Throughout Disney Art from Private Collections, you’ll see original works by long-time Disney animator Andreas Deja. Some of his most iconic Disney characters are featured in our exhibition, including menacing villains such as Scar and Jafar, larger-than-life muscle men like Gaston and Hercules, and the much-beloved Mama Odie.
In addition to his work for The Walt Disney Studios, Deja is known for independent projects, including his upcoming short film Mushka. The film—featuring a young girl and her tiger in “a story of love and sacrifice set in Russia”—is animated in a colored pencil style. Here’s an early example of his character development, drawn in graphite:
Over fifty original graphite and colored pencil sketches and drawings from Mushka–beautiful examples of the character development process–are showcased in our lower gallery. In our Joyner Gallery you can see samples from Deja’s Disney application portfolio.
Deja is also the collector behind most of the Collections you see in our galleries.
“When the Arlington Museum of Art asked me if I was interested in an exhibition that would feature my work from the Disney Studios, as well as some personal art, I felt flattered and excited,” Deja said.
A lifelong fan of Disney animated films, Deja was hired by Disney in 1980. In his early years at the studio, he sought mentorship from seven of the then-living Nine Old Men, who were hired by Walt Disney himself and rose to high levels of artistic leadership within the company. Deja’s enthusiasm for their tutelage fueled his interest in collecting their work.
“It is my great pleasure to exhibit the work of Disney animators who came before me,” Deja said. “Artists like Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have inspired me my whole life through characters they animated for classic films like Pinocchio, Peter Pan, and The Jungle Book. Their original drawings give viewers an insight into the depth of their character analysis and draftsmanship.”
Meet Andreas Deja
Text courtesy of The Walt Disney Family Museum: Andreas Deja first applied for a job as a Disney animator at the age of 10. Born in Poland and raised in Germany, he remembers writing to The Studios immediately after seeing The Jungle Book. The Studios wrote back to explain there were no openings but that they were always on the look-out for new talent. This offered him the encouragement he needed and the motivation to work hard towards that goal.
“The day I received a letter back from Walt Disney Productions expressing the necessity to become a master in the mechanics of drawing, it lit a fire in me to truly become an outstanding animator,” said Deja. “After years of art school and dedicating my personal time to studying animal anatomy and behavior, I was accepted into the animation training program at The Walt Disney Studios in August 1980 and didn’t look back once.”
At the age of 20, after completing his studies, he applied again and this time he was accepted. Deja completed several tests and went on to do early character design, costume research, and animation for The Black Cauldron (1985), The Great Mouse Detective (1986), Oliver & Company (1988), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
While working on The Little Mermaid (1989), Deja oversaw the animation of King Triton, a powerful figure that required expert skills in draftsmanship and acting ability. For Disney’s Academy Award®-winning animated musical Beauty and the Beast (1991), he served as the supervising animator for the first of his many Disney villains, the very pompous and narrow-minded Gaston.
Deja continued to explore his darker side by designing and animating the evil vizier, Jafar, for Disney’s animated-musical hit Aladdin (1992). He went on to supervise the animation of the power-hungry villain, Scar, in The Lion King (1994), which has become one of The Walt Disney Studios’ most successful films, which became The Walt Disney Studios’ most successful animated film at the time of its release, and quickly earned a place as one of the industry’s biggest films of all time.
For his next assignment, Deja relocated to the Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Paris animation facility for a stint overseeing the animation of Mickey Mouse in Runaway Brain, the first new Mickey short since 1953 and an Oscar® nominee in 1996 for Best Animated Short. Following that, he returned to Burbank where he took on the challenging assignment of bringing life and personality to the title hero in Disney’s 35th full-length animated feature, Hercules (1997). He went on to design and supervise the animation for the charming and unpredictable little Hawaiian girl, Lilo in Lilo & Stitch (2002), hailed as one of the Studios’ most entertaining and imaginative features.
Deja contributed animation for several characters in Disney’s live-action/animated musical Enchanted (2007), and served as one of the supervising animators on Goofy’s big-screen return in the short film How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre (2007). He was a supervising animator on Disney’s hand-drawn animated feature, The Princess and the Frog (2009). Deja supervised the animation of Tigger for a new Winnie the Pooh feature, which was released theatrically in 2011.
In 2007, he was honored with the Winsor McCay Award from ASIFA-Hollywood (the International Animated Film Association). In 2015, he was named a Disney Legend by The Walt Disney Company. At present time, Andreas Deja is working on his own independent animated short films, including Mushka, and regularly contributes animation-related material on his blog, Deja View: The Art of Andreas Deja.
Our eternal thanks to The Walt Disney Family Museum for introducing us to Andreas, a truly inspiring Disney Legend.
