Selick also got into trouble working on The Fox and the Hound. “It’s hard to do four-legged animals that are pretty realistic,” he admits. “I just decided that I was going to do the feet and I left the head off. I animated the whole scene with a headless option,” he recalls with a laugh. “But Glen Keane was deeply upset. He said, ‘Please, animate with the head on from now on!’ ”

The new recruits were on fire and full of ideas, and management was wary. Bird felt that “you were kind of coached to take anything distinctive out of a scene. Jerry Rees did this wonderful walk that was a little bit stiff but full of life and very distinctive,” for the hunter in The Fox and the Hound. “They made him re-do that walk probably 8 to 10 times, and every time they told him to tone it down, tone it down, tone it down. He didn’t want to give them what they wanted, because what they wanted was not good.”

Bird feels that the best scene in The Fox and the Hound is the bear fight, mostly because “they ran out of time to screw it up. So all the young people who were still there—I was fired by that point for ‘rocking the boat’—got together and basically jammed on that sequence. John Musker took the hunter; Glen Keane did the bear. Suddenly, this film that’s just mildly pleasant—no real ups, no real downs, it kind of lithiums its way along—suddenly comes out of its mild coma and snaps to life. The camera angles get dramatic and the animation gets bigger and the drawings get really good and the light glints off the bear’s fur. The only reason it exists is that they didn’t have time to ruin it.”

When the film was finally completed, Bird noticed that one of the cameras was out of focus. “We were so mad at that point, we didn’t tell anybody. We just thought, Let’s see how long it takes them to notice. And guess what? It’s still out of focus. Probably a third of the movie is out of focus!”

Burton recalls, “All these people—Musker and Lasseter and Brad Bird and Jerry Rees—they were so ready and willing and able to just go, but it took years. The Little Mermaid, which was probably the first movie that really used people like Musker—that could have happened roughly 10 years earlier if the powers that be had been up for it! The Little Mermaid? It took forever to make that film.”

Musker remembers “Crusading City Editor Day,” where “we had loosened ties and wore white shirts and talked like we were in a Howard Hawks movie. ‘We got to get this thing out by tomorrow!’ Tim adopted the persona of a washed-up, dissolute writer struggling at a newspaper. So we’re all sitting at this long table—secretaries, executives—and they’re looking at all these kids who are talking like hard-bitten newspapermen. Tim sort of staggered into the table, saying, ‘Please, I need a job. I just need a job!’ And he had pre-chewed all this food, and he threw it up on the table and staggered out of the dining room. There were screams and moans, but we just started howling with laughter.”

After being under-utilized and under-appreciated, Burton recalls, “Lasseter left, Bird left … a lot of people left the building because they were so frustrated.” Lasseter was in fact fired after he tried to persuade Disney Studios to use the innovation of computer graphics on its next animated feature, The Brave Little Toaster. “They basically heard his pitch and said, ‘O.K., that’s it. You’re out of here,’ ” says Bird. “He was just kind of dumbfounded because, like me, he had been prepped by the Old Masters, and suddenly no one was interested in all the stuff we were inspired to do. It was a very weird, very specific time. As disney’s top-tier guys retired, the people running things became the businesspeople and the middle-level animation artists who had been there awhile. They just wanted to sit back and coast on the disney reputation while we younger guys were on fire, full of the ideas that the old-master disney guys inspired in us. Now we were the ones thinking outside the box.”