Producers vs Animators 1980

(Video care of Randy Cartwright)

Caricature by Animation Director John Musker

Well, hello again! I scratched my gray old noggin and dug way in to my past at Disney Feature Animation for a few more reminscences, which might trigger memories for you if you were on production around the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. As mentioned in my previous piece, I began my last decade of professional life hired by Peter Schneider in ‘86 to set up training and recruitment services for all of you. I got tremendous inputs from so many of you “vets” then about what the folks in the trenches were thinking might pick up spirits (that got lowered after Animation got moved off lot into a series of warehouse buildings in a Glendale Industrial Park, aka “Flower Street”! Anyway, for what it’s worth let’s look back. (more…)

First Day at Walt Disney Pictures May 23rd, 1983

In 1983 when I was hired at, what was then called, Walt Disney Pictures every new employee went through a process to be welcomed into the family and to become familiar with the entire Walt Disney Company. The 3 day orientation was called Disney Way One.

The first day was on the main lot watching a “Welcome” video and then off to an in depth tour of the sound stages, editorial, animation, ink and paint, gallery cells and the back lot which then included such sets as from Zorro and Something Wicked This Way Comes. The second day was Imagineering and touring the parks and rides division, epcot and the sculpture shop. The third day was a bus ride to Disneyland in Anaheim California where we climbed into character costumes based on our hight and size and were sent out into the park with the public. (more…)

Ahh, yes, it was truly a magical time at Disney Feature Animation…what most of us “old timers” like to remember as Disney’s 2d Golden Age of animated features. New, young “stars” creating (but not yet knowing it) legends of themselves with each production, a new spirit of carrying on the Disney Magic through features, which, oddly enough, are themselves, only a decade or so later, considered “classics”, and a spirit of the future as unlimited…a sense which, I’m happy to report, still instills the current generation of new techno-savvy artists! I identify with that 2d Golden Age roughly from 1986 (with John Musker and Ron Clements memorable “The Great Mouse Detective”) to around when I departed into semi-retirement during, if memory serves me, around the making of “Tarzan”. (I’m still, if you can believe it, still under contract to Feature Animation as a “consultant”, doing once-a-month lectures on our history for the new stars in the firmament!) (more…)