May 3 - California Institute of the Arts

On this day, in 1969, a groundbreaking ceremony was held as Lillian Bounds Disney turned over the ceremonial first shovelful for the new campus of the California Institute of the Arts. CalArts, as it is usually called, was incorporated in 1961, but it's story actually began forty years earlier. In 1921, Nelbert Murphy Chouinard founded an art school in Los Angeles, California. The whole point of the Chouinard Institute of Art was to bring some prestige to the West Coast art scene. It worked, with the help of another fledgling company that came along in 1928.

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Walt Disney's relationship with Chouinard began almost as soon as his studio did. By 1929, Walt was making sure his inexperienced animators were taking weekly classes at the Institute. He knew that the better his staff became at their craft, the better his studio would do. By the early Thirties, instructors from Chouinard were coming to the Disney lot to teach classes. By the mid Thirties, Walt was treating the school like a personal breeding ground for new talent, filling the ranks of the Snow White team as fast as he could with its graduates. And that's how things went for the next two decades. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Disney artists attended classes there over the years, including several of Walt's Nine Old Men, Mary Blair and Imagineer Herbert Ryman. More than a couple also taught classes.

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In the mid Fifties, Nelbert Chouinard suffered a terrible stroke and was unable to continue in her duties as head of the school. Walt said not a problem and the Disney Studio basically took over the administration of the place (Walt wasn't about to let go of the best trainers his staff ever had). But even with the administrative and financial help of Disney, the Chouinard Institute was struggling to stay open at the turn of the Sixties.  At the same time, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music was also hitting hard times. Seeing an opportunity to expand Chouinard's scope and strengthen both arts schools, Walt proposed that they merge into one entity. The leadership of both institutions agreed and CalArts was born, at least on paper.

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When it was incorporated in 1961, CalArts became the first school of higher learning in the country to offer degrees to both the visual arts and the performing arts. It offers both under- and post-graduate studies in Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film, Music and Theater. Its first board of directors included Roy O. Disney, Roy E. Disney, Chuck Jones, HR Haldeman (of Watergate fame), Meredith Wilson (creator of The Music Man) and Ralph Hetzel (then vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America), among others. But the process of combining the fortunes of the two schools wasn't a quick one. It wasn't until eight years later that construction could begin on a combined campus.

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Mother nature did her best to derail the new campus, dumping massive amounts of rain on the site throughout 1970 and rocking the area with a 6.5 magnitude earthquake in February 1971, but CalArts persevered and moved in during the month of November that same year. Over the next few years the school experienced almost constant upheaval in its administration. The first president, Robert Corrigan, fired most of the instructors from Chouinard and instituted a very laid back atmosphere with cyclical rather than sequential curriculum. He lasted a year. The next president, William Lund (Walt's son-in-law), fired more than 15% of the staff, imposed structured schedules and force the school to operate on a budget. He lasted three years. In 1975, Robert Fitzpatrick took over and offered the school enough stability to find its footing and begin thriving (he lasted 12 years).

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CalArts became and remained for Disney what Chouinard had been before it: a breeding ground for new talent. The list of modern Disney artists that have been through the Institute is quite extensive and includes John Laseter, Brad Bird, Kirk Wise, Tim Burton, Glen Keane, Gary Trousdale, Andrew Stanton, Pete Doctor, John Musker and many (many) more. Going to CalArts doesn't guarantee you a job at Disney, nor are you automatically excluded if you don't, but it sure does help to grease the wheels.

The last thing we need to talk about when it comes to CalArts is the infamous classroom A113. Currently the first year graphics design studio, classroom A113 has also been used extensively by first year Character Animation students and has become an inside joke in the industry. The moniker A113 appears literally every where you look in animated films and television shows. Sometimes it's a license plate number, sometimes it's an apartment number or on a billboard, sometimes it's harder to incorporate it into a story. In Finding Nemo, for instance, you see it as the model number of the camera the scuba diver uses to take a picture before capturing Nemo. In WALL-E, the directive given to prevent Autopilot from ever returning to earth is, you guessed it, code A113. A113 has appeared in everything from The Simpsons to South Park to an episode of Dr. Who. So the next time you're watching your favorite bit of animation, be on the lookout for A113. Chances are, it's in there somewhere.