♪♪♪ Bruce Smith: So I'm at CalArts.

I'm a freshman.

I remember one day my roommate says, "Hey, let's go down, let's go down to the Disney studio.

I know someone who actually works here."

We drive down and there was a big fence, so me and my roommates park on the side, we climb the fence.

It's like, who are these four Black dudes climbing the fence to get in Disney Studios at the time?

As we're walking, it says animation building this way and all of this stuff, right?

So we're following the signs and then we get to, you know, a couple of bungalows that actually sort of had open doors.

And we're like, "There's a Black dude, there's a Black dude over there."

That Black dude was Ron Husband.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ron Husband: I'm not real big on tables and chairs and inanimate objects.

I want something that's moving.

Everything and everybody that's moving is telling a story.

They're sitting still or they're in action, there's a story taking place.

And how best as an artist can you tell that story?

I get so much joy and pleasure out of people looking at my work and being encouraged, and bring a smile to their face.

Joshua Sweet: The name's Sweet, Joshua Sweet.

Ron: I never considered my time in Disney "work," you know, for 38 years I was there.

It was just, you know, I got paid to push a pencil.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ My high school art teacher, Mrs.

Dorothy Clemons, encouraged the class to carry a sketchbook.

And on her encouragement, I took her advice.

Art Center had classes for high school students on Saturdays, and so she arranged for me to take advantage of that, obviously out of her own pocket, paying for those classes.

So she had a real heart for her students.

And one day we had a class and there was a couple of brushes on the sink that students had just sort of walked off and left and she said, "Ron, will you clean those brushes for me?"

And I just sort of looked at her and just kept walking.

The next day I sat, you know, I sat right up front, bell rang, and she walks over to the desk.

And she looks me in the eye, she says, "Get the hell out and don't come back."

And Ms.

Clemons never spoke to me a word again.

A couple of months later, I had won a national award for a painting piece I had done, and the principal and Ms.

Clemons and I took a photograph, but she didn't speak to me during that time.

We took the photograph, never spoke to me again, and I'm sitting there looking with this dour look on my face, but I took her advice to always carry a sketchbook, and to this day, it's probably why I'm sitting here today because I took her advice.

male: Oh wow.

Just a couple of sketchbooks.

Ron: Just a couple of sketchbooks.

Ron: These books here go back to 1962.

I was 12 years old.

You know, I love sports.

I get these sports magazines and copy the photographs, which really paved the way for what I'm doing now in the sense of action, negative space, silhouette value, things that are really, really important to drawing today.

Now, these books here, you know, they've got some history also.

I look at my sketchbooks as practice, practice, practice.

It's practice won't make you perfect.

Practice just makes you better, and I wanna get better.

You're always on your journey.

And you know, my journey started long ago.

Ron: I was born and raised in Monrovia, California, a small town, you know, there was unofficial barriers, a certain street was the limit for Blacks to live in.

LaVonne Husband: We'd have a public pool and the Black kids could only swim or people of color, really, 'cause it wasn't just the Black kids, anybody of color could only swim on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Ron: My mom, a single mom, she had come out from Mississippi by way of Saint Louis and then coming to California, you know, not having very much money.

We lived in 15 different houses, you know, rent's a little cheaper here, you know, rent's going up here.

We had to move over here.

We did, and I remember this guy came into our apartment and he had been stabbed and he staggered into the house.

He ended up going in the bathroom and dying in the tub.

It had to be about three years old 'cause at four years old, we had moved.

She was a great mom, you know, raising four boys by herself.

Mom worked a lot.

I mean, mom did still the work ethic and all the kids, you know, and I was one of the original latch-key kids 'cause she took a key and pinned it to my Levis, and off to school I went, come back home.

"Don't let anybody in the house," until she got home.

You know, we were poor, but when you're poor, you don't know you're poor, you know, you got love, it's your mom's love, you know, never went to bed hungry.

LaVonne: Well, my husband's, yeah, I understand my husband's priorities.

One of them is his sketchbook.

Ask him about me always fussing that every time we go somewhere we have to have--I have to compete with the sketchbook.

He'll tell you all the time.

I told him, "Just once in the 53 years that we've been married, I would love you not take that sketchbook anywhere."

And now he's gotten to the point he don't care what kind of sketchbook he has.

You know, he used to carry nice sketchbooks, leather bound, the whole bit.

Now, he carry one with tape on it and just, you know, I don't have to worry about him getting an actual woman 'cause he's--the sketchbook is his other woman.

male: Which is kind of beautiful.

LaVonne: No.

male: No.

Ron: LaVonne, yeah, the love of my life.

We've been married 52 years.

We didn't start dating until my junior year in high school.

She was a pep cat and I was on the football team.

LaVonne: He was just quiet.

I don't know what attracted me to him other than, well, he had a great body, for one thing.

