Afterword

A Long Life as a Disney

Animator
For nearly seventy years, Burny Mattinson drew many of the studio’s
best-loved characters.
By
March 14, 2023

If you wanted to make a Disney-style animation of, say, Florida’s governor, Ron
DeSantis, furiously repealing a special tax status, you’d have a lead animator draw
the extremes of the action: DeSantis screwing up his face in an angry pout,
perhaps, and then declaring, “There’s a new sheriff in town!” Then you’d bring in
what’s known in the business as an in-betweener—that is, the animator who draws
all the incremental frames of the action. In-betweeners don’t get the glory, but
without them cartoons would be herky-jerky, lurching from angry pout to
swaggering declaration with nothing smoothing the transition. Burny Mattinson
(1935-2023) started his career at the Walt Disney Company in the mailroom, and,
even though he had no formal training in animation, he was given a swing at
in-betweening just six months later. His first big assignment was to in-between the
swishing of Peg’s tail in the 1955 film “Lady and the Tramp.” (For those who
might not have instant recall of the movie, Peg is a fluffy little dog who—along
with her friend, Bull the bulldog—is rescued from an evil dogcatcher by the heroic
Tramp.) Peg swishes her tail a lot. Disney animation was famous for its silky
elegance, owing in no small part to the skill of its in-betweeners, and, thanks to
Mattinson, Peg’s tail practically glided from side to side.

Mattinson had wanted to be an animator ever since his mother had taken him to see
“Pinocchio” at a theatre, in San Francisco, when he was six years old. He soon
developed a knack for art. “He would draw endlessly,” his son, Brett Mattinson,
told me recently. “If he drew a bee, he would draw every single hair on that bee.”
Burny’s father was a professional musician, and the family had moved to Los
Angeles; auspiciously, they lived within striking distance of Disney Studios. In a
bold move that can, perhaps, be attributed to the guilelessness of youth, Mattinson
showed up at the studio gate with his portfolio as soon as he finished high school,
in 1953. The magical part of this story is that, instead of shooing him away, the
security guard liked his drawings and called the head of personnel to take a look.
Thus, Mattinson became a messenger at Disney, beginning a career that would
eventually make him the longest-tenured employee of the company (just shy of
seventy years) and one of the last still at the company to have started there when
Walt Disney himself was running it. As it happens, one of Mattinson’s tasks as a
messenger was to go to Walt’s office every Friday and pick up a check, cash it at
the studio cashier, and bring the money (three hundred dollars) back to Walt. (It
was Walt’s weekend spending money.)

At lunch, Mattinson would practice in-betweening. Soon, he graduated from

delivering mail to working on Peg’s tail, and then helped animate such classics as
“One Hundred and One Dalmatians” and “The Sword in the Stone.” He had joined
the company at a golden moment; he was mentored by what were known as
Disney’s Nine Old Men, the foundational animators at the company, hired in the
nineteen-twenties and thirties. For more than a decade, Mattinson worked for one
of them, Eric Larson. Under Larson’s tutelage, Mattinson perfected the animation
for Donald Duck’s uncle, the harebrained Austrian scientist and psychologist
Professor Ludwig Von Drake, who was a regular avian presence on “Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color,” which débuted in 1961, on NBC. While working on
the film “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too,” Mattinson was promoted to the
position of key animator. Listing the films that he worked on is a little like listing
the entire output of the Walt Disney Company over the past six decades: “Sleeping
Beauty,” “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” “The Jungle Book,” “The
Aristocats,” “The Lion King,” “Mulan,” “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” and on and
on. His last project was the 2022 film “Strange World.” Most of his time was spent
on Disney’s marquee films, but he also worked on more obscure projects, such as a
Goofy short called “How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.” He directed and
produced several films, including “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” and “The Great
Mouse Detective.”
In an interview some years ago, Mattinson said that he really enjoyed working on
wicked characters, such as the evil fairy Maleficent, but in real life he skewed
cheery and upbeat. He had a big laugh; a wide, round face; and small eyes that
actually seemed to twinkle. He said that, of all his characters, he identified most
closely with Winnie the Pooh. Mattinison was, perhaps, one of the last of an almost
extinct genotype—the happy company man, the lifer. He never had an employer
besides Disney. He married another Disney animator, Sylvia Fry. His son, Brett,
works for Disney, and his second wife, Ellen Siirola, whom he married after he
was widowed, is a paralegal with Disney’s legal department. Last November, just a
few months before he died, he went on a cruise on the Disney Wish, which sailed
from Florida to an island owned by the company. When I asked Brett what his
father enjoyed doing outside of his life at Disney, he had to stop and think. Finally,
Brett said, “He just loved his work.”