At Disney, the Studio of Animation

A fully packed day, with office work, a large "new member" lunch for Imagi Studio employees (where I detailed the wonders of the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan), and finally an afternoon walking tour of Disney Animation Studios.

There were no WGA picketers on Riverside Drive, but near the gate to the main lot stood two honey-wagons. A Disney executive told me a few days ago: "We thought portable toilets were better than having picketers running over to St. Joseph Hospital to use the restrooms there."

Nice. Back in '82 during TAG's last strike, I just gritted my teeth and held it.

Upstairs in the hat building, I spent a fun-filled twenty minutes trying to locate a four-digit room number. The numbering system for cubicles and other spaces is eccentric. More often than not 2824 follows 2822, but 2826 is absent. (Half the time it's around the corner, down some other hallway.)

After a lot of tramping around I discovered what the problem was. The number I looked for was covered up with a poster. But it turned out not to matter. There was nobody inside anyway.

Three or four different artists told me that Bolt's story development is in good shape, and that Rapunzel and Princess and the Frog "look like they're going to be big deal, box office pictures." Said one artist:

"Rapunzel has really, really come together. Before it was a series of really nice moments, some really funny sequences. But now it has a real epic sweep to it. To me it has the feel of those early Disney features from the forties..."

Since I haven't seen much of the work for any of these features, we'll consider the above hearsay. Encouraging hearsay.