In Stones’ opinion, The Little Mermaid (top left), Beauty and the Beast (top right) and Aladdin (bottom left) all exemplify great story, strong themes and great visual gags. From left to right: © The Walt Disney Co.; © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved; and Courtesy of Disney Pictures, © Disney Enterprises Inc.

We were told by some of the Nine Old Men [Disney’s legendary team of original animators] that when Walt died they figured their walking papers were going to follow soon. But The Jungle Book turned out to be a huge hit; suddenly they were asked, “Well what’s next?” so they kept on going. Finally I think it was when Card Walker was president of the company they said “Are you guys making any plans to train new people?” and the response was kind of like “Uh, err... “.

Eric Larson created a training program for them. It just so happened that the girl I was dating in college, who’s now my wife, her roommate was the daughter of [Disney animation artist] X Attencio and she knew about the training program, which at that time was just starting up at WED division of the company, which is now known as Imagineering. I called up just trying to get information and the head of the program said, “Can you come in next Thursday?” “Uh-uh-uh-uh.” “… and we want to see your portfolio.” Well, I wasn’t an art major at the time, so I had to go back and do new life drawings, new sketches and all that and I brought that stuff in.

JS: What time was this?

TS: This would be 1974.

JS: I assume living out in L.A. you were sort of surrounded by the entertainment industry to start with.

TS: I was actually born across the street from the studios — maybe it was destiny. The training program was basically Eric Larson in one room and all of us in the other. When I entered I shared the room with Andy Gaskill, Ron Clements, Alan Huck, who left Disney and worked in the industry at several different studios. In the next room was I think was Jim George, John Pomeroy, Dick Sebast was there. That was when I was accepted and met all the guys. They were currently working on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. By the time I came back from the training program they had all gotten offices and become inbetweeners.

That was in 1974. Basically it was an eight-week training program. You did four weeks of animation and showed a test, and hopefully you survived into the second four weeks, did a test and then started as an inbetweener. What was strange about this is actually Don Bluth was there at the time and said what was strange about that is you’re trying to learn and do it at the same time. Imagine trying to learn the trumpet: somebody teaches you where to put your fingers and at the same time says, “OK, now we’re going to play a John Philip Sousa march.” How are you supposed to learn like that? But we kind of had to do it at the same time. Luckily I knew a lot about animation from the Preston Blair and Bob Thomas books and I felt I had kind of a leg up on some of the guys coming in.

JS: You could tell that The Jungle Book and a lot of the later films were missing Walt’s story sense. They did not have that fantastic story construction that he was so good with.

TS: There’s a side of animation and animators that really enjoys the performance, the gag but doesn’t necessarily know how to craft a storyline. Ron Clements once said to me about Woolie Reitherman that Woolie was great at making what was on the screen at any given moment fun, enjoyable, but a couple of hours after you left the theater you weren’t sure what you had seen.

That’s what was really missing. It didn’t really come back in a major way until Jeffrey Katzenberg came in and kind of shook up things. What I really appreciated about that transition is that when people talked about animation — within Disney, even from management, you’d always get this, “animated films are a different kind of thing, they’re not like movies.” Don Bluth used to say they’re like plays or silent movies. Ron Clements was one of the people who’d say — “It’s a movie, that gets projected up on the screen.”