July 11 - Hal Adelquist

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On this day, in 1914, Hal Adelquist was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. When he was about three, Hal and his parents moved to California, living in Oakland for a couple of years then settling in Los Angeles. While attending Los Angeles High School, he was able to develop his burgeoning talent as a cartoonist as well as hone his organizational and planning skills on the Publicity Committee. Hal graduated in 1932 and less than a year later was working at the Walt Disney Studio.

Despite his drawing talents, Hal quickly moved into the production side of animation with the studio. For much of his first few years at Disney, he served as an assistant director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, although you won’t find his name on any official credits list. After Snow White was released, Hal was put in charge of organizing classes for the studio’s stable of animators. He made sure that new hires and seasoned pros alike worked on their characterization skills and learned how to make demo reels of their art.

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By the end of the Thirties, Hal had moved into the Personnel Department. His first duties there reminded him of his days on the Publicity Committee as he planned all the company picnics and various other outings. When the animators went on strike in 1941, he was in the dubious position of being in charge of the department. Several resignation letters tendered at that time, including the Legendary Carl Barks’, were addressed to Hal. He clearly acted with both professionalism and dignity throughout the strike process, however, or he would never have been chosen for his next role.

It wasn’t long after the strike that Hal was moved into the Story Department. While there, and in spite of the fact that he was technically studio management, Walt’s Nine Old Men collectively picked him to be their spokesperson in all matters that arose between the studio and the animators. For over a decade, Hal juggled the egos of Disney’s animation superstars and balanced them with the ego of the studio’s owner, smoothing the way for the production of classics like The Three Caballeros, Cinderella and Peter Pan. His skills and charisma must have been outstanding during this period because even though he was essentially representing labor after the strike, Walt still hand picked him in 1954 to be a major part of the studio’s new television show.

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When Walt agreed to create The Mickey Mouse Club for ABC, he turned the project over to Bill Walsh as producer and Hal as general coordinator. A simplified explanation of the two men’s relationship would be Bill made the decisions and Hal made the decisions happen. But don’t be fooled by that simplification. Hal had just as much influence on the look and feel of the show as practically anyone else. He had input on everything from the iconic mouse ears to who was hired as Mouseketeers to who the  Talent Round-Up winners were. Once filming began, Hal was production supervisor for Fun with Music Day, Anything Can Happen Day and Talent Round-Up Day, in other words 60% of the episodes.

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As the first season of The Mickey Mouse Club wrapped up filming, Hal was tasked with creating and staging the live shows of The Mickey Mouse Club Circus at Disneyland. For two months covering the 1955 Holiday season, guests could see some of their favorite Mouseketeers performing with professionals from the Ted DeWayne Circus. It was easily one of the most difficult shows to stage that the park ever undertook.

Between the launching of the television show and the running of the circus, Hal was beginning to crack under the strain of his job. His habit of an occasional steadying cocktail took a sharp turn towards alcoholism. Whether it was his growing drinking problem or something else entirely (nobody knows for sure), Walt and Hal had a major falling out in early 1956. Hal was replaced in his Club producing duties by Mike Holoboff and demoted to basically being a scout for acts for Talent Round-Up Day. In the spring of that year, Hal took a ten city tour with Jimmy Dodd to do just that, but it would be his last project with the company. Shortly after returning to Los Angeles, Hal resigned his position.

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The remainder of Hal’s life is fairly tragic and sketchy on details. About a year after resigning from Disney, he approached Walt to ask to be rehired. He was willing to take literally any job the studio had, but Walt said no. Hal then drifted to the East Coast, winding up in New York City. The New York Times interviewed him in 1977 in the common room of one of the city’s homeless shelters. He’d apparently bounced around among jobs as varied as an executive at the Freedomland Amusement Park in the Bronx to washing cars. In between jobs, he admitted that he was sometimes reduced to panhandling but considered himself to be pretty good at it and encouraged the reporter to learn how because you just never know.  From all accounts, he was still a pretty charismatic guy in good possession of his mental capabilities, which leads me to believe that he never got control of his dependency on solving his problems at the bottom of a bottle. Four years later, Hal had drifted back to the West Coast. He was living with his mother in Long Beach, California when he passed away on March 26, 1981. He was 66.

