In his addenda, Disney always adopted a positive, can-do tone. In August 1932, he touted the possibilities of Mickey’s Good Deed, a Christmas cartoon to be released at the end of 1932: “Here is a story that has everything necessary to make it a wow. A good plot—good atmosphere—personality—pathos—and plenty of opportunity for gags. There are seven major sequences to this story—each holds wonderful possibilities for good gags and bits of human action. I am expecting everyone to turn in at least one gag on each sequence.”95 (Disney was correct when he said that the story had a “plot.” It does have one in the strict Aristotelian sense, with beginning, middle, and end—one of the first Disney cartoons of that kind.)
In November 1932, at the end of the outline for a Mickey Mouse cartoon, a burlesque of costume dramas set in medieval England to be called Ye Olden Days, Disney dwelled at length on the musical and comic potential in the story, and on how different characters could be portrayed: “I see this story as a wonderful possibility for a burlesque on a comic opera . . . For a change I would like to see us make a Mickey built around good musical angles . . . This is our first costume Mickey—think of gag possibilities with the King in his royal robes—his funny looking attendants—the court jester and the court musicians with quaint ruffled costumes with balloon trunks, etc. . . . Possible chance for a Zasu Pitts type in Clarabelle Cow as the lady-in-waiting—she could be the nervous type who doesn’t know what to do to help yet is a very sympathetic type—when Minnie cries, she cries too, and when Minnie is in love, she feels it too . . . The King could be the type that is very blustery and excited over the least thing. I have in mind Mary Pick-ford’s story Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall . . . Chance for some funny characters in the King’s army. The soldiers could have guns of the blunderbuss type with forked stick to hold them up while they fire them—making noise like auto horns along with muffled explosions.”96
These distinctive notes vanish from the outlines starting early in 1933; the closing notes from then on have a more functional, workmanlike quality, less concerned than before with the feeling behind the gags. Disney, the ever more confident coordinator, was stepping back still further from a day-to-day role in work on the films.
That work was becoming steadily more organized. Disney told Bob Thomas that Webb Smith devised what came to be called the storyboard, almost by accident: “We would sit in his office in the morning and think up gags. . . . After lunch I’d drop in Webb’s office and he’d have the sequence sketched out on sheets of paper. They’d be scattered all over the room, on desks, on the floor, every place. It got too tough to follow them; we decided to pin all the sketches on the wall in sequence. That was the first storyboard.”97
It probably did not happen quite that quickly and neatly. If, as seems likely, the first real storyboard was put up for a 1932 Technicolor Silly Symphony called Babes in the Woods, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel,” other cartoons came after it without the help of fully developed storyboards. Wilfred Jackson remembered that the storyboard for the Silly Symphony called Father Noah’s Ark (1933) “was just a grouping of sketches here and there on the board with each group depicting a gag or a short continuity of business for an incident.”98 It may have taken a year or two before the idea of telling a complete story through sketches pinned to a large piece of corkboard really took hold. But even in embryonic form, the storyboard’s efficiency must have appealed to Walt Disney himself, at a time when the pressures on his time were multiplying, along with the budgets of his cartoons and the size of his staff.
Art Babbitt, a former animator at Paul Terry’s new Terrytoons studio in New York, was one of the many new members of the staff; he was hired in July 1932. The Friday-night classes at Chouinard had ended by then. As reflected in Jack Zander’s anecdote, many of the Disney animators had been reluctant to attend such classes, but by the summer of 1932, with the cartoons changing rapidly and drawing skills in greater demand, interest in formal art instruction was quickening. When Babbitt organized classes of his own and hired a model, growing numbers of his colleagues turned up each week for three weeks.
Disney noticed that Babbitt was succeeding where he had not. At Disney’s instigation, Babbitt moved the classes to the studio, where Disney picked up the tab. Babbitt said in 1973 that Disney “was quite upset. As he put it, it wouldn’t be very nice if the newspapers ever came out with the story that a group of Disney artists were drawing naked women in a private house. . . . He thought it would look a lot better if these art classes were held on the sound stage.”99 Disney did not have to be persuaded of the value of such classes, of course. In November 1932, he hired a Chouinard instructor, Donald W. Graham, to teach life classes at the studio two nights a week.100
Phil Dike, who taught painting at Chouinard for four years before joining Graham at Disney’s, said of his colleague that “he had a practical sense of what made things work, from his engineering background”—Graham had originally studied to be an engineer—“and also intuitively.”101 William Hurtz, who studied under Graham at Chouinard in the mid-1930s, said that Graham “was concerned with space, volume, movement—kind of a structural approach to drawing.”102 That approach was highly appropriate for animated characters of the kind that were emerging in the Disney films.
As the Disney animators learned from innovations like Ferguson’s moving holds how they could produce more lifelike animation, the life classes forced them to look outward, to consider the life to which some of their animation now bore resemblance. From their earliest days, the Disney cartoons’ characters had been flat and simple formula characters, most often animals whose faces were, like Mickey Mouse’s, white masks on black bodies. By 1932, though, Disney’s animators were drawing characters that looked more realistic (very generally speaking) and could move convincingly in what seemed to be three-dimensional space.
