August 26 - Retta Scott

Image courtesy greatwomenanimators.com

On this day, in 1990, Retta Scott passed away in Foster City, California. Born on February 23, 1916 in the tiny town of Omak, Washington (it had less than 1,000 residents at the time), Retta and her family moved four hours east to the Seattle area when she was a fairly young girl. Art was her favorite subject in school and she first thought about doing it as a career when, in the fourth grade, she won a scholarship from the Seattle Art and Music Foundation. She was able to stretch that award into nearly ten years of art classes, continuing to get local training well past her 1934 graduation from Roosevelt High School. Her dedication to honing her craft paid off when she then won a second scholarship, this time for three years of study at the famous Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Retta packed up her belongings, moved a couple of states south and set her sights on becoming a fine artist. She ended up making history.

Image courtesy tumblr.com

While at Chouinard, Retta would spend a lot of her free time at the Griffith Park Zoo, just a short distance from the school. Her bold sketches of the animals there caught the attention of one of her professors. He recommended that she apply for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. Retta said no thanks, cartoons did not appeal to her. The professor explained he had more of the type of artistry present in the recently released Snow White in mind and understood, through some contacts of his, that the studio was looking at doing an adaptation of Bambi next. Retta’s expertise with animal drawings would be a natural fit. Retta was finally convinced to apply and, almost to her surprise, was hired.

Image copyright Disney

Retta began her Disney career in 1938 in the Story Department, a fairly unusual start given that most women at animation studios were almost always relegated to the tediousness of the Ink and Paint Department. Her time spent at the zoo came shining through in her story sketches and character development work. Both David Hand, Bambi’s director, and Walt himself were impressed with the intensity of her drawings. When the movie moved into the actual production phase, Retta was moved into the actual animation department, put under the tutelage of the Legendary Eric Larson and assigned to the sequence where the hunting dogs are chasing Faline. Her amazing work led to a full-fledged on-screen credit as an animator for Bambi, making her the first woman at Disney ever to receive that honor.

Image copyright Disney

Over the next few years, Retta continued on as an animator for both Fantasia and Dumbo (although she gets no official credit on either of those films) as well as contributing to at least two Donald Duck shorts, Donald’s Snow Fight and Donald Gets Drafted (again sans credit). Retta was working on animating the weasels for the studio’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows when she made an on-screen appearance during the filming of The Reluctant Dragon in 1941 (she presents the film’s star, Robert Benchley with a caricature of him as an elephant). Later that year, as things became increasingly tight for Disney just prior to World War II, she was briefly laid off with a number of other animators, but by the beginning of 1942, she was hired back into the Story Department. She worked on several animated shorts and educational films until she married a submarine commander and retired from Disney in April 1946.

Image courtesy alchetron.com

Retta and her husband, Benjamin Worcester, moved east to Washington, DC where she continued her art career as an illustrator. She would work with the Walt Disney Company several more times over the years, most notably on Little Golden Book editions of Disney movies. Her illustrations for the Cinderella Big Golden Book are what make that book a must have for collectors. She was praised for a picture book that didn't look exactly like the film but yet still felt like it came directly out of it. Other vintage non-Disney Little Golden Books she is famous for include The Santa Claus Book and Happy Birthday.

Image courtesy pastemagazine.com

In the late Seventies, Retta returned to the world of animation when she was hired by Martin Rosen, a British filmmaker, to help animate The Plague Dogs released in 1980 (it's said to be a pretty decent movie in spite of a terrible title). She moved to San Francisco to work on the picture (having divorced her husband around the same time), teaming up with a youngish Brad Bird (who would go on to direct The Iron Giant and The Incredibles). And even though four decades had passed since the last time she had to prove herself in an animator's workroom, the men in the room were reportedly both surprised by her talents and awed by them. Unfortunately, some things take longer to change than we might like.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

After production wrapped up on Dogs, Retta would join another future member of Pixar, Bud Luckey, at his studio, doing animation for commercials like Cookie Crisp Cereal. She worked there until 1985, when she suffered a stroke that spared her life but robbed her of the ability to produce quality work. She would live quietly for another five years before passing away at her home in Foster City. The pioneering animator who helped open doors for generations of women after her was 74. Ten years later, in 2000, Retta would posthumously be declared an official Disney Legend, for reasons that should be fairly obvious.

June 28 - Herb Ryman

Image courtesy californiawatercolor.com

On this day, in 1910, Herbert Dickens Ryman was born in Vernon, Illinois. When he was 9, Herb's family moved to Decatur. He began following in his father's footsteps as a medical student at the private Millikin University there, until he became deathly ill with scarlet fever. His mother, who had pushed for the medical studies over what Herb wanted to pursue, an artistic career, became concerned for his health and relented, allowing him to enroll in the Art Institute of Chicago. He graduated cum laude and, in 1932, moved out to Los Angeles, California to try his luck at making money with his art. He quickly found a job at the MGM Studio, as a storyboard illustrator. For a while during the studio's Golden Age, Herb was the only illustrator on staff and helped design the looks of such classic films as Mutiny on the Bounty, David Copperfield, the Emerald City portion of The Wizard of Oz and The Good Earth.

