A Brief Intro to Disney Designer Tom Oreb

Tom Oreb worked as a character designer and story writer at Walt Disney Studios between 1945 and 1963.

Oreb’s sleek, chic, ‘modern art’ approach to cartooning was unique at Disney. His flat, stylized designs often resembled the work of rival studio UPA more than anything normally coming out of the Mouse House.

While at Disney, Oreb contributed character designs for 101 Dalmatians, Paul Bunyan and Sleeping Beauty. For this last film, Oreb would famously use actress Audrey Hepburn as the model for Aurora/Briar Rose.

Sadly, not a whole lot has been written about Oreb. Looking at what little there is out there, it would appear that Oreb suffered from some sort of depression. Here’s how Disney layout artist Ray Aragon described Oreb in the book Walt’s People –: Talking Disney with the Artists who Knew Him, Volume 11:

“Tom Oreb was one of the great artists. Did you see his drawings on Sleeping Beauty? Those wonderful model sheets? […] He was such a great artist. As a person he was a little bit strange. He had some problems. He could be very happy and very wonderful one minute, and he could be very solemn and withdrawn and a different guy altogether [the next]. He had personal problems. I didn’t know exactly what they were, but [Disney art director and layout artist] Vic Haboush knew, because they were very, very close friends. We used to have lunch together all the time. Vic Haboush and Tom and I used to go to lunch quite a bit. So I got to know him that way. A great guy, but there were times when he was very moody.”

In a 2000 interview with Cartoon Brew, Oreb’s close friend, Disney art director and layout artist Vic Haboush, described how the two of them (along with Disney legend Eyvind Earle) first bonded. It really makes Oreb sound like a cool guy – he was very kind, generous and supportive to the Studio’s newer artists:

“Eyvind [Earle] and I were the two hot new guys, and we developed a lot of people not liking us. We’d work on the weekends, we’d throw storyboards up…a lot of the old guys just absolutely turned on us. It was really kind of brutal in a way. But guys like Tommy [Oreb], Ward Kimball, Bill Peet, Don DaGradi, they didn’t have that closed kind of thing. Tommy really married Eyvind and I. He became our friend. He looked after us. He talked us up. So the three of us became really good friends. We started hanging out together and all of that. Eyvind was kind of like Tom’s equal. They were both in the same age range. And I was the young kid. I was probably nine nor ten years younger than both of them. I just became Tom’s protege. I idolized him.”

Folks interested in seeing Oreb’s delightful design aesthetic at its purest should check out Tex Avery’s Symphony in Slang, Carl Urbano’s Destination Earth, Ward Kimball’s Academy Award winning short, Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, and a series of 1950s TV commercials he did with Disney for American Motors.