of kindergarten - or maybe longer. Oakley tells about how he once went for a palm reading, and the psychic told him "you knew Lincoln" and suggested he had been a guard in the Lincoln White House during a previous lifetime. Oakley says his great-great-grandfather was a guard in that White House.

The animator originally wanted to be an actor. When his fourth-grade class celebrated Presidents Day, "I had to play Rutherford B. Hayes instead of Lincoln," Oakley says, his adult voice rising at the memory of the childhood indignity.

Excelling in theater for three years at Lake Zurich High School, where he starred in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Oakley ended his high school career at Highland Park High School. For his senior film class, Oakley built a miniature replica of Ford's Theater and used a Super 8 camera to record a stop-action animation of Lincoln's assassination, starring a remodeled G.I. Joe doll as the president.

"It kills me now because it was an original G.I. Joe," moans Oakley, who ruined its value by carving up the collectible action figure's face and using mortician's wax to replicate Lincoln. "Mary Todd Lincoln was a weird little doll my sister had that I just used because she was plump. I used the Lone Ranger as John Wilkes Booth. Barbie and Ken were on the stage as actors Laura Keene and Harry Hawk."

Oakley's mother, Hannelore, an actress and model from Germany, made the outfits for his characters. Oakley knew set design because his father, Frank, designed sets for shows on Chicago's ABC 7. Oakley attended the College of Lake County in Grayslake and Columbia College Chicago before graduating from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, with a degree in theater. But he didn't want to be a performer.

"As an animator, you are the actor," Oakley says.

His gift for animation became obvious in graduate school at Columbia University in New York, where he paid his way by working for animation studios. He worked on memorable TV commercials starring the California Raisins and Bud Bowl I and II. He directed and animated two seasons of "Penny Cartoons" on "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

In demand, he flew around the country doing animation for advertisers and entertainment. The crew building his props for one job went on to become the cast of TV's "MythBusters." Eventually, Disney hired him to work on the film "Dinosaur." That success led to other movie jobs with "Scooby Doo" and "Men in Black II."

Hired as the animation director by EA Games, Oakley brought his movie realism to games such as "Medal of Honor." Oakley also was hired by Madonna to produce the big-screen animation production for the singer's "Sweet and Sticky" concert tour.

In addition to teaching, Oakley paints and sculpts in his North Carolina home, where he lives with his mother, and his partner of 29 years and new husband, Bruce Steele.

Not many Lincoln historians can include Madonna, Pee-wee Herman and Disney on their résumés. Oakley says he didn't realize all the odd twists his life had taken until he was asked by his church to give a talk about choosing a path.

"If I picked a path, I wouldn't have been able to do all these other things," Oakley says. "As I look back on it, I got to do all of it."

His kindergarten connection with Honest Abe has come full circle.

"Since the age of 5, I've been looking at him, drawing him, painting him, sculpting him, re-creating him," Oakley says, noting that the new Virtual Lincoln film is the piece he's always wanted to do. "We are very confident that we've nailed it."

Image: "Men in Black II," "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and "Medal of Honor" among suburban native's credits