I'll put that out there and I'll leave that alone.

But anyway, he was just a classy guy and I decided, okay, he's mine.

Melissa Aaron: The name was actually LaVonne Jackson, but because she was part of ASB snuck in somewhere and added her name as LaVonne Husband in the high school yearbook.

So she's there as LaVonne Jackson as a junior and as a senior as LaVonne Husband.

So she was staking her claim.

LaVonne: And then when at Citrus College we were there together.

male: Then he went to Vegas.

LaVonne: And then he went to Vegas.

male: And you followed?

LaVonne: No, I told him he better come back.

Ron: I played football in college, went to university on a football scholarship, so you get $15 a month.

In 8th grade I was playing flag football, this little chart here, and I said what I was gonna do in order to build my body up to play football, right?

So, 20 push-ups, 30 sit-ups, 100 jumping jacks.

Really, really crude stuff that I was going to do, I lift weights, didn't have any weights, but I ended up signing up October 22, 1963.

Never knew where it was gonna end up.

This is a start.

After graduation from the university at Las Vegas, I wanted to be a commercial artist, I wanted to do book and magazine illustration, but coming back to Southern California, where there are no publishing houses, I had to have a job to bring in some income.

I got a call from Honeywell.

They offered me a position as a technical illustrator, and that sounded sort of like illustrator.

So I took that job.

There was one guy who got to do all of the exploded views and all the really really creative stuff and the rest of us in the apartment, we did block diagrams and flow charts.

But it paid the bills and it was a lot of overtime.

After about a year and a half, I said, "I want to do something more creative.

Where can I find creativity and be creative?"

I said, "Well, maybe an art school."

So I took a class at Art Center, a class called Sketching for Illustration.

It was taught by Sam McKim, and he was an imagineer, you know, they design and build the rides for the theme parks.

I just wanted to get in an environment to where I could be more creative.

Lorna Cook: Art Center to me was like the pinnacle of where I could get my education.

Floyd Norman: Going to Art Center was just the best thing that could have happened to me because it gave me a foundation in art.

Before that, I was just a kid drawing pictures, but drawing and painting suddenly became serious when I was an Art Center student.

John Pomeroy: I love sculpting, I love drawing, I love painting, but this is what I wanna do.

I wanna paint backgrounds for Walt Disney Studios.

So that was the propellant that pushed me forward.

Ron: One night after class, Mr.

McKim said there's a training program that Disney's bringing in artists to train to perhaps become animators.

Back in the '70s, it was very, very bare bones.

You know, you had Disney, you had Hanna-Barbera.

Yogi Bear: Well, don't wait, illustrate.

Ron: Ralph Bakshi doing, you know, his thing.

male: Strong man and diaper man.

Ron: So it was very minimal, and I remember the discussion on the way out of the classroom that night was that, "I'm not going to Disney.

They don't pay anything."

For me, it was like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna follow up on this 'cause, you know, I just need something more creative to do.

I went home, grabbed a couple of sketchbooks and dropped them off at the guard gate on Buena Vista and went back to work.

These are the sketchbooks that I turned in to the studio that they looked at and were able to see my ability being able to capture movement in my drawings.

And nothing real, you know, real fancy, and so I was basically hired on potential.

Ron: The world I walk into of animation is total creativity.

Glen Keane: Disney was looking for young people to come in and to replace the nine old men who had really created this art of animation.

Floyd: It was the '70s when a lot of the new kids came to Disney.

They were gonna be the one to carry this business forward.

To make the Disney classics yet to be made.

So it was a very exciting time.

John Musker: Hello, my name is John Musker.

Ron Clements: I'm Ron Clements and I'm a story man.

Tim Burton: Hi, I'm Tim Burton, and I'm in the story department, kind of.

I don't really have a rank, but just kind of work here.

Randy Cartwright: Randy Cartwright, animator.

I found out that if you can't draw, that you can't really animate.

It took me eight portfolios to get in, but finally I did get in.

Randy: We're gonna go inside and see what it's like.

Come on, come on.

Glen: The thing that I really remember instantly as I walked into this place where "Pinocchio" and "Bambi" and "Fantasia" and all these films were created was the smell of the studio.

It was this wonderful artistic incense of cigarettes, pencil shavings, and scotch.

It just permeated, it was, gosh, it was intoxicating.

John: Being at the Disney Studio in the '70s, I think there were attempts, really, to open up the Disney Studio.

Disney Studio had been so insular for many years.

Lorna: It was such a new thing to be there and particularly as a young woman, I was so excited and just terrified at the same time.

Glen: One day, this football player from Las Vegas, Nevada, came in and he looked tough.

I mean, muscles, Fu Manchu, shaved head, the sweetest, most gentle disposition.

Floyd: People would often tell me, "That Floyd's really a nice guy."

Oh no, Floyd's not nice at all.

