Walt Disney had now been in two partnerships with Ub Iwerks, one rather more nebulous partnership with Fred Harman, and a semipartnership with Carl Stalling. Two of those partnerships, the first with Iwerks and the one with Harman, had fizzled quickly, and the other two had ended in the rupture of long friendships. There would be no more partnerships. Although the Disneys seriously considered sharing ownership with outside investors in 1932, only Walt and Roy and their wives would own the company as long as it remained privately held.41 Disney spoke guardedly or misleadingly of all his former partners in future years (in 1956, he referred to Stalling as “the organist”), and, as one new employee learned in 1930, he was particularly bitter about the most important one, Ub Iwerks.
David Hand, an animator from New York, accepted a job on the Disney studio’s staff on his thirtieth birthday, January 23, 1930. Unlike the New York animators who preceded him, Hand had not been lured west by an offer from Walt Disney. Instead, he moved to Hollywood in the hope of making a career in live action. “But you couldn’t get a job,” he said many years later, “so I went to Disney’s.” Hand was hired on a Thursday—probably by Burt Gillett, who had known him in New York, since Walt Disney himself was not around to do any hiring.
When Hand finally met Disney, he said, “Walt was awful mad at Ub, because he didn’t talk about anything else to me.” Disney complained to Hand—in an echo of his petulance in the 1920s—that Iwerks would not stay at his drawing board. Instead, he parked his car in the driveway beside the studio building and spent the day there, working on the car and ignoring Disney’s plea that he animate and let a mechanic do the work.42
None of Disney’s other employees followed Iwerks out the door. The New York animators had been recruited by Walt Disney himself and had relocated because of him. Like Ben Sharpsteen, who turned down a job offer from Iwerks, they may have felt justified skepticism about their former colleague’s ability to run a successful studio. Sharpsteen summed up their attitude a couple of days after Iwerks announced he was leaving; as quoted by Roy Disney in a letter to Walt, he said, “We know that the difference of these cartoons over the average run is nothing more or less than Walt’s personality, along with cooperation from his fellows.”43
The net effect of Iwerks’s and Stalling’s departures was to leave the Disney brothers in a stronger position, personally and financially, than ever before. What Walt heard in New York must have given him added confidence that he had outgrown a parsimonious, small-scale distributor like Pat Powers. “From what Dick [Huemer] and Jack Carr [another veteran New York animator] told us,” Lillian Disney wrote to Roy on January 30, “[the Fleischer and Mintz studios] get everyone [sic] of our pictures and run them for the crews over and over again.”44
The break with Powers was messy, to the point that Disney changed hotels and registered under an assumed name, the better to elude process servers, after he wrote to Roy on February 7, “Have definitely broke [sic] with Powers. Will deliver no more pictures.”45 On February 19, he signed his own contract with Columbia, which had been distributing the Silly Symphonies under its contract with Powers, and left for Los Angeles, ending yet another protracted stay in New York.
