- [gentle instrumental music playing]
- [birds chirping]
[Bruce] So, I'm at CalArts.
I'm a freshman.
I remember one day my roommate says,
"Hey, 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
at Disney Studios at the time?
As we're walking, he 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 [gasps]
"There's a Black dude.
- There's a Black dude over there."
- [music fades]
That Black dude was Ron Husband. [laughs]
[mellow instrumental music playing]
[Ron] I'm 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.
The city's still, or they're in action.
There's a story taking place.
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 bringing a smile to their face.
The name's Sweet, Joshua Sweet.
[Ron] I never considered my time
at Disney work.
For 38 years, I was there.
It was just, uh, you know,
I got paid to push a pencil.
[music fades]
[Ron] My high school art teacher,
uh, Mrs. Dorothy Clemons,
encouraged the class
to carry a sketchbook.
[breathes deeply]
And on her encouragement,
um, 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,
uh, for 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 and she said, "Ron, will you clean
those brushes for me?"
And I just sort of looked at her
and just kept walking.
- [light instrumental music playing]
- [Ron] The next day I sat,
you know, I sat right up front.
Bell rang
- [school bell ringing]
- and she walks over to the desk,
and she looks me
in the eye and she says,
"Get the hell out and don't come back."
And Ms. Clemons never spoke
to me a word again.
Couple 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,
probably why I'm sitting here today,
because I took her advice.
- [interviewer] Oh, wow.
- [chuckles]
- Just a couple of sketchbooks.
- Just a couple of sketchbooks.
[music fades]
[Ron] These books here go back to 1962.
I was twelve years old.
You know, I love sports.
I get these sports magazines
and copy the photographs,
which really, um, 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. [chuckles]
Um.
I look at my sketchbooks as practice.
Practice, practice.
Because practice won't make you perfect.
Practice just makes you better.
And I wanna get better.
You're always on your journey.
And, uh, you know,
my journey started long ago.
[sentimental instrumental music playing]
[Ron] I was born and raised in Monrovia,
California, a small town.
You know, there was,
uh, unofficial barriers.
A certain street, uh, was the limit
for Blacks to live in.
We had 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 St. 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.
And I remember this guy came
into our apartment
- [door knocking]
- and he had been stabbed.
And he staggered into the house.
He ended up going in the bathroom
and and dying in the tub.
It had to be about three years old,
'cause at four years old, we had moved.
She was a a great mom,
you know, raising four boys by herself.
Mom worked a lot. I mean, mom instilled
a work ethic in all her kids, you know
I was one of the original latchkey kids,
'cause he took a key
and pinned it to my Levi's.
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 never Went to bed hungry.
- [music concludes]
- [birds chirping]
[LaVonne] Well, my husband, yeah,
I understand my husband's priorities.
- [Melissa chuckles]
- One of them is his sketchbook.
- [Ron] Yes.
- Ask him about, uh,
me always fussing that every time
we go somewhere,
I have to compete
with the sketchbook.
He'll tell you all the time, I tell him,
"Just once in the 53 years
that we've been married,
I would love you to 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'll carry one with tape on it,
and just, you know,
I don't have to worry
about him getting an actual woman,
- 'cause the sketchbook is his other woman.
- [Melissa laughs]
- [Ron] Which is kind of beautiful.
- No.
- [Ron] No.
- [gentle instrumental music playing]
[Ron] LaVonne, yeah, love of my life.
We've been married, um, 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.
I'm gonna leave that alone. [laughs]
But anyway, he he was just a classy guy.
And I decided, "Okay, he's mine."
[Melissa] Her name is
actually LaVonne Jackson
- [Ron] Mm-hmm.
- but she, because she was part of ASB,
snuck in somewhere and added her name
as 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.
- [laughs]
- Yeah.
[LaVonne] And then at Citrus College,
we were there together.
- [Ron] And he went to Vegas.
- [LaVonne] And then he went to Vegas.
- [Ron] And you followed?
- [music fades]
No, I told him he better come back.
- [dramatic instrumental music playing]
- [indistinct chatter over TV]
[Ron] I played football in college,
went to university
on a football scholarship,
so I get 15 dollars a month.
