Scarlett Stahl: An Interview with John Musker and Ron Clements
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John and Ron were considered part of the Young Turks during the period of the late seventies shown in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty . �Don Bluth had been there before I came,� John recalls. John Pomeroy and Andy Gaskill were among the really talented draftsmen who had already come through the training program. I was among the new trainees drafted to work on The Small One, a Christmas featurette which Eric Larson was scheduled to direct. Don Bluth, however, was not happy with the cartoony style Eric was planning for the film and went to Ron Miller, the executive in charge of the entire Studio. As I understand it, Don said something along the lines of wanting to direct the featurette himself in order to use it as a proper training ground for the young animators to develop feature animation skills. Ron was persuaded and Don became the new director. We CalArtians were disappointed because we wanted to work with Eric Larson. So I, along with Brad and Jerry, animated on The Small One. I worked with Cliff Nordberg, a veteran animator, a wonderful fellow who did broad, �cartoony,� intuitive animation. He had worked with Ward Kimball and Woolie Reitherman doing comic animation on several features. After that I segued into animating on The Fox and the Hound working on the comic relief, the two birds Dinky and Boomer. Don Bluth, meantime, eager to have control of his work and believing he carried the true flame of Disney animation, left Disney to start his own studio and to produce and direct The Secret of NIMH. Once Bluth departed on his birthday, September 13, 1979, with several talented animators in tow, management realized they needed people to animate the human characters that Bluth had been doing with John Pomeroy on The Fox and the Hound.�
At just about the same time, the first of what became a yearly display, the Disney caricature show, had been exhibited in the Studio library. Gale Warren, a Studio librarian, whom John had met some months before at an in-house dance class conducted by fellow animator Betsy Baytos, arranged monthly art shows at the library. When a gap in the schedule appeared, and knowing the prevalence of caricatures being drawn around the Studio, she suggested to John (by now completely smitten with Gale and engaged to her) that he and his friends have a show of their drawings. The show was a big hit featuring drawings not just of animators but the many people who worked around the Disney lot. Because John did a number of caricatures for the show where his drawings of �humans� were noticed, he was enlisted to animate on the human characters in The Fox and the Hound, picking up work that would have been done by Don, John Pomeroy, etc., had they not left.
John and Gale, meantime, married in September of 1979. They have twin sons, Patrick and Jackson, and a daughter, Julia, who are all creatively minded.
As production loomed on the next feature, The Black Cauldron, a fantasy based on an imaginative series of novels written by Lloyd Alexander, there was a question of adding a young director to the mix of veteran directors. Tom Wilhite, a young executive working for Ron Miller, was becoming familiar with some of the �new kids� from CalArts. Tom thought adding John as a director to the film would bring in someone open to new ideas and the young untapped talent. Tom also installed Joe Hale, a veteran layout man who had worked with Ward Kimball and more recently with Henry Selick on a live action project, as a producer. Tom felt Joe had enough experience to satisfy Ron Miller, but enough inclusiveness, as he had demonstrated working with Henry, to be open to the young talent as well. John discovered, though, that he was not welcomed by the other directors who felt he had been imposed on them by a meddling live action executive ( Wilhite.) �The other directors didn�t like any of my ideas,� says John. �I was kind of a radical and had Tim Burton to do drawings and ideas for Cauldron in his distinctive style, which I really liked and Joe Hale initially liked. But the other directors didn�t care for them. So Joe went to Ron Miller and asked whether he was open to styling Black Cauldron in a newer way or felt more comfortable with a more familiar �classic� approach. Ron opted for the latter, citing strong box office returns on The Lady and the Tramp which had recently done well in Europe. �Why would I want to change that?� he said. So the �malcontents� of Black Cauldron, the story artists like Pete Young, Vance Gerry, and Ron Clements who wished to follow the books more closely than the veteran directors, and in the case of John Musker, had also wanted to use the film as a departure from the Disney �house style,� were reassigned to Basil of Baker Street, an adventure about a mouse Sherlock Holmes. It was based on a book of that same title that Ron Clements had brought to the Studio�s attention as a possible feature. So a small crew including, among others, Ron and John, Joe Ranft, and the aforementioned veteran story men Pete Young and Vance Gerry, began work on Basil of Baker Street. Many twists lay ahead: the change in studio management, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, etc. All of which may be illuminated in subsequent interviews, but the tape and the time ran out here.
Ron and John are currently developing their next project, and are hoping once again to utilize hand drawn animation. It is too early in the process to talk about the movie�s content. It will take about three years before it will be released but Ron and John seem very enthused about it.
Footnote from Scarlett: Being a fan of animation myself, I asked these great animation artists to each do a sketch for our viewers. In seconds they had sketched the characters shown in this article and allowed me to copy them for your viewing pleasure.
Musker's Sketch
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Clement's Sketch
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-- Posted February 17, 2010