My Dad, Walt Disney

Bits and pieces of this 1956 series of articles from the Saturday Evening Post have surfaced online, but since I have scans of all of them, I thought you might enjoy the whole lot (posted in increments). In the mid 1950s journalist Pete Martin interviewed Walt about his life and career. This resulted in a book, in which his daughter Diane talks about her famous dad.

I have had the chance to listen to the entire interview, and even though Pete Martin (who seems somewhat intimidated by Walt) asks the questions, Diane is present the whole time, giving input.

Walt's grandchildren Joanna and Christopher are pictured throughout the articles, and today they are "old" enough to remember their Grandfather. I have had the pleasure of speaking to them just recently. As much as the Disney family prefers to be private, they are very much engaged in their mother's mission to portray the life of Walt Disney sincerely and properly.

Here is the first installment of Diane's and her dad's reflection on how it all began.

Stuff I Drew in Art School

Here is another post with old student samples, ranging back from 1976 to 1979.
That's my landlord's son Rene in the drawing. He would stop by my rented room once in a while with friends. They sometimes watched cartoons while I sketched them.

A couple of life drawings. My art teacher encouraged us not to get used to our favorite tool. So I tried marker, pencil, brush and ink and even finger paint. It's always interesting to see what happens when you experiment.

A rough self portrait. A little too rough.

Studying anatomy and rhythm in old masters' paintings.

And then having the audacity to apply that to a cartoon girl.

Occasionally me and my student friends would get together and pose for each other. The models at school seldom got into poses that showed any motion.

More of Rene and his friends.

These are drawn from Super-8 film footage I took of dogs in action. Trying to get a feeling for anatomy in motion.

Playing around with poses for cartoon animals, anthropomorphic or otherwise.

An exercise in shape and line. After a few rough doodles I choose one composition to create flat graphics. I had just visited CalArts and assignments like these were exhibited on the school's classroom walls. So I thought I'd give it a try.

Studying the great Uderzo, of Asterix fame and other iconic comic strips. What an artist! Meeting him years later was un indescribable thrill.

Dabbling in semi abstract forms. Look at my signature on the bottom right, LOL. Any similarity to an American Animation producer is coincidental.

Looking back, I had a great time as an art student. There were two things that turned out to be essential to my future career:
Giving myself assignments that related to the art of animation, and having Hans Bacher as my "after hours mentor".
Here is more of my student work from a previous post:
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2012/01/post-100-old-portfolio-stuff.html

The Huntsman

Albert Hurter drew these charming sketches showing the Hunter after he couldn't bring himself to kill Snow White. He begs her to run far away and hide.
That makes him a good guy, who disobeys the Evil Queen's orders. During the sequence preceding this moment though he is portrayed as a killer who will go through with murdering the princess.
With his scary expression and body movements everyone who sees the film for the first time believes he is going to do it.
To achieve this kind of horrific depiction some live action reference was used to help with the realism required for this type of character.

An actual photostat with the corresponding animation drawing, which is likely a clean up study, since it is drawn in red and not in black pencil.

It's astonishing to me how far Disney went with the portrayal of villains from the early features.

The Queen, the Witch, even the Spirit of the Magic Mirror must have scared the popcorn out of kids way back. But Disney insisted on strong contrast between good versus evil, and that needed to be clear in the characters' design as well as their acting.

Even the 1938 comic strip based on the film maintained the frightening anxiety of the moment.

Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson

Way back my art school (Folkwang Schule, Essen, Germany) didn't offer any animation classes. As a student I decided to give myself various assignments in order to explore my potential as a future animation artist. I would create model sheets a la Disney, animate walk cycles and try to explore character concepts for an imaginary movie project.
Early in 1980 (still at art school) I wondered what the cast of Sherlock Holmes might look like, if depicted as animal characters, similar to Disney's Robin Hood. 
It was a way for me to practice the Disney style in rough form (I had just found out that Disney designers and animators worked pretty loosely). So I practiced staging, expressions and a little bit of color exploration with Magic Markers. I never showed these sketches to my art teachers at school, knowing how much they disliked the Disney approach to animation. The one person I did show them to was my friend Hans Bacher, who had graduated from the same art school and was at that time in business as a designer, storyboard artist and animator for several German agencies and TV stations.
Without Hans' constructive criticism and input I would have been completely lost.

So here I figured Sherlock Holmes as some kind of bloodhound, Dr. Watson as a duck, the inspector as a fox, and a policeman as a lion.
When I look as these sketches now after so many years, I still sense my unstoppable passion for Walt Disney's Animation, so many years ago. (A passion that is even stronger today).