Image courtesy progresscityusa.com

Something about The Good Earth really struck a chord with Herb. He was inspired enough by his work on that film to quit his job and spend a year traveling around China. He made hundreds of sketches and paintings during his Asian tour, publishing many of them in a book when he returned to the states in 1938. As part of his homecoming, Herb had an exhibition of his work at the Chouinard Art Institute which was attended by Walt Disney. Walt was so impressed with Herb's paintings, he asked him if he wanted a job. Herb said sure and became Disney's art director on Fantasia and Dumbo. In the summer of 1941, when Walt and an entourage took a goodwill tour of South America on behalf of the United States government, Herb was one of the artists that went along for the ride. His sketches from the trip influenced the look of both Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.

Following the end of World War II, Herb got word that 20th Century Fox was developing a film based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon. He had actually become an acquaintance of Margaret during his time in China and was interested in working on the film. He amiably resigned his position at Disney and changed studios again. Over the next several years, Herb worked on Fox films including Forever Amber, David and Bathsheba and The Robe.

For two summers, in 1949 and 1950, Herb took leaves of absence from Fox and literally joined the circus. He traveled with the performers of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey, preserving their way of life through his paintings. During his time with the circus, he became good friends with Emmett Kelly, one of the greatest clowns of all time.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

On September 26, 1953, Herb received a desperate call from another old friend, Walt Disney, asking for an immediate meeting. Intrigued, Herb agreed. When they came face to face, Walt began describing all his ideas for a new theme park and asked if Herb could produce some drawings bringing those ideas to life. Herb said sure, when do you want them? Walt said how about right now? The two men worked pretty much non stop throughout the weekend to finish several detailed sketches. It wasn't long after that when Roy Disney took those sketches and showed them to the investors who would agree to finance Walt's latest dream. Without them, Disneyland might never have become reality.

Image copyright Disney

Once the plans for his theme park were securely in place, Walt asked Herb to come back to work at Disney. This time around, Herb worked mainly with WED Enterprises, designing and creating concept images for theme park attractions. For Disneyland, he helped design Sleeping Beauty Castle, Main Street USA, New Orleans Square, the Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean. He was integral to the development of Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the 1964 World's Fair. He was the chief designer of Cinderella Castle when the Florida Project was taking shape.

In 1971, Herb officially retired from Disney, but like most old timers of the era, he never completely walked away. By 1976, he was back consulting with the company on plans for EPCOT Center, giving style to the American Adventure and the China pavilion. He then helped design a history of Japan show for the opening of Tokyo Disneyland called Meet the World. His last project with Disney was creating concepts for the version of Main Street USA that would eventually debut at Euro Disneyland.

Image courtesy rymanarts.org

Outside of his work with various Hollywood studios, Herb was a prolific artist. In addition to his paintings with the circus, he created watercolors of the California coastline and portraits of various celebrities. He was a member of the American Institute of Fine Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the California Art Club. His paintings were collected by the Guggenheims, the Barrymores and Cecil B. DeMille among others.

In late 1988, Herb became ill and he passed away on February 10, 1989 at the age of 78. In 1990, he was officially declared a Disney Legend for all his work shaping the beloved Disney theme parks. That same year, his sister Lucille, along with Marty Sklar, Sharon Disney and Buzz Price, created the Ryman-Carroll Foundation in Herb's honor. The Foundation's main purpose is running Ryman Arts, an organization that provides free art classes with master teachers to Los Angeles area high school students. You can find out more about their work, and the man that inspired them, at rymanarts.org.

May 27 - Ken O'Connor

Add caption

On this day, in 1998, A. Kendall O'Connor passed away in Burbank, California. Born on June 7, 1908 in Perth, Australia, Ken began his professional career at the age of 16 as a reporter for the newspaper his father owned. At some point, someone died (he can’t remember who) and no one had a picture of them for their obituary. Ken drew a better than passing portrait of them and became the paper’s resident artist as well. As his interest in art grew, he began taking classes, selling the cartoons and oil paintings his studies produced for spending money. In 1930, Ken’s father started working for the Australian National Travel Association and the whole O’Connor clan moved to San Francisco, California to promote tourism to the Land Down Under. Ken continued his art education at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute) and earned money by becoming the art director for a local poster company.

Image copyright Disney

In 1935, the Walt Disney Studio was desperately hiring artists in order to have a staff that could actually create a feature length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ken’s father encouraged his reluctant son to apply. He was quickly hired as an inbetweener and just as quickly moved into the special effects department. His main job was to be a rotoscoper. Rotoscoping is a process where you make a live action movie of something you want your animated character to do (like dancing) and then make rough tracings of each frame of film. Those rough drawings then get handed off to animators, overdrawn with the character and cleaned up, giving you a much more realistic representation of action than freeforming would. It’s a very tedious process but was probably the best way young Ken could have ever learned about how the process of animation differs from a still life painting. And learn he did.

