Making Disney Magic . . . from a Mermaid to Moana

Ron Clements decided he wanted to be a Disney animator at the age of nine after seeing a rerelease of Pinocchio (1940) at a local theater in his hometown of Sioux City, Iowa. In 1974, at the age of twenty, he was accepted into the recently established Walt Disney Animation Studios Talent Development program, working under the tutelage of some of Disney’s top animators. He went on to become an animator on The Rescuers (1977), Pete’s Dragon (1977), and The Fox and the Hound (1981); a storyboard artist on The Black Cauldron (1985); codirector on The Great Mouse Detective (1986); and in creative partnership with longtime collaborator John Musker, he cowrote and codirected The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Hercules (1997), Treasure Planet (2002), The Princess and the Frog (2009), and Moana (2016).