Kenneth B. "Ken" Anderson (March 17, 1909 – December 13, 1993) was an American animator, art director, and storyboard artist for The Walt Disney Company. He had been named by Walt Disney as his "jack of all trades".
Born in Seattle, Anderson studied architecture at the University of Washington. He later studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the American Academy in Rome. When he returned to the United States, Anderson worked for six weeks at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) before joining the Disney studios in 1934. He worked as an inbetweener and was later promoted to an animator. His first major assignment was the Silly Symphonies short film Three Orphan Kittens (1935). He later moved to the layout department. For Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Anderson designed layouts, experimented with the multiplane camera, and built a model of the dwarfs' cottage.
Anderson served again as an art director on Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) for "The Pastoral Symphony" Segment. Anderson worked closely with Mary Blair in adapting her visual style for The Three Caballeros (1945) and Song of the South (1946). He also worked on the story development for Melody Time (1948), So Dear to My Heart (1948), and Cinderella (1950).
During the 1950s, Anderson joined Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI), then known as WED Enterprises, in which he designed several Fantasyland "dark rides" for the Disneyland theme park. He subsequently worked as a production designer on Sleeping Beauty (1959) and introduced the xerography technique for One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). He later contributed background and character designs for The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970), Robin Hood (1973), The Rescuers (1977), and Pete's Dragon (1977). He retired in 1978, but he rejoined WED Enterprises a year later to help renovate Fantasyland. On December 13, 1993, Anderson died from a stroke.
Early life and education Anderson was born in Seattle on March 17, 1909. He was the son of Luther Anderson Sr., a lumber merchant, and Ethel Way. He had two sisters, Ruth and Roberta. When Anderson was three years old, his family moved to the Philippines (then a territory of the United States). While sailing back to the United States in 1919, his father died from malaria, leaving the family destitute. Anderson's sister, Ruth, also died during this time. Anderson's mother sent him to live with his uncle who abused him, which forced him to run away and lived in the woods. "I figured life was too damn hard," he recalled, "so I found a log cabin and caught 127 trout for my dinner and lived there for a month before they found me." Meanwhile, Anderson's mother Ethel finished her training as a schoolteacher and was hired for a teaching position in Seattle. His mother reclaimed him, and at age twelve, he began working several minor jobs to put himself through school.
Anderson studied architecture at the University of Washington. He then won a scholarship where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleu in Fontainebleau, France, to which he claimed no one west of the Mississippi River had obtained before. He later studied at the American Academy in Rome for two and a half years. Anderson returned to the United States in 1933 during the Great Depression.
Career 1933–1942: the Silly Symphonies, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia Due to a scarcity in architectural jobs, Anderson worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) on The Painted Veil (1934) and What Every Woman Knows (1934) for six weeks as a set designer. He recalled his time at MGM was "a most unhappy experience" and his wife was "fed up with our living on credit." One day, when Anderson and his wife Polly were driving around the Disney studios near Hyperion Avenue, she said, "Why don't you go in there and get a job?" He refused at first, to which she fought back: "You need a job. We've got to have a job. We're living off these canned beans down at the beach and we can't keep doing that."
Anderson returned to the studio and showed Walt Disney his watercolor architectural paintings, which impressed Disney. The next day, he was given a two weeks' apprenticeship in the inbetween department. Polly herself worked as a painter in the Ink and Paint department for three years until she became pregnant with her first daughter. On September 3, 1934, Anderson began working as an inbetweener doing fill-in scenes with other junior animators, including Milt Kahl, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, Jack Hannah, and James Algar. His first projects were the Silly Symphonies short films, including The Goddess of Spring (1934) and Three Little Wolves (1936), and Mickey's Polo Team (1936).
Disney admired Anderson's skill in perspective drawing and selected him to animate on the Silly Symphonies short Three Orphan Kittens (1935). Anderson recalled, "[Walt Disney] gave me several scenes in Three Orphan Kittens, in which I animated the kittens and the backgrounds. The camera traveled along with the kittens at their eye level to show the surroundings as they saw it." The short won the 1935 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons).
After Three Orphan Kittens, Disney offered Anderson a position in the layout department, headed by Charles Phillippi and Hugh Hennesy. One evening, in 1934, Anderson was first notified of Disney's plans for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) when Disney acted out the entire story to his animation staff on a soundstage. Feeling motivated by Disney's performance, Disney assigned Anderson, alongside special effects animator Cy Young, lighting expert Hal Halvenston and engineer Bill Garity, to design moving backgrounds for an animation test of a peddler woman in the forest, meant to display actual depth and perspective. Using an experimental multiplane camera, Anderson drew three planes of animated trees, which were placed on large glass plates, and had the team experiment with distances. Disney was pleased with the results and ordered further animation tests of the dwarfs' cottage and Snow White.