Image copyright Disney

Following the release of Snow White, Ken became an assistant in the layout department. His first project was the 1937 short Clock Cleaners. Because a Mickey Mouse short can be a lot less realistic than Walt wanted his features to look, Ken could take a lot of artistic license to achieve the effects he wanted. Or as he put it, having learned the rules of perspective at art school, he could violate all of them to make the picture much more dramatic. So he did and everyone noticed. Ken’s incredible work on Clock Cleaners marked the beginning of a brilliantly long career in layout, an area of animation most people don’t even know exists.

Image copyright Disney

A layout artist is quite literally in charge of how you will see everything in an animated movie. They create the backgrounds, or sets, that the action will take place in. They also work with directors to decide what angle the audience will see things from. In live action, a scene can be shot from multiple angles and then cut differently if the first take isn’t something the production team likes. Animation is completely different. If the angle of a scene doesn’t work for some reason, there isn’t different footage that can be spliced in to fix it. What you have is the only thing that was painstakingly drawn. If you look at it and decide it would be better to, say, see a character from the side view instead of dead on, you have to restart the scene from scratch. In the days of hand drawn animation, it was cost prohibitive to do even a small amount of redraws. Determining all that beforehand is the only way to do it. It’s better now with computers and 3D rendering and all that, but even now, better is a relative term.  A good layout artist was and is crucial to creating successful animated movies. It turned out that Ken wasn’t just good, he was one of the best.

Image copyright Disney

For Pinocchio, Ken crafted the overhead shot of the puppet being led astray by Foulfellow and Gideon, parading through the streets of the town. He filmed some live action reference footage to help with that one. For Cinderella, he designed and built a detailed model of the pumpkin coach, which was approved by Walt with zero (that’s right zero) changes, becoming the coach that’s seen in the film. Having the model improved the action of those scenes immensely. For Lady and the Tramp, Ken knew it was going to be important to be able to show things from Lady’s perspective and shot all sorts of reference film from about a foot and a half off the ground. For Alice in Wonderland, he spent hours working out the proper horizons and vanishing points and multiple perspectives for all the scenes featuring playing cards, knowing that if just one of them was off, the whole scene would look wonky. All told, Ken would work on 13 of the 21 animated features that were released during his years with Disney, making invaluable contributions to each and every one of them.

Image copyright Disney

Ken wasn’t only good at camera angles, he was good at coming up with new techniques as well. For the Trees segment of Melody Time, he suggested using pastels on the cels and then coating them with lacquer to keep them from smudging to get the unique look of that scene. In Dumbo, when Timothy and Dumbo get drunk, he knew it would be nearly impossible to keep the colors of the pink elephants consistent. What you are actually seeing there is the color of the background. Each individual cel is painted all black except for an elephant shaped clear spot. A simple but highly effective solution. For the Dance of the Hours segment in Fantasia, he deliberately changed the general motifs of the animation each time the music entered a new movement, going from vertical shapes to elipses to diagonals.

Image copyright Disney

The Shorts Department didn’t let Feature Animation hog all of Ken’s talents over the years. He was part of the teams that created classics like Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met and several of the educational shorts like 1946’s The Story of Menstruation.

Ken officially retired in 1974, but would continue to consult on a variety of projects. He contributed to the films that became part of the World of Motion and Universe of Energy pavilions at Epcot and the short Back to Neverland, starring Robin Williams and Walter Cronkite, that was a staple of the animation tour at the Disney-MGM Studios for many years. He also spent time as a professor at CalArts, teaching the next generation of animation giants, including Brad Bird, John Lasseter and John Musker. In 1992, for his nearly four decades of making Disney animation the best in the world, Ken was declared a true Disney Legend. Six years later, the Australian reporter who reluctantly turned into an artistic heavyweight would pass away at home from natural causes. He was 90 years old.

May 24 - Ed Love

Image courtesy scoobydoo.fandom.com

On this day, in 1910, Edward H. Love was born in Tremont, Pennsylvania. Ed found himself in Los Angeles, California by 1930, desperately looking for work as the Great Depression began settling in for the long haul. As he dug through the newspaper looking for employment leads, he noticed an an ad for animators over at the Walt Disney Studio. Ed had enjoyed drawing as a child, but knew nothing about animation. He didn't have a job, but he did have a car and he was able to track down someone in the animation business who was willing to trade lessons for the use of that car. I haven't been able to find out who that teacher was, so that part of the story must be taken with a grain of salt, but what is verifiable is that in early 1931, Ed brought a piece he'd animated of Mickey Mouse playing the violin over to the Disney studio and was hired the same day. Starting as an inbetweener for $18 a week, he would be moved up to full animator within two months.

