Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Marc Davis at Disneyland

A month before Marc Davis's passing on January 12, 2000, he and Ann Guenther were guest speakers at the Fantasy Fun Club at the Disneyland Hotel. Their mission: To talk about "the old days" at the Disney Studio.

For Marc, that meant the 1930s and Hyperion:

... [T]he first job I had at the studio was "Snow White". I don’t like the term particularly, but I got stuck with the human characters ... One of the things Milt Kahl and I suffered from was that we could both draw so much better than some of the others. We both had a better understanding of the human figure, and there simply weren’t that many people who could handle them. After a while these things just became automatic: “OK, Milt does the Godmother and Marc does the Princess.” We both really wanted the opportunity to do some of the things we would have loved to have done and were quite capable of doing ...

For Annie, that was the Burbank Studios in the 1950s, when she rolled into California, a fresh-faced teenager from Pennsylvania, and broke into animation ...

She discovered there was some, ah, regimentation:

In the fifties, men wore white shirts and ties. The women wore dresses. One woman, Renee Henning in the ink and paint department, decided to wear a stylish pantsuit to work. She was called in by Supervisor Grace Turner and told if she wore it again she would be fired. Well, she wore it again and was fired.

The photo above was taken by Alice Davis, Marc's wife. Ann Guenther believes it was one of the last photographs of Marc taken.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

My favorite Marc Davis story:

Disney released a "Chanticleer" storybook that used Marc's development sketches for the abandoned feature as illustrations. In one of those sketches, the Fox was holding a cigarette in a holder, which Disney deleted. Marc wouldn't autograph that book unless he was allowed to draw the cigarette and holder back in. Naturally, I let him :0)

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