July 3 - Marcellite Garner

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On this day, in 1910, Edna Marcellite Garner was born in Redlands, California. She enrolled in night classes to study art at Polytechnic High School, the second oldest high school in Los Angeles, California. Right after she graduated she applied for a job at the Walt Disney Studio. At the age of nineteen, Marcelitte became one of only 35 Disney employees in February 1930 as part of the Ink and Paint Department. She’d been there about six months when Burt Gillett, one of the directors of Mickey Mouse shorts, walked in and asked if any of the girls (Ink and Paint was staffed entirely by women) knew how to speak Spanish. Marcellite and one other woman raised their hands. Burt asked if either of them could sing. The other woman wasn’t willing to do that and put her hand down. Burt looked at Marcellite, said follow me and took her to the recording studio for a sound test. She passed and became the first regular voice of Minnie Mouse.

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Starting with The Cactus Kid in 1930 (it’s set in Mexico, thus the reason for the Spanish question), Marcellite would lend her voice to Miss Minnie for over 40 shorts in the next ten years. You can hear her in such classics as Mickey’s Orphans, Mickey’s Rival, Brave Little Tailor and The Nifty Nineties. She is generally credited with helping to develop Minnie’s personality beyond eye candy for Mickey.  Marcellite also provided various other voices and sounds for the Silly Symphony series, like cats meowing in the Academy Award winning Three Orphan Kittens.

When the Great Animator’s Strike happened in 1941, Marcellite’s sympathies lay with the studio not the animators. She couldn’t see how anyone was being mistreated and felt the strike was ruining the family vibes of the studio. Her main contribution to the strike actually came about quite casually. She took some color home movies of the workers walking the picket line; nowadays, whenever footage of the strike is shown, it’s almost always her work you’re seeing. Though the strike was soon settled, Marcellite wouldn’t be around for much longer. Later that year, she retired from Disney in order to focus her efforts on raising her two kids with her husband, Richard Wall.

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In later years, when the Wall family had moved to Los Gatos, California, Marcellite did briefly re-enter the entertainment industry, producing a comic strip called El Gato for the local paper. Throughout her life she continued to expand her artistic skills, taking classes in ceramics, watercolor and oils. She made all sorts of pieces for friends and family, selling a handful in art galleries or at local festivals, but she never did any more voice acting after leaving Disney. Until that is, archived recordings of her were used to create Get a Horse!, the short released before Frozen in 2013. Unfortunately, Marcellite hadn’t lived long enough to hear herself as Minnie again. Horse hit theaters two decades after she passed away at her home in Grass Valley, California on July 26, 1993. She was 83.

May 21 - John Hubley

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

December 30 - Bill Tytla

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On this day, in 1968, Vladimir Peter Tytla passed away at home on his farm in Flanders, Connecticut. Bill, as he was known, came into this world on October 25, 1904 in Yonkers, New York as the son of Ukrainian immigrants. Supposedly at the age of nine, he saw Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur and instantly fell in love with the medium of animation. While in high school, Bill started taking night classes at the New York Evening School of Industrial Design. It wasn't long before his love of art began to win out over his love of pretty much every other subject and he didn't bother going to high school anymore. By the time he was 16, Bill worked at the New York branch of Paramount Studios doing the lettering for their title cards.

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Bill soon moved over to the Raoul Barre Studio and began working on the Mutt and Jeff shorts. He then sign on with John Terry and eventually ended up at John's brother Paul's studio, Terrytoons. By this time, Bill was making a good living as an animator but the medium was a little simplistic and crass for his taste. He still dreamed of becoming a master artist. He enrolled in classes again, this time at the Art Students League of New York. Then, in 1929, he relocated to Paris, France and studied painting and sculpture. Unfortunately, being surrounded by the works of the old masters didn't help his confidence any. He ended up destroying most of his work from this period because of its inferiority and hightailed it back to America.

Determined that his studies would make him a master animator if not painter or sculptor, Bill resumed working for Terrytoons. He became good friends with a fellow artist there, Art Babbitt. When Art left New York for Hollywood and the Walt Disney Studio, he would spend the next two years trying to entice Bill to follow him. Bill resisted. He was making great money during the Great Depression after all. But finally, he decided to make a visit to his old friend Art. He was so impressed by the city and the studio, he took a pay cut to move there.

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Starting in 1935, Bill worked on Silly Symphonies like The Cookie Carnival and Mickey shorts like Mickey's Fire Brigade. His work was so filled with passion that he reportedly tore holes in his paper with his pencil. His work was also so incredibly good that Walt was quickly throwing money at him to get him to stay. Bill and Art became the studio's top money makers and even became roommates again, like they'd been while working at Terrytoons. That arrangement would stand until Bill's 30 year marriage began in 1938.

