In need of a job in 1944, Santa Monica High School graduate Joyce Carlson followed a friend to Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, where she landed work in the traffic department delivering mail, and office and art supplies.
But what started out as just a job turned into a career for Carlson, who spent the next 56 years involved first with Disney animated movies and then theme park attractions worldwide.
Carlson, who helped ink animated films such as "Cinderella," "Peter Pan" and "Sleeping Beauty" before helping create the original model for the "It's a Small World" attraction for the 1964 New York World's Fair, died of cancer Wednesday at her home in Orlando, Fla. She was 84.
As part of Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's theme park attraction design division, Carlson worked on many attractions but is most closely identified with "It's a Small World."
In addition to working on the model for the ride, she was known as the artist behind many of its singing dolls.
Carlson, who was among a small group of artists sent to New York by Walt Disney to install the attraction at the World's Fair, had a feeling "It's a Small World" would be a hit.
"It was fabulous, because of the song and the characters," she recalled in a 2006 interview with the Orlando Sentinel.
"The little audio-animatronic figures, the way they were moving. The costumes were beautiful. Everyone, grownups and kids, would just love it."
With her experience on "It's a Small World" at Disneyland, Carlson later helped bring the ride to Walt Disney World in Florida and Tokyo Disneyland.
"What Joyce shared with everyone in the Model Shop was passion," Marty Sklar, executive vice president and Imagineering ambassador for Walt Disney Parks & Resorts, said in a news release.
During her years as an Imagineer, Carlson was known for preaching the message of artistic precision that she had learned from first-generation Disney attraction designers such as Mary Blair, Grace Bailey and John Hench.
"Without a doubt, Joyce influenced a whole group of us about the importance of detail," Patrick Brennan, Disney World's director of show design, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2006. "It's all in the detail. And the authenticity. And color. . . . She would have you remix a color 10 times if it was required. You learned that it wasn't arbitrary."
Even after she officially retired in 2000, Carlson continued to mentor fellow Imagineers at Walt Disney World for several years.