Although Walt had until this point taken the lead in business matters, it fell to Roy to go to New York in April 1930 to work on the settlement with Powers. Their correspondence makes clear that Walt still called the shots, but Roy’s background as a “money man” was finally being put to productive use. The three-sided negotiations, involving Columbia as well as the Disneys and Powers, had actually begun by early March, and Roy took part only for the last couple of weeks. What he saw left him skeptical about Columbia, which he described to Walt as not “overburdened with good intentions.”46 The settlement, signed on April 22, was expensive—the Disneys not only gave up their claims against Powers but had to give him fifty thousand dollars, money they borrowed from Columbia and would have to repay from their films’ profits before they saw any profits themselves. But Columbia would advance the Disneys seven thousand dollars upon the delivery of each film—they would actually be able to spend more on each cartoon than they could when they were getting smaller advances from Powers and seeing none of the profits. “I honestly feel elated over everything,” Roy wrote to Walt on May 6. “Settlement going to work out good and future very bright.”47
At this point, Walt Disney may not have been ready to take full advantage of his improved situation. In the early 1930s, he could be strikingly conservative when he spoke for publication about cartoons. In a statement for Film Daily in April 1930, he was cautious about both color and the wide screen: “After all, in a cartoon comedy it is laughs and personality that count. Color alone will not sustain public interest.”48 About a year later, American Magazine quoted him as saying that it was a “mistake” to think “that American audiences always want brand-new gags—surprises and cute turns. We have found out that they want most to laugh. They easily forget the original turns, but if a picture has given them a good laugh, whether by old gags or new, they always remember it.”49
Disney remembered all the gags in his silent cartoons, or so it seems, because gags from Alice comedies like Alice’s Fishy Story, Alice’s Orphan, and Alice’s Brown Derby can be identified in cartoons made years later—reworked and improved, to be sure, but still the same gags. “The best gag men are those with the best memories,” David Hand said in 1946, two years after he left the Disney studio. “Disney has the most marvelous memory—like an elephant he never forgets, and he remembers all the awful animation you ever did.”50
Disney’s model for the “laughs and personality” he sought was not any new talkie star, but the greatest star of the silents, Charlie Chaplin. In 1931, Disney cited Chaplin as a principal source for Mickey Mouse: “We thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin . . . a little fellow trying to do the best he could.”51
In the first few months of 1930, after Iwerks’s departure, the Disney staff continued to gather at night once a week or so—in Walt’s office, or in the adjacent music room—to talk about gag ideas. No one on the staff devoted full time to writing. No one had devoted full time to writing for Disney’s silent cartoons, either, but in their last year or two—if the surviving examples are a fair measure—he had still been able to fill at least some of those cartoons with comic business that was dense and complex. When Disney was making his early sound cartoons, though, the greatest challenge they posed was essentially technical—sound and images had to fit together in a pleasing way.
Iwerks had met that challenge adroitly, after hitting his stride with Skeleton Dance, and that is why so many of the early Disney sound cartoons seem more his creations than Disney’s own. Iwerks’s kind of animation, ticking away with mechanical precision, could not have been better suited to the demands of early sound cartoons. By 1930, though, Disney and other members of his staff had absorbed the basics of making cartoons with sound, and the loss of Iwerks’s expertise could actually be seen as a blessing. The Disney cartoons could now recoup some of their pre–Steamboat Willie vitality, but with sound as a fillip.
How to do that was the problem. Disney in the early 1930s was not some visionary leader, trying to inculcate in his followers what he had already grasped himself, but was instead groping toward some better kind of cartoon alongside his animators. He was notoriously inarticulate. “In the real early days,” Ben Sharpsteen said, “Walt didn’t seem to have the command of ways of expressing himself for the benefit of the animator, and I would say that most of the progress was made among the animators themselves, in pinpointing faults.”52 Les Clark remembered a Disney who “talked a lot and sometimes you didn’t understand what he wanted. . . . Maybe he didn’t, either, until he saw something he liked.”53
Disney was never ambiguous about what he liked or, more often, disliked—“Walt was much less easily satisfied with whatever we did than any of the rest of us,” Wilfred Jackson said—but it was frequently difficul
t for him to translate his ideas into guidance for his animators. It was only after he had worked with people for some time that a simple expression of approval or disapproval told them what they needed to know.
Even in the early 1930s, Jackson said, “Walt already did have his fast eye and quick overall comprehension of whatever he put his attention on, so he would usually be first to detect what it was that made [the animation in a competitor’s cartoon] more effective than ours.” Jackson cited as examples of the “little things that would make a big difference”: “Varying the spacing of the inbetweens so as to slow out of a hold before moving full speed toward the next one, and then slow to a stop to avoid . . . abrupt, jerky motion. Or spreading out, then condensing the spacing to get an accent in the action.”54
The “big difference” produced by such “little things” was to make the animated characters on the screen seem a little more real. This was the thread that kept surfacing in Disney’s films in the 1920s—in the repentant hippo in an Alice comedy, in bits and pieces of the Oswald cartoons—but had been mostly absent from his first year and a half of sound cartoons, dominated as they were by coarse gags and synchronized sound. Now it was slowly coming to the fore again, but in a different way at first, through movement that seemed worthy of belief even when the characters were wholly fanciful.