Image copyright Disney

Ed worked almost exclusively in the Shorts Department during his time with Disney. One of his first assignments was on the first cartoon in glorious three strip Technicolor (all previous color cartoons had only been lowly two strip wannabees), the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees. His work can also be seen in the great Mickey shorts Lonesome Ghosts and Mickey's Trailer. Ed often (semi) joked that he was responsible for the position of assistant animator (otherwise known as clean up man) being created at Disney. Since he had no formal art training, he was terrible at cleaning up his own animation. Someone had to be assigned to him to help turn his rough drawings into finished product. Some of the older guys around the studio felt that if Ed could have an assistant, why not them. And the animation team went from an animator paired with an inbetweener to a three man process.

Image copyright Disney

One of Ed's last projects with Disney was The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Originally slated to be an extended Silly Symphony, Apprentice became the centerpiece of Walt's great experiment in animation, Fantasia. Only a few months after the release of Fantasia, the animators at the studio went on strike in early 1941. Ed, in a move he would later label as stupid, was one of the leaders of the fight. The strike would get resolved, but Ed (who was making $81 a week plus bonuses at that point, over $72,000 a year today) was one of its casualties. After a decade with the studio he was once again unemployed.

Image copyright MGM

Luckily for Ed, his jobless stretch didn't last very long. He was soon hired at MGM and became part of the great Tex Avery's studio. For the next five years, Ed worked on classics like Red Hot Riding Hood and What's Buzzin' Buzzard, sometimes animating as much as two thirds of a short by himself. In 1947, he switched studios again to work under Walter Lantz on the Woody Woodpecker series. Unfortunately the financial situation at Lantz's studio was rapidly deteriorating and that job barely lasted two years. So Ed did what many a talented guy before him had: he started his own studio. Not much is known about what Love, Hutten and Love produced (Ed's son Tony was the other Love) during this period. But all three of the firm's namesakes (Bill Hutten was their partner) ended up, where else, Hanna-Barbera.

Image copyright Hanna-Barbera

Ed got in on the ground floor of several iconic series at Hanna-Barbera. He was part of the original teams of The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear and Scooby-Doo Where Are You? He also worked in the Commercials Department at the studio, inspiring a whole generation of animators with the highly stylized way his characters moved (although he apparently was still horrible at cleaning up his own work, even after decades in the business). His son Tony became a director with the studio and sometimes father and son would work together, mostly on Ed's later series like A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Ed continued to work at Hanna-Barbera until finally retiring in 1994, at the age of 84. Less than two years later, he passed away at home in Valencia, California on May 8, 1996. He was just two weeks short of his 86th birthday.

May 21 - John Hubley

Image courtesy michaelbarrier.com

On this day, in 1914, John Hubley was born in Marinette, Wisconsin. Right out of high school, John moved to Los Angeles, California and began studying painting at the ArtCenter College of Design. He was following in the footsteps of his mother, artist Verena K Hubley, and his grandfather. After three years of instruction in the finer points of painting, John began working for the Walt Disney Studio in 1935 as a background painter. He would later add layout artist to his resume, working his magic mostly in the Features Department. John’s work can be seen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi and, specifically, in the Rite of Spring segment of Fantasia.

In 1939, Frank Lloyd Wright visited the studio, bringing with him a print of a Russian animated feature, The Tale of the Czar Durandai, looking to inspire Disney’s animators to be more modern. Walt at the time was consistently pushing for ever more realistic animation while Durandai had a very stylized, abstract look. Some of the animators, John among them, were inspired by the Russian drawings, they just weren’t allowed to use that inspiration at work. Their frustration over what they saw as a creatively stifling atmosphere was one thing that led to the great Disney Animator’s Strike of 1941. John was one of the first young bucks to walk out the door and never look back.

Image copyright Disney

John began creating shorts for Screen Gems, a contractor for Columbia Pictures, with a number of other former Disney animators, including the company’s founder, Frank Tashlin. The artistic freedom at Screen Gems was looser than at Disney, but only marginally. When World War II finally came to America, John became part of the Animation Unit of the Army Air Force First Motion Picture Unit, making training films for the troops. The Air Force only cared about what information was taught, not what the film looked like, so most of the animators got to experience more experimentation than they’d ever enjoyed before.

Image courtesy fandor.com

In 1944, John was asked to help create a reelection film for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He prepped the storyboards with fellow FMPU worker Bill Hurtz. The studio chosen to make the final short was Industrial Film, which had just been founded by former Disney and Screen Gem employees so John fit right in. Following the successful release of Hell-Bent for Election (yes, that is the actual title), the United Auto Workers approached Industrial to make an anti-racism film and John was chosen to direct. Following the end of the war, Industrial Film became United Productions of America and would go on to become the most influential animation studios of the Fifties.

