The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Their scenes should have been a big step forward from Norm Ferguson’s animation of the Big Bad Wolf or Fred Moore’s scenes with the pigs. Neither Ferguson nor Moore had studied real movement as Luske and Babbitt had. Yet there is nothing so deadly in an actor’s performance as the sense of performing consciously actions that ordinary people perform without thinking about them, and this sense pervades Babbitt’s and Luske’s animation. However lifelike a character’s individual movements might be, those movements could not in themselves make the character lifelike. In fact, the reverse was true: isolated by analytical animation, even the most carefully observed movements would seem shallow and counterfeit.

  Norm Ferguson’s and Fred Moore’s animation had much more vitality but also lacked the particularity of real people. Thus the challenge before them and all the other Disney animators was one that artists working with more respectable materials had met and mastered many times before, going back to the Greek artists of the classic period. What those artists valued most, E. H. Gombrich has written, was that “the new-found freedom to represent the human body in any position or movement could be used to reflect the inner life of the figures represented. . . . This is what the great philosopher Socrates, who had himself been trained as a sculptor, urged artists to do. They should represent the ‘workings of the soul’ by accurately observing the way ‘feelings affect the body in action.’ ”112 Disney and the best of his animators, working in their own humble medium, were struggling to bring just such an emotional dimension to animation that represented the mechanics of movement with increasing accuracy. Theirs was not an easy task, considering animation’s history of triviality and crude formulas.

  In April 1933, shortly before the release of Three Little Pigs, Paul Fennell animated a scene for Mickey’s Mechanical Man, a cartoon in which the robot of the title boxes a gorilla. “I had a test of Minnie, pounding the mat,” Fennell said, and he showed it to Disney in the sweatbox next door to Wilfred Jackson’s music room. “Walt looked at it, and ran it again, and he said, ‘You know what’s wrong with this? You don’t know anything about psychology. You ought to go home and read a book on psychology. It’s feeling. You’ve got to really be Minnie, you’ve got to be pulling for Mickey to beat that big lunkhead. You’ve got to hit that mat hard, you’ve got to stretch.’ I got a good bawling out, but I didn’t understand him. Later on, I knew what he was trying to tell me. We learned it: feeling.”113

  By 1933, Disney had caught up with his best animators, and his ambitions for the medium were surging ahead of theirs. Now there were fewer and fewer occasions when the churlish Disney of the 1920s, the Disney who had driven away Hugh Harman and Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling, showed his face. The Disney in charge was once again the enthusiastic, ambitious Disney who had set up his own cartoon studio when he was just twenty years old—but armed now with more than a decade of experience making cartoons and, most important, with an artist’s excitement about the possibilities he saw in his medium.

  It was this combination, his powerful entrepreneurial drive combined with his new artist’s sensibility, that made Disney so inspiring a figure to many of the people who worked for him in the middle 1930s. “Somehow,” Wilfred Jackson said, “Walt always made it seem to me that the most important thing in the world was to help him make a picture look the way he wanted it to look. It was a lot of fun to feel I was doing the most important thing in the world, every day.”114

  * Iwerks began the 1930s releasing his Flip the Frog cartoons through MGM, the biggest and most powerful major studio, but then saw his fortunes decline. He rejoined the Disney staff in 1940—as an employee, not a partner. He specialized in solving difficult technical problems.

  CHAPTER 4

  “This Character Was a Live Person”

  The Leap to Feature Films

  1934–1938

  In March 1934, someone who signed himself “an animator” wrote to the Hollywood Citizen-News:

  Walt Disney’s personal achievements, since the creation of Mickey, have been largely the use of his ability in the fields of production, business, publicity, and direction, rather than his actually doing any of the things to which his name is signed. He does not draw the newspaper strip, neither does he draw any of the movies. The entire operation is done by others under his direction. Although much credit is due Disney, a great deal must be given to the account of those who perform the actual work. After all, they make the pictures.1

  The anonymous writer was pointing out that Disney did not draw the cartoons that bore his name; he had not done so for the better part of a decade. But in early 1934, Disney was about to make a picture himself, for the first time in several years—that is, he was going to direct one, a Silly Symphony called The Golden Touch, a retelling of the King Midas story.

