The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  While he was in school in Kansas City and Chicago, Disney said, “I was quite a ham. . . . I loved this drawing business but everything was a means to an end. When I put on a stage play I would make my own scenery. . . . I was putting on these little plays at school where I was always staging ’em, directing ’em, acting in ’em. . . . I always got something where I could fit the kids, because the kids would always laugh at the other kids.” In Kansas City, he and his neighbor Walt Pfeiffer presented skits on amateur nights at local theaters, with Pfeiffer’s mother accompanying them on the piano.

  Disney performed at home, too—“I’d do anything to attract attention”—with the help of hoary magic tricks like a “plate lifter,” a bladder that he put under a plate or pan and then pumped full of air when he squeezed a rubber bulb attached to a tube running from it. His mother “got a big kick out of it” when he put the bladder under some kitchen pans, he said, and at her urging he put it under his father’s soup plate. “Every time my dad would go down to get a spoonful of soup my mother would rock the plate. . . . My mother was just killing herself laughing.” Elias noticed her laughter, but not the animated plate.

  Walt Disney’s capacity for hard work was enormous. From July to September 1918, he went to work at the Chicago post office around seven in the morning as a mail sorter and substitute carrier.62 (The post office hired him, Disney said, only because he wore his father’s clothes and lied about his age after he had been turned down as too young.) When he finished with that job in midafternoon, he sought out other work at the post office—carrying special-delivery letters or picking up mail from boxes—for an hour or so, until he rode the elevated line to the South Side to work as a “gate man,” loading the trains during rush hour.

  Roy Disney had joined the navy on June 22, 1917, soon after the United States entered the First World War. He was called up in the fall of that year, and after leaving Kansas City he passed through Chicago with other recruits on their way to Great Lakes Naval Training Station.63 Walt met Roy at the rail terminal, where Walt was briefly mistaken for one of the recruits. “It put a bee in my bonnet,” he said. When Roy came down from Great Lakes to visit the family, “he looked swell in that sailor’s uniform,” Disney said. “So I wanted to join him.”

  He was too young, but in the summer of 1918, when he was working in the Chicago post office, he signed up with “a private subscription deal forming for the Red Cross,” as a driver in the American Ambulance Corps. “I was still a year too young,” he said, and his father balked at signing the required affidavit, so his mother signed for both of them. Disney then altered his birth date on the affidavit, changing “1901” to “1900,” so that he would appear to be seventeen, rather than sixteen, and thus old enough to get the required passport.

  Disney was sick for weeks in the great flu epidemic of 1918, and so his departure for Europe was delayed. The war had ended by the time his Red Cross unit reached France on December 4, but he spent almost a year in a motor pool there before returning to Chicago early in the fall of 1919. His time in France was, in Disney’s account, much like a greatly enlarged version of his summer as a news butcher. (In one echo of that earlier experience, his comrades surprised him immediately after their arrival in France with a seventeenth-birthday celebration at a French bar—they drank cognac, he drank grenadine—and left him to pick up the tab.) He was grateful, Disney said many years later, that he was so young then, “because I did things that I know when I got up to my twenties that it would be an ordeal for me to do. I’d sleep on the floor of my truck and never thought anything about it. I didn’t need a cushion or a big featherbed. . . . And I didn’t care where I ate. . . . Everything was an experience to me then.”

  There is nothing in Disney’s history, or his memories of it, to suggest that he ever resented working so hard, starting so early. Disney himself professed to see continuity between his work for Elias and his work as a news butcher and as a driver in France, when Elias was far away. “I don’t regret having worked like I’ve worked,” he said. “I can’t even remember that it ever bothered me. I mean, I have no recollection of ever being unhappy in my life. I look back and I worked from way back there and I was happy all the time. I was excited. I was doing things.”