I was also working at the university
as a model for photography
and art classes.
In eighth grade,
I was, uh, playing flag football.
This little chart here,
and I said what I was going to do in order
to build my body up
[chuckles] to play football, right?
So, uh, 20 push-ups,
30 sit-ups, 100 jumping jacks.
Really, really crude stuff
that I was gonna do. Uh, lift weights.
Didn't have any weights,
but, uh, I ended up
signing up, uh, October 22nd, 1963.
I never knew where I was gonna end up.
This is a start. [laughs]
After graduation
from the University of Las Vegas,
I wanted to be a commercial artist.
Uh, 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, uh, Honeywell.
They offered me a position
as a technical illustrator.
And that sounded
sort of like illustrator. [chuckles]
So, I took that job.
It was one guy who gotta do
all of the exploded views
and all the really, really creative stuff.
And the rest of us in the department,
we did block diagrams and flow charts.
[chuckles] But it paid the bills,
and it was a lot of overtime.
Uh, after about a year and a half,
I said, "I wanna do something
more creative."
- "Where can I find creativity
- [music fades]
and be creative?" I said,
"Well, maybe an art school."
[dramatic instrumental music playing]
[Ron] So, I took a class at Art Center,
a class called
"Sketching for Illustration."
It was taught by Sam McKim,
and he's-- was a 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.
Art Center, to me, was like the pinnacle
of where I could get my education.
[Floyd] Going to Art Center
was just, um, 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] 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 trainee program
at Disney bringing in,
uh, artists to train
to perhaps become animators.
Back in the '70s,
it was very, very bare bones.
You know, you had Disney.
- Yeah.
- [Ron] You had, uh, Hanna-Barbera.
- Well, don't wait. Illustrate.
- Ralph Bakshi doing, uh,
you know, his thing.
[voice-over on TV]
Strong man and diaper man.
[Ron] So, it was very, uh, 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. [chuckles]
For me, it was like, "Okay, yeah,
I'm gonna-- I'm gonna follow up on this
'cause, you know, I just need
something more creative to do."
[music concludes]
[Ron] 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-- 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,
uh, hired on, uh, on potential.
[whimsical instrumental music playing]
The world I walk into in animation
is total creativity.
Disney was looking for young people
to come in and to replace the nine old men
who had really created
this art of animation.
It was the '70s when, uh,
a lot of the new kids, uh, came to Disney.
They were gonna be the one
to carry this business forward,
to make the, uh,
Disney classics yet to be made.
So, it was a very exciting time.
- Hello, my name is John Musker.
- I'm Ron Clements and I'm a story man.
Hi, I'm Tim Burton,
and I'm in the story department,
kind of, I don't really have a rank,
but I just kind of work here.
Randy Cartwright, animator.
I found out that if you can't draw,
you can't really animate.
It took me eight portfolios to get in.
But, uh, finally, I did get in.
We're gonna go inside
and see what it's like. Come on. Come on.
[Barry] The thing
that I really remember instantly
as I walked into this place
where Pinocchio and Bambi and Fantasia,
all these films were created,
was the smell of the studio.
It was this wonderful
artistic incense of cigarettes,
pencil shavings, and scotch.
[chuckles] It just-- It just permeated.
It was Gosh, it was intoxicating.
Being at the Disney Studio in the '70s,
I think there were attempts, really,
to open up the Disney Studio.
There-- The Disney Studio had been
so insular for many years.
[Lorna] It was such a
a new thing to be there,
and particularly as a young woman.
I was so excited
and just terrified at the same time.
One day, uh, this football player
from Las Vegas, Nevada, came in,
and [chuckles] he looked tough.
I mean, muscles,
full man shoes, shaved head.
- [laughs]
- [Barry] The sweetest,
most gentle disposition.
People would often tell me
[chuckles] Floyd's really a nice guy.
"Oh, no, Floyd's not nice at all."
Nobody's nicer than Ron Husband.
- [laughs] He's the nice guy.
- [music fades]
Every day was, um, an experience for me.
It was a learning experience.
I knew nothing about Milt Kahl,
Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston,
all these these greats and anima--
I had-- I had no idea
who these gentlemen were.
It was so surreal to know
that you were among these these, uh,
legends of animation.
