It all comes to an end with the release of They Drew As They Pleased Vol. 6: The Hidden Art of Disney’s New Golden Age (The 1990’s, 2000’s and 2010’s). Didier Ghez’s six-volume series from Chronicle Books has taken readers from the earliest years of Disney to the present, shining a spotlight on some lesser-known artists and showcasing never-before-published artwork. The same is true here, not only giving animation fans the chance to see how their favorite modern films evolved, but also a look at artwork from some famously canceled or altered films.
Just because the book focuses on five artists that contributed a great deal to the three decades in the title doesn’t mean you won’t get some Walt-era artwork in this release. Joe Grant is the first artist featured, who started at Disney in the early 1930’s contributing to many shorts and features, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He famously received no credit for Lady and the Tramp, an original idea that he created, because he had left the studio in the late 1940’s, but returned in 1989 to work on Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Fantasia 2000, and a variety of unfinished projects. His return to Disney also gave him the chance to fully realize an idea he had pitched to Walt Disney in the 1940’s, the Academy-Award nominated short film Lorenzo.
The They Drew As They Pleased series has tried to remain focused on artists that haven’t received a huge amount of exposure, which is why you won’t find names like Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, or Mark Henn with their own sections in this volume. The three other artists highlighted are Hans Bacher, Mike Gabriel, and Michael Giaimo. Since all three are still alive and active in the animation industry, it gives them the chance to tell their own unique and compelling stories, with their art sections each featuring work that the artists provided directly to the author. This volume also includes a few collaborations with Walt Disney Imagineering that Michael Giamo and Mike Gabriel worked on.
One of the many highlights of this series for me has been the chance to see artwork from abandoned projects and this releases features the most recently announced and cancelled animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, Gigantic. Through Joe Grant’s section, we get to see artwork from some Walt-era canceled projects for the first time, like a Mickey Mouse short called The Hollywoods and a detective story starring a hound dog that looks a lot like McGruff the Crime Dog called Inspector Bones. Moving into the era that the book primarily focuses on, Disney Animation fans will learn about and see artwork from scrapped projects including The Little Broomstick, Bitzi and the Hollywood Dream, The Abandoned, The Nightingale, My Peoples, Wild Life, Fraidy Cat, I Am, and Swabbies.
It also covers earlier versions of two projects that became two very different films, Sweating Bullets (Home on the Range) and American Dog (Bolt).
The entire They Drew As They Pleased series gives Disney Animation fans a collection of rare art and untold histories from a studio that’s dear to our hearts. This sixth and final volume was a bittersweet joy to pore over, representing an era in which I was actively following the studio as an adult rather than reliving a past I didn’t experience firsthand. It not only answers questions about what could’ve been with abandoned projects, but achieves its goal of connecting fans to the artists behind some of the most cherished animated films of the past three decades.