  That was a remarkable statement, considering what Disney said about the miserable winter mornings when he was delivering newspapers, but it was no doubt how he preferred to remember even that part of his life. Neither did he express regret that his formal education ended after the eighth grade. “I don’t know how kids can stand four years of college,” he said many years later. “I should think they’d get so darn restless and tired, and I don’t know how they can stay in college for four years without wanting to try to apply some of what they’ve learned.”

  Despite his enthusiasm for work, Disney wanted a job that would not entail the hard physical labor that had been a constant in his life since his family moved to Kansas City. In France, while his buddies were shooting craps, Disney was usually drawing cartoons that he submitted to humor magazines like Life and Judge. “I remember those damn rejection slips,” he said. But he picked up money by drawing “special things for the guys”—caricatures and decorations.

  By the time Disney returned to Chicago, he had determined on a career as an artist of some kind. Not only did he turn down an offer of twenty-five dollars a week to work at the jelly factory, he turned his back firmly on the kind of physically demanding work Elias had always done—“I didn’t want any part of it”—and headed for Kansas City. “It was a smaller town,” he said. “I sort of felt more at home.” Moreover, Roy had been discharged from the navy in February 1919 and was in Kansas City working as a bank teller. Walt moved into the family home on Bellefontaine, sharing it again with Roy, Herbert, and Herbert’s wife and daughter.64

  As soon as he returned to Kansas City, Disney applied for a job at the Star, the newspaper he had delivered for years. He had hung around the paper’s cartoonists when he was a delivery boy—“they’d give me old drawings I could take home”—but now there were no jobs open in the art department. He was “pretty husky” after his year of “manual labor” in France, and when he applied for a job as an office boy the Star turned him down again because he seemed too mature.

  In October 1919, in Walt Disney’s recollection, one of Roy’s colleagues at the bank told him about an opening as an apprentice at a shop called the Pesmen-Rubin Commercial Art Studio.65 Walt showed Louis A. Pesmen and Bill Rubin samples of his work—“they were all these corny things I’d done in France about the fellows finding cooties”—and he got the job. What he would be paid was left to be decided later.

  “I worked at this drawing board and during the day I never left it,” he said in 1956. “If I had to go to the toilet I just held it until noon.” When Rubin approached him at the end of the first week, Disney was sure he was going to be fired. Instead, Rubin, after some hemming and hawing, offered him fifty dollars a month. “I could have kissed the guy,” Disney said. It was not the first time he had been paid for drawings, but, for the first time, he had a real job making them.

  Disney’s new job did not last long, probably not much more than a month. It ended when Pesmen and Rubin ran short of work after a rush to prepare illustrations for catalogs. But, Disney said, his time at that studio was immensely valuable because he learned so many “tricks of the commercial [art] business.” A striving for perfection was an unaffordable luxury in commercial art, he found: “When you get into the commercial art shop you cut things out and paste over and scratch out with razor blades. . . . Cutting corners. Moving. . . . That’s what I learned in six weeks.”

  After he was laid off, in late November or early December 1919, he quickly found work with the post office, carrying mail during the Christmas rush. At home on Bellefontaine, using his newly acquired commercial art skills, he began working up samples with the idea of going into business for himself. Then Ubbe Iwwerks (known later as Ub Iwerks; the name is Dutch) called him
, probably in early January 1920. A colleague at Pesmen-Rubin, he had been laid off, too. Iwerks, who in Disney’s recollection did “mainly lettering” for Pesmen-Rubin, came to see Disney. He was distressed because he had lost the modest salary he was using to support his mother, who had been deserted by Iwerks’s father. Disney told him, “ ‘Let’s go into business.’ And he couldn’t quite fathom that.” But Iwerks went along, probably because the new business’s capital would come entirely from Disney’s savings, money he had left with his parents in Chicago.

  Disney’s parents reluctantly sent him only half the five hundred dollars he had left with them, but that was enough for Disney to buy two desks, an airbrush and tank of air, drawing boards, and supplies. The new firm—called Iwerks-Disney because, in Disney’s words, Disney-Iwerks “sounded like an optical firm or something”—grossed what Disney remembered as $135 in its first month, a respectable figure measured against what the two young men had been earning at Pesmen-Rubin.

