Like Being Trapped Between Two Mirrors

[tealin]

GREAT LIVES: WALT DISNEY
Gerald Scarfe (famous cartoonist and production designer on Hercules), Richard Williams (longstanding animation director, most notable for Roger Rabbit), and Brian Sibley (who ... wrote a book?) discuss the life and legacy of Walt Disney. Mr Scarfe also talks a little about working on Hercules, which was interesting for me to hear, knowing the people he's talking about; it's a bit like overhearing stories about your roommate from a stranger they went to high school with. Anyway, it's all very interesting, and Mr Williams is, as ever, very knowledgeable on the animation history side of things.

And then, as I was sitting in my little cubicle that I've made my own world, with the drawings* pinned on the wall which almost say 'keep out,' my little province was invaded by these words:

If you go to the Disney studio – which is very anodyne and very very clean and set up – all of the artists there have got these little cubicles set up, and they've made these little cubicles their own world. They put drawings and pin them on the wall, and almost cover the door with them, which says 'keep out'; that's their little province.

... and I had a very very odd sensation, almost a psychological version of your vision coming back into binocular focus after you've been crosseyed for a while, which I realised was the extremely unfamiliar event of my mind and body being in the same place at the same time. Usually when I sit down at my desk I plug in to Radio 4 and my mind goes and plays in the buttercups and sunshine** of Radio 4 Land, following wherever it takes me, while my body stays and works on my scene, but this morning it led me right back to where I was sitting. Weird.

*Well, I say 'drawings,' one of the things I have pinned on my wall is Sunday's LA Times article on Radio 4. THE CIRCLES, MAN.
**Wellll, more like dimly-lit libraries and jovial dinner parties, unless it's a natural history program...