This interview was originally published in Animation Journal, Volume 2, Number 1 (Fall 1993).
“Layout is a curse as a name” maintains veteran Disney layout artist A. Kendall O’Connor. “I say, ‘I lay things out.’ Then the man in the street thinks that I work in Forest Lawn—the cemetery! It gets to be very awkward.” The role of the animator—the person who “makes drawings move”—is well understood within the discipline of film studies. On the other hand, the layout artist, although equally important, is rarely acknowledged in scholarly investigation.
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