Once a formula has been established, it exerts a powerful gravitational pull on artists who have used it. Resisting it, and observing life directly with the idea of reproducing it more accurately, is hard work, as the Disney animators found. The effects on their drawings were sometimes awkward at first. “I’d go to this art class,” Dick Lundy said, “and then I’d come back, and I would try to put bones in Mickey, and he wasn’t built that way.”103
Mickey Mouse was immutably a formula character, but human characters were troublesome, too. In assessing the plausibility of characters on the screen, audiences make increasingly rigorous judgments the more closely those characters resemble themselves. Working with animal characters, animators could improve their skills without exposing their weaknesses to withering scrutiny. It was in their animation of the animals in Silly Symphonies like Birds in the Spring and Father Noah’s Ark, both released early in 1933, that the Disney animators showed most clearly just how rapidly their skills were improving.
By early that year, the Disney cartoons had changed so rapidly, in so many ways, that the timing was perfect for a cartoon that in its seven minutes summed up how far they had come—and how far they might go. Disney made just such a cartoon, Three Little Pigs, which was released in May 1933.
“I was told,” Walt Disney later wrote, “that some exhibitors and even United Artists considered the Pigs a ‘cheater’ because it had only four characters in it.”104 Father Noah’s Ark, by contrast, was overflowing with animals of all kinds, as well as human characters. But the small cast of Three Little Pigs was exactly what Disney needed at this point. He had been making cartoons, like Santa’s Workshop (1932), that were as intricate and detailed as elaborate mechanical toys or department-store windows at Christmas. Their characters were more realistically drawn than earlier cartoon characters, but they were not much more than moving parts. In Three Little Pigs, Disney was making a cartoon where the audience’s attention would be squarely on the characters.
In his addendum to the outline for Three Little Pigs that circulated in the studio in December 1932, Disney talked at length about how to make those characters appealing:
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sp; These little pig characters look as if they would work up very cute and we should be able to develop quite a bit of personality in them. Use cute little voices that could work into harmony and chorus effects when they talk together and everything that they would say or do in the first part of the story, while they are building their houses, could be in rhythmical manner. Anything that they would say would be handled either in singing or rhyme. The old wolf could be the fourth in a quartette, the bass voice, growling snarling type. When he fools the little pigs, he raises his voice, into a high falsetto. All the wolf dialogue would also carry either in rhyme or song. . . .
Might try to stress the angle of the little pig who worked the hardest, received the reward, or some little moral that would teach a story. Someone might have some angles on how we could bring this moral out in a direct way without having to go into too much detail. This angle might be given some careful consideration, for things of this sort woven into a story give it depth and feeling. . . .
These little pigs will be dressed in clothes. They will also have household impliments [sic], props, etc., to work with and not be kept in the natural state. They will be more like human characters.105
Only a few animators worked on the film, assigned carefully to characters, so that Norm Ferguson—the studio’s pioneer in giving the semblance of life to animated characters—animated almost all of the Big Bad Wolf, whereas Dick Lundy and Fred Moore, an upcoming young animator, handled most of the pigs’ scenes.
Moore was a small, compact man who survived in his colleagues’ memories as something of a cartoon character himself. Although he was a superb athlete, “his proportions were cute . . . and it kind of tickled you to watch him move around imitating someone like Fred Astaire or Chaplin, or trying some fancy juggling act,” the animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written. “Even if the stuff dropped on the floor, Fred would always end up in a good pose—just like his drawings.”106
Early in work on the story, Albert Hurter had drawn the pigs as idealized versions of real young pigs, smooth and pink and round. Moore animated those characters with the pleasing elasticity that animators call stretch and squash. There was nothing loose or sloppy about this stretching and squashing—instead, Moore animated his characters from one pleasing shape to another. There was no sense that their true form had been compromised just to inject a little life into the animation. Instead, whatever shape they assumed at any given moment had the same pleasing roundness and solidity.
Norm Ferguson had shown animators how to suggest that a character was alive. Now Moore showed them how to enhance that illusion, almost to the point that it seemed that the character had a personality. His animation in Three Little Pigs—he handled the scenes at the start of the cartoon when the pigs introduce themselves—was charm itself.
The real genius of the cartoon, though, was that all its action took place within the musical framework that Disney described. In Three Little Pigs, the pigs’ expressions, if not their movements, were still formulaic—they struck attitudes, rather than revealed emotions. There was no confusing them with any kind of real creature. It was music that filled the gap. Three Little Pigs was the first cartoon to plunge wholeheartedly into the sort of operetta style that had been germinating in the Silly Symphonies almost from the beginning of the United Artists release. King Neptune (1932), scored by Bert Lewis, opened with the title character singing about himself, and the operetta flavor was even stronger in Father Noah’s Ark, whose characters introduced themselves through song within Leigh Harline’s classically oriented score.
