Q: I’m doing my history day project on how Walt Disney’s animation was a turning point for animation. I would like to know what you think is the most significant thing he did for animation.
Griffin, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
A: There were in fact a number of significant things—some of the more important were sending his artists back to school to learn how to draw better, emphasizing realism in animation especially when it came to animal action in Bambi and later films, pioneering the use of Technicolor in animation, bringing personality to his characters, emphasizing story development, and helping create the multiplane camera and the Xerox process for transferring drawings to cels.
Dave Smith