John Musker
John Musker is a writer, born 1953.
John Musker was born in Chicago in 1953 and spent his career inside one building. He is an animator turned writer and director, and almost everything he made was co-written and co-directed with Ron Clements, one of the most durable partnerships in American animation.
Their run tells the story of the studio better than any single film does. The Great Mouse Detective (1986) was made at Disney's lowest ebb, a small Sherlock Holmes pastiche played by mice. The Little Mermaid (1989) restarted the whole enterprise, and Aladdin (1992) was the commercial peak, a film built to give a comic performer room to improvise inside hand-drawn animation, which nobody had really tried at that scale. Hercules (1997) is the odd one, Greek myth reworked as a gospel-chorus sports comedy.
Then the wilderness. Treasure Planet (2002) put Robert Louis Stevenson in space with a genuinely beautiful hybrid of drawn and computer-generated imagery and did not find an audience. The Princess and the Frog (2009) was Disney's return to hand-drawn features and turned out to be close to the last of them. Moana (2016) was their first computer-animated film and their last together. Since leaving the studio he has directed the short Gone Fishing.
He also turns up on camera in documentaries about the industry he worked in, including Waking Sleeping Beauty, which covers the collapse and revival he was living through at the time.
Movies (12)
Where to start with John Musker
There is one correct starting point and it is The Little Mermaid. Everything about the modern Disney musical, the structure, the wanting song, the comic sidekicks carrying the plot, was set here, and it is still the tightest thing he made.
Aladdin next, for the same formula with the brakes off. Then The Great Mouse Detective, which is short, cheap and much stranger than its reputation, and worth seeing because it was made before anyone knew the studio would recover.
The interesting failures come after. Treasure Planet is the one to argue about: visually the most ambitious work of his career, commercially a disaster. The Princess and the Frog is the last great hand-drawn Disney feature and the animation alone justifies it. Hercules is the weakest of the run and still has the best songs, and Moana is the graceful exit.
For context, Waking Sleeping Beauty documents the era he helped build.