Frank Churchill, who wrote the score for Three Little Pigs, had nothing like Harline’s musical education—Harline majored in music at the University of Utah—but he was a highly adaptable musician with a skill common to musicians who worked in the silent-film era, the ability to improvise quickly to fit whatever was happening on the screen. Churchill was perfect as composer for Three Little Pigs because the cartoon’s action required him to switch gears constantly. When the wolf pretends to give up his pursuit of the two foolish pigs, he goes into hiding to the accompaniment of what Ross Care has called “a charmingly bland ‘wolf-trot.’ ” Later, the Practical Pig executes, in Care’s words, “an imposing piano cadenza a la Rachmaninoff”—played on the sound track by Carl Stalling, Disney’s original musician, who had returned to the studio briefly as a freelancer—“as the wolf literally blows himself blue in the face while vainly attempting to blow down the door of the brick house.”107 All of this takes place within a score dominated by “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” the song that Churchill wrote for the cartoon, but Three Little Pigs is so fragmented and musically demanding that the song is never heard in its entirety.
Since directors and musicians worked as teams in the early 1930s, assigning Churchill to Three Little Pigs meant assigning Burt Gillett to it, too. Gillett had been directing the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which by 1933 had become a series devoted mostly to comic adventures depicted in broad strokes. Even though Mickey Mouse and the other characters in those cartoons were little more than what Walt Disney later called “animated sticks,” it made a strange sort of sense for him to assign Gillett to a cartoon like Three Little Pigs, in which the characters themselves were the center of attention.
Gillett “was quite talkative, and a pretty good salesman,” Ben Sharpsteen said. “He’d act things out. It was pretty horrible, but that was what Walt wanted—it was stimulation.”108 Gillett was distinguished by his enthusiasm and energy and his small-boy liking for excitement, Wilfred Jackson said (Gillett chased fire trucks). He “visualized each thing with his whole body,” Jackson said, and this made him a “noisy neighbor” to have in the music room above Jackson’s.109
Gillett did not bring to his direction anything like the care and precision that Jackson brought to the Silly Symphonies. Dick Huemer recalled forty years later that he was “just floored by the perfectionism” when he picked up his first assignment from Jackson, on a 1933 Silly Symphony called Lullaby Land. “The fact that [Jackson] would hand me a scene, and all the [camera] fields would be marked, and the trucking [camera movements toward and away from the animation drawings] would be marked (I had never heard of cartoon trucking before), with a little red square indicating where the action would be in close-up. . . . This would be handed to me; and several action poses in that scene to boot.”110 As Huemer said, “All I had to do was just move [the characters] around”—and Jackson always conferred carefully with his animators about how they would do that, too. Gillett worked as a director much less precisely, exactly the right approach for the principal animators on Three Little Pigs (Moore and Ferguson rarely animated for Jackson). The important thing, with Gillett as director, was that animators who wished to bring more to the characters in Three Little Pigs could easily find room to do it, as Moore in particular did.
It was in such sensitive casting of director and animators, and in his understanding of how music could shore up half-grown character animation, that Walt Disney now made his ability as a coordinator felt, first in the studio and then beyond. “The main thing” about Three Little Pigs, Disney said in 1956, “was a certain recognition from the industry and the public that these things could be more than just a mouse hopping around.”
In terms of that broader recognition, Three Little Pigs was indeed a breakthrough, especially where the public was concerned. It played for only a week (May 25–31, 1933) at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but as it spread to neighborhood theaters it aroused more and more enthusiasm. No short cartoon had ever been so popular; Three Little Pigs ran for weeks at some theaters, through one change of feature after another. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” was the first hit song to come from a cartoon.
The timing of the cartoon, and especially the song, made a difference—Three Little Pigs was released in the depths of the Great Depression, and its song could be heard as an echo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, with the Big Bad Wolf a bogeyman no
more to be feared than “fear itself.” But other cartoons were just as cheerful, and scoffed at the Depression much more directly, without stimulating anything like the same response. It was, Disney said in 1941, because he and his animators were beginning “to put real feeling and charm in our characterization” that Three Little Pigs was so successful.
“Feeling” was the key word. There was nothing like real feeling in Three Little Pigs, but it was the first Disney cartoon that fully employed many of the elements—lifelike movement, rounded forms that seemed to move in three dimensions, characters whose appearance was realistic enough to invite a suspension of disbelief—that would be most useful if a cartoon were ever to make an emotional connection with its audience. And this, it was increasingly clear, was where Disney wanted his cartoons to go.
If in the 1920s Hugh Harman was most concerned with cartoon acting, Disney was now seizing on its possibilities. Her husband acted out scenes, Lillian Disney said, “always—to the sky, the birds, to anything. He was always making gestures—talking. . . . Laughing and acting out something he was working on. He was always doing that.”111
It was hard to translate this interest in “feeling” into animation that embodied it, especially when human characters were involved. When animation of The Pied Piper began under Wilfred Jackson’s direction in May 1933, just as Three Little Pigs was entering theaters, the key scenes of Hamelin’s mayor and the piper himself went to two young animators, Hamilton Luske and Art Babbitt. More than any other animators on the Disney staff, they could bring to the animation of human figures not just a reasonably high level of draftsmanship, but also an intense, analytical interest in how the human body actually moved.
The Animated Man Page 15