And I mean, I tried
to keep my cool and, you know,
I just did [chuckles]
what I was told, but I felt
I was in such a special place
and it was so exciting.
- [light instrumental music playing]
- [Ron] Eric Larson was the head
- of that program.
- 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.
It was this feeling
that you've got to learn,
that you've got to be, uh,
give with 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.
Um, I remember the first week,
I was so nervous.
[John Musker] He was such
an avuncular mentor, the gentlest guy.
He 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 with positive statements.
He would say, getting good silhouettes,
getting arcs,
getting strong anticipations,
you know, uh, Manna
from heaven for a a young,
nerdy, animation, uh, student.
[Tom] We have a staff
of 200 young artists,
animators, sculptors
from art schools, colleges.
And what that does for this company is
it has-- It's a group of people
who are bringing a whole different
sensitivity to the-- To the studio.
Give what I had and get
what they-- What they had to give.
I mean, they're squeezing everything
they can out of us. [laughs]
[Frank] No, the the new fellas, uh,
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, uh,
carry on the Disney tradition
of entertainment.
He's gotta look like
he's really going on this gal.
He can't take his eyes
off of it, you know?
Yeah, kind of like the same way
I've been with girls.
[both laugh]
But it was an interesting time.
There was this
- feeling of, like, you didn't really know
- [music concludes]
- [dramatic instrumental music playing]
- 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 the animator did.
[John] Ron Husband came in
around that time.
He wasn't, you know,
he he was a good art student.
He was a a good enough draftsman
to be accepted onto the training 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.
Yeah, let's let's see it.
- Let's see the scene.
- [overlapping chatter]
Here's another good scene.
This isn't, uh, as good
as the things they used to do,
like I said, but it's the best we can do.
[Don] 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.
[whirrs]
[Don] There's a guy
named Woolie Reitherman,
who is an amazing animator
from Walt Disney's era,
who was kind of the--
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 out of your next four weeks
or politely say goodbye.
And they were tough.
My pencil test would be a lot
um, less sophisticated
than somebody like, Glen,
who came in from CalArts.
Maybe, uh, one out of every two people
wouldn't pass the test, you know.
So, you're you're sitting there
sweating b*ll*ts, uh,
when they're they're taking your test
and you're gonna show it
to the review board.
Eric took me in, um, to his office,
and he showed me a reel
of some of the personal tests that, like,
uh, Dale Baer had done and Pomeroy.
And suddenly, I thought,
"I'm in over my head."
Um, I'm not gonna make it,
and my my dream since childhood
is gonna be over in four weeks,
and how am I gonna 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 [chuckles] devastated.
I mean, at the time,
I thought I I had come
to the Taj Mahal of animation,
and here I am,
you know, and I I can't stay.
[Ron] But, you know, I think-- I think
the first test was a Goofy test,
and Goofy is running with the football.
They accepted it so I could be, um,
you know, the official Disney employee.
- [Glen] At a certain point
- [music fades]
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.
- [comical instrumental strings]
- [Glen] At lunchtime
- [indistinct chatter]
there would always be a group
of us that would gather together.
- And I noticed that Huz
- [dramatic instrumental music playing]
he was reading his Bible.
And I'd never seen anybody
read their Bible before.
People that talk about God
or talk about faith, like he lives this.
- [gentle instrumental music playing]
- [Ron] There's a line in Chairs of Fire
when Eric's little sister asked him,
you know, "Why you run?"
He runs all the time. And and he says
when when I run, I feel God's pleasure.
And when I draw, I feel God's pleasure.
You know, God gave him this gift
and him utilizing it
just as 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 and the beauty
of his holiness, you know,
and and we're, as artists,
we're creating beauty.
[Glen] Your calling is to be an artist
- and you can't not be that.
- [birds chirping]
[Glen] 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
- [camera shutter clicks]
'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.
Um, and so this is pretty much
how we began each day.
[music fades]
[Glen] You know, animation
is a very contained medium.
You are drawing, flipping,
making little tiny adjustments
and drawing.
But both Huz and I had been used
to football where [chuckles]
you are totally physically into this,
and there's such energy
and expression that you--
That is built up.
