Marc Davis chuckles when asked if he ever has minded being called one of Walt Disney's "Nine Old Men."
"It's accepted now without any great problem," Davis said, reached by phone at his home in Silver Lake. "But there are only four of us left, and we look at each other with great suspicion as to who's going to be the last old man."At 80, Davis has been an "old man" since the mid-1930s, when Disney borrowed the phrase coined by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who used it as a disparaging description of an adversarial Supreme Court) to refer jokingly to his core team of animators.
Davis' creations include not only cartoon characters such as Cinderella, Bambi, Tinkerbell and Cruella DeVil, but some of the most popular Disney theme park attractions - "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "The Haunted Mansion."
Davis was to share some of his memories - both verbally and through film clips - with the public at the inaugural edition of an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lecture that bears his name.
The Marc Davis Lecture on Animation is the fifth annual lecture sponsored by the Academy Foundation, the educational arm of the motion picture organization best-known for its annual awards.
"There's been a lot of talk about (animation) being an area the Academy Foundation has sort of neglected," said foundation program coordinator Mikel Kaufman.
The concern produced action after Davis and his wife gave a sizable donation to the foundation. "We've been kind of close to the academy for some time, and it was kind of a natural thing that came up," Davis said.
He hoped that the other three surviving Disney old men - Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and Ward Kimball - would show up in person at the event. They would, in any case, be represented in the film clips.
"This is just an opportunity to talk about animation, my feelings about it, and give maybe some interesting history about it that maybe a lot of people don't know.
"If you look at animation as really the art form it is now, and you look back at about the time I got into it, it was a pretty crude art. And it is definitely an art form of its own now, and you can do almost anything with it."
Davis makes no bones about his traditionalist tastes in animation. "I kind of approved of the things Walt Disney did. I see things now that I wouldn't have enjoyed working on," he said.
"There's an awful lot of mechanical things they do that I don't know much about - computer animation and that sort of thing. I have no great sympathy for that, although I see some things that could have been done easier that way.
"I think that we were a little better equipped as artists to do what we wanted," he said. "I think now, they have some awfully good people, but they have some people who are still in the learning process . . .
"But the times are different," he added. "We got into the animation business because there was a depression on. You got out of art school and you wanted to be Michelangelo or you wanted to be Leonardo - why not?
"But when we were coming out of art school, this wasn't possible. The one person who was saying, `Hey, we hire artists,' was Walt Disney."
Davis said Disney relied on his staff artists to create the visual images he could not. "He was not a graphic artist himself, but he was a great storyteller. He had to get people that could tell his stories for him.
"He put together a lot of people and they worked together and did his point of view. If you didn't like that point of view, then you did something else. And we had people who became other things, even New Yorker cartoonists, when they felt that this wasn't what they wanted."