Half of the leading writing and directing team in animation. Musker received his start as an animator with the Disney company in 1977, where he began as an assistant animator on the short "The Small One". His following projects were as a character animator on "The Fox and the Hound" (1981) and doing story work for the feature flop "The Black Cauldron" (1985). Musker's break as a filmmaker came when he shared the director's credit with three other people, among them future partner Ron Clements, on the feature "The Great Mouse Detective" (1986).
In 1989 Musker and Clements wrote, directed and produced "The Little Mermaid" (1989), a prelude to the huge commercial and critical resurgence of animated films; it harkened back to the golden age of Disney animation (e.g., "Dumbo", "The Jungle Book", "Bambi"). Their second team attempt was "Aladdin" (1992), a loose retelling of "The Thief of Bagdad" and featuring the music of the late Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, the composers of such recent Disney favorites as "Beauty and the Beast" (1991) and "The Little Mermaid" (1989).