Scarlett Stahl: An Interview with John Musker and Ron Clements
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I met Ron Clements at the 2009 D23 Legend Ceremony and then John Musker at the 2010 Academy of Motion Picture Marc Davis Tribute series. I asked both of them for interviews and relentlessly pursued them for over a year before their schedule allowed time for our interview. I found Ron to be a rather shy and gentle man but strong in his convictions, while John�s strong personality was immediately apparent. It was soon evident that they mesh well together in their work collaboration but live completely separate personal lives with their families. They were extremely kind and generous with their time for our interview. We all agreed that we needed to do another interview to discuss their films as this interview focused on their lives and careers.

Ron Clements was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on April 25, 1953 to parents of French Canadian and Belgian backgrounds and is an only child. Though his parents were not artistically inclined, his mother came from a family of thirteen children and many of his cousins draw, including one who is a professional illustrator. He started drawing when he was two or three. He liked to draw characters and made up stories for little books. He began watching the TV Superman series with George Reeves and he �loved that show.� He became a big fan of the Superman comic book and began drawing his own comic books. He liked DC comics and his favorite characters after Superman were Batman and Green Lantern. Then Marvel Comics started doing super heroes and he got interested in Spider Man and the Fantastic Four.

�I was also very interested in animation, particularly Disney animation. I saw Pinocchio when I was about nine years old and after seeing Pinocchio, I started thinking I might want to work in animation and for Disney. I even went back to look at the stills in front of the movie theatre and started drawing them. I started finding out more about it. I would go to the library and read about animation.�

�I�m pretty much self taught. I was interested in both writing and drawing all the while I was a kid. I wrote a science fiction novel about kids building a space ship when I was eleven and sent it to publishers. I got very nice rejection letters. I would go back and forth as I had many ideas for animated films. I would write scripts and design characters but didn�t actually have any means to do animated films. I thought that someday I would get a camera and make these. When I had a paper route in eighth grade, I bought a still frame camera and started making some little super eight animated films. When I was fifteen, I had gotten interested in doing caricatures and sent some of the local newscaster and sportscaster in to the local TV station. They liked my work and did show them on the air. They also had an open position in the art department and not knowing that I was only fifteen, asked me to bring in a portfolio.� KCAU TV Channel 9, an ABC affiliate, got dispensation to allow him to work part time while he was going to high school.

After he graduated from high school, he ended up not going to college as he knew that he definitely wanted to go into animation. He didn�t really know how to go about it and wrote to different art schools. This was prior to CalArts having their character animation program or he might have gone to school there. He did visit New York�s School of Visual Arts as they had an animation program but backed out at the last minute because he was nervous about moving to New York.

Ron worked with an older artist at the station doing TV graphics, print ads, and TV slides. He received an award for some courtroom illustrations that he did for a murder trial. �I showed the TV station some of the little animated films that I had done and they had me do some animated commercials. What came out of that is I wanted to make my own films so I talked them into letting me make my own personal film while I was working there at the station, using this equipment that had been built. I made a fifteen minute film, a little mystery story, about Sherlock Holmes called Shades of Sherlock Holmes, with Holmes, Watson and Moriarty in it. The TV station was proud of it and they would show this film when people would visit. A man from Los Angeles, who worked in TV news and knew people at Hanna Barbera, was shown the film. He said that Ron should take the film and go to Los Angeles so Bill Turner, the general manager/president at the TV station where 19 year old Ron worked, paid for him to go to Los Angeles. He really wanted to work for Disney but had no idea of how to do it. He showed the people at Hanna Barbera his film and portfolio and was hired as an in-betweener, with seasonal work, which is how animators start. He got his experience there while taking some evening classes in life drawing at Art Center. He also took a class at the Cartoonists� Union, where Art Babbitt, a legendary Disney animator, was teaching an animation class.

Disney had just completed the film, Robin Hood, and had laid off some people. Ron had called up the personnel department only to be told that they weren�t hiring. So he went around looking for work. He read an article by John Canemaker in a magazine about a talent development program at Disney. �It turned out that Disney was actually looking for people to train but they hadn�t told the personnel department. The name of the person heading this program was Don Duckwall, which was an unusual name. So I called him up and he told me to come in and bring my film and portfolio. When I went in, I met him and Eric Larson, who was in charge of the training program and also Ed Hansen, who was the department manager. They hired me on a four week trial basis and at the end the senior animators would look and judge my personal test, to determine if I should continue in the program. Eric suggested I work on Sherlock Holmes as I had already done a film on him. I don�t think my test was that good. I was nervous and intimidated because I was in a group that was really talented. So for the first three weeks, I was afraid I wasn�t going to make it and in the last week I began to get a little hold of something and just barely made it. Then there were another four weeks and another test. For the second test I did the rabbit from Winnie the Pooh and they liked that test a lot. If you made it through the eight weeks, then you were hired on a permanent salary. So I made it through the eight weeks and this was January 1974.� Ron worked in production as an inbetweener on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger too.

The Studio had considered phasing out animation after Walt died in 1966. When Jungle Book came out in 1967, it was such a huge success that the Studio decided that they needed a training program to replace the older animators, who would be retiring and others, who had gone to Imagineering. The training program was started in the early �70s and they were looking for people to train from scratch. He continued doing tests in his spare time and did one of Cruella de Ville that they liked a lot. So Frank Thomas invited Ron to work with him as an animating assistant and he would be Ron�s mentor and teacher, which Ron was delighted to do. Eventually he graduated to animator in the course of The Rescuers.

�There were several regime changes. I got along pretty well with the CalArts group and then there was Don Bluth, who was considered the leader of the New Generation. There was some friction between the CalArts Group and the Don Bluth group, which came to a head during Fox and the Hound. Don left the Studio during Fox and the Hound to open his own studio and took a fair amount of people with him. But a number of people stayed and that led into the Black Cauldron, which was the next film. It was on Black Cauldron and the early stages of The Great Mouse Detective, that John Musker and I became friends. We were both animators on The Fox and the Hound and came to know each other, though we didn�t work together on that. I pitched Basil of Baker Street to the Studio. I was a Sherlock Holmes fan. Ron Miller liked it so it got into development. That was the period when everything changed, when Roy Disney brought Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Ron Miller left and for a while it seemed like the Studio might be taken over by corporate raiders. There was a possibility that the Studio might be broken up with the assets sold off, Parks might have been sold along with the film library. It was a kind of scary time. I think the film Waking Sleeping Beauty was pretty accurate in depicting a lot of that.� Of course this was the beginning of the Renaissance to be followed with Ron and John�s collaborative hits of Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules, Treasure Planet and Princess and the Frog.

Ron said he was very shy and found it hard to meet people during that time. Some friends of his found a magazine called Intro Magazine, where you could meet singles. In the summer of 1984 he took out an ad and several women responded to it. He began dating one woman, Tami, who eventually became his wife. After their wedding, Ron was so involved with Little Mermaid, that he couldn�t take a lengthy honeymoon. However the Studio sent them for three days to the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, which was a really nice gift. During the honeymoon, Tami noticed a little spot on his back. When he went to the dermatologist, they did a biopsy and told him that she had saved his life as it was a melanoma cancer in a place he never would have seen. His wife, Tami, has a son, Marc, from a previous marriage, who has chosen an animation career and of whom Ron is very proud.