Join us for a special talk featuring two influential Disney Legends who worked on the classic film Sleeping Beauty (1959), alongside Eyvind Earle. Floyd Norman started his long and prolific career at The Walt Disney Studios working as an inbetweener on Sleeping Beauty, and Burny Mattinson worked as an assistant to Marc Davis while he was animating the villainous Maleficent. Come hear their stories, moderated by Rick Law, about what it was like to work on such a powerful film alongside the likes of Walt Disney and Eyvind Earle at this one-of-a-kind program.
About the Speakers
Rick Law
Rick Law is a producer, creative director, and illustrator who has worked in Hollywood for three decades and with The Walt Disney Company for over 24 years. Over the course of his diverse career as a content creator, his artwork has appeared on the covers of Disney VHS and DVDs, he's contributed story, and created or developed a myriad of products for the company and its licensees. A creative lead in the design and launch of Disney English, he consulted on the creation of the Shanghai Disney Resort. As Creative Manager for Disney Learning, his responsibilities involved creative oversight of educational products globally, such as the first series designed for communicatively-challenged children. He’s been instrumental in fostering projects respective of the Disney legacy including Awaking Beauty: The Art of Eyvind Earle.
Burny Mattinson
Burny Mattinson celebrated his 64-year anniversary with The Walt Disney Studios in June 2017, and was officially named a Disney Legend in 2008. He continues to play a creative role at Walt Disney Animation Studios, and serves as a story advisor and consultant on a variety of projects. He is also one of the few remaining Walt Disney Studios artists who worked with Walt Disney. Among the many highlights of Mattinson’s impressive career is a directing stint on the Academy Award®-nominated 1983 animated featurette, Mickey’s Christmas Carol, which returned Mickey Mouse to the big screen for the first time in 30 years. He also produced, co-directed, and helped to adapt the story for Disney's 1986 animated feature, The Great Mouse Detective.
The veteran Disney filmmaker has worked on such classics as Lady and the Tramp (1955), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), and The Rescuers (1977). Additionally, he served as a key member of the story team on such contemporary Disney classics as Aladdin (1992), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), and Tarzan (1999). Among his more recent credits, he served as the story supervisor on the 2011 theatrical feature, Winnie the Pooh, and also contributed to the delightful 2007 Goofy short, How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.
In 1953, he started his career at Disney working in the Studios’ mailroom. He was promoted to assistant animator on Sleeping Beauty (working under Disney Legend Marc Davis) and continued in that capacity on One Hundred and One Dalmatians. He spent the next twelve years assisting Eric Larson, one of Walt's Nine Old Men, on such films as The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book, and The Aristocats (1970).
Floyd Norman
Disney Legend Floyd Norman first joined Walt Disney Studios in 1956 as an inbetweener on the classic film Sleeping Beauty, not knowing at the time that he would still find himself working in the Disney Studios over sixty years later. As the first African American to ever be hired at the Studios, Norman first gained recognition from Walt Disney himself when Walt stumbled upon some of Norman’s comics and caricatures that he had made depicting various Disney employees around the office. After Walt’s discovery, Norman was quickly promoted to the story department, where he was assigned to work on The Jungle Book (1967). Following Walt’s death in 1966, Norman left Walt Disney Studios and co-founded Vignette Films, Inc., which would go on to produce some of the first animated films about black history. He returned to Disney in the 1970s to work on Robin Hood (1973), while also working at several other prestigious animation studios like Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears. Over the years, he went on to contribute creative work on films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Mulan (1998), and also contributed to several Pixar films, including Toy Story 2 (1999) and Monsters, Inc. (2001). He was named a Disney Legend in 2007, and today, 61 years after he was first hired, he continues to happily work as a freelancer at Walt Disney Studios.
See a full schedule of upcoming films here.
Schedule subject to change. Please check calendar or ticket desk on the day of your visit for most current schedule.