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When work began on Disney's first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bill was one of the first animators assigned to the project. Working closely with Fred Moore, he designed the look of the whole film and helped define each of the dwarfs personalities. One of the best scenes in the film where you can experience Bill's talent is watching Grumpy's transformation after Snow White kisses him. Following the success of Snow White, Bill's next assignment was the villain of Pinocchio. His ability to express the strong inner feelings of the somewhat crazy kidnapper makes Stromboli marvelous to watch.

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Bill's followup to Stromboli would be the Giant in Brave Little Tailor. Ollie Johnston, one of Walt's Nine Old Men, rightly argues that the look, feel and personality of giants in cartoons was set once Bill had done it. The short was nominated for an Oscar but lost to another Disney short, Ferdinand the Bull. Bill then moved on to animating the sorcerer, Yen Sid, in The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Once that became part of the larger project of Fantasia, though, Bill would get assigned perhaps the most iconic character of his career, Chernabog. The fierce, domineering and downright scary demon is clearly only that way because Bill Tytla was his animator. Growing tired of drawing "heavies," as he put it, his next assignment was decidedly more light hearted. He got to become the title character of 1941's Dumbo, which he modeled partly on his baby son.

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Then came the infamous Disney Studio Strike of 1942. Even though he was one of the best paid animators, Bill sympathized with his friends and, to the consternation of Walt, joined them on the picket line. Even though he returned to work once the strike was over, it was never the same. The war economy meant much less stimulating assignments. For Saludos Amigos, Bill animated Pedro the airplane and Jose Carioca, neither much of a challenge for him. He lent his talent to a couple of wartime shorts, but his growing dread of a Japanese attack on California led him to make a decision he would regret for the rest of life. On February 24, 1943, Bill resigned from the Disney Studio and went to live on a farm he owned in Connecticut.

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For a while, Bill went back to work for Terrytoons as an animator but soon left to become a director at a Paramount owned studio, Famous Studios. Over the next decade he directed shorts featuring Popeye, Little Lulu, Casper the Friendly Ghost and Little Audrey. In the early Fifties, he joined Tempo Productions, a studio formed by former Disney compatriots David Hilberman and Zack Schwartz, and began producing animated television commercials for the likes of Camel cigarettes, Plymouth cars and Tide. His last project was on the 1964 Warner Brothers film The Incredible Mr. Limpet, which starred future Disney Legend Don Knotts.

During production on Limpet, Bill's health began to decline and, shortly after it wrapped, he suffered a series of small strokes that left him blind in one eye. Near the end of his life, he tried several times to return to Disney, but, since Walt had passed a couple of years before, he was told there wasn't a place for him anymore. The excuse was given that there wasn't enough work for the animators the company already had, but Bill's heart just became even heavier with regret. He would pass away in 1968, mere weeks after his final rejection. Thirty years later, in recognition of his animation genius he was made an official Disney Legend.

December 27 - Jack Bradbury

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On this day, in 1914, John Morin Bradbury was born in Seattle, Washington. Jack was always interested in the comic strips he saw in the newspapers growing up and felt that drawing them must be a pretty great way to spend one’s time. So he practiced his skills as often as he could, waiting for an opportunity to break into the business. In 1933, he saw the Disney produced Silly Symphony The Three Little Pigs and not only was enamored of it himself, but noticed how everyone in town seemed to be talking about it. He heard rumors that the Disney Studio was hiring and sent a portfolio down to Hollywood. He was invited to come down for a two week trial run, mostly at his own expense. Jack put $50 in his pocket and took the offer. He passed the test and, at just 20 years of age, started his life in cartoons for the princely sum of $15 per week.

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For the next four years, Jack worked as an inbetweener on such classic Mickey Mouse shorts as The Band Concert and Through the Mirror. As work ramped up on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he began working under Eric Larson and Milt Kahl. The employees of the studio were encouraged to work up their own little pieces of animation and actually have them filmed so they could be critiqued and given pointers on how to improve. As the big drive to finish Snow White wound down, Jack made a couple of those pieces and asked Ham Luske, who’d been supervising animator for Snow White’s title character, to look at them. Ham approved of them and showed them to Walt, who also approved.

