by Rees Quinn
Movie magic
Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein declared the animated film “America’s most original contribution to culture.” The creation process at the Disney studio had become every bit as complex and involved as that of a live-action film.
Each cartoon began with a “gag” meeting, where everyone threw out ideas for visual jokes and funny situations. Gradually, a narrative would emerge, and writers would draft a script. The Disney studio had an established library of gags it could draw on for its films, set aside or recycled from previous projects. Once a script was approved, a series of rough sketches reduced the story to an orderly sequence of scenes and specific shots. Then music, sound effects, and dialogue were recorded to be matched later with the completed storyboards. Artists then created the backgrounds against which the action would be set. Finally, the animators stepped in. A typical Disney cartoon required seventy-five animators, huddled over drawing boards and often peering through magnifiers to scrutinize every pencil stroke. This quiet study often erupted in a frenzy, as animators jumped to their feet to mock the movements of their two-dimensional creations. Working under a giant skylight, the primary arts drew the start and conclusion of each visual gag, then passed their work to the “in-betweeners,” who drew the connecting images, each ever so slightly different from the last, that brought the cartoon come to life. From there, each scene was transferred to a film strip by a test camera where flaws were rooted out in an editing process using a two-way projector called a Moviola. Drawings signed off on by Disney and the director went next to the painting department to be traced onto celluloid transparencies called “cels” and given color. This work required the delicate, nimble fingers of more than 150 women employees.
It took as many as 7,000 individual drawings to make a single-reel of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. With the studio was cranking out twenty-six cartoons a year - thirteen Mickeys and thirteen Silly Symphonies – the number of drawings totaled 180,000.
Disney’s deal with United Artists garnered considerable attention both inside and outside the movie industry. The opening credits of each Silly Symphony began with the words “Mickey Mouse Presents,” suggesting the mouse enjoyed executive status in the Disney Brothers Studio. The New York Times noted that Mickey Mouse would now be a “producer” in the esteemed studio, whose founders included Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Gloria Swanson.
With the Disney Brothers Studio’s perpetual financial crisis finally eased, Walt looked for a new challenge. For several years, moviemakers had been experimenting with color film, but no one could figure out how to produce more than a handful of colors, mostly reds and greens. This incomplete spectrum resulted in images that were smeared and garish.
The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was a pioneer in color films and had made some improvements to Technicolor over the years, but the breakthrough came in 1932, when the company invented a new camera that could film a full range of colors.
Disney immediately wanted to try Technicolor on his new Silly Symphony titled Flowers and Trees. Roy objected. It would cost $6,000 more to make the film, plus added expense to make color prints for distribution. Beyond that, Roy was skeptical about how well animation cels would accept color inks. The brothers argued for days. Finally, Walt persuaded Technicolor to give him the exclusive rights to use their camera for animated shorts for two years.
Flowers and Trees centers on two trees, one clearly a young man, the other a young woman. The male tree is smitten with the female tree, and she returns his ardor. But an evil tree - stump-like and ogreish - also wants the girl tree. When she rejects him, the male trees fight. The angry antagonist then sets fire to the forest, intent on destroying everything since he cannot have what he wants. But he is engulfed before a gentle rain falls, saving the two lovers.
Flowers and Trees premiered in July 1932 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, before Strange Interlude, starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. Disney’s first color cartoon was a sensation. Roy informed the executives at United Artists that all Disney cartoons would henceforth be made in color.
Nineteen-thirty-two marked a turning point in the evolution of the Disney style. Color was the most obvious example, but another development was the introduction of other leading characters. On the same day he released Flowers and Trees, Disney released another black-and-white Silly Symphony called Just Dogs.
Just Dogs starred Pluto, a dog who had appeared in earlier Mickey Mouse cartoons. With Pluto, Disney began to feature other animal characters who were not Mickey Mouse. Pluto also represented Disney’s fundamental re-thinking of animation. Unlike Disney’s other animal characters, Pluto isn’t given human characteristics, beyond an expressive face. He walks on four legs. He doesn’t wear clothes. He is a dog.
