Floyd Ernest Norman is an American animator and writer. Throughout his career, Norman worked for a variety of animation companies, including Walt Disney Animation, Hanna-Barbera, Ruby-Spears, Film Roman and Pixar.

Norman’s love for animation began during childhood after he watched the Walt Disney animated movies Dumbo and Bambi. That passion lead to his attending Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he majored in illustration. He started his career as an assistant to Katy Keene comic book artist Bill Woggon, who lived in the Santa Barbara, California, area where Norman was raised. In 1957, Norman was employed as an inbetweener on Sleeping Beauty at The Walt Disney Company, becoming the first African-American artist to remain at the studio on a long-term basis. Following his work on Sleeping Beauty, Norman was drafted into the military, then returned to the studio after his service in 1960 to work on One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and The Sword in the Stone (1963).

After Walt Disney personally saw some of the inter-office sketches Norman created to entertain his co-workers, he was reassigned to the story department, where he worked with Larry Clemmons on the story for The Jungle Book.

After Walt Disney passed away in 1966, Floyd Norman left the Disney studio to co-found Vignette Films, with business partner and fellow animator & director Leo Sullivan. Vignette Films produced six animated movies and was one of the first companies to produce films on the subject of black history. Norman and Sullivan worked together on various projects, including segments for Sesame Street and the original Hey, Hey, Hey, It’s Fat Albert television special, which was conceived by Bill Cosby and aired in 1969 on NBC. In 1972, a different Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids Saturday morning cartoon series was produced for CBS by Filmation Associates.

Norman returned to Disney at one point in the early 1970s to work on the Disney animated feature Robin Hood, and later worked on several animated television programs at Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears. In the 1980s he worked as a writer in the comic strip department at Disney and was the final writer for the Mickey Mouse comic strip before it was discontinued. Norman also published a number of books on the animation industry during this time.

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