J On The Spectrum - Disney's 100th Anniversary - The Next Generation Graduates

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.Show more

By the time Disney's 23rd animated feature rolled around, The Rescuers, in 1977, the next generation of Disney animators have progressed from being mere trainees to actual character animators, and Don Bluth had progressed from character animator to full animation supervisor, alongside Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, and Milt Kahl. Glen Keane was given the ask of animating several shots of the character Bernard, voiced by Bob Newhart.

The Rescuers was adapted from Margarey Sharp's books of the same name, and were optioned for film rights by Disney in 1959. The film would go through phases of development before finally getting around to production in 1975. Originally they were gonna have the story set in the Arctic, that was scrapped, then they tried to make a story with a lion, so that was also scrapped, then Wolfgang Reitherman, the director, suggested that the story should be simple. Little girl gets kidnapped, and the mice go out and rescue her. Also wild to know is that originally the villain was gonna be Cruella de Vil again, but the animators felt that Marc Davis' character wouldn't be justified for a sequel, so instead, they created a new villain based on The Diamond Duchess in one of the books, and called her Madame Medusa. The character of Snoops was heavily inspired by journalist John Culhane, who went around interviewing many of the Disney animators at the time, but never dreamed he would become a Disney character himself. Milt Kahl would retire from animation after this movie, and wanted to go out with a truly knockout performance for Madame Medusa, so much so that he did almost all of the animation on the character himself, pencil tests of which are still viewable today online for study.

Originally Louis Prima and Phil Harris were gonna be in the movie, but both of their characters and parts were scrapped. This is Eva Gabor's second Disney animated feature, after playing Duchess in The Aristocats in 1970.

The Rescuers premiered in theaters on June 13, 1977, and grossed $48 million worldwide. Surprisingly in France, it beat out what would become the highest grossing movie of the year and of all time at that point in history, Star Wars from 1977. By now, Ron Miller, Walt Disney's son-in-law, was the vice president of Disney and wanted a division for A movies and a division for B movies for the younger animators to work on. This was the first collaboration between the next generation of artists and the senior animators who already existed at Disney. Though by now, the senior animators knew they were really getting old, and they couldn't do feature films forever, so they had to pass the torch on to the next generation who would carry on this great craft of animation, yet by now, executives in Hollywood were weary of trying to do anything with animation at this point.

Next week, the last animated feature that the Nine Old Men ever worked on at Disney.