June 10 - Becky Fallberg

Image courtesy cartoonbrew.com

On this day, in 1923, Becky Dorner was born in Los Angeles, California. Her early years were spent in the Elysian Valley area, but in 1936, her parents moved the family into a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood at 3021 Angus Street. It was a move that shaped the rest of Becky’s life. Since the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, the Dorners rented out their extra rooms to artists who worked at the nearby Walt Disney Studio. Having spent her nights and weekends surrounded by talented animators (who were in the heady midst of creating their first animated feature no less), Becky naturally wanted to become part of the excitement of Disney herself. She graduated from John Marshall High School and immediately enrolled at Los Angeles City College as an art student. One year later, in 1942, she was hired as one of the studio’s telephone operators. Within months, she’d been moved into the Ink and Paint Department, where she toiled away on military training films and propaganda shorts like Victory Through Air Power for the war effort.

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Becky’s first stint with Ink and Paint lasted less than a year. By early 1943, she’d become part of the Animation Department as an assistant to animation supervisor Johnny Bond. Her main tasks were to copy drawings that needed to be sent to the Color Model department and help Jonny decide which animators were going to draw which scenes. It was during this period that the Dorner’s choice of boarders became even more personal for Becky. In 1945, she married one of them, Carl Fallberg, who was a story man with Disney. Carl would eventually leave the studio in the early Fifties to write Disney comics at Western Publishing and freelance for Hanna-Barbara and Warner Brothers, but Becky would remain with the company for the remainder of her professional career.

Image copyright Disney

In 1947, Becky transitioned into the Layout Department as a blue sketch artist. For the next three years, her job was to chart character movements across background art, assisting the layout artists in framing animated scenes. She returned to the Ink and Paint Department in 1950, as a paint matcher, ensuring each new batch of paint was properly mixed. From there she was promoted to the position of Final Checker, where it was her responsibility to make sure each animation cel was properly drawn and colored before sending it to the Camera Department. In the early Sixties, when Disney developed its Xerography process of photocopying animator’s drawings onto cels rather than hand inking them, Becky moved into the Xerox Camera Department.

Image courtesy visitpasadena.com

In the early Seventies, Becky became part of the Educational Films Department where she was one of two people who handled all of the Ink and Paint requirements for the unit. In 1975, having worked on every Disney feature since Saludos Amigos, Becky was put in charge of the entire Ink and Paint Department, a position she would hold until 1986, when the company began to transition to computer based coloring of its animation and she retired. For her nearly 45 year career, spanning 25 features and countless shorts, Becky was declared an official Disney Legend in 2000. Carl died in 1996 and Becky spent her remaining years supporting the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and volunteering as a docent at the historic Gamble House in Pasadena. On October 9, 2007, she passed away from complications due to lymphocytic leukemia. She was 84.