[laughs] And sometimes Huz
would just kind of look at me.
[drum beats]
[grunts, laughs] And I'd just--
You want some of this?
And we would just
- [objects clattering]
- [men fighting, grunting]
throw each other down and be wrestling,
and fighting and things would be falling.
[laughs] We had a lot of, um,
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 [laughs]
just tear you apart in this drawing
because I think you know how much I care."
In The Fox and the Hound,
I was responsible
for the rough animation
in the bear fight.
This is a scene from it.
Looking at the Bear,
I mean, it's just one great blob
of fat and fur and nothing to hold onto.
My name is Ron Husband.
I'm an animator here
at Walt Disney Studios.
Next step in, uh,
the process of animation would be
taking the line drawings to, uh,
Xerox to be inked and painted.
[gentle instrumental music playing]
[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
and introduce us to all the animators.
- [interviewer] Okay.
- This is my daughter.
[Ron] Coming up and just being Disney kids
and all the camaraderie that Mikel,
and, uh, Jai, and Melissa
had 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 Husbands!"
And it was, like, a big thing.
My parents would pop popcorn.
And, like, we had our own
- little movie theater.
- [Yehudah] Movie theater. Yeah.
[Melissa] And it was,
like, the coolest thing.
Especially growing up
in San Dimas, we were, like,
- one of the only Black families.
- [Yehudah] Yeah.
[Melissa] And so I don't wanna say
helped me fit in,
but where I was-- probably have
felt very othered in a lot of ways,
like, uh, I feel like, being able
to have this conversation piece
of being able to talk about my dad.
- [music fades]
- [indistinct chatter]
[birds chirping]
[Don] The oddest coincidence
in the history of the planet Earth is
that the head of Disney Animation
was named Don Duckwall.
And, uh, he was the guy
you didn't wanna get a call from
- because he ran the place
- [tense instrumental music playing]
and, uh, it meant
there was something wrong.
[Ron] I get a call and, you know,
call up to the the third floor.
Our, uh, production manager
One-sided conversation,
says, uh, "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 I'm assuming
it was his person's-- personal thought
or his personal, whatever it was,
uh, even though, you know,
it was myself
and Mike McKinney were only Blacks
in feature animation, uh, at the time.
So I just didn't think that much of it.
And the fact that I didn't--
He didn't give me a pink slip.
And I just went back and continued
to do my in-betweens
and, um, and, see how things worked,
you know, worked out.
Coming from a Black neighborhood,
you you gotta be twice as good
as a white person just to break even.
And I mean, that was where I was raised.
When I was growing up in St. 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 my heroes.
I grew up in a heavily
g*ng-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 backseat,
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, "Oh. I never knew
this was sort of a race thing."
He was like, "Hey, man,
you ever see The Flintstones?"
"Ain't no Black people
in The Flintstones."
And I was like [gasps] "I guess not."
Flintstones, one of my favorite shows.
And he said,
"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.
So, you just did the best you could,
where you could,
how you could, with the best--
With the best you had.
[Yehudah] Despite any obstacles
that he had,
um, he would never let those obstacles
to be, you know,
an excuse for any--
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
- [music fades]
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 formation ended up,
you know, I had 51 feet.
So, uh, 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 my 100 feet. [distorted]
[dark suspenseful music playing]
[Ron] I started to get fatigued,
and I was talking to a friend of mine
on the phone,
and he says, "Huz, are you drunk?"
[chuckles] Uh
'Cause my speech
was starting to get slurred.
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.
I get in one lane, because I look
left or right, I get dizzy.
[truck horn honking in distance]
But he kept coming in and working
and putting in his hours.
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.
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.
And I noticed that as he was
animating,
um 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, very low.
I took a week off,
and Ed Hansen called.
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 a hundred feet in the movie,
and he gets a phone call
while he's at home.
- [phone ringing]
- [Ron] I was in bed,
you know,
just literally dying on the vine.
And Ed calls.
He says, "Ron,
you've been promoted to an animator."
I said, "Thanks."
I went back to sleep.
I mean, that was as much as I could do.
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.
- This is Ron Miller.
- 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 doctor's appointments
to see specialists.
[Don] So Ron Miller had his secretary,
Lucille Martin, 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.
