The Years with Walt Disney

Hardie began working at the Walt Disney Studio in 1929, two years after the Studio began. He went to Chouinard art school at night and to the Studio during the day. His first job was to do a Disney comic book, but he finished six months of drawings in three days when Walt asked him, “Gee, Hardie, what would you like to do now?” Dad told Walt that he'd like to try animation. There were only fourteen animators there when he arrived (and 250 when he left for New York in 1936). In an interview in 1972, my father recalled, "In those days, there was a very small group. We would do the story at night with Walt clowning around, acting like crazy, and in the daytime we did the animation." He described how exciting it was and how Walt was such a master at inspiring others. Often the animators would be discouraged, not knowing how to translate an idea into animation, and Walt would start to act out what he could see in his mind. He could demonstrate in slow motion the body language for the emotion they wanted to draw. "Working with Disney opened the world for me. Walt sat next to me and taught me animation. I think that the movement and action in my watercolors stem primarily from that early work with animation." During that first year, Hardie would go out and paint watercolors or sketch every day at noon. One day Walt saw him coming back to the Studio and asked, "What were you doing?" Hardie said he was out painting, and Walt asked, "What do you do that for?" Soon afterwards, Walt arranged for his animators to study drawing with Don Graham -- a good artist who knew anatomy very well -- at Chouinard.