Scarlett Stahl: An Interview with John Musker and Ron Clements
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Disney Animation Studios Building

John Musker was born in Chicago, Illinois, on November 8, 1953 to parents of Irish and English backgrounds and is the second of eight children. His mother�s maiden name was Lally and the entire clan went back in 1978 to Ireland to see the old family farm, where John�s grandmother had lived.

John�s father Bob enjoyed art but never did anything with it, while his mother Joan was creative and took painting classes. She encouraged the children to do artwork. One of his sisters is an actress and one of his brothers is an art director of a magazine, while another sister did film and video work for the Enesco Company in Chicago which produced the Precious Moments series of figurines.

�I went to Catholic schools as did he (Ron) and they didn�t have much in the way of art programs. We did have art classes in grammar school but not in high school. I went to a Jesuit High School and there were no art classes whatsoever so I would draw on my own time and was the cartoonist for various school publications. I went through phases of being interested in different types of drawing and cartooning, whether it be animation, comic strips and books, or editorial cartooning. When I was really little, like seven or eight, I read Diane Disney�s biography of her father Walt written with Pete Martin. I also got the Bob Thomas book The Art of Animation out of the library about the time Sleeping Beauty was released�Sleeping Beauty was the pivotal film for me as I saw it when I was about six and it made a huge impression on me. I also saw Pinocchio and Dalmatians all around that time too.�

As a kid he wanted to be an animator, but became more interested in editorial cartooning as he got older. He was a fan of Pat Oliphant, who worked for the Denver Post. He was interested in comic books, mainly Marvel Comics, the Fantastic Four, and the X Men. From eighth grade through college at Northwestern University, John was a cartoonist on the various school papers, doing caricatures and was a big fan of Mad Magazine and Mort Drucker�s exceptional caricatures. At Northwestern University his interest in animation was rekindled by a couple of events at the Chicago Film Festival in the early Seventies. One was a retrospective of films from the Zagreb Studios in Yugoslavia which John found entertaining and thought provoking. The other was an appearance by Richard Williams, the great animator and director who among other things had done brilliant title sequences for the Pink Panther films and who later went on to supervise the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He showed his version of A Christmas Carol, a TV special beautifully hand animated in the style of the original illustrations for Dickens� novel. Williams� enthusiasm for the craft of animation was infectious. A year or so later, Chuck Jones, the legendary director from Warner Bros who did the Roadrunners cartoons, came to Northwestern as part of an animation festival. He showed several shorts he did at Warners including �What�s Opera Doc?� and �Duck Amuck.� He made animation seem like an appealing artistic career which strongly impressed and inspired John who was trying to figure out what he would do after college. Also about the same time he read a book by Christopher Finch, which talked about a training program at Walt Disney Studios. �I wrote to Disney and they told me to put together a portfolio of drawings of human figures and animal sketches. Now I come from a non-animal household, from an Irish family with a lot of allergies (John begins to cough at the mere mention of animals.) So my search for animals to draw led me to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and there were still a few of them outside although it was February and freezing. I tried to draw them but my fingers were just too cold. So I went to the Field Museum of Natural History instead, and I drew the animals in the dioramas, which was much nicer. Much warmer! Then I sent my portfolio to Disney and lo and behold it was promptly rejected. They told me that my animal drawings were stiff. (John laughed) They couldn�t be stiffer�they were stuffed! I drew them the way I saw them!!�

�So after Disney rejected me, and still interested in a drawing career, I sent a different portfolio of sample comic book pages to Marvel Comics in NYC. They rejected me, too, saying that I didn�t draw well enough. Shortly after, while trying to figure my next move, I got a letter from Disney saying maybe you intended to send your portfolio to CalArts, which has an animation program. I had never heard of CalArts so I wrote to them. They responded and said they were just starting a �character animation� program that was going to be run by Jack Hannah, the director that did a lot of Donald Duck shorts. The staff was from Disney or Chouinard, the great art school which produced many Disney artists. So I sent CalArts the same portfolio that I had sent to Disney. I was accepted there which was exciting, although it was a bit like starting over as I wasn�t going to get a Masters Degree. I thought I would go there for a year and see how it went. In that first year of the character animation program, my classmates included, among others, John Lasseter, Brad Bird and Jerry Rees, while Tim Burton was a year behind us.�

�At the end of that first year at CalArts, the Review Board from Disney came to see our student work. Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Eric Larson, and Don Bluth were part of the contingent that came from Disney. We showed them our little bits of animation and our life drawings. They liked my animation well enough to offer me a job, not realizing I was a guy they had rejected a year earlier.� Having come from Chicago with family there, John wasn�t sure he wanted to relocate to California but accepted when he was offered a temporary position as an intern to work with Eric Larson in Burbank at the Studio for six weeks in the summer. So he did that in the summer of 1976, while still staying at CalArts dorm with his friends. Then he went back to school for a second year at CalArts, expecting that when that was done he would go back to Disney. Towards the end of that second year at school, he called Disney expecting to have a job but their reply was �we didn�t make you any promises.� �Yikes!!� John thought. �I blew it!!� Luckily when the Disney Review Board came back to the school at the end of the second year, they liked the film he did that term, and offered him a job. And so John joined Brad Bird, Jerry Rees, Henry Selick, Doug Lefler all of whom were recruited at that time, as the first ��migr�s from the character animation program.� Once at Disney, John commenced work on short animation �pencil tests� with Eric Larson. John was used to drawing very loosely at Cal Arts and continued this approach at Disney in his personal test. His test and its scribbliness were not well received. Eric counseled him to slow down and tie things down more. He took this to heart in his subsequent animation test which was much more successful and he was moved into production work and animation.