Jim Responds to the Recent Fan Requests for New Designs

Sep 07, 2020

Thank you to all for continuously sending your product suggestions to us. It's great to see your enthusiasm and your ideas really got my mind working. Here are some of the insights we were able to get from your suggestions, things we’ll keep in mind for future designs.

I will never run out of work! We got a huge variety of responses with almost no two exactly alike. And no single character or movie even approached 10%. Your ideas ran the gamut from Fantasia to Bedknobs and Broomsticks to Frozen. And there were some that really jogged my memory or took me in whole new directions. I love the ideas about the 3 Caballeros, that will be fun. The Black Cauldron is a great one I hadn’t thought of in years. And Pete’s Dragon is a something I’d like to try my hand at. With all these great ideas, like I say, I’ll never run out of great stories and characters for my art. I think that kind of variety and enthusiasm show that people are really Disney fans more than they are fans of just one particular story. I’m proud to be associated with that large a body of work, that kind of lasting tradition.

People like the storybook and carved by heart designs! A large percentage of your ideas were for multiple character, more elaborate pieces. We got a lot of great requests for scenes from Sword in the Stone, Hercules, and I really loved the idea of one from Pocahontas featuring Grandmother Willow. And I thought the ideas we got about Disney Dogs or Disney Cats all together on one piece were terrific. I was more than happy to see this feedback from you, I really like working on those more complex designs.

Everyone loves the villains! (Disney knows you can’t have a good story without a good villain). We got a lot of requests for Ursula from Little Mermaid and more of those back to back good versus evil pieces. Again, I was happy to see that from the poll. I love working on the villains! I don’t know what that says about me…

There’s as much interest and enthusiasm for the older classics as there is for the newer films. I expected a large majority of ideas would be from the great movies made since 1990, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and such. But older movies like Snow White and Pinocchio more than held their own. It just shows these are characters and stories stand the test of time! Or looking at it another way, it could mean a lot people who responded are about my age!

There’s a real interest in and affinity for the female characters, not just princesses. We got a large percentage of requests for Daisy and Minnie and Tinker Bell and her friends. It’s good to see Mickey and Donald aren’t hogging all the attention.

But the thing that really drove the variety we saw was interest in secondary characters. It was all over the board, and everyone seems to have a different favorite! There were ideas about Meeko, Pascal, Figaro, Mushu, Thumper and Flower, Pegasus, even one for the Centaurs from Fantasia (I love them, I’ve done them before but may have to do another.) It just shows the creative genius that has sustained Disney all these years. And it’s another insight into my job security! It’ll take a lifetime to get to them all.

All that said, here are the top 10 movies you’d like to see designs from according to the poll. Again, no movie got more than 10% of the votes cast, so the difference in votes between #1 and #10 is quite small.