Image copyright UPA

UPA became the main studio for Columbia Pictures, pushing Screen Gems out of the picture. In 1949, John created one of UPA’s biggest characters, Mr. Magoo. Based on an uncle of his, he directed the first few Magoo shorts and was instrumental in helping Jim Backus find the voice of the obstinate senior citizen by encouraging Jim to improvise much of the dialog. John quickly became unhappy with the direction the studio took his character, in spite of Mr. Magoo’s growing popularity. He felt too much emphasis was being placed on his near-sightedness and the more interesting aspects of his personality were being ignored.

In the early Fifties, John found himself in trouble at work once again. This time, he got caught up in the investigations being conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Someone branded John a communist and he was hauled in front of the committee. He saw McCarthy for what he was, refused to name anyone else and was blacklisted from all major Hollywood studios. Out of work again, he did the only thing he could do. He started his own company, Storyboard Studios, making mostly commercials, at least to begin with.

In 1955, John married his second wife, Faith Elliot, an artist and fellow animator, and moved his company to New York City. John and Faith continued to do purely commercial projects but made a commitment to producing one independent short every year. They explored just about every kind of animation technique you can think of, as well as using ambient sounds (like their children at play) as soundtracks. The experimentation paid off. They were nominated for an Academy Award seven times, winning three for 1959’s Moonbird, 1962’s The Hole (about the horrors of nuclear war) and 1966’s Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature.

Image courtesy laughing-stalk.blogspot.com

When Sesame Street started up in 1969, Jim Henson and company needed lots of content in a short amount of time. John and Faith were more than happy to fill in some of the gaps. Featuring their signatures of jazz music, improvised dialog and abstract images, they helped teach kids about the letters of the alphabet and concepts like danger. They would later do the same thing for The Electric Company, most notably the Letterman bits (voiced by the late great Gene Wilder). John’s final project was in collaboration with a former student of his, Garry Trudeau, bringing to life the characters from Garry’s comic strip, Doonsbury, for a half hour television special. Part way through production, John was diagnosed with cancer. He worked until he couldn’t anymore, leaving Faith and Garry to finish the project in tribute to him (a fitting final note to his career: A Doonsbury Special would earn an final Oscar nomination). John passed away in New Haven, Connecticut on February 21, 1977. He was 62.

May 11 - Albert Hurter

On this day, in 1883, Albert Hurter, Jr. was born in Zurich, Switzerland. The eldest of three sons, Albert was inspired to become an artist by his father, a technical drawing teacher at Zurich’s Berufsschule. At a young age, he was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease, brought on by rheumatic fever (which can occur after getting strep throat). The series of diseases is something that would be easily curable by the early 1900’s, but which did irreversible damage to Albert’s heart, not killing him outright, but shortening his life considerably. Luckily, the disease didn’t keep him from living in the meantime.

Image courtesy wikipedia.com

In 1903, Albert moved to Berlin to begin his formal art training. He studied diligently for seven years, returning to Switzerland shortly before Albert Senior died. Partly to escape from the overwhelmingly fond memories of his father (and partly because that’s where an exciting new art form was starting to explode), Albert soon moved to America, taking up residence in New York City. He began working in animation at the Barre-Bower Studio on the Mutt and Jeff shorts in 1912. Six years later, he suddenly left Barre-Bower (and the animation business altogether), apparently over continuous disagreements with his fellow co-workers (although what exactly those fights were supposedly about, no one really knows).

Image courtesy bpib.com

Albert moved west to Southern California. For the next decade he eked out a living, designing clothes, furniture and magazine layouts for whoever would pay him. In 1931, he reconnected with Ted Sears, an old co-worker from his Barre-Bower days, who was then working for the Walt Disney Studio. Disney was always looking for new talent and hired Albert on Ted’s word. It quickly became apparent that Albert was a genius when it came to anthropomorphizing both animals and objects. Walt moved him into the Story Department (which, including Albert, now had three members) and turned him loose. Albert also sketched quickly and with great proliferation. Given a simple story idea (like "The Three Little Pigs"), he could go into seclusion for days, coming out the other side with dozens (if not hundreds) of characters, gags, settings, props, animal sidekicks, etc.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

Albert worked mostly on the Silly Symphonies, but when features came along, his fingers are all over Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo and Fantasia. It's almost impossible to overstate how many characters that came out of the studio in the Thirties and early Forties had their origin in Albert's brain. It's as equally impossible to pinpoint specific bits of animation that can be considered 'Albert's,' since most of his work was more on the concept end. Not only could he come up with all sorts of variations on a theme, his sketches often inspired the animators around him to explore new directions and themes. And the grounding he got in classic art back in Berlin elevated everything Disney did to artistic heights Mutt and Jeff could only dream of.

image courtesy bpib.com

One of the few characters that didn't change a whole lot from his early sketches was the first Disney Princess, Snow White. He nailed her right from the beginning. A big chunk of his ideas, though, ended up getting used on different projects from the one that gave birth to them. One general rule of thumb around the studio was that nothing Albert drew should ever be thrown away because eventually a project will come along that it will be perfect for. Albert's weak heart finally give out on him on March 28, 1942, but his sketches would continue to influence the look of Disney films for over a decade longer, showing up in Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp.