Nobody's nicer than Ron Husband.

He's the nice guy.

Ron: Every day was an experience for me 'cause it was a learning experience.

I knew nothing about Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, all these greats of animation.

I had no idea who these gentlemen were.

Lorna: It was so surreal to know that you were among these legends of animation, and I mean, I tried to keep my cool and you know, I just did what I was told, but I felt I was in such a special place and it was so exciting.

Ron: Eric Larson was the head of that program.

Randy: And this here is Mr.

Eric Larson.

John: Of all of the animators that could have been the shepherd, our shepherd and mentor in our first month or so of growing into animation, they couldn't have picked a better person than Eric.

I mean, that was godly ordained, as far as I'm concerned.

Eric Larson: It was this feeling that you've got to learn that you've got to be, give anything that you've got, if it's of any value, give it to somebody.

I felt that this exchange of ideas was the whole thing the studio was being built on.

Basically they were Walt's ideas.

Lorna: He was so lovely, so giving and kind, and I was such a newbie at this.

I remember, the first week, I was so nervous.

John: He was such an avuncular mentor, the gentlest guy, he gave you criticism when he worked on your drawings, he literally put your drawing down on a drawing board, he'd put a piece of paper over it and draw almost like diagrams over it, but they showed how you could make your animation so much stronger.

With positive statements he would say, getting good silhouettes, getting arcs, getting strong anticipations, you know, manna from heaven for a young nerdy animation student.

Tom Wilhite: We have a staff of 200 young artists, animators, sculptors from art schools, colleges, and what that does for this company is it's a group of people who are bringing a whole different sensitivity to the studio.

Eric: Give what I had and get from what they had to give.

Ollie Johnston: I mean, they're squeezing everything they can out of us.

Frank Thomas: No, the new fellows always have their own talents, their own way of doing things, and that's as it should be.

And we're trying to help them develop in a way that will carry on the Disney tradition of entertainment.

He's got to look like he's really gone on this gal.

He can't take his eyes off of her, you know.

male: Yeah, kind of like the same way I've been with girls.

Glen: But it was an interesting time.

There was this feeling of like you didn't really know all that you felt like you should know.

Ron: I came in with no animation experience whatsoever.

I had no idea what the animator was, what an animator did.

John: Ron Husband came in around that time.

He wasn't, you know--he was a good art student.

He was a good enough draftsman to be accepted onto the trainee program, but I think he needed to, you know, the bar was at a certain level, and he needed to practice getting up to that level, getting those chin-ups right up to where he needed to be.

male: Yeah, let's see it.

Let's see the scene.

Here's another good scene.

This isn't as good as the scenes they used to do, like I said, but it's the best we can do.

Don Hahn: So animators, when they were hired on into this kind of training program, they had four weeks to prove themselves, and they would animate something and animation in that day was done with a pencil and a piece of paper, and it was really no more elaborate than let's say when you were a kid and you would draw like a little flip book, except for Disney animators, it was filmed and that film came back and you could see those pencil drawings come to life.

That was put up in a projector and the review board would look at it.

♪♪♪ Don: There's a guy named Woolie Reitherman who is an amazing animator from Walt Disney's era, who was kind of in charge of animation at that time.

And the review board was Woolie and these talents who virtually invented character animation at Disney.

So if you were a young trainee, you'd come in and you were shaking in your boots.

They were the ones that would pass you to go on to your next four weeks or politely say goodbye, and they were tough.

Ron: My pencil test would be a lot less sophisticated than somebody like Glen, who came in from CalArts.

Maybe one out of every two people wouldn't pass the test, you know, so you're sitting there sweating bullets when they're taking the test and you're gonna show it to the review board.

Ron Clements: Eric took me in to his office and he showed me a reel of some of the personal tests that like Dale Baer had done, John Pomeroy, and suddenly I thought, I'm in over my head.

I'm not gonna make it and my dream since childhood is gonna be over in four weeks, and how am I going to deal with that?

Lorna: And I did my test, but unfortunately, it didn't go well with two of the gentlemen on the review board.

So I was devastated.

I mean, at the time I thought I'd come to the Taj Mahal of animation, and here I am, you know, and I can't stay.

Ron: But you know, I think the first test was a Goofy test, Goofy is running with a football.

They accepted it so I could be, you know, an official Disney employee.

Glen: At a certain point, all of us were in this bullpen up there next to Eric Larson, and then they split us into twos, and so that's where Huz and I ended up in a room together.

At lunchtime, there would always be a group of us that would gather together and I noticed that Huz, he was reading his Bible.

And I'd never seen anybody read their Bible before.

Melissa: People that talk about God or talk about faith, like, he lives this.

Ron: There's a line in "Chariots of Fire" when Eric's little sister asked him, you know, "Why do you run?"

He runs all the time and he says, "When I run, I feel God's pleasure."

