1. Maurice "Jake" Day was an American artist, sculptor, photographer, naturalist and illustrator.
15 Facts About Jake Day
1. 2.
Jake Day is best known for creating the fawn-like character of Bambi for the 1942 animated Walt Disney feature film Bambi.
3.
Maurice Ellicott Day was born in Damariscotta, Maine in the Day family homestead that his great-grandfather built in 1892.
4.
Jake Day attended school at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maine, studied art and painting at the Massachusetts College of Art and graduated from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1915.
5.
Jake Day was known to his family and friends as "Jake"; but no one knows how or when he received the nickname.
6.
Jake Day's adventures were featured in many outdoor sporting stories by Edmund Ware Smith; which Day illustrated.
7.
Jake Day worked at various animation studios including MGM, Harman and Ising, and Hanna Barbera before joining the Walt Disney Studios in California in 1936.
8.
Jake Day served as an illustrator and layout artist for films such as Merbabies.
9.
However, Jake Day argued that mule deer had large "mule-like" ears and were mostly indigenous to western North America, while the white-tail deer was more commonly recognized throughout America.
10.
Jake Day ultimately swayed Disney, who gave the green light for Bambi to be a white-tail deer.
11.
Since Disney animators had never seen a live white-tail deer, Jake Day arranged with the Maine Department of Economic Development to have two four-month-old orphaned fawns brought from the state to be sketched by the studio artists.
12.
Always connected with the outdoors, Jake Day traveled extensively throughout the state of Maine.
13.
At age 78, Jake Day climbed Mount Katahdin with then governor Ken Curtis.
14.
Jake Day was survived by his second wife, Martha Beane Larson Day and three children.
15.
In 1967, Governor Percival P Baxter appointed him "artist in residence" of Baxter State Park; for which Day designed the park's seal and illustrated the park's map.