In a Silly Symphony called Frolicking Fish, released in May 1930, an animator named Norman Ferguson introduced what his colleagues called “moving holds,” breaking with the sharply defined poses that were characteristic of much other animation, like Ub Iwerks’s. Ferguson, one of the New York animators hired the previous year (he had worked at Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables studio), animated a fish trio that moved with a new freedom and naturalness. As Wilfred Jackson put it, “He slowed in, moved through. If one part moved, some other thing moved. Before that time, we’d get into a pose and hold it; we’d move into another pose and hold it.”55 Ferguson gave to his colleagues a tool they could use in animating many different kinds of characters.
When Ferguson animated his fish, Disney was still expanding his use of assistants and inbetweeners in order to increase the more experienced animators’ output. “I kind of think it was the nicest thing I ever did for this business when I realized that it was not like the old art of painting and things, that it was a new art,” Disney said in 1956. “That it was a mass production for survival. . . . Of course, the industry was set up that way . . . before I came into it. But I think I organized more mass production things”—that is, a more refined division of labor—“than had ever been used in the industry before.”
The gains were slow in coming. Sometimes the animator might turn to an assistant for help in providing inbetweens, Dave Hand said, but “at other times when there was a difficult bit to do, we did our own inbetweening.”56 The animator’s assistant might be no more than “an apprentice inbetweener”—the term Ed Benedict applied to himself when he recalled his work as an assistant to Wilfred Jackson in 1930—whose inexperience left the animator no choice but to do most of the work himself.57
Disney’s 1956 remarks echoed the work of Frederick W. Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management (1919) was a classic argument for the benefits of the division of labor. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith pointed out the advantages of breaking production down into discrete tasks and assigning each to a specialist. Taylor carried that idea further, dividing tasks into simple components that required little or no specialized knowledge or skill. But what happened at Disney’s bore no resemblance to what Taylor had in mind, or, probably, to what Disney himself had in mind at first. Instead, the division of labor was increasingly pursued—at least at the levels above those of inbetweeners and inkers and painters—as a means of artistic collaboration.
Around 1930, a few assistants began to improve their animators’ drawings as well as make inbetweens. Some animators may have produced a few more drawings than they did before, thanks to that change; they no longer had to struggle with their shortcomings as draftsmen. But the gains came less in increased output than in better-looking cartoons. This was a countercurrent in the Disney studio’s use of assistants and inbetweeners, one that worked against the higher output that such a division of labor could be expected to bring.
Increasingly, the pattern at the Disney studio in the early 1930s was not that Disney himself introduced stunning advances, but that he recognized, accepted, and often encouraged the improvements that his people were coming up with on their own. When the animators began shooting pencil tests, for example, “we got to shooting more and more tests,” Wilfred Jackson said, “and Walt rather encouraged us to, because we would often make good improvements.”58 It was because he was so receptive to such changes that Disney stood apart from the proprietors of other cartoon studios, most of whom attempted comparable improvements only because their cartoons were suffering by comparison with Disney’s.
It was probably not until 1931 that animators began shooting complete scenes as pencil tests, and again this was an idea that Disney endorsed but did not originate. Shooting complete scenes had conspicuous advantages for all concerned—Disney, the director, and the animator—as compared with what Jackson called the “primitive, laborious, makeshift” alternative of shooting only parts of scenes and judging the rest of the animation solely by how it looked on paper, “flipping the drawings to see portions of the action a bit at a time.”59 Small wonder that Disney should decide that shooting complete scenes was a good idea.