Um energy level was gone.
So, you know,
I was literally falling apart,
and I didn't really realize how much so.
Got him to the doctors 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
[chuckles] you know, he said,
you know, "Don't go home,
you know, don't pass go,
don't collect 200 dollars,
go straight over
to St. Joseph's Hospital,
- check yourself in."
- [slow sentimental music playing]
[Ron] What it was is I had a cyst
on the back of my brain.
How it got there,
I 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 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, because I you know,
they'd already told me
he was going to die, so,
and that's what I was expecting to happen.
[music concludes]
[indistinct chatter over the TV]
[Ron] I remember waking up and seeing
Cal Worthington and his dog, Spot.
[chuckles] That only came on
on Saturdays, right?
What am I doing here on Saturday?
Oh, you had the operation, you know.
You're waking up.
You're finally waking up.
After surgery,
they could drain the cysts,
and by draining the cysts,
it took pressure off my brain,
which allowed my physical attributes
to come back to a certain extent.
I had lost my ability to write or draw.
[slow soft music playing]
[Glen] I remember going
and visiting him 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 regain that drawing ability.
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.
[] Ron went through the surgery
and survived, thankfully.
But it wasn't that quick.
It wasn't like he jumped
right back into work.
They said he wouldn't go back to work
for probably a year or two.
Ron was back at work in six months.
[soft uplifting music playing]
[bicycle bell dinging]
[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.
If 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 Cartoonist 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.
Word went out.
There was a little blurb
in one of Ebony's publications.
But, you know, I got a lot of fan mail.
Uh, I had no idea.
You know,
I had no idea this was happening.
So it made a real wave
in the Black community.
[birds chirping]
[Ron] Working on a crew doing a character,
that was something that eluded me
for a long time.
He was a guy that you gave, like,
the kind of long shots to,
or the close-ups
of the hands turning doorknobs,
or he was like a backbone animator,
but he didn't ever
really get the real sexy scenes.
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. [chuckles]
And so that drove me to do
a little bit more experimenting
with my pen and ink work.
- [crowd cheering]
- [suspenseful music playing]
[Ron] 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.
[crowd cheering]
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 that he does,
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.
[reflective instrumental music playing]
And Knockout, 1930. [chuckles]
This is, um labor of love, right?
You can look at that for a long time.
You know, this is, um
trying to capture the emotion
of the moment.
I've had people come up and say,
"I saw something
that I had never seen before."
The faces on everybody here
has got some story to tell
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.
- [bell ringing]
- [crowd cheering]
- [camera shutter clicking]
- [crowd jeering]
[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
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, like, 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.
[] 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 have 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.
[music concludes]
[laughs]
[Andreas] Ron Husband had worked
with me in my Gaston team.
Ron had been very used
to drawing human figures
in his sketchbooks, live 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.
- Come on out and fight!
- [thunder rumbling]
[Andreas] He did a fantastic job there.
And when it came to Lion King,
we all had to kind of switch gears.
- [soft uplifting music playing]
- [growls]
One of the things I really enjoyed
about the studio was the fact
that they gave you time
to research and really develop
the characters that you're working on.
You know, we called it 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.
[enchanting instrumental music playing]
[indistinct chatter]
[groans]
Yeah, some 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
into the skin of any character.
[Ron] Yeah, this is Scar.
He's talking.
[imitating] Stick with me
and you'll never be hungry again.
[Don] 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.
[Don] The production needs warthogs.
Yeah, warthogs.
About halfway through the picture,
I started working on Pumbaa and Timon.
- Oh.
- Oh.
[Don] You're an actor.
You can do warthogs.
So you got to shift. Warthogs it is.
- So we're giving them?
- [scoffs] Of course.
Who's the brains in this outfit?
- Uh
- My point exactly.
Jeez, I'm fried.
Let's get out of here and find some shade.
[] You play this. 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. One, two
[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's just a quiet person.
Like, you know, he's 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] Oh, a stick. This is a stick.
A what? A stick.
A what? A stick. Oh, a stick. Oh, a ball.
This is a ball. A what?
This is what he does at work.
Like, this is what I've missed this.
Like, how am I, like, waiting until
I'm like, 20 years old,
- and I'm just now seeing all this.