Disney was not abandoning the anthropomorphism that had brought Mickey Mouse to life; that would express itself in other characters like Donald Duck and Goofy. Disney wasn’t after realism; animal characters with human attributes remained an essential feature of the Silly Symphonies. But he did want to break with some of the conventions of early animation - most notably formless and rubbery limbs and torsos. Ub Iwerks had created many of these traits in Disney’s cartoons; Disney may have wanted to put Iwerks’ contributions and style behind him. But he also understood that Mickey Mouse could not reflect the subtleties and sensitivities of a fully realized character. Mickey was lovable and funny and engaging, but he lacked depth. Disney wanted his animators to create characters people could relate to on an emotional level. In early 1932, Disney sent a memo to the staff ahead of a regular gag meeting that included a new policy. It stated: “ALL SCENES WILL DEPEND ON THE CHARACTERS ACTING AS NATURAL AS POSSIBLE WITHOUT ANY EXAGGERATED TRICKS.”
Disney’s animators would have to become better artists. Drawing a cartoon animal with only simple lines and shapes was not the same as drawing something lifelike. In 1929, Disney had started sending his animators to art classes in Los Angeles. As younger, more talented artists joined the studio, Disney hired a gifted art instructor from the Chouinard School of Art named Donald W. Graham to give regular classes in life drawing in the studio.
The Disney Brothers Studio released another color cartoon in November 1932, featuring the giant King Neptune and the watery creatures who inhabit his undersea domain. King Neptune sings lustily underwater and is serenaded by all kinds of fishes. The King’s subjects include a school of demurely animated mermaids. All is well until a shipload of pirates spy the mermaids singing, siren-like, on a rock. They attack and spirit one of the mermaids off to their ship, where the men leer and paw at her. The day is saved when the sea creatures fight back and defeat the pirates in a bloodless but ferocious battle. Some fish take on the attributes of cannons, firing bursts of caviar at the offending pirates. Others attack from the air like warplanes, taking off from the back of a jolly whale, made to resemble an aircraft carrier. Swordfish put their sharp beaks to work sawing down the pirate boat’s mast. Neptune ends the skirmish by causing a storm that sinks the pirate ship to the bottom of the sea, where he lounges on it like an arm chair. King Neptune was another hit.
Disney was now earning $400,000 a year from his creations and planned to produce his Mickey Mouse cartoons in color the following year. A few months later, the Kennedy Galleries in Manhattan exhibited animation cels from the Disney Brothers Studio. The critics who attended the opening called Disney a “genius” and his art a “profound” expression of “the eternal ego.” One reviewer praised “the integrity of the draftsmanship, the flair for effective massing of spaces and the never failing rhythmic pattern.”
Flowers and Trees won the 1932 Academy Award for Animated Short Subject, and Disney was given a special Oscar as the creator of Mickey Mouse.
But the summer of 1932 brought more heartbreak for Walt and Lillian. When Lillian got pregnant again, Walt was euphoric and a whirlwind of preparation. He quickly decided his family needed more room to grow and bought an acre and a half
in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. “We had been living in a little place where I couldn’t turn around,” Walt said. He built an expansive, Tudor-style house with a pool. He laughingly “made a lot of vows that my kid won’t be spoiled.” It was completed in two months. Then Lillian suffered another miscarriage.
Walt threw himself back into his work. Polo continued to provide some comfort. Most Sundays, he and Lillian spent at the country club. Walt recruited others to play on his “Mickey Mouse Team,” including Roy, and a few of his studio executives. He also played with Hollywood stars Will Rogers, James Gleason, and Spencer Tracy. Lillian was a faithful spectator, watching the matches while eating from a big bag of popcorn that Walt always bought her.
