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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.