- [laughs]
[Randy] Ron Husband,
illustrious animator here.
I've talked about how Ron
worked his a*s off, like, every single day
- [Randy] You're not sketching?
- [Rob] Trying to work out a scene here.
Oh, okay.
From my early days at Disney,
I would see this guy
sitting out and drawing on a sketchbook
all the time, every break we had.
[Kirk] Even during break time,
when all of us were happy
to put down our pencils,
Ron is drawing. [chuckles]
And God love him for it,
because we were
the beneficiaries of that.
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, "Oh, kind
of struggling to kind of get it."
He was like, "boom!" He got it right away.
And to the best of my knowledge,
Ron animated
every single shot of Djali in the movie.
[chuckles]
[Djali bleats]
[whimsical music playing]
So after The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
um
me, Don, and Gary started talking,
and Tad 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.
That's what this is all about, right?
I mean, discovery, teamwork, adventure.
When I first talked with Fer and Gary
about coming aboard on Atlantis,
there was a number of characters
that had not been cast,
and Dr. Sweet was one of 'em.
[Kirk] Dr. Sweet.
who was going to be kind
of the ship's surgeon, the team doctor.
Some of our artists were
doing exploratory drawings of him
as being this big, hulking,
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. [chuckles]
Get back. I've got soap,
and I'm not afraid to use it.
I don't remember it ever really
being a matter of discussion.
It was like,
who are we gonna get for Dr. Sweet?
I think, I mean, it was just like,
"Let's let Ron do it."
- Phil Morris.
- [Phil] Hey.
- Hello, Phil. How you doing?
- Nice to meet you.
Vinny's playing Dr. Sweet.
Sweet meet Vinny.
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
- [intriguing music playing]
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
[chuckles] who was also an actor.
And Greg Morris was
on the first Mission Impossible TV show.
[host] I guess we better meet
that boy right now.
- Then Greg, your son, Phil.
- [audience applauding]
[Phil] These were not just artists.
These were superheroes.
They superseded and excelled
in an industry that was not for them.
He's a hardworking man,
but whenever he can spare the time,
he spends it with my sisters and myself.
It was not created for them.
It did not look like them.
But they were determined to change that.
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.
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.
You know, eventually,
as Black folks really started
to shape the landscape, culture, music,
what you're wearing, you know,
how you speaking, all of 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.
My Lord! I can't say it too loud.
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.
[intriguing music playing]
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 breathtaking 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.
[laughs] We were all layered up.
Paul and Gaetan's vision of the elk
was that he was going
to 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.
[music concludes]
[Fox] All right, Ron, we've got some
of your rough animation in here.
[Ron] All right.
So let's go see
if I can find the box for you.
Let's see
Oh, there we are. Here it is.
- Do you recognize any of these?
- [Ron] Oh, yeah.
[Fox] 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.
- Okay.
[Ron] 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.
He's walking through,
coming towards camera.
- [Fox] Mm-hmm.
- [Ron] And to accomplish that story point
[slow soft music playing]
[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 um
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.
- [music concludes]
- [traffic whizzing]
[Ron] There's a quote
by Jackie Robinson who said that
"A life is not important
except in the impact
it has on other lives."
[soft music playing]
And that's the way I would like
to be remembered.
[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 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 down there.
And I'd like to read that.
[Ron] Okay, ladies and gentlemen.
We're gonna start in a quick minute.
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 a 110, everything I create,
a dot, a line,
will jump to life as never before."
Think about form you're trying to create.
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.
"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?
Heads too small, legs too long.
As 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.
For as long as I can, you know,
I'm going to be pushing that pencil.
[announcer] How fitting that tonight
we gather to honor
one of Citrus' own success stories.
Tonight, we induct Mr. Husband
into this category
as a member of Distinguished Alum.
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 wellbeing
of their communities,
and demonstrate high
moral and ethical principles.
[crowd cheering]
[Ron] I'm so blessed and humbled.
So this night is just, as my son
would say, off the chain.
[uplifting, upbeat music playing]
[music fades]
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HUZ: Drawn to Life (2026)
Moderators: Maskath3, sidolanters, GabrielAlejo2341