Fresh take on a fairy tale
In December 1932, the outline for a new Silly Symphony – Three Little Pigs - made the rounds among Disney’s animation staff. Earlier that year, Disney had released a Silly Symphony called Babes in the Wood, a loose combination of a traditional British folk tale and the story of Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm. Disney added a troop of woodland elves that wasn’t present in either of the source stories. Everyone at the studio envisioned Three Little Pigs as just another cartoon version of a fairy tale, and at the time, even Disney didn’t see Three Little Pigs as a departure. “It was just another story to us, and we were in there gagging it just like any other picture,” he said later. As it turned out, Three Little Pigs was much more.
Disney modified the original story, an English nursery rhyme that first appeared in children’s books in the mid-1800s. In the traditional version, three young pigs leave home to make their way in the world. One builds a house of straw. When a wolf happens by, he blows the house over and devours the pig. The second pig’s house of sticks is no sturdier, and he, too, is eaten by the wolf. But the third pig builds his house of brick. The wolf cannot blow it down, and tries to lure the pig outside. Then the wolf attempts to enter the house by coming down the chimney. But the third pig outwits the wolf by having a cauldron of boiling water on the fireplace. The wolf falls in, is cooked and then eaten by the pig.
Knowing his Silly Symphony could not show pigs being eaten by a wolf, Disney adopted a less-well-known variant of the story in which the first two pigs escape the wolf and flee to their brother’s brick house. He also made the story an operetta, with all dialogue either sung or rhymed. This change helped give pig a personality. The first two sang and danced as danger approached, but the third was, like his brick house, stolid and humorless. Disney was intent on making the music work with the film, but he remained firm that the story had to stay funny. He ordered the staff to “gag it every way we can.”
Disney insisted that the pigs look like pigs but behave like people. He wanted them dressed in clothes and able to use tools and other household items. In the finished cartoon, all three pigs wear caps and walk upright on anatomically correct trotters. The two lazy pigs wear short jackets that flare and flap above their plump stomachs. The serious pig wears overalls. Their hands are rendered with the standard Disney three-fingers-in-white-gloves treatment.
Disney put three of his top animators to work on Three Little Pigs. Fred Moore, who had started at the studio in 1930 when he was eighteen, animated the opening sequence, which introduces each of the three pigs. Those scenes marked the first time Disney characters found the charm Walt had been looking for. Moore’s chubby little pigs came alive on the screen.
Three Little Pigs hit theaters in May 1933. It cost Disney almost $16,000 to make and earned $125,000 in the first year. The film enhanced not only the prestige of the Disney studio, but the medium of animation in general. Audiences and critics loved Three Little Pigs. The New York Times said it was a film you could see again and again and love it every time. Many did just that. Demand for the film was so high that in some neighborhoods prints had to be shuttled between theaters by bike messenger. Some theaters had to settle for Spanish or French versions. The film ran for so long that on a poster outside one New York theater, whiskers were drawn on the chins of the pigs, growing longer each week.
The cartoon’s theme song, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” was such a sensation that thereafter every Mickey Mouse cartoon and Silly Symphony included a theme song.
There was one dark shadow over Three Little Pigs. In two scenes, the wolf attempts to lure the pigs from their houses by disguising himself, first as a lamb, then as a door-to-door salesman. In the original version, the salesman is a grotesque caricature of a Jewish peddler. He has a long, hooked nose and full beard and wears a cap, a long coat, and small, round glasses. Rabbi J.X. Cohen, the head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote Disney about the scene, decrying it as a “vile, revolting unnecessary” insult to Jews and demanded it be deleted. Disney had the scene re-animated to remove the offensive references. Disney often complained when critics took an analytical microscope to his cartoons, searching for something deeper than the silliness that sat on the surface.
Three Little Pigs won the 1933 Oscar for Animated Short Subject, Walt’s second in a row. It was a good year for Walt personally as well. Lillian had suffered two miscarriages, but her third pregnancy went smoothly. The couple was cautiously optimistic. Walt wrote his mother that “Lilly has been feeling fine and having no trouble at all. In fact, she is so healthy that she has been worried about it.” Walt prepared a large nursery decorated in pink and blue. Lillian hoped for a girl; “personally,” Walt said, “I don’t care, just as long as we do not get disappointed again.”