And when I draw I feel God's pleasure.

Melissa: You know, God gave him this gift and him utilizing it is just part of like it's like him breathing and it's like how he gives glory back to God.

Ron: And so everything artistically becomes a part of that, literally, you know, "worship the Lord in the beauty of his holiness," you know.

And we're--as artists, we're creating beauty.

Glen: Your calling is to be an artist and you can't not be that.

And you know, as iron sharpens iron, one person sharpens another and you run up alongside other people who have that calling of being an artist and you're strengthened by other artists and Huz ended up, really, changing my life.

And so each day when Huz and I would come in to the office, Huz would say--'cause he knew that I was reading the Bible now and he'd say, "What's the word, Jack?"

And so I would tell him what the word was.

And so this is pretty much how we began each day.

Glen: You know, animation is a very contained medium.

You are drawing, flipping, making little tiny adjustments in drawing, but both Huz and I had been used to football where you are totally physically into this, and there's such energy and expression that you just built up and sometimes Huz would just kind of look at me...I-- just, "You want some of this?"

And we would just throw, agh, each other down and be wrestling and fighting and things would be falling.

Ron: We had a lot of youthful energy at the time.

Glen: The caricatures were pretty insulting.

I mean, there was nothing held back from either one of us.

It was a way of saying, "I am going to just tear you apart in this drawing because I think you know how much I care."

John: In "The Fox and the Hound," I was responsible for the rough animation in the bear fight.

This is a scene from it.

I'm looking at the bear, he was just one great blob of fat and fur and nothing to hold on to.

Ron: My name is Ron Husband.

I'm an animator here at Walt Disney Studios.

Next step in the process of animation would be taking the line drawings to Xerox to be inked and painted.

Melissa: I remember being like six years old at the old animation building, you know, literally dragging us out of bed.

We would go in there like bleary eyed and like just sit in the chair and like he would just be drawing and we would sit there and then he'd go get us some hot chocolate from the little hot chocolate place and like you just sit there, drink your hot chocolate, take a nap while he's drawing, and then he would walk you down the hall, introduce us to all the animators.

"This is my daughter."

Ron: Coming up and just being Disney kids and all the camaraderie that Mike and Jay and Melissa had, you know, growing up together.

Melissa: The cool thing about dad was that before VHS, he would bring home the reels and like set it up in the living room like we would tell all the kids in the block like, "Movie night at the Husband's," and it was like a big thing.

My parents would pop popcorn and like we had our own little movie theater and it was like the coolest thing.

Especially growing up in San Dimas, we were like one of the only Black families.

And so I don't wanna say help me fit in, but where I was probably have felt very othered in a lot of ways, like I feel like being able to have this conversation piece of being able to talk about my dad.

Don: The oddest coincidence in the history of the planet Earth is that the head of Disney Animation was named Don Duckwall.

And he was the guy you didn't want to get a call from because he ran the place and it meant there was something wrong.

Ron: You get a call and, you know, call up to the third floor, our production manager, you know, one-sided conversation says, "You know, you won't be an animator here, maybe Hanna-Barbera or maybe Filmation somewhere else, but never-- not here."

And that was sort of the end and the beginning of the conversation.

Glen: How do you handle disappointment?

How do you handle seeing other people advance when you really desire that for yourself, but it's not going to happen and guaranteed by the ones who can make it happen are telling you it's not going to happen?

Ron: I'm assuming that it was this person's personal thought or his personal, whatever it was, even though, you know, it was myself and Mike McKinney were only Blacks in feature animation at the time.

So, I just didn't think that much of it and the fact that I didn't get--he didn't give me a pink slip, and I just went back and continued to do my in-betweens and see how things worked, you know, worked out.

Coming from a Black neighborhood, you had to be twice as good as a White person just to break even.

And I mean, that was the way I was raised.

Marlon West: When I was growing up in Saint Louis, I didn't know anybody Black doing this.

I had the same nerdy heroes that my White comic book and movie-loving friends had.

I loved Ray Harryhausen.

I loved Jack Kirby.

I loved Neal Adams, and those were my heroes.

Bruce: I grew up in a heavily gang-infested neighborhood.

So I remember one day driving down the street, I'm in the backseat of this stolen Mustang, a guy who was driving and he turns to me in the back seat and he says, "So, Bruce, are you still doing that cartoon thing?"

And so he says, "Man, Black people don't do cartoons."

And I never thought about that aspect like because right away my mind started swirling around.

I was like, I never knew this was sort of a race thing.

He was like, "Hey man, you ever seen the 'Flintstones'?

Ain't no Black people in the 'Flintstones.'"

And I was like, "I guess not."

"Flintstones," one of my favorite shows.

And he says, "Yeah, you ever see "The Jetsons'?"

And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I see where he's going."

"There's no Black people in the past and in the future of what you're trying to do."