In his will, Albert, who never married or had any children, designated money to publish a book of his work, leaving it up to his old pal, Ted Sears, to make it happen. Ted toiled away faithfully and honored his friends last wish. Seven years after Albert's death, He Drew As He Pleased was published, featuring over 700 of his doodles, drawings and incredible concepts. I've only seen a fraction of what's in it but what I have seen is absolutely delightful (it is out of print but copies are available on Amazon for around $250). I really get the feeling that if Albert had lived longer or been slightly later in Disney history, made it past World War II perhaps, he would be better known. But, regardless of his lack of fame, his talent and influence are undeniable. Without Albert, the Disney we know and love, might never have existed.

May 6 - Joe Grant

Image courtesy disney.fandom.com

On this day, in 2005, Joe Grant passed away in Glendale, California. Born on May 15, 1908 in New York City, Joe and his family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was two. His father was a newspaper art editor, which gave Joe exposure to the possibilities of the art world from an early age. Following high school, Joe attended classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute. His first professional gig was drawing caricatures of celebrities for a local newspaper. One of the readers of that paper was Walt Disney, who was impressed enough with Joe’s style to invite him to submit some caricatures for incorporation into the 1933 short Mickey’s Gala Premier.

Image copyright Disney

The success of Joe’s work in Gala led to him being offered a full time job with the Walt Disney Studio as production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was ramping up. Joe was given the task of designing the Queen and her alter ego, the Wicked Witch. Supposedly the old hag’s appearance (but not, presumably, her evil intent) was fashioned after a woman who lived across the street from Joe at the time. He continued working on character designs for Pinocchio before switching over to the story department when production began on Fantasia. Not only did Joe help develop the plot of several of the segments in Fantasia, he assisted in helping Walt and Leopold Stokowski choose what music would be used in the first place.

Image copyright Disney

Joe received credit for co-writing the script on his next two films, Dumbo and Saludos Amigos. As World War II raged on, he went back to the Shorts Department (of course so did everyone else, really; even the features during that period were just shorts that had been cobbled together). His input can be seen in the propaganda shorts The New Spirit, Reason and Emotion and the Academy Award winning Der Fuehrer’s Face. Following the war, Joe served as Production Supervisor on Make Mine Music. He then began working in earnest on a story he’d first conceived of in 1937. While watching the antics of his English springer spaniel after his daughter was born, he made some sketches and wrote a bare bones plot for a film that was known for years as Lady, after his spaniel. Even though Joe tinkered with the story off and on for almost a decade, Walt was never quite satisfied with the direction it was taking. After reading a 1945 short story, Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog, Walt thought that merging it with Joe’s story just might do the trick and Lady and the Tramp was born.

Image courtesy one1more2time3.wordpress.com

Joe didn’t stick around to see his story develop into a classic film, though. He left Disney in 1949, six years before Lady hit theaters, but not because of any animosity or hard feelings. Wanting a new challenge in his life, Joe left to open his own ceramics studio. Some years later, he started up his own greeting card company. Throughout the years, no matter what else he was doing, he would still occasionally come over to the Disney lot to consult on a character’s design or a particularly sticky situation in a movie’s plot, chat with the boys and then return to his pots or cards.

In 1989, when Joe was 81, the age when most people have long since retired, he was apparently looking for another new challenge. Whether it was because the Disney Renaissance was just starting to hit its stride making animation exciting again or Joe just missed the good old days, he returned to work at Disney, forty years after he left. And not just on a consulting basis, but actual full time work. He would come into the studio at least four days a week from then until his death, over fifteen years later.

Image copyright Disney

Joe became part of the Visual Development team on Beauty and the Beast. From there he added Character Design back into his repertoire and did both tasks on The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules and Tarzan. He added to the stories of Mulan and Lilo and Stich and came up with the concept of giving yo-yos to a flock of flamingoes for the Carnival of the Animals sequence in Fantasia 2000 (making him the only person to contribute new material to both Fantasia movies). In 1992, long before he was done making significant contributions to the company but decades after he had started, Joe was declared an official Disney Legend

Image copyright Disney

Joe’s final project was a short called Lorenzo, which he thought up after observing another pet of his, this time a cat, after it had been in a fight with two poodles. He thought What would happen if my cat lost its tail and what would that look like set to tango music?  Lorenzo was initially supposed to be part of a third Fantasia film, but when that project fell apart it was released on its own in 2004. The following year it received an Oscar nomination and won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short. Just over two months later, Joe was sitting at his drawing desk at home (it being one of the few days he didn’t go to the studio), doing one of the things he loved most in this world, when he suffered a fatal heart attack. The Legendary story man was just nine days short of his 97^th birthday.