Throughout 1930 and 1931, even as pencil tests came into general use and made it easier to spot mistakes, the cartoons that emerged from the Disney studio suffered from glitches—as when a character departed sharply from its standardized appearance for a scene or two—that must have been obvious but were not repaired, probably because repairing them would have been too expensive. In Midnight in a Toy Shop (1930), for example, a spider is simply enormous just after it enters the toy shop of the title; it has supposedly entered the shop through a keyhole, but it is far too big to have done that.
In those years, Disney was working within the limitations imposed on each cartoon by Columbia’s advance of seven thousand dollars—a figure that was liberating at first, but quickly became a straitjacket. Disney expanded the studio’s physical plant significantly between February and July 1931, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars,60 but much of that construction—of a sound stage, in particular—as well as much of the studio’s hiring, was dictated by the complications created by sound, and the need to have more people on hand to deal with them. The cash available to spend on any one cartoon was still tight.
Disney was keenly interested in licensing Mickey Mouse merchandise as early as 1929, when he wrote to Powers’s man Charles Giegerich: “I should think that there would be a big market for MICKEY dolls, toys and novelties for the coming season and it may not be a bad idea to feel out the possibilities along these lines as these things are also considered very good publicity.”61 He said in 1956 that he began licensing merchandise when he was in New York “and we needed money and a fellow kept hanging around the hotel with three hundred dollars cash waving at me all the time and I finally signed a deal” to put Mickey Mouse on writing tablets. That must have been in 1929—and may have been a handshake agreement—since the Disneys signed the first contract of which there is a record early in 1930. That first contract, dated January 24, 1930, was with King Features Syndicate for a Mickey Mouse comic strip that had actually started running eleven days earlier. Walt Disney and Gunther Lessing sealed the deal while they were in New York to confront Pat Powers.62
Once the licensing of toys, novelties, and books was under way—it began with a February 3, 1930, contract with Geo. Borgfeldt & Co.—Walt Disney played almost no role in it. He left that side of the business to Roy, although he showed a continuing interest in the comic strip; it was drawn at the studio by Ub Iwerks at first, and later by Floyd Gottfredson.63
The revenue from such licensing was still small in the e
arly 1930s, however, and the staff’s limitations were a continuing handicap, too. An advance like Ferguson’s on Frolicking Fish occurred in the context of work that was typically much cruder (and Ferguson himself was notoriously weak as a draftsman). At Disney’s in the early 1930s, the animator Ed Love said, “We were all pretty lousy artists. I remember one time they were doing a scene in a Silly Symphony, of a guy playing a xylophone [with a bone], and nobody could figure out how to draw a hand, holding the bone. Dave Hand, who was then starting to direct, said, ‘Oh, just make a black circle and put a bump on it.’ ”64
Even in the early years of the Great Depression, such untutored artists (Love had no formal art training) still made up most of the pool of talent available to Disney. When Love applied for a job at the Disney studio in 1931, he was hired personally by Walt Disney. “I showed him probably three quarters of an inch of drawings that he flipped. Mickey Mouse came out on a stage, played a violin, made a sour note, got embarrassed, started to go off, tripped and fell. . . . [Disney] said, ‘Come to work.’ ”65
Disney’s animators seized upon various expedients when they tried to dress up their animation. Rubber-hose animation, for example, was basically action that curved excessively in the direction of the movement. This device suppressed the jitter that was always a hazard when a stiff vertical line animated across the screen, but, Wilfred Jackson said, it was overdone “tremendously” in the early 1930s until Disney cracked down.66
Animators might achieve something lifelike, and take pride in the result, but such occasions were still scattered and rare. Ed Benedict, who assisted Rudy Zamora, spoke of Zamora’s pleasure in one scene in The China Plate, a Silly Symphony with Chinese characters that Zamora was animating in March 1931: “Rudy had this scene and he was quite delighted to have thought to do this himself; I remember him leaning over to me, flipping the animated drawings [and] saying, ‘Hey, how do you like this?’ . . . This little girl was to turn from left to right—but when she turned, the hair trailed across her face. That had never been done before. That’s a first—beginning to loosen up things.”67
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