He immediately began buffing up the skills that needed improvement, and he successfully landed an internship when the Disney recruiters came back the next year.įor professor Antony De Fato, the path to the Disney internship was more obtuse. “I think it was the rejection that really inspired me,” Francoeur recalls, saying he was suddenly possessed with an all-encompassing desire to work for Disney. “My dad said, ‘You know, son, you need to pay off those loans, so if I were you I’d go to that presentation.’ And I said, ‘Dad, I don’t know anything about animation,’” Francoeur remembers.ĭespite his own misgivings, Francoeur met with the recruiter, applied for the internship, and was rejected. So there I was, the sweaty security guy showing up at the drawing class.”įor Francoeur, who was studying to illustrate kids’ books, animation as a vocation had never occurred to him before Disney showed up at his college campus.
After submitting their portfolios of figure, gesture, and animal drawings, they made the cut on the first try.
“I knew these were just drawings,” Morgan says, “but to make someone feel something so strongly with just drawings … I had to be a part of that.” When Disney recruiters came to Morgan and Mathues’ campuses, they leapt at the opportunity and applied for the internship. “I would always draw the Fantasia characters.”įor a 12-year-old Morgan, it was the emotional power of a scene from The Rescuers that decided it. “When the Fantasia re-release came out, I just got hooked,” Mathues says. Professors Richard Morgan and Pamela Mathues, for instance, had known they wanted to be Disney animators since they were children. That internship is where most of the DigiPen animation faculty began their own journey at Disney.įor some, the path there was fairly straightforward. To staff the new studio, Disney kicked off what Francoeur calls “a hiring blitz,” actively recruiting at select art schools across the country and funneling qualified college artists into its intensive Florida internship program to gauge their potential. Revitalized by the success, Walt Disney Feature Animation decided to expand beyond its Burbank, California, headquarters that same year, opening a brand new production studio in the also new Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park, just outside of Orlando, Florida. Its biggest critical and box office hit since 1977’s The Rescuers, the film re-established Disney’s faith (as well as its audiences’) in its animated productions. The Little Mermaid, however, turned things around. Bringing in just half its production budget at the box office, The Black Cauldron nearly bankrupted Walt Disney Feature Animation. The widely-panned 1985 fantasy marked a low point in Disney’s slow but steady descent in critical and commercial success since the early ’70s. “I remember going to the theaters to see The Black Cauldron and being pretty disappointed, feeling like Disney Animation had kind of dropped the ball,” he says.įrancoeur wasn’t alone in his assessment. When The Little Mermaid splashed into theaters in 1989, the film’s success marked the beginning of what’s now referred to as the “ Disney Renaissance.” The aquatic adventure ended a long drought for Disney Animation, which according to Francoeur had not released a major hit for quite some time. And it all begins with what professor Richard Morgan calls “art school on steroids.” Part I How did they all end up at DigiPen? While their paths have veered in slightly different directions on their journey here to Redmond, the majority of them share a similar story. Many of them have known each other since they graduated college and have worked together, both as animators and educators, for decades. They’re no strangers to one another either. DigiPen’s BFA faculty is indeed stacked with a number of people - nine to be exact - who previously worked on Walt Disney feature films. He’s referring, of course, to the large contingency of former Disney artists and animators who roam the halls of DigiPen on a daily basis. Though, later on in conversation, he does concede, “After a while, some of us did start jokingly calling it ‘Disney Pen.’” “It’s not like there’s this secret Disney cabal,” he says with a laugh. Jazno Francoeur, director of the BFA in Digital Art and Animation program, insists there isn’t a clandestine Disney conspiracy happening here at DigiPen. Discrimination & Harassment Incident Report.BS in Computer Science and Digital Audio.
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