I had a super fun time this past weekend drawing for the kids at a fundraiser at Walt Disney Elementary School in Burbank, CA. I know, it sounds like the Disney company is running a school now, but no, it is a public school just named after Walt Disney the man, just as schools are named after Thomas Edison or Abraham Lincoln.
Tom Caulfield (director on the Tangled TV series) and I spent a few hours sketching whatever the kids asked for. Somehow, I got schnookered into drawing the Leviathan from Disney’s Atlantis for one boy. Now, I did work on Atlantis, but I reminded the young art patron that the Leviathan had been animated on the computer because it was so complicated. People didn’t draw it in the movie. Maybe this statement from me caused him to be extra worried that I wouldn’t do things right, because the whole time I was sketching it from an image on a phone, this kid was art directing me making sure I was drawing it correctly. It was pretty funny, and daunting.
The event itself was centered around a screening of Disney’s Big Hero 6, so we had lots of requests for Baymax drawings. And just about anytime someone asked for Rapunzel, I sent them to Tom! Kids kept asking for all these things I hadn’t drawn before, and I was itching to draw something I knew – specifically, Goofy! I kept asking each kid who came up if they would like me to draw Goofy. “No” was a common answer as they asked for Miguel from Coco or Belle from Beauty & the Beast or Pikachu from Pokèmon. Finally, towards the end of the night, one kid surprised me by saying “yes!” So he got a very exuberant Goofy.
My friends Jennifer & Bert Klein (check out their Pups of Liberty animated shorts on YouTube and Amazon Prime!), who I’ve known since my days at Disney Feature Animation, organized our part of the event. Jen even got into sketching with us for a little while! It was a fun evening!
