Having entered as a post-room boy, Burny Mattinson went on to become a Disney legend. The veteran animator and film-maker meets TARA BRADYin the East Sussex countryside that inspired AA Milne's Winnie the Poohadventures and tells her about working on the new Poohfeature all these years after first drawing the bear
IT ISN'T a blustery day. There are ponies and daffodils as far as the eye can see. This is Buckhurst Estate, the idyllic ancestral home of William, Earl De La Warr, and his wife Anne, and the couple are stuck for neither postcard views nor Lebensraum. The Sackville family have resided in this verdant corner of Sussex since William the Conqueror was charging across the continent. Queen Elizabeth I, their famous cousin, hunted across the meadows. The graffiti in the thicket is a poem scrawled by Lord Byron. Even the sheep on the estate – not regular docile wool balls, but superior specimens from the Jacob genus – seem to exude a sense of entitlement.
Burny Mattinson, the veteran animator and film-maker, is particularly taken with the dinky horses. Inevitably the animals boast historic links to Queen Victoria and the Empress of Russia, and have better breeding than either of us.
“You know Walt Disney raised a farm of miniature ponies for Disneyland,” he tells me. “Cute as can be. He had this idea they would pull the stage coaches of people through the town. When it came time to put them in Disneyland they all pooped out. They could go maybe a couple of hundred feet. It sounds like a crazy idea now, but you have to remember that people thought Disneyland itself was a crazy idea. When I got to the studio it was one little room out the back of the machine room with a little mock-up castle that somebody had made out of cardboard. I was there on the opening day. All the high heels kept sinking into the asphalt. It got better. But I do sometimes wonder where all the ponies went.”
Burny Mattinson is a Disney lifer. He first decided he wanted to work at the animation studios back in 1942 when, aged six, he watched Disney's Pinocchio. With no formal art training he entered the House of Mouse as a teenage post-room clerk and worked his way up. Within months he was doodling on Lady and the Tramp.
“I don’t think I’d get in with a portfolio at the gate nowadays,” says Mattinson. “I came right out of high school. But a lot of the early animators had no art education to speak of. There were all sorts of crude tricks like drawing around dollars and quarters for Mickey’s ears.
“We had the desire. We kept drawing. I came at a very fortunate time.
“Just after the war there were a couple of moments when Walt had to put his house on the market just to keep things going. But when I arrived we had started working on the TV show and Disneyland was being built. We were shooting live-action things all of a sudden. Walt was all over the place. He was everywhere. It was so exciting.”
If the studio has been good to Burny Mattinson, he has repaid them in kind by producing, drawing, directing and writing for more than six decades on such titles as The Aristocats, The Jungle Book, The Lion Kingand Beauty and the Beast. His 1983 revival of the company mascot for Mickey's Christmas Carolwas nominated for an Academy Award. His 1986 feature The Great Mouse Detectivekick-started the great Disney comeback of the 1990s and was even shortlisted for an Edgar Allan Poe Award.
"That picture was probably the one I had the most control over," he says. "But most of the time it's a very collaborative business. The basic process really hasn't changed at all. You still start with storyboards. You still divide everything into segments and assign them to teams. You meet up every other day for suggestions and feedback, and you slowly build your story. You can end up someplace totally different by the end of the process. We worked on Kingdom of the Sunfor years as a serious picture and it became The Emperor's New Groove. But that's how you manage little breakthroughs like the talking clock in Beauty and the Beast. Once that little guy was right, the movie was right."
Mattinson was born in San Francisco and raised on the Disney lot. His presence on these stately acres is, nonetheless, a sort of homecoming. Down past the sprawling lawns we find the birthplace of the animator’s longest-serving on-screen cartoon collaborator. Never mind the snooty sheep. Buckhurst’s Ashdown Forest boasts an extraordinary literary lineage. More than 70 years ago this particular stretch of woodland inspired local author AA Milne to pen Winnie-the-Pooh. Nearby signposts indicate our proximity to Poohsticks Bridge, Galleon’s Lap, Roo’s Sandpit, the North Pole and the Hundred Acre Wood.
"I worked on the first Winnie picture," says Mattinson. "And it almost didn't happen. Walt had had the rights to the property for a while, but it was on the back-burner. We had some downtime after One Hundred and One Dalmatiansand went to work on it. But we had only got as far as the Honey Tree and the Blustery Day sections when Walt decided it would work better as 20-minute featurettes. He didn't think it was funny enough to justify a whole movie."
Mattinson admits he is still a little surprised that Disney’s silliest bear is currently the biggest- selling baby brand on the planet. Market forces, however, have always been integral to Pooh’s progress.
“The second short won the Academy Award, so there was suddenly a little bit of interest. Then Seers picked up on it and put it on the front of their catalogues for Christmas. That was that. You couldn’t get one of those catalogues anywhere in the country. Pooh’s success surprised everybody, not least Walt himself. He didn’t think there’d be that much excitement about the characters. Even Walt wasn’t infallible about these things.”
More than half a century after Mattinson first signed up at the studio, he's back on Pooh detail. His contributions to the brand spanking new Winnie the Poohwere, he says, much like his contributions to older versions.
“The old Disney featurettes were always true to Milne and the original illustrations by Ernest Shepard, and nothing’s changed. We have to talk about 3D now on different projects, but not on this one. It’s a new movie but it’s the old Pooh and it’s straight from the book. “These characters are so innocent. They’re a dear little family in an enchanted forest. We have to protect them from hurtful jokes and the modern world at all costs.”
Pooh-ology Winnie’s postmodern life
It is one of the oddest cultural paradoxes; Winnie the Pooh, a bear too dim-witted to realise the value of trousers, is frequently the subject of philosophical inquiries and unlikely intellectualisations.
The most famous Pooh-inspired texts are Benjamin Hoff's diptych The Tao of Poohand The Te of Piglet. Hoff contends that Milne's best-known ursine creation exemplifies the Taoist principle of P'U, the Uncarved Block or as Pooh's BF Piglet so eloquently puts it: "Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right." By this logic Owl seeks knowledge for the sake of appearing wise and Rabbit is cursed by the knowledge of being clever and certain but neither is actually as wise as Pooh, who just wants to eat honey all day. Hoff's Tao of Poohspent months on best-seller charts when it first appeared in the 1980s and lives on as a campus standard.
In the intervening years, Pooh-ologists have become increasingly fractured along postmodern lines. Our favourite batch of Pooh-writing is Frederick Crews's Postmodern Pooh, a collection purporting to be the proceedings of a Modern Language Association seminar on Winnie-the-Pooh wherein Christopher Robin prefigures po-mo theorist Frederic Jameson, Heffalump is "the colonised lamb" and Eeyore's lost tail enables "polymorphous perversity whereby the oral, anal and genital stages can merge in an endless pre-oedipal, nonphallic loop."
Well, AA Milne always insisted he didn’t write the books for children.
Winnie the Poohopens next Friday
