Cinderella fairy godmother4/9/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “My mother's best friend through college is Walt's niece, Dorothy,” explains J.P. ![]() In fact, their union was okayed by Mickey Mouse’s head cheese himself. Mary Alice had met her husband on a set-up date several years earlier and proclaimed immediately afterward that he was the man she would marry. He ultimately turned to his wife Mary Alice for inspiration – even though she was only in her early 30s at the time, his artist’s eye aged her by a few decades and infused the drawing with a sense of her innate warmth and increasingly well-known kindness. He came in after the Nine Old Men – he was kind of the tenth Old Man in the role and he outlived a lot of them.”Ĭharacter design wasn’t typically a part of O’Connor’s duties, but when his fellow artists were struggling to land on the right look for Cinderella’s magical benefactor, he volunteered to take a shot at it (he’d previously hand-built the model for the famed Pumpkin Coach in the film). “Those are all my dad’s scenes, and they're very powerful and memorable. “A lot of the scenes that you'll remember, like the marching cards in 'Alice in Wonderland' the hippos and ostriches in 'Fantasia,’ which is considered one of the most powerful ever in animation Snow White, when she stumbles on the rocks and there's this dramatic angle where she splashes down to the ground the pink elephants on parade in ‘Dumbo’ and on and on,” remembers J.P. “The staging is really the power part, because you can have a script that says, 'The boy is swinging on a little swing in a tree,' and if it goes side to side it's not powerful, but if the swing comes towards you and then back, that's very powerful because it has great perspective.” “Dad was what they called a layout man and art director, so he would take scripts and he would stage the whole action for the animated film, whether it was a feature or a short,” the Australian-born artist’s daughter J.P. He took a good, long look at his beautiful young wife Mary Alice and imagined how she would age – never really suspecting that he would perfectly capture both her future image and the generous spirit that defined her life. “Cinderella,” the beloved 1950 film that marked Disney’s return to full-fledged, feature-length animation after a long break during World War II, is marking its Blu-Ray debut, and a captivating featurette included on the new Diamond Edition reveals the story of how now legendary layout artist Ken O’Connor conjured up the very distinctive look and warm, kindly spirit of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother. If the Fairy Godmother from “ Cinderella” seems animated with a bit more magic than even the high Walt Disney standards, it’s because she was the result of a real fairy tale romance behind the scenes of the classic film. ![]()
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