Ron: So you just did the best you could, where you could, how you could, with the best you--best you had.

Yehudah Jai Husband: Despite any obstacles that he had, he would never let those obstacles be, you know, an excuse for anything other than excellence.

Don: So here's the thing, to become an animator, you needed to animate 100 feet, which is about one minute, in a film you were working on.

Ron: So, you know, we were keeping track of how many feet you got on the rescuers.

It built up, but by the time the evaluation ended up, you know, I had 51 feet.

So, close but no cigar.

After "Rescuers," we went on to "Pete's Dragon" and by the time that ended up, I had about another 50 feet.

After "Pete's Dragon," we went into the small one.

I was getting very close to-- close to my 100 feet--my 100 feet.

I started to get fatigued and I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and he says, "So, how is it, are you drunk?

Because my speech was starting to get slurred.

Glen: Ron was getting dizzy.

More and more dizzy.

I remember him just saying, "I don't know what's wrong, but I just when I turn my head, everything keeps moving a little bit."

Ron: We lived in Monrovia.

It was about 20 miles or so to Burbank, and I get in one lane 'cause I look left or right, I get dizzy.

Glen: But he kept coming in and working and putting in his hours.

John: His personality, you know, he got quieter, I feel like, and he got more subdued.

and I remember Glen being very, very concerned and we all were, you know, "Was he gonna come through this okay?"

Ron: I went to a doctor and he examined me and he says, "Ron, I'm not gonna write you a note to get off work."

So he didn't take it seriously, so I didn't really take it seriously, so I continued to go to work.

Glen: And I noticed that as he was animating, you typically place your drawings up on the shelf, so you do some drawing and take one from this shelf and put it over there, but there was something in that action of the hand lifting up that, it was difficult for him, so he would just drop it on the floor.

♪♪♪ And so around his desk was all of these drawings just laying on the floor.

Ron: I continued to go to work, but again my energy level was getting very low.

I took a week off and Ed Hansen called.

Don: Finally, Ron gets to this point and he's pushed through a million sketchbooks.

He got his job at Disney.

He made it past the review board.

He has 100 feet in the movie and he gets a phone call while he's at home.

[phone ringing] Ron: And I was in bed, just, you know, just literally dying on the vine.

Ed calls and says, "Ron, been promoted to an animator."

I said, "Thanks..." I went back to sleep.

I mean, that was the most I could do.

Don: And so at the height of his career, the time when he should be having a party and having his friends over and celebrating, he can't move.

Ron Miller: This is-- Randy, how are you?

Good to see you.

Ron: Ron Miller was the president of the company at the time.

He saw me walking, staggering down the halls, and he said, "What's wrong with Ron?"

So he had his secretary call up and make doctors' appointments to see specialists.

Don: So Ron Miller had his secretary Lucille Martin to help out.

Now, Lucille Martin was Walt Disney's secretary.

So here you have Ron Miller pulling in Walt Disney's secretary to make some calls to doctors and specialists.

Ron: You know, so I was losing weight, energy level was gone, so, you know, I was literally falling apart and I didn't really realize how much so.

Don: Got him to the doctor's fast and found out that the news wasn't good.

Ron: It was a neurosurgeon and I remember staggering over, going up the stairs.

I'm really, you know, sort of losing my physical attributes.

After he examined me, you know, he said, you know, "Don't go home, you know, don't pass go, don't collect $200.

Go straight over to Saint Joseph's Hospital.

Take yourself in."

What it was is I had a cyst on the back of my brain.

How it got there, really wasn't quite sure, but what was a certainty is that something had to be done and sooner, not later.

LaVonne: And the doctor said, "I just need to tell you this so that you're aware of what could happen.

He's either gonna die on the operating table or he's gonna be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life."

I just had never had anybody tell me anything like that.

I mean, that was just awful.

Ron: They did the surgery.

It was an eight hour brain surgery.

Glen: A group of us got together, prayed at the studio while they were going into surgery.

Lorna: Glen saying, "Let's pray for him."

And I thought, of course, anything that's gonna help give Ron, you know, that extra spiritual something.

LaVonne: And it seemed like it took forever.

Finally he came and they rolled him down and they--I went out there and saw him and I went out and I touched him and he was like he had just come out of a freezer.

I passed out 'cause, you know, they already told me he was gonna die, so, and that's what I was expecting to happen.

[muffled voices] Ron: I remember waking up and seeing Cal Worthington and his dog Spot that only came on on Saturdays, right?

"What am I doing here on Saturday," you know?

"Oh, you had the operation, you know, you're waking up, you're finally waking up."

After surgery, but they could drain the cyst, and by draining the cyst, it took pressure off my brain which allowed, you know, my physical attributes to come back, you know, to a certain extent.

I had lost my ability to write or draw.

