Burny Mattinson passed away today after a brief illness; he was 87, and had worked for Disney for just shy of 70 years, with a career stretching from Lady and the Tramp to Strange World.
Mattinson worked on most of the Disney animated features, and many of their other animation projects, of the '50s, '60s, and '70s in one capacity or another, usually as an inbetweener, character animator, or storyboard artist. It was while working on The Black Cauldron in the latter role that the normally-calm Mattinson exploded at the directors of the film when they criticized a sequence he had boarded, saying it wasn’t ready to move forward into production. Worried that he had jeopardized his career at Disney, a depressed Mattinson told his wife what happened when he arrived home after work; she reminded him of a project he’d been toying with, an animated adaptation of a record put out by Disneyland Records a few years earlier, and encouraged him to pitch the idea to studio executives.
Then-CEO Ron Miller liked the pitch, and soon Burny Mattinson found himself in charge of “Mickey’s Christmas Carol”, keeping the album’s writer and voice of Scrooge, Alan Young, to perform the same role in the cartoon. The success of that project led to a co-directing role on The Great Mouse Detective, where two of his fellow directors were Disney animators getting their feature directing debut, John Musker and Ron Clements. While those were Mattinson’s only directing credits during his long Disney career, they are among the creative high points of Disney’s post-Walt and pre-Ashman years, and helped put in place some of the pieces upon which the Disney Renaissance was built.
R.I.P. to a true Disney Legend, the longest-tenured employee in company history. Thanks for all the entertainment throughout the decades, and the support and mentoring given to fellow artists at the company.