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In 1938, Jack became a full animator. He worked on shorts like Ferdinand the Bull (one of his sequences is when Ferdinand sits on the bee) and Barnyard Symphony. He also lent a hand to the next several features the studio produced. Jack’s work can be seen in some of Figaro’s scenes in Pinocchio, the Pegasus family in Fantasia and the stage fight in Bambi. Then, in 1941, Jack got caught up in the big animator’s strike at the studio. After being out for several weeks, he was invited back to work when the strike ended but his return didn’t last long. By the end of the year, Jack was one of a number of animators who would be permanently laid off.

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From 1942-44, Jack went across town to work for Friz Freleng at Warner Brothers, mostly working on Bugs Bunny shorts. Following his stint there, he went to work for American Comics Group working on comic book stories for characters like Fremont Frog and Spencer Spook. In 1947, Jack began working for Western Publishing, the company that produced comic books based on works by Disney, Walter Lantz and Warner Brothers. For the next 31 years, he drew practically every Disney character that existed for comic books and the Little Golden Books. He was so adept at it that Walt reportedly told Western that if Jack drew it, it didn’t need to be submitted for approval.

Starting in late 1969, Jack would begin to suffer from macular degeneration. As his eyesight worsened, he gradually moved from drawing comics to writing them instead. He finally had to call it quits for good in 1978. Towards the end of his life, Jack enjoyed a resurgence of interest in his work and would occasionally make appearances at various comic cons. He would pass away from kidney failure on May 15, 2004 in Sylmar, California. He was 89.

October 23 - Dumbo

On this day, in 1941, Walt Disney Studio's fourth animated feature, Dumbo, had its world premier at the Broadway Theater in New York City. With war raging in Europe, the studio had hit hard times. No foreign markets meant that both Pinocchio and Fantasia had failed to turn a profit. In desperate need of money, Walt decided to go cheap and simple. It was a gamble that paid off, both in the short and the long run.

In 1939, Kay Kamen, the head of the licensing department, showed Walt a prototype of a new toy, the Roll-A-Book. The scroll on the toy was a story by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The entire scroll consisted of eight pictures and a few words of text. It was enough for Walt to want to buy the rights. He originally intended to turn it into a short, but as development of the story proceeded, it became a feature.

When it came time to start animating Dumbo, Walt instructed his team that they had to make this picture on the cheap. Gone were the lush details of the studio's earlier films. The backgrounds were done in watercolors instead of oils. Character designs were simpler and more cartoony. Exacerbating costs was the fact that rough animation was barely finished when the animators went on strike for five weeks starting in May of 1941. The strike was finally settled (not terribly amicably) and the film was finished that fall. The final cost of Dumbo was a mere $950,000 (about 15.8 million dollars today), half of Snow White and a third of Pinocchio.

When Walt went to turn Dumbo over to RKO Radio Pictures, his distribution company at the time, they didn't want it. At just 64 minutes, Dumbo remains one of the studio's shortest features. RKO wanted it either lengthened or cut down to a short or they'd release it as a B-movie. Walt refused all of that and RKO begrudgingly released it as it was. Naturally that turned out to be the best choice.

Dumbo would be the most financially successful Disney film of its decade, grossing 1.6 million dollars (about 26.6 million dollars today). The simple, charming story resonated with movie goers even with (or perhaps because of) the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war. Dumbo would be nominated for two Oscars, winning for its score created by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace. It currently enjoys a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It's spawned two attractions, a television series in the Eighties and a new live action version set to come out next year. I don't think the story of the little elephant who gets bullied, finds an unlikely friend who gives him confidence and ends up saving the day will ever go out of style and might just be needed more today than ever.

Also on this day, in American history: Op Art

October 8 - Art Babbitt

On this day, in 1907, animator Arthur Harold Babitsky was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Known in life as Art Babbitt, his family moved to Sioux City, Iowa when he was in kindergarten. His father had injured his back, causing the family to struggle financially. Art decided he would become a psychiatrist to help alleviate that struggle, so after high school, he moved to New York to be a pre-med student at Columbia University. He didn't realize how much money that would take. To earn some, Art transformed into a freelance commercial artist, drawing advertising cartoons for companies like Sylvania. Inspired by the Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance, he got a job with the Terrytoons studio in New Rochelle doing animation. He never did become a psychiatrist.

In the early 1930s, Art moved west to try to get a job with the Disney Studio. He managed to snag one along with a fellow Terrytoon animator, Bill Tytla. Starting as an assistant animator, Art's talent was immediately noticed and he was promoted to animator. His first major work was bringing to life the drunken bumpkin mouse in the 1936 short The Country Cousin. Cousin would go on to win the Academy Award for best animated short.