Glen: I remember going and visiting him and to the point where he was beginning to walk, but he could only walk very slowly down the street.

You didn't know if he was going to gain, regain that drawing ability.

Lorna: It was so shocking and staggering that he was having to go through that and it took time to recover, but he hung in there.

Glen: Ron went through the surgery and survived, thankfully, but it wasn't that quick.

It wasn't like he jumped right back into work.

LaVonne: They said he wouldn't go back to work for probably a year or two.

Ron was back at work in six months.

♪♪♪ Don: So from the 1930s all the way up to 1978, there were no Black people credited with the title of animator at Disney Studios.

There were real pioneers like Floyd Norman, who came to Disney as a trainee, as an in-betweener, worked on the drawing board for a while, but then was plucked upstairs by Walt Disney himself to work in story because Floyd, well, he was really funny and his story ideas were great.

Then there was Frank Braxton, who really made history in Hollywood by becoming the first head of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, and he was the only Black head of any union in Hollywood for like 30 years.

And then there was Ron.

He was the guy that kind of broke through it all and was the first Black animator at Disney.

Ron: I had no idea that, you know, history was being made.

The word went out, it was a little blurb in one of Ebony's publications, but, you know, I got a lot of fan mail.

I had no idea, you know, I had no idea this was happening.

So it made a real wave in the Black community.

Ron: Working on a crew, doing a character that was something that eluded me for a long time.

Gary Trousdale: He was a guy that you gave like the kind of long shots to or the close-ups of the hands turning doorknobs or, you know, he was like a backbone animator, but he didn't ever really get the real sexy scenes.

Don: In Ron's case, he felt like he couldn't really contribute at work the way he thought he wanted to as hard as he tried.

Ron: I started getting scenes that were less appetizing and so that drove me to do a little bit more experimenting with my pen and ink work.

♪♪♪ What gets me started is a photograph or so.

So I have something to sort of base it on.

This whole idea of boxing came out of doing some quick sketching on a boxing match that I was watching.

Don: This personal work is intensely personal because Ron starts to draw a history of his that he never knew from the lives of not only his mother, but his relatives that he may not have ever known, and it's something that Ron wanted to express.

Ron: My mom, she was born in Mississippi, one of 14 children living on the farm, and she would tell me stories about her life in the South.

LaVonne: Listening to his mother talk about them being raised in Mississippi and he, for some reason, he just picked up on that and every piece he says if it's not 1930s related, he didn't want to do it.

Ron: And black and white sort of lends itself to that era.

Knockout 1930.

Yeah, this is labor of love, right?

You can look at that for a long time, you know, this is trying to capture the emotion of the moment.

I've had people come up and say, "I saw something I had never seen before."

The faces on everybody here has got some story to tell, you know, as to what's going on and what they've just witnessed.

Glen: Seeing the drawings that Huz is doing, they are worlds that he draws where he draws them not just to do a drawing, but to make the paper go away, to step into that world.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ron: That's what makes storytelling so interesting because you become a part of it.

Glen: The kind of care and detail that he draws, I don't know of anybody that's doing anything like that.

Yehudah: It's personal in that it's he's sort of retelling and creating a legacy of where he came from and I think that's super important to him, especially from his upbringing and his personal family situation and just really wanting to tell that story and define himself and connect to those roots.

Melissa: As a child growing up, there was always art on the walls, his art, right?

And so you grew up in a museum basically that your father created.

Like, it was just really, I don't know how many other people grew up like that.

Like, it was just a blessing.

It was just really, really beautiful.

LaVonne: He uses people in our lives as the characters in his drawings, his family members, his brothers, our children, our children's friends.

You can sit and stare at that picture and you still can't find all of them.

Yehudah: Because my dad is not so expressive verbally all the time, this is the way that I have understood who he is on the inside.

I've learned so much about him through, you know, the stuff that's on the walls and the vignettes and moments and stories that he's telling on these walls and why they're important to him and it's really a huge window into his soul and I've always appreciated it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Andreas Deja: Ron Husband had worked with me in my Gaston team.

Ron had been very used to drawing human figures in his sketchbooks, life drawing classes, so he was very good at drawing humans, and I remembered him really staging and animating a lot of the fight between the beast and Gaston on the rooftop of the castle.

Gaston: Come on out and fight!

Andreas: He did a fantastic job there, and when it came to "Lion King," we all had to kind of switch gears.

Ron: One of the things I really enjoyed about the studio was the fact that they give you time to research and really develop the characters that you're working on.

You know, we go to "The Lion King," they brought a lion to the studio.

We sat and we drew lions.

To draw those animals and see 'em so that we could bring an air of believability to the animation.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Ron: Thumbnails of Scar.

Andreas: Animators are actors, but in a really strange way, they have to be kind of utility hitters all the time.

They have to be willing to crawl under the skin of any character.