April 21 - Bob Moore

Image courtesy disneydetail.me

On this day, in 1920, Robert C. Moore was born in Los Angeles, California. His father was a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. As Bob was growing up, his father would play on recordings of various projects around town as part of his job. Allegedly, two of those projects were for a fledgling cartoon studio in 1928, soundtracks for a new series of animated shorts starring a scrappy little mouse. One was titled Plane Crazy and the other Steamboat Willie. Whether the fact that dear old dad played for Mickey Mouse sparked little Bob's imagination or not, he began taking classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute right out of high school. He must have been pretty naturally talented as he didn't stay there long before beginning work at the Walter Lantz Studio in 1938. He was with Lantz for two years, helping to usher in the popular Andy Panda character, before becoming the second person in his family to work for the other Walter in town.

Image courtesy pinterest.com

In 1940, Bob became an animator for the Walt Disney Studio, starting out as an assistant to a third Walter, Walt Kelly. After working under Kelly on Fantasia and Dumbo, Bob became a gag man in the Story Department. As World War II raged on, he contributed to The Reluctant Dragon and The Three Caballeros before being drafted into the Navy to work on propaganda films. He came back to Story for a few years after the end of the war, transferring over to the Publicity Department in 1948. Bob worked under Hank Porter, who had drawn the Snow White and Pinocchio Sunday comics before becoming the head of Publicity Art. Under Hank's guidance, Bob created artwork for movie posters, book covers, greeting cards and any other promotional material you can think of.

When Hank passed away in 1951, Bob was promoted to Art Director of Publicity, a position he would hold for the next three decades. In the early Fifties, in addition to everything he was doing publicity wise, he also began drawing for the Western Publishing comic books the company had licensed. He worked mostly on Donald Duck stories, but his name can be found on Grandma Duck panels and Little Bad Wolf strips. During the same time period, Bob was also illustrating Little Golden Books bearing the famous Disney characters.

Image courtesy wikimedia.org

Throughout his 43 year career with Disney, Bob was tapped to do all sorts of special jobs. One of the little secrets the company doesn't necessarily like to talk about surrounds Walt's signature. He got asked to sign so many things, he simply didn't have time to scrawl autographs and run a company. He authorized a handful of his artists to sign things for him and Bob became one of the best (it's apparently really difficult to tell what is Walt's actual signature and what is Bob's forgery). In 1960, when a new school was built in Walt's boyhood home, Marceline, Mo, and named after the town's most famous citizen, Walt asked Bob to design the artwork for the lobby and gymnasium. After Walt passed away, the United States Post Office wanted to commemorate him with a stamp. Bob was one of the two guys asked to design it (Paul Wenzel, another Disney artist was other). In 1984, when the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, Bob, who had been retired for three years at this point, was commissioned to create the official mascot of the Games. Not only did he design Sam the Eagle, but he had to integrate him into hundreds of other signs and logos, for everything from individual events to novelty t-shirts.

Image courtesy waltdisneymuseum.org

In 1981, Bob retired from his post after over four decades of creating thousands of logos, letterheads, brochures, etc. etc. etc. For all his contributions to the company, Bob was honored in two ways. First an exclusively Disney color was named after him. For years (until everything started being done on computers), there were plenty of tubes of Moore Red all over the Ink and Paint Department. Second, in 1996, he became an official Disney Legend. On November 20, 2001, the man who cheekily referred to himself as Bob Moore, MD (the MD stood for Mouse Drawer) left this world in the same city he entered it. He was 81.

February 26 - The Academy Awards

On this day, in 1942, Walt Disney received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 14th Academy Awards ceremony. First presented in 1938, the Thalberg award is an honorary Oscar (even though it's not the traditional statue but instead a bust of its namesake) given to "creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production" (to be official about it). It's not awarded every year. Walt was only the fourth person to be honored with one but it wasn't, of course, the first time he'd left the ceremony with a statue.

The Walt Disney studio has a long history of impressing Academy voters with the films they've produced over the last 90+ years. Which, in my opinion, is how we get into a bit of a grey area when it comes to those golden statuettes. The answer to the trivia question "Who has received the most Academy Awards?" is, hands down, Walt Disney. His 26 wins in 59 nominations dwarfs anyone else's total by more than triple. But while he was the guy signing everyone's paychecks, how much of his work is represented in those statistics versus the work of the people cashing those paychecks? Would the studio have done such stellar pictures if Walt hadn't been cheerleading everyone on with a meticulous eye for detail and a bankroll to match? Most probably not. Could Walt have made such stellar pictures on his own? Definitely not. But it's a debate that's gone on as long as collaborative art has been made and will go on until the last director on earth says "That's a wrap": how much belongs to the ones who made it and how much to the one who paid it.

