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Mike Gabriel
Viewing the Disney animated classic "Sleeping Beauty" (1959) inspired the five-year-old Mike Gabriel to become an animator. To achieve this goal, the future animation director began drawing everyday. Opportunity knocked unexpectedly in 1979 when the most promising of the new generation of Disney animators--Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy (the nucleus of what would become Don Bluth Studios)--quit in disillusionment with the current company product and 11 others followed suit the next day leaving the studio's next scheduled feature only partially completed. Gabriel was hired that year as an assistant on "The Fox and the Hound" (released 1981).