Ron: Yeah, this is Scar.

He's talking, "Stick with me and you'll never be hungry again!"

Andreas: You can imagine Ron's done all this homework.

He's drawn, he's prepared, he's ready.

Lions.

Got it.

But then the directors also noticed that maybe Ron would be more comfortable in a different unit.

Andreas: "The production needs warthogs."

"Yeah, warthogs."

Ron: And about halfway through the picture, I started working on Pumbaa and Timon.

both: Oh.

Andreas: You're an actor.

You can do warthogs, so you gotta shift.

Warthogs it is.

Pumbaa: So we're keeping him?

Timon: Of course.

Who's the brains in this outfit?

My point exactly.

Jeez, I'm fried.

Let's get out of here and find some shade.

male: You play--you take this part.

I'll play this part.

Ready?

You're gonna say this is a stick this time because that is a stick after all, okay.

Yehudah: I kind of bonded the most with my dad when I was working at Disney for that short time on "Lion King."

And my dad--just a quiet person, like, you know, he's like very reserved in his emotions and all that.

For a long time I felt like I didn't really know him, know him and then we were in this--Disney has dudes like acting classes, and then they paired me with my dad, and I was like, I was like, I do not--like, my dad is not that kind of person.

I mean, he was like hamming it up and acting, I was like, "Who is this guy?"

all: This is a ball.

This is a stick.

A what?

male: Stick!

all: A what?

male: A stick!

all: A ball, a ball, this is-- Yehudah: This is what he does at work?

Like, is what I've missed this.

Like, how am I like waiting until like I'm 20 years old and I'm just now seeing all of this?

Randy: Ron Husband, illustrious animator here.

Gary: I've talked about how Ron worked his a-- off, like, every single day.

Randy: And Ron's sketching.

Ron: Trying to work out a scene here.

Randy: Oh, okay.

Gary: From my early days at Disney that I would see this guy sitting out and drawing in a sketchbook all the time, every break we had.

Kirk Wise: Even during break time when all of us were happy to put down our pencils, Ron is drawing, and God love him for it because, you know, we were the beneficiaries of that.

Gary: The first character he got to supervise was the goat in "Hunchback of Notre Dame."

And it was like a light clicked on, you know, he was just like, all those years suddenly paid off and he was suddenly great.

It wasn't like, he was like, kind of struggling to kind of get it.

He was like, boom, he got it right away.

Kirk: And to the best of my knowledge, Ron animated every single shot of Djali in the movie.

So after "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," me, Don, and Gary started talking, and Tab Murphy, the writer, started talking a lot about what sort of movie we'd like to make next.

All of us had this desire to tell an action adventure story, kind of as though, you know, we walked down Main Street in Disneyland and instead of going straight through into the castle for a third time, we decided to turn left at the hub and go to Adventureland this time.

And that's exactly how we pitched "Atlantis" to Michael Eisner, and as soon as we said that, he leaned in.

Milo Thatch: That's what this is all about, right?

I mean, discovery, teamwork, adventure.

Ron: When I first talked with Ferd and Gary about coming aboard on "Atlantis," there was a number of characters that had not been cast, and Dr.

Sweet was one of them.

Kirk: Dr.

Sweet, who was going to be the kind of the ship's surgeon, the team doctor.

Some of our artists were doing exploratory drawings of him as being this big hulking, you know, handsome Black man, but with a tremendous sense of humor.

So even though he was very good at his job, he had kind of a sly, kind of a winking sense of humor where you never quite knew if he was kidding or not.

Joshua: Get back.

I've got soap and I'm not afraid to use it.

[Gaetan "The Mole" hissing] Gary: I don't remember it ever really being a matter of discussion is like, who are we gonna get for Dr.

Sweet?

I think, I mean it was just like, "Let's let Ron do it."

male: Phil Morris.

male: Hello, Phil, how you doing?

Nice to meet you.

male: And he's playing Dr.

Sweet.

Phil Morris: I'm Sweet.

Phil: When I met Ron and I shook his hand, that dude's got some strong hands.

This is a legitimate specimen of a human being.

I went to his office and saw all of the character studies and all the things that he was working with to see his own tools, to be in his own space, to have him share that with me, I knew he was a special man.

And I knew we were doing something really special.

Floyd: I knew Phil, but I knew his dad, Greg Morris, who was also an actor, and Greg Morris was on the first "Mission Impossible" TV show.

male: I guess we better meet that boy right now.

Then, Greg, your son Philip.

Floyd: These were not just artists, these were superheroes.

They superseded and excelled in an industry that was not for them.

Phil: He's a hardworking man, but whenever he can spare the time, he spends it with my sisters and myself.

Phil: It was not created for them, did not look like them, but they were determined to change that.

Bruce: Disney and Disneyland just by its own nature wasn't thinking about us, like, so we didn't get a chance to kind of be a part of the fabric, of the fiber.