  Disney had clearly inherited his father’s entrepreneurial temperament, but as he entered business for himself for the first time, he enjoyed a great advantage: he was free of his father’s rigid, debilitating beliefs. He was neither particularly religious nor strongly attached to any political persuasion. As for his field of endeavor, he had become a commercial artist in the first place because that was one area where he had identifiable if modest talents. He lacked education or background for any other pursuit. When he decided to go into business for himself, commercial art was again readiest at hand.

  Disney’s desire for independence was still half-formed. When the Kansas City Slide Company advertised in the Times and Star of January 29–31, 1920, for a cartoonist,66 Disney tried to recruit the company as a client. Its proprietor, A. Verne Cauger, offered him a job at forty dollars a week instead. After conferring with Iwerks, Disney took the job.

  Kansas City Slide made slides for local merchants—advertisements that were shown in movie theaters throughout much of the Midwest. Soon after Disney joined the staff, the company moved from 1015 Central Street to new quarters at 2449–51 Charlotte Street and took a new name, Kansas City Film Ad Company, an acknowledgment that short filmed advertisements—the equivalent of today’s television commercials—had displaced slides as its principal product. Disney dated the start of his career in motion pictures to February 1920, the month he became a Film Ad employee.67

  Iwerks stayed behind at Iwerks-Disney, but he was much quieter than Disney—much less adept at winning and keeping customers—and by March he had joined Disney at Kansas City Film Ad.68

  As an animator for Film Ad, Disney worked with cutout figures, their movable joints riveted with a device that the brother of another animator called “this little gun.”69 Those figures could be manipulated under the camera, their position changing each time a frame of film was shot—an arm could be raised frame by frame, say—so that when the film was projected the figure seemed to move. The films were shot as negatives and projected as if they were positive prints, which meant that everything that was supposed to be black on the screen had to be white when it was photographed, and vice versa. That method saved the expense of making a positive print of a film that would be shown only briefly and then discarded.

  Animation itself could not have been new to Disney. Animated cartoons—short films made with drawings, rather than cutout figures—had been commonplace on theater programs since 1915 or so. Those cartoons, made by New York studios, were at a peak of popularity—or at least visibility—in early 1920, to the point that Paramount, the largest distributor, felt obliged to launch a weekly cartoon package of its own after losing the cartoons made by John R. Bray’s studio to a rival.70 It was not until he went to work for Kansas City Film Ad, though, that Disney saw how such films were made.

  Disney was intrigued by animation’s possibilities and by what he called “the mechanics of the whole thing.” He was essentially self-taught as an animator; he wrote to an admirer many years later, “I gained my first information on animation from a book . . . which I procured from the Kansas City Public Library.”71 That book was Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development by Edwin G. Lutz. According to its copyright page, Lutz’s book was published in New York in February 1920, the same month Disney joined Kansas City Film Ad, so he must have read it very soon after it was added to the library’s collection. He said of the book in 1956: “Now, it was not very profound; it was just something the guy had put together to make a buck. But, still, there are ideas in there.”

  As elementary as the Lutz book was, it still offered a vision of a kind of animation far more advanced than the Film Ad cutouts. Lutz wrote at a time when animators commonly worked entirely on paper. They made a series of drawings, each different from the one before, that were traced in ink and photographed in sequence to produce the same illusion of movement that Film Ad achieved by manipulating cutouts under the camera. Lutz advocated the use of celluloid sheets to cut down on the animator’s labor—the parts of a character’s body that were not moving could be traced on a single sheet and placed over the paper drawings of the moving parts. Such an expedient (and Lutz recommended others) would have resonated with Disney, who had been so impressed by commercial art’s shortcuts when he worked for Pesmen-Rubin.