The first time the Walt Disney Studio earned itself an Oscar was for the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees in 1932, which was also the first time that one was given for Best Animated Short. In fact, Disney went on to win Best Animated Short the first eight times it was given out. The last of the dozen times Walt won in that category happen posthumously in 1968 for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. His other wins came as producer on Best Documentary (2 wins), Best Documentary Short (2 wins), and Best Short Subject (5 wins). He was also presented with 3 honorary Oscars for the creation of Mickey Mouse, Fantasia, and his most famous win, one big statue and seven little statues for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Eventually, Walt wasn't the only one in the studio winning awards. At first, it was just for music, like when Leigh Harline, Paul Smith and Ned Washington won Best Score and for Pinocchio and Best Song for "When You Wish Upon a Star" in 1940. Then, as Disney started making live action pictures (and was newly eligible for the whole gamut of categories), the wealth was really spread around (for instance, when Mary Poppins won five, Walt didn't get any of them). And the flow continues right up to today, with films produced by Disney garnering over a dozen nominations and bringing home four wins at the 91st ceremony just a couple days ago. It was a showing I'm sure would have put a sparkle in Walt's eye and had him saying "Not bad. Not quite up to me yet, but you'll get there."

February 1 - Jimmy MacDonald

Image courtesy of wikipedia.com

On this day, in 1991, John James MacDonald passed away in his home in Glendale, California from heart failure. Born on May 19, 1906, Jimmy and his parents emigrated to America when he was one month old. After a fifteen day voyage across the Atlantic (I can only imagine how nerve wracking that was with a newborn) the family settled in Pennsylvania. As a young man, Jimmy showed an aptitude for music, especially the drums. He wound up getting a job as a musician on the Dollar Steamship Line (now known as American President Lines). Through his contacts there, he began performing on the recordings for the cartoons made by the Walt Disney Studio. In 1934, Jimmy became one of two people in Disney's newly formed Sound Effects Department, a job he would hold for the next 42 years.

Jimmy was a master at finding ways to produce the sounds that were needed for any given situation. Sometimes it was something as simple as flopping down in a chair in someone's office, liking the creaking noise the chair produced and commandeering the chair for his department. Other times Jimmy had to create gadgets in his workshop to get the sound he was looking for. He would build thousands of noise makers over the years to give life to everything from Evenrude's unique buzz in The Rescuers to the sound of the forest fire that take's the life of Bambi's mother.

Image copyright Disney

Early on in his tenure with Disney, Jimmy began providing voices as well as sound effects. As he put it, the studio could save money by not hiring actors since he was already there and getting paid anyways. It started out with some laughter here and a few barks there. Eventually he just kept getting asked if he could voice something particular, he'd say I don't know, they'd have him try it and he was usually great. For instance, during the long production process on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it was decided at one point to have the dwarfs yodel during their party song. Jimmy was sent into the recording booth to test out a whole bunch of different yodels. Some professional yodelers were brought in for the official soundtrack. When a bunch of changes were made to the scene, rather than bring the professionals in and pay them again, Jimmy was sent back into the booth to record the new stuff. This sort of versatility lead to continuously bigger roles.

Image copyright Disney

The story of how Jimmy landed his biggest role is just as casual. While production was going on for Mickey and the Beanstalk, a short that eventually became part of Fun and Fancy Free, the crew called Walt in to record Mickey's lines. Walt claimed that he just didn't have time for this sort of thing anymore (although his smoking habit was making it increasingly difficult to produce Mickey's falsetto) and they should just call Jimmy. Someone did and said Walt needed to see him. Jimmy tried to think of what he'd done all the way to Walt's office. When he got there, Walt asked him if he'd ever tried to do Mickey. Jimmy said of course not. Walt said give it a try right now. Jimmy worked up his best Mouse and said "Hi Walt, how are you?" Walt said sounds good, gave him a few pointers and sent him off to the booth. He would be the voice of the Boss until 1977.

Image copyright Disney

There have been plenty of other times you've heard Jimmy. For features, he did both Jacques and GusGus in Cinderella, the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, the wolf in Sword in the Stone and the hyena in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. In shorts, he played all sorts of animals, from Delores the Elephant to Humphrey the Bear. He only appeared twice in live action parts. He was the Circus Band Drummer in 1960's Toby Tyler and he is seen in silhouette as the timpani player in Fantasia. Outside of work he joined Ward Kimball's jazz band, the Firehouse Five Plus Two, as their drummer.

Image copyright Disney

Fans of the Monster Sound Show, the original sound effects show at the Disney-MGM Studios, might remember seeing Jimmy. The pre-show that played in the queue area was a piece he did with David Letterman, showcasing many of the homemade noise makers he'd made over the years. He even did a little bit of Mickey, even though by that point he'd handed those reigns over to Wayne Allwine (who also started out as a sound effect man). Jimmy had officially retired from the company in 1977. And by retired, I mean there was often several weeks in a row when he didn't come into the studio to consult on a project. In fact, when he passed away fourteen years later, he was preparing sounds that would be used in Splash Mountain. In 1993, Jimmy was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend, even though he was truly one of the few people who are widely regarded as such long before their final curtain.