Marlon: I've heard a lot of people say if you can't see it, you can't be it when it comes to being a woman or a person of color doing this.

Bruce: You know, eventually as Black folks really started to shape the landscape, culture, music, what you're wearing, you know, how you speak, and all this stuff just started to really kind of shape and curl in and it was just a matter of time before the bandwidth of content started to really sort of allow us to kind of jump in and we all wanted to be a part of the dream.

Phil: As a child I was an animating nerd.

I loved animation, so as an adult to get a Walt Disney film and to do Dr.

Sweet, who was the first human representation of an African American in a Walt Disney major feature film.

So, oh yeah, we saw a huge change.

Phil: Milo!

I can't say it too loud!

Gary: That's, you know, that's kind of when animation becomes magic, you know, when you put these different elements together and out comes this character.

Don: Roy Edward Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney, wanted to create a new "Fantasia."

Roy felt like "This is part of the legacy of Walt Disney, we have to do this."

One of the sequences is a breath-taking finale to the whole movie.

There's an elk in it, and the elk is a symbolic character, a mythological character, but it's based on real elk.

And so being Ron Husband, he gets on an airplane with the directors.

He flies into possibly the coldest place on the planet.

Ron: There was a certain kind of elk and there was none in the local zoos.

So they got a trip to this elk farm in Montana and I remember it had been snowing.

It was 14 below zero.

So we're putting on these clothes.

We look like Ralphie's little brother in "Christmas Story."

We were all layered up.

Ron: Paul and Gaetan's vision of the elk was that he was gonna be real royal and majestic like the king of the forest.

I was trying to capture that nobility, being able to walk regally.

So that's a challenge of a character that doesn't have dialogue.

Fox Carney: All right, Ron, we've got some of your rough animation in here, so let's go see if I can find the box for you.

Let's see, what was it?

Oh, there we are.

Here he is.

Do you recognize any of these?

When you're animating are you-- this is a silly question--are you an elk?

Are you putting yourself as an elk to try to put it through on your pencil, or is this more cerebral?

Ron: It's probably some of both.

And initially I'm trying to feel what it's gonna be like to go from point A to point B. It's a very subtle movement.

It's walking through, coming towards the camera, and to accomplish that story point.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Glen: Ron doing the elk, I mean, when I saw the animation that he did, I didn't see the elk, I saw Ron.

There's this quiet strength, confidence, a nobility in that the power of this elk and a spiritual presence and I thought how wonderful that Ron animated that and animating it with all of this analysis going on still really what was communicated was him from the inside out in that character and that's really the goal in animation: put yourself into the characters that you animate.

And nothing was more clearly defining Ron than, I think, that character.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ John: When he retired, I did this caricature of him as Hokusai, the great Japanese printmaker who drew well into his old age and I called him "Huz-kusai," and I have, if you don't mind, I have a--I did this caricature of him.

And there's a quote from Hokusai, the actual artist on there, and I'd like to read that.

Ron: Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna start in a quick minute.

John: And Hokusai said, "From the age of 16, I had a mania for drawing all shapes of things.

When I was 50, I had published a universe of designs, but all I had done before the age of 70 is not even worth bothering about.

At 75, I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, of birds, fish, and insects.

When I am 80, you will see real progress.

At 90, I shall cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.

And at 110, everything I create, a dot, a line will jump to life as never before."

Ron: Think about the form you're trying to create.

Don: And there's this wonderful tradition in the arts that goes back thousands of years of masters and apprentices.

For all of us to sit there and hear Eric Larson say, you know, "Here's what I know from Walt Disney.

Here's what I know from making all these movies.

Now it's up to you."

And now to look at Ron saying, "Well, here's what I know from Eric Larson and what I've learned from my career and from the bumps and bruises and all the ups and downs of a life in the arts.

And I'm gonna give that to you."

As a human being, we have to share that, and Ron's gift is his amazing drawing, and now he's giving it generously to the next generation.

John: "To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word.

I am writing this in my old age.

I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign myself the old man mad about drawing."

To me that is Ron Husband.

Ron: What do you see?

How about the proportions?

Head's too small, legs too long?

Ron: 'Cause artists, you paint a painting, you do a sculpture, it's not for us, it's for other people to enjoy what we do.

And so that's part of my motivation.

But as long as I can, you know, I'm gonna be pushing that pencil.

♪♪♪ male: How fitting that tonight we gather to honor one of Citrus's own success stories.

Tonight we induct Mr.

Husband into this category as a member of Distinguished Alumn.

The Distinguished Alumni Award honors those who have achieved a high level of accomplishment and recognition in his or her chosen career field, make significant contributions to the well-being of their communities, and demonstrate high moral and ethical principles.

Ron: I'm so blessed and humbled.

So this night is just, as my son would say, off the chain.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