I had some connections from the newspapers that I did work with up there, so there was a newspaper publisher in Hollywood, and they promised me work and so on.
His feeling was the name Walt Disney represented all of us. Walt was hanging by his teeth financially and really I think he was for most of his career. Not at all like today.
Disney had made such a great deal of money on Snow White that the banks gave him the go-ahead on the next three films. But he was heavily dependent on the foreign market.
Before I got through high school I had attended 22 different schools. In the time before I was well acquainted with the latest school, I would amuse myself by drawing and found that I was pretty good at it.
At that time, the people that were in the animated film business were mostly guys who were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists. In other words, their ability to draw living things was practically nil.
There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you're animating unless you've had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you've done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object.
Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.
Some of these sketches were done at the very beginning of the Pirates project, when I was trying to find a direction for myself. That was the early sixties... maybe 61 or 62.
The first professional training I received of any kind was when I was 14 years old and we were in Kansas City, Missouri. I attended the Kansas City Art Institute for one summer.
Yes, the 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. They just didn't have that many people who could draw humans.
