Burny Mattinson Dies: Walt Disney Animation Studios Legend & Disney’s Longest-Serving Castmember Was 87
deadline.comAnimator, director, producer and story artist Burny Mattinson, who joined the Walt Disney Company at the end of its first great run of films, when Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942) were new and an in-his-prime Walt Disney was just 42 years old, died today.
He was 87. He was the last full-time Walt Disney Studios employee who had worked at the company when Walt Disney still ran it.
Seeing the studio’s Pinocchio at the age of six convinced Mattinson he wanted to work in animation. “Ever since I saw that film, this was my dream—to work in this business,” he recalled years later. “So I worked every day, drawing.” After graduating high school, he convinced his mother drop him off at the studio gate, where he handed his portfolio to a security guard.
Impressed, the guard called Ken Seiling, the head of Personnel. There were no available job positions in the studio’s animation department, but Mattinson got his foot in the door with a job in the traffic department.
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