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Wednesday night June 10, Sunnie and I headed to Woodbury University in Burbank to see a panel discussion about Walt Stanchfield. This Walt was someone I was not familiar with until I did a little research after I heard about the event. It turns out that Stanchfield has had an extremely profound effect on the Disney animation that most of us know.

The panel was mediated by Don Hahn who put together the two volume book titled Drawn to Life, 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes. These books are a comprehensive collection of notes, class handouts and sketeches given out by Stanchfield during his tenure as an Animation Instructor at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. Hahn put together a slideshow of sketches that demonstarted the concepts that Stanchfield instilled into young artists such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Brad Bird and many many more.

Among the many others mentored by Walt S. was Andreas Deja, Dave Pimental, Dave Pruiksma, Ruben Procopio and Don Hahn. These 5 men gave us so much insight into the world of animation and how their careers and succeses were driven by Stanchfield. They also discussed some things that they had recently been working on. Deja told us how he pratically begged to animate the Old Blind Woman with the Seeing Eye Snake in the upcoming Princess and the Frog. Procopio talked about some of his sculptures that he created for the Walt Disney Classics collection and how these were influenced by his father who was a sculpter at Disney Animation for quite some time. Dave Pimental discussed some of his current work at Dreamworks.

The evening ended with some questions from the audience of around 50 people, most of which seemed to be former or current animators or students. A nice surprise was from Bill Matthews who told a couple of stories, the most interesting of which was when he and Walt Stanchfield were animated together playing checkers in a scene of Mulan.

This event was extremely interesting with great art, amazing insight from some great animators and as always, Don Hahn kept it flowing and interesting. It was a great opportunity to spend time listening to some of the people behind the incredible Disney that so many of us adore!

Some links to more information about the panel

Don Hahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hahn

Andreas Deja http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Deja

Dave Pimental http://drawingsfromamexican.blogspot.com/

Dave Pruiksma http://www.pruiksma.com/Bio.html

Ruben Procopio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruben_Procopio