John Pomeroy, the animator who quit Disney to save its pencil

John Pomeroy

Photo: Cpl. William B. Hill / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 26, 1951 Los Angeles
Occupation	Film Producer

A handful of drawn mice run off with Sadie Sink’s shoes in Prada’s new holiday campaign, and a cynical fox trails Maya Hawke through the snow. Every one of those animals was made with pencil and paper by a team John Pomeroy directed, and the fashion press read the choice as a rebuke to the generated images that have crept into Christmas advertising. For Pomeroy the pencil is not a statement. It is the tool he once walked out of Disney to protect, and the reason he later walked back in.

The road began next door to the Disney family. He grew up in Toluca Lake, in Los Angeles, with Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew, as a neighbour, and as a boy he found The Art of Walt Disney at the public library, a thick book about how the artists animated Pinocchio and Bambi, which he says he read ten times. He wrote to the studio almost every week. At fifteen he carried a portfolio to the gate in Burbank and was turned away because nobody was hiring. He left, he recalls, energised anyway, simply for having stood there.

Pomeroy, born in Los Angeles on March 26, 1951, studied illustration at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. His second attempt, in 1972, ran into Milt Kahl, one of the Nine Old Men, who told him his perspective was off. He took a perspective class and came back. In January 1973 Disney accepted him into its training programme, where Eric Larson became his mentor. He had wanted to paint backgrounds; watching his first pencil test move on a Moviola changed that. “I realized I was creating something out of nothing,” he has said. “And I became addicted.”

The apprenticeship was hard. Frank Thomas supervised his first scene, in Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, in which Tigger walks away after being told he can never bounce again, and made him redraw it about eighteen times. Ollie Johnston then took him on The Rescuers, where he helped develop the orphan Penny, and taught him, in Pomeroy’s phrase, to be “an actor with a pencil.” On Pete’s Dragon he worked beside two other young animators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, and at weekends the three learned the rest of filmmaking in Bluth’s garage: recording soundtracks, photographing drawings, shooting effects. The garage produced a short, Banjo the Woodpile Cat.

On September 13, 1979, Bluth, Goldman, Pomeroy and a group of fellow animators resigned to found Don Bluth Productions. Their quarrel was with a studio they felt was cutting corners on the craft the old masters had built, and their plan was to make features the way those masters had taught them. The Secret of NIMH, released in 1982, with Pomeroy as producer, co-writer and animation director, was the proof of concept. The laserdisc arcade game Dragon’s Lair, made with designer Rick Dyer, followed, and when that market collapsed the company went bankrupt.

It came back as Sullivan Bluth Studios, with businessman Morris Sullivan, Steven Spielberg as partner on its first feature and a large animation facility in Dublin. Pomeroy was directing animator and producer on An American Tail, which in 1986 outgrossed Disney’s own mouse picture of that year, The Great Mouse Detective, and became the highest-grossing animated feature on first release up to that point. The Land Before Time, with Spielberg and George Lucas as executive producers, followed in 1988. In 1989 Pomeroy moved back to California to run an American wing of the studio, which supplied animation for All Dogs Go to Heaven.

The rebel story is usually told as a win: the upstarts left Disney and beat it at the box office. Pomeroy’s own account is less flattering to the rebellion. Later Bluth features such as Rock-a-Doodle failed with critics and at the box office, and he places the trouble inside the studio rather than outside it. “We started getting into a creative rut,” he has said. The producer’s job had taken the pencil out of his hand. “I was dying as an artist.” He had left Disney to keep drawing, and the company he built had stopped him drawing. In 1992 he sold his share and went back to painting.

Don Hahn, the Disney producer and an old friend, brought him back to supervise John Smith in Pocahontas, a character Pomeroy designed and animated with a crew of fourteen. Fantasia 2000 put him to work with his boyhood neighbour Roy Disney. He then led the animation of Milo Thatch, the linguist hero of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and animated on Treasure Planet. In 2003, when Disney wound down its hand-drawn feature department, he left a second time.

The freelance decades were steadier than they were glamorous. He was a lead animator on Universal’s Curious George, animated on The Simpsons Movie and worked on Warner Bros.’ Tom and Jerry films and on Disney Television Animation’s Fancy Nancy. He illustrated Walt’s Imagination: The Life of Walt Disney, Doreen Rappaport’s picture-book biography published by Disney Hyperion in 2018, which meant drawing men he had once worked beside. He sculpts busts that animators use to see a character in three dimensions, paints historical scenes and teaches animation at Lipscomb University in Nashville. He became a Christian in 1998 and talks about his work in those terms.

Prada’s “Drawing Prada” campaign, released on October 27, 2026, pairs Glen Luchford’s photographs of Sink, Hawke, Chen Haoyu, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Luther Ford with animals drawn by Pomeroy’s artists, and adds short films that mix the live action with hand-drawn animation. WWD, which had it first, called it “Prada’s antidote to AI slop.” Pomeroy, credited as animation director, put it in terms of craft rather than technology: “There’s a very distinct and purposeful reason to do hand-drawn animation, and that’s to see that there’s value in it.” He added: “I learned my craft with pencil and paper.”

That line is the whole career in miniature. The student Milt Kahl sent away to learn perspective now gets the call when a luxury house wants proof that a drawing came from a hand. Pomeroy says he wants to carry that method forward to the next generation, and he is doing it in a Nashville classroom as much as in a Prada campaign.

Tags: Prada, animators, John Pomeroy, An American Tail, Don Bluth, Gary Goldman