Interview for a book on Disney after Walt

So nice, I did it twice.

I was contacted by an author who is writing a book on Disney after Walt. He wanted some information on the beginnings of Cal Arts’ Character Animation Program. I was in the first class in 1975, one of three female students in a class of 24, and the only female student left after Year 2.

Apparently the recording device stopped working four minutes into our conversation, which lasted about an hour.

So, I did the interview again, a day later.

Then the telephone disconnected. Then a scammer called on the other phone. Maybe someone did not want me to do this interview?

My official Disney portrait and one of the few pictures of me taken when I worked at Features.

It was a pleasant interview, but since I don’t work in animation any more, I told him the truth. There was a definite ‘double tier’ of employment at the Disney studio with women at a distinct disadvantage, and I was having none of it.

The double tier extended all the way back to Cal Arts days. The male students have happy memories of socializing there. I do not. I and Leslie Margolin, the other female student in my course year, were never invited.

I socialized with students in other departments and worked most of the time. And by the time I graduated there were other opportunities—you did not have to stay in Los Angeles to be employed. The late Seventies was a dry period for animation, with many layoffs in television animation and with only Disney doing features. Animated commercials were very popular. I was lucky enough to be hired by Zander’s, a commercial studio that was staffing up for a television special, and one that prided itself as being a full-animation studio run by an experienced animator. I moved to other studios and countries to get promotions and see the world. My career path moved in zigzags, not in a straight upward line the way it did for many of my classmates.

I’m now doing the FurBabies comic strip. It is slowly gaining followers. Since the online comic distribution game is completely new to me, and my advisors are not familiar with it (since their strips all ran in newspapers first) I do not know if it is doing well, poorly, or about average. There are some regular commenters, who sometimes have very funny remarks that I wish I could use.

The only thing I can compare it to is a one year old comic that has double the followers of FurBabies. Since I’ve only had my strip online for a month and a half, that might not be a bad comparison.

I also note that about 24 people unsubscribed from this blog when I announced that it was no longer about animation.

I’m the same writer, I just write about my own work now, not someone else’s. There are plenty of animation history blogs, some of them very good.

Enjoy.