Sutherland was born on September 11, 1910, in
Williston, North Dakota. His father, Ronald Duffas Sutherland, was a bank president overseeing several in North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. However, the
Dust Bowl caused the banking industry to collapse with a number of loan failures. His family moved to
Great Falls,
Montana to
California. There, in 1937, Sutherland graduated from the
University of California, Los Angeles with a bachelor's degree in politics and economics. While working as director of UCLA's drama and debate department, he met
Walt Disney through a mutual acquaintance. Disney hired him on September 12, 1938, as an assistant director on
Bambi (1942). Shortly after,
Alfred P. Sloan pledged a grant through the
Sloan Foundation to
Harding College (now Harding University) in
Searcy, Arkansas with the goal of producing a series of short films that exemplified the
American way and
free enterprise. Aside from the Sloan Foundation, Sutherland Productions contracted with other industrial corporations to sponsor their short films, including
General Electric,
United Fruit,
American Telephone & Telegraph,
Du Pont Motors, and the
New York Stock Exchange. In 1952, MGM replaced their sales manager W. F. Rodgers with Charles M. Reagan, who declined to distribute their latest films
Dear Uncle (1952) and
The Devil and John Q (1952). Despite multiple re-edits, Benson blamed Sutherland claiming he had made the shorts more political than educational. Subsequently, Sutherland and Arnold J. Zurcher, the executive director for the Sloan Foundation, negotiated over the cost of future films but it ended in a stalemate. Throughout the 1950s, John Sutherland Productions had attracted top animation talents, including
Frank Armitage, Victor Haboush,
Bill Melendez,
Maurice Noble,
Bill Scott,
Frank Tashlin, and
Carl Urbano. During the 1960s, Sutherland founded Sutherland Learning Associates. In 1972, Sutherland produced
The Most Important Person short films for the
Head Start program that later aired on
CBS's
Captain Kangaroo. A spin-off series titled
The Kingdom of Could Be You also aired on the program. In 1991, Sutherland closed down his studio. His final project was a proposed series of films about gaining confidence through knowledge. The project was funded but was never completed. ==Personal life and death==