Sketch artist of genius who became Art Director and later Production Supervisor for some of the Studio’s finest animated feature films. Anderson’s architectural training and graphic skills enabled him to place characters against convincing backgrounds and he could also tell a story in pictures. His contribution to the collective art that was Walt Disney has been overshadowed by the work of his colleagues. especially the animators who developed his conceptual character designs. For example, in Jungle Book (1967), the anthropomorphic villainy of Shere Khan owes as much to Anderson’s original story sketches as to the rightly praised animation of Milt Kahl and the voice of George Sanders.
Born near Seattle in 1909, Ken Anderson was the son of an itinerant lumberman who moved with his family to the Philippines when Ken was three years old. His father died when he was ten and mother and son returned home destitute, the young Ken being farmed out to relatives where he was so cruelly treated that he ran away and lived rough in the woods. “I figured life was too damn hard,” he recalled, “so I found a log cabin and caught 127 trout for my dinner and lived there for a month before they found me.”
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