Disney Studio Pt. 4 - Animation Drawings for Features/Featurettes *

I have been a fan of animation drawings from the Walt Disney and other studios for over 40 years. I have also been fortunate to have been friends with several of the dealers and other sources for such art, which often allowed me to have my choice of the best drawings out of complete scenes. It also allowed me to be privy to much inside knowledge regarding this and other types of animation art. The following is an account of some of that knowledge. When I first began collecting animation art in the late 1970s, not at the very beginning but before most collectors had started to buy such art, animation drawings were not that plentiful on the market. Some, but very few, Disney drawings had been sold by Courvoisier Galley soon after the release of Snow White. A photograph of a Courvoisier display of drawings of an Elephant from the Dance of the Hours segment of Fantasia can be seen in Muncie's book, Disneyana. The drawings which went through Courvoisier, have an embossed copyright notice on a bottom corner of the drawings. I have only seen three of these drawings, all from Snow White, in all my years of collecting. Drawings out of a few scenes of Disney short cartoons and features were floating around in the 1970s, including some partial figures of Mickey Mouse from Steamboat Willie, drawings of of Goofy from Clock Cleaners by Walt Kelly, and drawings of Pluto and the parrot from Mickey's Parrot. There have always also been single, stray drawings from various Disney productions which would pop up here and there. These were undoubtedly drawings studio employees took home just because they liked them. But, starting in the early 1980s, complete scenes of drawings came onto the market in increasing numbers. A friend of mine had 18 scenes which he obtained from a Disney employee. That employee had also sold to my San Fernando Valley friend/animation dealer a scene which caused quite an uproar. The scene showed the Witch from Snow White at the window of the dwarf's cottage. I had been told about it, but before I saw the drawings, my friend sold the entire scene to a movie memorabilia store at the Century City Mall in Los Angeles. This happened just as Thomas and Johnston's book, the Illusion of Life, came out. In that book a series of drawings of the Witch at the window was reproduced. As might be expected, a woman employed by Disney came into the store and complained that a drawing from my friend's scene that was on the wall for sale had been stolen, since others from the scene were documented as having been in the studio when the book had been written. This caused the store owner to return the whole scene to my friend. When I tried to get him to sell one of drawings to me, he refused and returned the entire scene to the source from whom he had obtained it. The source then moved the scene to a Disney animator, who later became a friend. It turned out that the woman who had identified the drawings as being stolen was just plain wrong! There are at least three separate scenes of very similar drawings of the witch. The scene that was in the book has at least some drawings which show the witch's hand on the window sill while none of the drawings that my friend had included a hand on a drawing. The hands which registered with those drawings were on a separate, held drawing. A few years after these events took place, I bought one of the best drawings from the scene, as I had wanted to do before the scene went to the animator, and I got the held hand drawing as well! I also had my choice of drawings from the other 17 scenes of Disney Drawings and from 121 scenes of MGM drawings when my animator friend parted with the scenes. More drawings came out of complete scenes that were still in the Disney Studio in early 1983, when Russ Cochran and Bruce Hamilton convinced the management of the Disney Studio to sell some of their drawings, beginning with a trial sale at the San DIego Comic Con. It was a great idea, since the studio had millions of drawings that were rarely consulted by animators. Copies would be made of all that were taken for sale, so the images would be available in the event they were needed. The only problem was that the panel that decided which drawings could be sold included persons who insisted that only in-between drawings could be taken, with all animators' extremes, often the very best drawings, remaining at the studio. The absence of extremes, along with the fact that the drawings offered at San Diego were significantly more expensive than Disney drawings were going for in the mid-1980s and that the drawings were rather poorly displayed at the con, meant that very few of the drawings were sold, with the rest being returned to Disney. But, ironically, the scenes of drawings, including all the extremes, probably never made it back to their places in the Disney animation morgue, where they had been stored for decades. Continued under first jpg below.