I saw this on his site about an hour ago and my jaw literally hit the keyboard. I'd been checking his blog pretty much every day since his last post in November, hoping for an update, but I was offline yesterday and the day before.
I don't know how long I'd been visiting his blog. I can't even come up with an estimate. 3 years? 4 years? Hell it could even be 5 or 6 years ... I didn't keep count. All I know is that his posts were inspirational and consistently interesting, and that I learned much from them about the art of animation. It didn't matter what he posted. Sometimes he dug up some of Tissa David's animation drawings, other times he'd go into a lengthy analysis of the use of the smear technique in animation, highlighting work by Bobe Cannon, Bill Tytla and Jim Tyer. At other times he just posted photos of New York City, which were fascinating. And yeah, he hated Frozen ... but I don't give a damn. I was very annoyed by the disrespect shown toward him here on the Frozen thread. The typos and rambling posts were possibly caused by the effects of his illness.
I completed the thesis for my Bachelors degree last June. Michael was one of the people I specifically contacted, asking if they would like to be interviewed online (using Skype). He didn't reply at first, and when he did it was too late ... about a month and a half had gone by and I had submitted my thesis. Saddened, I wrote back telling him this. He never replied, and I wondered whether I may have unintentionally come off as rude (I hope not, but I couldn't lie). I really wanted to speak to him. Hell, I even wanted to tell him how I could swear I saw CG smears in both Wreck-It Ralph and Hotel Transylvania when I went to see them in the cinema, and that maybe he was mistaken about the CG smear being an impossibility. I wanted to have that conversation with him, nevermind the fact that I didn't know him personally. Sometimes, at night, I even dreamed of meeting him.
In any case, the strange thing about this is that I feel like I lost someone I knew.
Rest in peace, old chap.
By the way, please excuse my poor writing. I wrote this in great haste.