For the sequence, Anderson built a full-size miniature of the dwarfs' cottage and its interior to assist the background and layout artists. Live-action reference footage was then filmed of dancer Marge Champion (performing as Snow White) wearing a "black heavy dress" against a white screen background. Disney was pleased with the footage, wanting the camera movement and staging translated directly onto animation cels. Anderson further contributed by creating layouts and conceptual sketches for the "Someday My Prince Will Come" dream sequence; however, it was ultimately cut during the storyboarding phase. He was also the inspiration behind the dwarf Dopey's wiggling ears. In the finished film, Anderson was credited as one of the art directors.
Anderson next worked on the short Ferdinand the Bull (1938). He had creative differences with background artist Mique Nelson over the art direction, in which Nelson favored traditional tinted watercolors against Anderson's preferred use of saturated opaque colors. Nelson left the production and complained to Disney about Anderson. For Pinocchio (1940), Anderson handled layout for several sequences, including the scene in which the Blue Fairy gives life to Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket finding Pinocchio inside a cage, and Pinocchio becoming a real boy. Fantasia (1940) soon followed, in which Anderson was one of several art directors for The Pastoral Symphony sequence. For visual reference on the backgrounds, Anderson recalled, "I was inspired by Böcklin's Isle of the Dead and also by The Isola Bella in Italy. Walt said, 'Read up on Beethoven and get some style.' So I read up on the ribald and classical." Anderson subsequently served as an art director for the animated segment on The Reluctant Dragon (1941).
1943–1949: Package films, Song of the South By 1941, an animators' strike had lasted four months. While a federal mediator from the National Labor Relations Board negotiated with the two sides, Disney accepted an offer from Nelson Rockefeller, head of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs to make a goodwill trip to South America. Anderson was not invited as part of the trip, but he was asked to handle layouts for the "Pedro" segment for Saludos Amigos (1943). A year later, from October 9 to 23, 1942, Anderson was invited on a follow-up trip to Mexico for research on The Three Caballeros (1944). He worked closely with color stylist Mary Blair, in which he retained Blair's visual style while compositing the live-action footage and animation.
Anderson worked with animation director Wilfred Jackson on Song of the South (1946), in which they adapted Blair's styling sketches for more illusive backgrounds with a notable depth of field. During production, a new rear projection system was developed, in which the animation was done first and then the live-action sequences were composited. Before any live action was shot, Anderson had previsualized the segments through thumbnail sketches, which he gave the animators for their agreement. Filming began in Phoenix, Arizona in December 1944. Jackson remembered, "Ken helped set the camera angles and work out the staging of the thing, and Ken worked so hard with me on working out the details of how to fit the combination sequences, where the live action and cartoon work, together." However, much to Jackson's surprise, Disney was not satisfied because they did not replicate enough of Blair's style. Anderson later worked on the story development for Melody Time (1948) and So Dear to My Heart (1948).
1950–1959: Cinderella, Disneyland, Sleeping Beauty In 1947, Walt Disney decided to return to feature-length animated films, with Cinderella (1950) selected as the inaugural project. For the film, Anderson worked on the story adaptation, collaborating with Bill Peet. Anderson had stated Peet focused on the characters, while he concentrated on the production design. Anderson next did the color styling for Alice in Wonderland (1951).
On Sleeping Beauty (1959), Anderson served as the film's production designer. Kay Nielsen was the film's initial art director, in which he created "soft pastel" styling sketches. Anderson was impressed with Neilsen's artwork, though he felt that Nielsen's paintings would be difficult to translate into animation. Disney tasked John Hench to help interpret Nielsen's artwork with opaque cel paint, but Nielsen left the studio by 1953. Disney later hired Eyvind Earle as the new art director. Earle's conceptual paintings impressed the layout artists and animators, though they complained his style was too rigid and modernist. Anderson complained, "I had to fight myself to make myself draw that way."
In 1952, Disney founded the research and development company Walt Disney Inc. (WDI), known today as Walt Disney Imagineering. To design and build the Disneyland theme park, Disney selected several animation staff members, including Anderson, Hench, Bob Gurr, and Roger Broggie as his initial "Imagineers". Anderson collaborated with Claude Coats on the Fantasyland "dark rides", including Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Peter Pan's Flight, and Snow White and Her Adventures. The process began with Anderson and Coats designing the sets and interiors, in which they eschewed the title character and placed the audience in their perspective, while Bill Martin designed the track layout.
By 1956, Anderson returned to work on Sleeping Beauty when the film's production resumed. He storyboarded the battle sequence between Prince Philip and Maleficent. To match with the action, he listened to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1889 ballet The Sleeping Beauty.
1960–1966: One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, death of Walt Disney