Pinocchio, Fantasia animator ‘X’ Atencio dead at 98
LOS ANGELES — Xavier “X” Atencio, an animator behind early Disney movies including Pinocchio and Fantasia and “imagineer” behind beloved Disneyland rides like Pirates of the Caribbean and The Haunted Mansion, has died at age 98.
Disneyland spokeswoman Suzi Brown confirmed a company statement saying Atencio died Sunday. No cause or place of death were given, but Atencio lived and worked in the Los Angeles area most of his life.
Atencio’s drawings on Pinocchio helped give Disney its permanent identity in film and culture. His contributions to Pirates included the words to the Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me) song that is sung throughout the ride and by parkgoers for days after.
He was born Francis Xavier Atencio in Walsenburg, Colo. But friends in his youth called him just “X,” the name he was known by the rest of his life.
He was still a teenager with a gift for drawing in 1938 when he began working for Disney, a company that was even younger than he was and had just one feature film — 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — to its name.
Atencio would see his work on the big screen in the company’s next two films in 1940, when he helped bring Pinocchio to life and worked on the musical and mystical Fantasia before leaving temporarily to serve in The Second World War.
After returning, he helped design stop-motion sequences for the Disney live action films The Parent Trap and Mary Poppins.
When the company’s work started including theme parks in the 1950s and 1960s, so did Atencio’s. At the request of Walt Disney, he became an imagineer in the company’s parlance, helping design rides for Disneyland and Disney World. He wrote the story and songs that play out on Pirates and Haunted Mansion.
“X was an enormous talent who helped define so many of our best experiences around the world,” Bob Weis, president of Walt Disney Imagineering, said in a statement. “Some may not know that when he wrote the lyrics for Yo Ho he had never actually written a song before. He simply proposed the idea of a tune for Pirates of the Caribbean, and Walt told him to go and do it.”
Atencio retired in 1984, but he continued working as a consultant. In 1996, was declared a Disney Legend by the company.
His death comes just weeks after that of another Disney Imagineering legend, Marty Sklar.
Atencio is survived by his wife, Maureen, three children, three stepchildren and nine grandchildren. The Associated Press
Good luck making sense of the film career of David Gordon Green.
The 42-year-old Arkansas director wowed Toronto festival audiences in 2000 with his feature debut, George Washington, a lyrical tale of poverty and resilience set in the U.S. South. But his big-screen credits since have included a stoner comedy (Pineapple Express), a remake of an Icelandic drama (Prince Avalanche), a tale of redemption starring Nicolas Cage (Joe) and the political satire Our Brand Is Crisis, with Sandra Bullock.
His newest, Stronger, tells the true story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), who lost both his legs in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. After a gala world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, it opens in cinemas on Sept. 22.
“Your average audience wants to go see a little of this, maybe see that this weekend, and something else the next weekend,” Green says by way of explanation. “That’s what I do as a film enthusiast. I always look at something and think: What if I’d made that? What would I do with that concept, that actor, that genre?
“It’s just me being professionally greedy. Just as I love to travel around the world and go to countries I know nothing about, I like to step into that type of film experience. I personally am engaged by challenges where I’m stepping outside my comfort zone.”
Green says he shoots commercials to live, but he lives to make movies. In fact, it was while he was filming a Nike commercial in Oklahoma City that the Boston bombing took place. Ironically, he was visiting the memorial to that city’s bombing at the time. So “that really triggered something in me,” he says.
While the injury sets Bauman’s tale in motion, Green says he was most taken with the love story. Canada’s Tatiana Maslany plays Erin Hurley, Bauman’s girlfriend, who was running the marathon when the blast hit him near the finish line.
“If it was a front-and-centre recent event tragedy movie, I don’t think I’d be the right guy for that,” Green says. “You give that to Oliver Stone. What I was drawn to is that the event is way in the background. The event is never in focus.” (That’s literally true in the scene where Bauman’s amputated limbs are unbandaged for the first time; the camera avoids showing his bloody stumps, though we will see them later in flashback.)
Keeping true to his method of constant reinvention, Green’s next film will be Halloween, which he calls a sequel, though to which version of the 1978 classic he won’t say. But he’s never done a horror movie before, which was reason enough to do this one. “It’s going to take me to a place that’s more valuable than money,” he says.
Green wishes more directors would try something new. “I wish there were assignments. I wish I could assign David Fincher a lighthearted comedy. I wish he’d do a sitcom with a laugh track. Just step out of that serial killer comfort zone and do Fuller House.”