Legendary Disney Animator Floyd Norman Is No Luddite

At 82 years sometime, Floyd Norman still draws crowds, from his alive conversation/sketching events at Comic-Con to this week'southward computer graphics conference, SIGGRAPH.

"I have no plans to retire," he chuckled, surveying the SIGGRAPH audition, many of whom are but starting their careers.

An alumni of the California ArtCenter College of Design, Norman was the first African-American animator at Disney in the mid-1950s, where he worked with Walt Disney on classics similar Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, and Mary Poppins.

Floyd Norman But although he'due south an official Disney Fable, with his handprints immortalized on the Burbank lot, Norman is not a Disney lifer. At Hanna-Barbera, he drew Scooby Doo. And betwixt Disney productions, he co-founded Vignette Films Inc., which produced educational films for television focusing on black history, animations for the U.s.a. Navy, and the famous, trippy 70s-era yellow train opening credits to Soul Train. Working on Toy Story 2, he even encountered Steve Jobs.

"In many ways Steve Jobs and Walt Disney [were similar]—both very demanding, opinionated, and in that location was only ane mode to exercise things—their way," Norman said.

It wasn't all sixties animated grooviness, though. At one point, the 3 partners at Vignette Films were evicted from their offices. Undaunted, they slipped into a booth at their local coffee shop, gave out the number of the pay phone, and scrambled for it when information technology rang, merely in instance it was a client.

In the midst of the 1965 Watts riots, meanwhile, Norman and his team grabbed a 16mm Bolex film camera and headed into the fray, capturing incredible footage. Thirty years later, he was honored for his groundbreaking work by the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.

Floyd Norman

Norman has seen the shift from pencils to pixels. But he's no Luddite. At SIGGRAPH, he talked almost his love of tech, and reminisced near adding a Macintosh to his office at Disney in the 1980s.

"[Some executives] said, 'What can you lot practise with that?!' That'southward when I thought, 'You're non going to have your job for long.' Although in that location were ii immature guys—Steve Burke and Michael Lynton—they got information technology. And they did alright," he laughed. (Shush is now CEO of NBCUniversal and Lynton is chairman of Snap, Inc.)

Norman is now dorsum at Disney (yeah, at 82), where the "kids across the hallway" are piddling with VR headsets.

"There'south a agglomeration of immature men and women developing VR and they'll ofttimes come across to share a doughnut and a cup of coffee," Norman said. "Yeah, the tech is absurd, but ultimately, if you're non serving the audience with the story, it's not going to accept off. Walt Disney always said: 'Don't scout the movie, watch the audition'—that's how you larn to tell stories."

If y'all're curious to learn more about Floyd Norman, bank check out the documentary Floyd Norman: An Animated Life. Directed by Michael Fiore and Erik Sharkey, information technology won Best Documentary at last year's San Diego Comic-Con and is bachelor on Blu-ray, iTunes, and Netflix. Norman's SIGGRAPH chat is below; the keynote introduction starts at the 1:05:35 mark.