The next project Art did at the studio, required all hands on deck. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he was part of the team that worked on the Evil Queen, a role that fellow animators acknowledged was probably the trickiest one in the film. Incidentally, the movie also brought Art his first wife, Marjorie Belcher. She was a dance model for the animators to reference. Following Snow White, Art became a directing animator. For Pinocchio, he led a team of 22 in the creation of Gepetto. Art reportedly felt that some of the best work he ever did, and the studio ever did for that matter, was on Pinocchio. His work in Fantasia can be seen in the characters of Zeus, Vulcan and the dancing mushrooms. When Dumbo came along, Art was again a directing animator on the character of Mr. Stork, who looks a bit like his voice actor, Sterling Holloway, thanks to him.

During this period of work on features, Art didn't forget about the shorts. His biggest contribution of all to the Disney family can be summed up in one word: Goofy. Art saw something in the decidedly minor character of Dippy Dawg that no one else did. He gave him a distinctive walk and developed his personality. Art once described Goofy this way: "He was someone who never really knew how stupid he was. He thought long and carefully before he did anything. And then he did it wrong." Art's work on Goofy's character paid off. Goofy had a long string of immensely popular shorts where he taught viewers how to do everything from skiing to driving a car. And his popularity continues to this day. He's had his own movie, his own television series and endures as one of the most beloved characters in Disney history. Love Goofy? Thank Art.

Unfortunately, in 1941, Art's relationship with the Disney Studio didn't just sour, it went full-on rotten. By that time, every animation studio in Hollywood had been unionized, except one. Even though he was one of Disney's highest paid animators, Art sympathized with the lower earning employees. Not only was he one of the few lead people to support unionization, he went a step further and became a leader in the fight. Walt fired Art and 15 other union leaders in May of that year basically for what he viewed as personal betrayal. The next day, 200 employees began a strike that would last for five weeks. Art spent that time rallying the troops and leading the picketing, at one point almost coming to blows with Walt. The studio finally gave in to union demands but the damage was done. Walt never forgave the strikers (in fact he named a bunch of them as communists when he testified before the McCarthy Hearings) and the familial attitude around the place was gone.

Walt was forced to rehire Art following the settlement but immediately looked for grounds to fire him again. The two men would go back and forth several times, Walt firing Art, Art suing the studio, if Art won, Walt would be forced to rehire him and on to the next round. Eventually Art left Disney for good and, along with other strike victims, joined a newly formed studio, United Productions of America. UPA was kind of the anti-Disney studio. While Disney was going for ultra-realism in animation, UPA was all about stylized minimalism. Art was involved in a mess of UPA's award winning shorts. One of the highlights of his time there was an Academy Award nominated short titled Rooty Toot-Toot. Art was also involved in creating the early Mr. Magoo shorts.

Later in the fifties, Art co-owned a firm named Quartet Films, which mainly created television commercials. He would win a Cleo Award for a spot he did for Parkay Margarine. Later he became part of Hanna-Barbera. In the early seventies, Art began teamed up with Richard Williams, a Canadian animator, to give a series of lectures to young (and sometimes old) animators about the craft. It's said that the notes from those lectures constitute the most circulated, most copied, most revered unpublished bible on animation out there.

Art would continue working pretty much right up to his death. His final project was a film with his lecture partner called The Thief and the Cobbler. The movie was independently financed at first and was in production for nearly three decades. Warner Brothers finally agreed to finish and distribute it, but that fell apart when the production went over budget. Cobbler was finished by a bond company and released in Australia. Ironically, two years later, after Art had passed away, Miramax, a subsidiary of Disney, would acquire it, edit the daylights out of it and release it in the US. Art's work had come full circle.

The story goes that in 1991, when Fantasia was released on video, Roy E Disney sent Art a note thanking him for all his contributions to the Disney Company. Supposedly Art was touched by Roy's kindness and released 50 years of animosity toward Roy's father and uncle. People close to Art say that since he was dying at that point, it's possible but considering how vehement his anger towards the Disney brothers stayed well in the late seventies, it's not all that probable. On March 4, 1992, Art passed away from kidney failure, most likely still harboring some justifiable resentment towards the Walt Disney Company. Nevertheless, his former co-workers Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas spoke at his funeral and he was made an official Disney Legend in 2007.

Also on this day, in American history: Great Chicago Fire