Then, on December 18, 1933, while at a podium accepting an award from Parents magazine, the news he had been waiting for was whispered in his ear. “This is the biggest moment of my life,” he said to the audience. Before bolting from the auditorium, he added, “You’ll pardon, I hope, if I hurry away and show this beautiful award to my wife and . . .” Walt made it to the hospital in time to witness the birth of his daughter, Diane Marie. He wired his brother Roy, “AM PROUD FATHER OF BABY GIRL. LILLIE AND BABY DOING FINE.”
Lillian Disney said Walt was obsessed with being first. He had made the first animated film with sound, and the first in color. On the heels of his greatest success, he decided to try something more challenging and more costly than anything before in animation: a feature-length movie. Walt and Roy came up with an estimate of $500,000.
The estimate was low.
But Disney had tremendous resources at his disposal. His studio employed almost 200 people. Mickey Mouse had become a brand unto himself. Herman Kamen, who had joined the studio in 1933 as a promoter and merchandise developer, licensed Mickey’s image to some of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies and helped create and sell a flood of Mickey Mouse products, including the famous eared cap. In 1934, the studio took in $35 million in merchandise sales, plus another $200,000 in licensing fees. The next year, the animated mouse appeared plumper on screen and also more refined – his movements were sleeker; his eyes wider, and more soulful.
Disney got lots of encouragement when he started thinking about a full-length animated feature. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were suggested, as well as Gulliver’s Travels. Mary Pickford at United Artists lobbied for a version of Alice in Wonderland that would combine live-action with animation and even offered to put up the money to make it happen. But Disney had made up his mind to go with Snow White.
Snow White was a German folk story published in 1812 in Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The original story is macabre and unsettling. It begins with blood: A queen accidentally pricks her finger with a needle while sewing near an open window and her blood drips onto fresh snow on the windowsill. Fascinated by this stark tableau, the queen tells herself, “Oh how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony.” Later, she does, and names the girl Snow White. But the gentle queen dies, and the king remarries a new queen obsessed with being the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. She owns a magic mirror that she consults about this regularly. Always, the
mirror informs her that she is the “fairest in the land.” But when Snow White grows up, the mirror delivers the shocking news that while the queen remains the “fairest in the land,” Snow White has become “a thousand times more beautiful than you.”
Enraged, the wicked queen orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the forest, kill her, and return with the girl’s liver and lungs. But the huntsman cannot bring himself to kill Snow White, who flees deeper into the woods. Instead, he kills a boar and brings its liver and lungs to the queen. She has them cooked for her dinner. Snow White, meanwhile, is taken in by a band of dwarfs.
The queen takes matters into her own hands when the magic mirror reveals that Snow White still lives. She disguises herself, finds Snow White and makes several attempts on her life. She dresses as a peddler, and offers Snow White a lace bodice. She cinches it so tightly that Snow White faints. Snow White is saved at the last minute by the dwarfs. The queen then persuades Snow White to take a bite from a poisoned apple. Snow White falls into a deep sleep, and this time, the dwarfs cannot wake her. Thinking she is dead, the dwarfs place her in a glass coffin, where they can still gaze upon her eternal beauty.
Snow White remains in her coffin until a handsome prince happens by and falls in love with her. He begs the dwarfs to let him take her coffin away. When he does, a piece of apple is dislodged from Snow White’s throat, and she awakens. In time they plan their wedding, and the wicked queen is among the invited guests, unaware the bride-to-be is Snow White. When the queen is discovered, she is thrust into a pair of iron shoes, heated to glowing red and is forced dance as the flesh is seared from her feet. In agony, she falls dead.
Much of this, of course, would have to be softened to be suitable fare for a Disney audience. But Walt thought Snow White had everything. “I had sympathetic dwarfs, you see?” Disney would later say. “I had the heavy. I had the prince. And the girl. The romance. I thought it was a perfect story.”