Disney animator Joe Hale, 99, died on Jan. 29. He started his career as an “inbetweener” on Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Lady and the Tramp, drawing the movements between the artwork he was given. For the next few decades he worked his way up and became a full-fledged layout artist on Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Robin Hood (as well as a lot of TV animation, much of it involving Winnie the Pooh). Hale also produced The Black Cauldron (1985), for which he was Oscar-nominated (but the film lost money, and Hale was fired, after 35 years with Disney—typical). Hale explained his job in 2010: “What the layout man does is: he takes the storyboard and breaks it down into individual scenes. And then you ‘lay out’ that scene and you make drawings of the characters. You work very closely with the director and you have a lot of input . . . we approached each scene as if they were a painting that you could frame and hang on a wall. We made each scene very attractive. The layout man is like an art director.”