  On a more rarefied level, Disney also learned from one of the books composed of Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth-century photographs, taken in rapid succession and showing people and animals in motion. He had Photostats made from the pages of the book. The Photostat paper was thin, he recalled, and so he could put his copies of a series of photographs one on top of another, “and I could get the phases of action.”

  Fortified with such knowledge, Disney “worked out tricks that they hadn’t done” at Film Ad, he said. The exact nature of those “tricks” is hard to determine—Disney’s descriptions were cryptic, and the films have long since disappeared—but it seems clear that he wanted to steer Film Ad toward drawn animation and more natural-looking movement.

  Disney also found the advertising copy itself “a little stiff.” As he saw orders for ads coming in, he went to the copywriters with catch lines that would be easier to illustrate, so that, for example, a bank’s admonition not to drift through life might be illustrated with “this guy on a boat drifting down river somewhere.” He “doubled in brass,” Disney said, by posing for still pictures and acting in live action when a film ad required an actor. He pressed, with eventual success, to be allowed to shoot his own films “because I would plan things with my drawings and I couldn’t get those guys [the regular camera operators] to do it. . . . The cameramen weren’t doing half of what you prepared.”

  Verne Cauger responded favorably to his innovations, Disney said, and there is no reason to doubt that. From all appearances, Disney made incremental improvements—distinct, but not disruptive—of the sort most likely to be accepted by any but the most hidebound management. Even so, he said, his immediate superior, the manager of the art department, found him “a little too inquisitive and maybe a little too curious. . . . He was kind of sore at me, because I think he felt the boss paid me too much”—five dollars a week more than Ub Iwerks, and ten dollars a week more than some of the other artists.

  Lower-level supervisors at resolutely mundane places like the Film Ad Company, protective of their own positions, usually regard bright ideas of any kind with suspicion, particularly if they call into question established methods. Disney did not describe his Film Ad experience in somber terms—that would have been inconsistent with his resolutely optimistic temperament—but it sounds in his recollection like one long narrow escape. However pleased Cauger may have been with what Disney did, the shelter of his patronage was not really very large; he balked at going beyond the jointed cutouts. Early in 1921, after about a year on the Film Ad staff, Disney talked Cauger into letting him borrow an old, unused Film Ad camera so that he could experiment at home on Bellefontaine, in the family garage, but even then Cauger was wary: �
��He kept saying, ‘What are you going to do with it?’ ”

  Elias built that garage after he and Flora returned to Kansas City, probably in mid-1920. The conventional story is that Elias had failed yet again, this time through the jelly company’s bankruptcy, but there is no record at Chicago of O-Zell’s bankruptcy, and Elias, by then in his early sixties, may simply have sold his interest and retired (his occupation in Chicago in 1920, according to the federal census, was again “carpenter”). Roy Disney remembered that even though the Disneys didn’t own an automobile, Elias built a garage at the Bellefontaine house “for income. He was a carpenter and he wasn’t working at the time, kind of retired then. . . . So he gets the garage started and talking about renting it and Walt said, ‘You’ve got a customer. It’s rented.’ . . . I don’t recall him ever paying rent, but he set up a cartoon shop in there. He’d come home long after everyone else was in bed and be out there still puttering away, working, experimenting, trying this and that. That’s when he’d borrow Cauger’s equipment, bring it out, use it at night.”72

  Disney said in 1956 that he “wanted to experiment with this other method, which is the method that was then being employed by the theatrical cartoonists,” but what has survived of his experimental work differs sharply from the entertainment cartoons of 1921. It is a filmed editorial cartoon, the sort of thing familiar to audiences from newsreels that incorporated drawings by caricaturists like Hy Mayer. The very young Disney himself appears on-screen at the beginning of the film, as a lightning sketch artist. He had made a drawing in blue pencil—which would not photograph—and he then inked a part of the drawing before photographing it, one frame at a time, so that the drawing seems to materialize on the screen, emerging from the pen in Disney’s hand (or, more precisely, from a cutout photograph of his hand holding a pen, which he moved under the camera to match up with the inked lines).