When Jeffrey came, he was looking at footage from The Black Cauldron and he asked, “Do you have this from another angle?” Everybody laughed and said, “We could draw it from a different angle,” and he laughed too. But everybody was kind of, “Boy, the guy didn’t know it, he’s kind of ignorant.” But what I loved about the story that people didn’t get was Jeffrey was looking at it as a movie — the shot would work better from another angle. In his mind it was on film, it goes thru a projector, it plays up on a screen in a movie theater — “Guys, that’s a movie. I want a story arc, I want a solid script.”

You can argue that that system has been abused by how it’s interpreted. If you do it wrong you lose the visual strength that animation should have. But you also gain things with it. If you do it correctly, as in my opinion, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin did, you’re getting the best of both worlds; you’re getting a much stronger storyline, a stronger theme and you’re getting great gags and great visual set-ups because at the same time you kind of developed the story in the traditional way of putting sequences together for their visual storytelling.

A lot of times I talk to people and they don’t understand how we did the story before we had a script. Well, you kind of had a storyline that got hashed out in talking and in meetings, and they even put a drawing down that represented each sequence: you would say, “This is the sequence that represents the fox and the hound meeting,” or playing hide and seek or one of them in a house and one trapped outside. Then somebody comes in and has a meeting. They say, “Oh that hide and seek game looks interesting — let’s expand that.” Then you think of every hide and seek gag you can do.

Then they say, “I like these gags, I like that gag, I don’t like this.” Then you start crafting a sequence together. Because of the way you did it, it is very visual. You can now go in and layer in dialog, real character moments. But you’ve constructed the story visually.

The weakness of that process is that initial outline that you’re starting with. As long as you have a strong person at the top, whether it’s Walt or the writer who is constructing the overall thing, man, that’s the best way to develop a picture.

JS: You worked a lot in features before you went over to TV.

TS: The feature that was going on when I came was the original Rescuers. How you got ahead after surviving the training program, you were just an inbetweener and you would stay there forever until you showed a personal test that you did in your spare time.

Well, it’s a young man’s medium, preferably an unmarried young man.

JS: Yeah, “It’s 4:00 am and I’m still working on my test.”

TS: For my second test I actually did a kind of a Black Cauldron thing that went over well, but I showed it with Ron Clements’ third test. He had been there something like six months, and he did a Cruella DeVille test that was absolutely amazing. He was told that by some of the Nine Old Men — not in front of Marc Davis, of course — that it could have been in the feature film. Ron told me, “I didn’t want to hear that, I’m just starting out.” Nobody knows because he went into story and then directing, that he was an incredible animator. On The Fox and the Hound he was given Big Mama. By nature of the story and her design it didn’t give him a chance to show off. But had he gotten a human, he would’ve — it was just amazing how good he was. I remember Frank and Ollie coming into our room and saying, “Here’s the two master animators” — and of course they went right to Ron.

Six months later — maybe more than that — the manager of the department says, “You know how much everybody likes your second test.” I said, “Well actually, no. Everybody was so excited about Ron’s, nobody told me about mine.” He hadn’t shown my first test because he didn’t want to blow it for me.

That’s a side story. You got ahead by doing personal tests. I was doing personal tests, but I always had a better idea, I thought. So I would put what I was working on aside, and do a little more, then wonder, “What if I do this one?” Finally there was one day, I had done a pretty elaborate test, I think, with Madame Mim and Merlin. I had done it and Ed Hansen, who was the manager of the dept. stopped in. I asked him, “I was thinking about going back and finishing this up. Do you think there’s any point to it?’” He looked at it and said, “That’s great! God, we had just about given up on you.” My heart practically stopped. I was like, “Did no one think to tell me this?” “Gee Tad, we haven’t noticed anything from you.’’

The Fox and the Hound
I finally moved up to assistant animator, but at the same time I took stock of where I was going. I realized I enjoyed creating characters or deciding what they were doing more than making them do it. I was telling someone this morning that one of the most magical parts of animation that I love is rolling the drawings on an animation desk to see actually see your drawings coming to life five pages at a time. I’ve never lost that — I have the fun of a playing with a flipbook like a little kid. However, as much as I love that, when it came down to doing a test it wasn’t as much fun. I think that’s the definition of a story guy, so I was able to move into story on The Fox and the Hound, although I didn’t get credited — which is a sore point because they credited the worm as “Himself,” but -

JS: The worm?

TS: There is a worm in that movie, and he actually gets a credit, I forget his name, something like “Wiggles.” Someone’s trying to eat him, it’s a running gag — and I didn’t get a credit after doing the story on it. While they were determining credits the directors had changed on the movie, I did all my work for Woolie Reitherman, the new directors came in and, meanwhile, I had moved onto Imagineering.

Anyway, I moved into story on The Fox and the Hound. I worked closely with Mel Shaw and all the story guys. I took some sequences that were already done, tried to save the animation as we steered the sequences in a whole new direction. There was some great animation by Frank Thomas, but the story had been changed. They had this great animation and they said, “If we took the story this way we could save some of that animation.”

I remember it being between Copper and Chief after Chief’s accident. The older dog was trying to use the accident as a way to turn Copper against his friend. I forget whether that was before or after the decision had been made to have Chief live; for a while they were going to kill him.