August 21 - Vance Gerry

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On this day, in 1929, Vance Bryden Gerry was born in Pasadena, California. Vance studied at the famed Chouinard Art Institute before joining the Walt Disney Studio in 1955. His first position with Disney was as assistant inbetweener, which goes to show how much the place had expanded since the early days; Walt couldn’t afford anything below regular inbetweener in the beginning. Like most enormously talented people at the studio, Vance didn’t stay on the bottom rung for long. He was quickly moved into the Layout Department. His first projects in that department were for the burgeoning television division and were all a bit… well, goofy. Goofy with a capital G, that is. Vance helped put some zaniness in specials like The Goofy Success Story, Goofy’s Cavalcade of Sports and Goofy’s How to Relax. He also lent his talents to the Shorts Department (although since shorts were on their way out, those films were now being called featurettes). His layout work can be seen in The Truth about Mother Goose and the eternal educational classic Donald Duck in Mathmagicland. By the early Sixties, Vance was in the Features Department full time, working on One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. At the end of production on Stone, Walt decided to move him once again, this time to the position he was born to have.

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Although you might not realize it by looking at it, story development for The Jungle Book was a long almost tortuous process. Walt considered the first several drafts to be too dark for a children’s movie (even though they were pretty faithful to the book). He rotated through a number of people on the writing team (one of whom, Bill Peet, would actually leave the studio over disagreements about this script) before joining it himself and taking a bigger interest in an animated feature than he had in years. The final four man writing team (and yes, in those days it was all men) included Vance and getting to work that closely with Walt was an experience he never forgot. He once commented that Walt had a certain aura about him and you felt his presence in a room even before you saw him. And Walt’s laser focus on creating strong characters was a lesson Vance took to heart for the rest of his days.

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Vance would go on to become a legendary story man in not just at Disney, but in the animation industry as a whole. Don Hahn, the producer of The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, described him this way: you could probably find someone who drew better than him or wrote better than him or communicated characters better than him, but absolutely no one could do all three at once better than, or for as long as, Vance did. Vance himself once described his writing style as very loose. He preferred to only have a picture’s title rather than a script. Titles encouraged exploration and dreaming. Scripts, he felt, were fairly constricting. Necessary to the process, of course, but something that could come later on as far as he was concerned. One thing everyone could agree on, was that Vance could convey not only characters but whole sequences, complete with camera angles and how a character would react to the general mood, with only a few quick pictures on a storyboard. Ask anyone in animation at the time who the most charismatic, respected and all around fun to be with story man was and they would all tell you: Vance.

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After Walt’s passing, Vance continued to work his story magic in the Features Department for pretty much the rest of his life. He made major contributions to The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Rescuers (including the scene where Madame Medusa crushes Penny’s dreams of adoption), The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective (for which he also received story adaptation credit) and Beauty and the Beast. Starting in 1995, at the age of 66 (you know, when most people start a new phase of their careers), he began focusing more on character design and overall visual development. In that capacity, he helped shape Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Fantasia 2000 (particularly the Carnival of the Animals sequence, the one with the flamingos and the yo-yo), Hercules and Home on the Range.

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If all his work with Disney wasn’t enough to keep a man occupied (and in this case, clearly it wasn’t), Vance also had a side gig going for most of his life as well. Starting in 1963, he started his own book printing business, Peach Pit Press. As a teen during World War II, he’d worked for a printer basically because he and his family needed money and the job was available. The profession didn’t turn into an interest until almost two decades later. He changed the name of the business to Weather Bird Press in 1968 and spent decades making small batches of lavishly illustrated books that are highly collectable today. Most people have never heard of Weather Bird, mainly because Vance wasn’t much of a guy for self-promotion, but those who know about this sort of thing covet his creations.

In 2004, around the time the last animated feature he worked on was being released, Vance was diagnosed with cancer and it didn’t take long for the disease to consume him. He passed away from it on March 5, 2005 at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, in almost the same place he came into the world 75 years before.