About John Hench: John Hench was an employee of The Walt Disney Company for more than 65 years, during which saw the creation of nearly every Disney animated feature and theme park.
I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.
I suppose that I was a kind of consultant for taste. Is it good taste? Or bad taste? I had an attention to detail, to what would tell best the story. Because many people get excited about the work and drift off from the story.
Big cities are chaotic. And chaos for humans - who have experience from their ancestors - is the last step before conflict. So, in the park, every kind of visual contradiction has been eliminated.
Walt put everything he knew about communication with images into the park, so it was very familiar.
Even in China. Children there, next to the Great Wall, who had never seen Mickey Mouse responded. So the studio did have that skill to communicate with images.
Walt had a marvelous intuition. And because he understood people very well, liked them and had great respect for people, there was nothing cynical about Walt.
But Walt and him shared the same kind of optimism. Walt believed in himself, and he was optimistic about what he wanted to do. He just knew it will be okay, and Dali was the same way. They had a great deal in common that way.
In live action movies, you just hope that everything works. Because the actor may had a bad morning and doesn't play good, or accidents happen continuously. Many things contradict what you are trying to say. But in cartoons, nothing contradict what y...
I thought that it would be easier to learn that if I worked in motion pictures. So I went to work with one motion picture producer who was developing a color system. This didn't do to me much good. All I did was pick filters for the camera.
I don't think that was too successful. Because I always thought that the two of them should have been more separate. Also I had planned the monorail station to be in the center. So that one day you would have go to World Showcase and then the other d...
We don't have too much ritual in our life anymore. And these life symbols which people rely on to keep their feeling of well being, that life is not too bad after all are required more and more.
Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life sy...
Mickey is one of the prime examples: Mickey has never been suspected of being an American export. It was deja vu. They gave him a local name and he's been accepted everywhere he goes.
The park achieved a kind of reality. Like these virtual reality games the children are playing with. I told them we were doing this 40 years ago! Disneyland is virtual reality.
Walt understood all of those things, and even common things about people. For instance: Usually you get your idea of what kind of day it is by looking at the horizon, because the horizon is your eye level. So what Walt did is to eliminate the horizon...
When you go to the park, there is no horizon - just Disneyland.
We've achieved this feeling, for instance, with the colors. The colors in the park are harmonious with each other, not like in big cities where they don't.
It was supposed to be in the second street project for Main Street. But who knows? Maybe it will be built one of these days. We never throw away any idea.
For instance, some early ideas for Florida were done only recently. The idea of a little village was there from the beginning and now we have this 'Celebration' village. Same thing for the Disney Institute. Walt talked about this idea in the very fir...
The show is being changed right now, by the way. Jeff Burke is doing it for the Magic Kingdom. And I think it will be better, with new birds, master of ceremonies, etc.
