I wasn’t at all familiar with the artist so I tried to do some research on him, since he didn’t seem to be a comic guy. But there’s just not a whole lot about him on the internet. Found a couple of other drawings on CAF and a few more sketches on eBay. Pretty much all I was able to dig up is that his name is Jim Bonserio and apparently he is (or was) part of the Ink & Paint department of the Disney Hollywood Studios in Florida. There’s also an artist with the same name on Deviant Art whose location is also in Florida, so he may or may not be the same guy.

Anyway, not really sure what this was done for. I do remember going to Disneyland when I was very young and seeing these types of small sketches being sold in the gift shops as authentic original Disney art. But even back I understood that if these drawings were done by the original animators and used for any of the films, that they would have been much more expensive. So I just figured they were pieces drawn by production staff and sold as novelties in the gift shops (I was pretty smart for a kid, LOL). While they were indeed original drawings, they were certainly not drawn by the senior animators and were not from the actual films. If memory serves, when this piece arrived from the seller, it was shrink-wrapped on a piece of cardboard. It had no markings or labels on the paper, the wrapping, or the cardboard, that identified it as Disney property or Disney merchandise, so I could be wrong about the whole gift shop sketch thing. Because if you do an eBay search, you can find those gift shop sketches and they are all packaged as Disney merchandise. They either have some sort of identifying stamp or imprint, if not an actual Disney price sticker that easily identifies it as gift shop or Disney store merchandise. What’s really interesting to me on this piece is that the bottom of the paper (which I cropped on the scan for aesthetic reasons) has three binder hole punches. I’ve seen a lot of actual animation drawings done on that paper before so that got me a little excited that this might actually be something more than just a novelty. I’m pretty sure when I bid on this, there was probably more information on the eBay description, but unfortunately I never bothered to retain any of it. And it seems that (other than feedbacks) eBay doesn’t archive auction listings that far back.

I suppose I’ll never find out what this is or what it was done for, but I do think it’s a lovely piece none the less. Just sorry it took so long for me to share it with all of you.

Social/Sharing