Celebrating Disney's "The Great Mouse Detective"!

Today, July 2 2025 marks the 39th Anniversary of Disney's animated feature, "The Great Mouse Detective". This film is a particular favourite of mine, as I consider it the last hoorah of that type of character-driven feature I'd always enjoyed. I saw it several times when it was out in 1986 and I had just recently begun my career as a character illustrator at Disney's Canadian Consumer Products Division.

A couple years later, Barrie Ingham was going to be playing here in Toronto in the musical, "Me and My Girl", so I immediately got tickets for the show. Also, having recently videotaped an episode of "Murder She Wrote" that he had guested in, I set about doing a caricature of him. About a week before his scheduled performance I wrote to him, care of the theatre, asking if it might be possible for me to visit backstage after the show so I could present him my caricature. I mentioned how much I enjoyed his Basil and I included my work number at Disney on the hopes he might respond. 

Well, respond back he did, making a personal phone call to me while I was working at my Disney office, and starting out his introduction in the character of Basil I might add! Anyway, he was very gracious in letting me know I'd be more than welcome to visit backstage after the show. 

Meeting him backstage after his performance was a great thrill, as he really was a delightful gentleman and he was happy chatting for close to an hour. He regaled me and my friend with stories of the theatre, as well as the making of "The Great Mouse Detective", which he said he thoroughly enjoyed doing. The only disappointment he said, was that he never got to read his lines with Vincent Price, whom he had been hoping to reconnect with after having worked with him on something many years before. I think that his reading on Basil is a masterpiece. In fact, I think the reason I love that film so much is that it is one of the few Disney features where the hero is every bit as interesting (and quirky) as the villain. 

Here is a photo of Barrie Ingham and me backstage at Toronto's Okeefe Centre, where I presented him with one of two originals I'd inked up of my caricature, the other of which I had him autograph for me:

And here is a photo from several years earlier in 1981 when I'd had the great pleasure of meeting Vincent Price! I wish we'd had digital cameras back then, as the camera this was taken on was not a very good one. But it still brings back very fond memories that I have written about at length on another blog post from years back:

And finally, many years after I'd finished my Disney career and was now teaching in the Animation Program at Sheridan College in Oakville Ontario, I had the pleasure of renewing acquaintance with Disney animation director, John Musker, whom I'd originally met many years ago around 1981 when I was introduced to him while I visited the Walt Disney Studio Archives. John came to give a talk at Sheridan College around 2014, so I drew this caricature to present to him at that time:

Why I No Longer Draw Much Anymore

As I mentioned in my last post regarding the caricature of James Garner, I actually no longer draw much anymore despite it having been a lifelong passion since I was a young kid and making up my entire professional career. My old Disney work colleague asked me why that is, so maybe it’s something I should try to explain, as it is something I’ve asked myself over the years and have gradually concluded quite consciously why I no longer enjoy the process.

Here then are essentially the 3 main factors that have had an accumulated effect on my dwindling desire to draw for much of the last 10 years or so:

1) The Digital Age: 

As a traditional media illustrator I was finding it increasingly more difficult to keep pace with the steady transition the industry was making to digital tools starting in the mid-1990s. I am a self-admitted technophobe and I just found that I was neither able nor willing to make that transition, with my final efforts being at best a hybrid of old and new. I went crazy attempting to learn Photoshop, constantly finding myself going around in circles trying to accomplish anything, usually just striking out altogether. I learned as much as I could to get by, using PS as a colouring tool but never being able to draw or truly paint with it. I would still ink characters by hand and scan them in to be coloured, while still painting all of my backgrounds traditionally with gouache on illustration board, then also scanning them in to meld together with the character art. The result of my technical inadequacies was that my talent as a traditional illustrator was in decreasing demand by the end of the 2000s.

2) Lack Of Inspiration: 

This is also a big reason, as I believe one has to be inspired by the world around us, societal norms, entertainment, other artists, etc. To put it bluntly, as a 20th Century Man who still loves the societal norms and pop culture of my youth, I am not inspired by anything I see around me anymore and have no reason to document anything in the form of a cartoon. In fact, in today’s ridiculous 21st Century world, any visual satire runs the high risk of being set upon by the easily offended Left, who will then proceed to destroy you. This was certainly what I was increasingly experiencing firsthand in my later career as a college instructor in an animation program, and which ultimately led to my finally throwing in the towel and leaving after 12 years of teaching as the situation became exponentially more stifling over the last 3 or 4 years.

3) Loss Of Traditional Media: 

As digital media has taken over more and more of the illustration landscape, hobbyists who draw and paint for pleasure are finding many of their art supplies either becoming prohibitively expensive to purchase or almost impossible to find at all! In my own case, the tools of my trade like gouache paint, ink, and brushes are now costing a small fortune, and in fact the wonderful Winsor & Newton series 7 sable brushes I’d been using since the 70s are no longer available in art stores and nearly impossible to purchase online. Additionally, there are no longer any good black markers with the desired mix of flexibility and sturdiness to be used in the live event caricature trade I’d been doing for years. So yeah, basically I’m out of luck in having accessibility to the tools of my trade, whether for commercial work or just producing art for my own personal pleasure.

And this, my friends, is why I really don’t do much drawing anymore, sorry to say.

Happy Birthday, James Garner!

 

For this year's tribute to James Garner, I've drawn him in his role as Marshal Wyatt Earp in the 1967 film, Hour Of The Gun. Unlike his persona in The Rockford Files or his light comedy films, Garner shows his dead serious side here, all clenched jaw and steely-eyed in a style one might associate more with the likes of Clint Eastwood. He portrays a man tormented - trying to balance out his quest for legal justice while at the same time trying to convince himself that it's not revenge he seeks for the shootings that have left him with one brother dead and another one crippled from his wounds. I've tried to capture that haunted look in his expression as he doggedly pursues Ike Clanton and his gang for the many cold-blooded murders they've carried out in an attempt to politically control the town of Tombstone.

I've had to leave this as just a black and white illustration, I'm afraid, as I still have not replaced my scanner or found a suitable colouring program since having to replace my old Mac a couple years ago and no longer am able to access Photoshop. For an old guy like me, the ever-changing digital art world has been too much of a challenge to keep up with. As such, I just don't draw much anymore, sorry to say.