  Even though Disney had reconciled himself to his role as his studio’s all-powerful coordinator—someone who never lifted a pencil himself but passed final judgment on the work of others who drew—he was never entirely comfortable with it. Over the years, he fell back on awkward analogies to explain just what he did. At one point, for example, he invoked a musical parallel: “I like our cartoons to be put together like a symphony. You know, there’s a conductor—I guess I’m it—and then there are the solo violins, and the horn players, and the strings, and a lot of other fellows, and some of them are more stars than others, but every one has to work together, forgetting himself, in order to produce one whole thing which is beautiful.”2

  In early 1934, he had found a persuasive reason to depart from his role as “conductor”: he had decided that his studio would make its first feature cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and that he would direct it himself. By making The Golden Touch he would be warming up for that far more demanding job.

  Disney had decided to move ahead with a feature by the fall of 1933, although there was no public announcement to that effect, and he may not even have settled yet on Snow White as its title. In November, the animator Art Babbitt wrote to his friend Bill Tytla in New York: “We’re definitely going ahead with a feature length cartoon in color—they’re planning the building for it now [a second animation building was added to the Hyperion plant in 1934] and the money has been appropriated. Walt has promised me a big hunk of the picture.”3

  The public’s enthusiasm for Three Little Pigs encouraged Disney to believe that people would turn out for a feature, but cool business considerations pushed him in that direction, too. Three Little Pigs on the marquee might attract more customers than the feature it accompanied, but the increased traffic at the box office redounded to the benefit of the feature’s producer, and not Disney. There was only so much Disney could accomplish in the short form, either artistically or financially.

  Although he had turned to fairy tales when he first began making cartoons at Laugh-O-gram, there was nothing automatic about Disney’s choice of a fairy tale as the subject of his first feature. Given the popularity of Mickey Mouse, he could easily have put his star into a feature-length comedy that would have been the equivalent of the features that the silent comedians made when they moved up from two-reel shorts. There is no indication that he ever considered doing that. For all of Disney’s affinities with the silent comedians—particularly his intense exploration of gag possibilities—he had not created screen personalities strong enough to sustain a feature, as Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd had done. Mickey Mouse might echo Chaplin’s Little Tramp, but the Tramp was a much richer character. And so, when Disney went into feature production, he turned to the fairy tales that were already giving him the narratives for some of his Silly Symphonies.

  Disney remembered seeing the silent Marguerite Clark live-action version of Snow White when he was a fifteen-year-old newspaper carrier. The Kansas City Star sponsored five free showings of Snow White at Kansas City’s Convention Hall on January 27–28, 1917. The film was shown on four screens hanging at right angles in the center of the hall, so that someone sitting at one of the angles could see the film on tw
o different screens. “From the spot where I viewed the picture,” Disney wrote in 1938, “I was able to watch two screens at the same time. I could look at one screen and tell what was going to happen on the next.”4

  Although the Clark Snow White seems clumsy now, its Kansas City showings were a huge event, attracting crowds that the newspaper sponsors claimed totaled sixty-seven thousand people. The film made an impression on Disney for more than one reason. Not only was it one of the first “big feature pictures” he had seen, but “I thought it was a perfect story.”5

  If nothing else, he knew from that film that the Grimms’ story could be expanded without strain to feature length. Many other fairy tales, like the few he had already made into Silly Symphonies, could not. Fairy tales are as a rule rather stark. Disney’s challenge in adapting one of them for an animated film was to enrich the characterizations without destroying the story’s structure. The “Snow White” of the brothers Grimm was especially well suited to such expansion because its characters included seven undifferentiated dwarfs.

  One of the earliest traces of work on Snow White—twenty-one pages of “Snowwhite [sic] Suggestions,” dated August 9, 1934—includes a list of suggested names and traits for the dwarfs, who are unnamed in the Grimms’ version of the story.6 Giving the dwarfs distinct identities would permit shifting the weight of the story away from the lethal rivalry between Snow White and the queen, and toward Snow White’s stay with the little men. The girl and the dwarfs could have a warmer relationship, to say the least, and one more congenial to animation as it was developing at Disney’s studio. As much as Shakespeare or Verdi, Disney chose a subject that would take advantage of the abilities of the performers—that is, the animators—he was working with.

  Disney’s life was undergoing significant changes away from the studio, too. After more than eight years of marriage and two miscarriages, Lillian had given birth to a daughter, Diane Marie, on December 18, 1933. With a new home and a new daughter, Lillian now had strong competitors for whatever interest she felt in her husband’s work.

  Disney’s prosperity showed itself not just in the new house on Woking Way but in other ways. “For a good many years after Mickey Mouse was a success,” he said, “I still didn’t have a new car. And I think the first new car that I actually bought, I bought for Mrs. Disney. I still drove around in a little second-hand one that I had. When I got my family, then I had to get a family car, so . . . I splurged, I got a Packard, a new one.”

  The scrappy clothes that Lillian remembered from the 1920s were now far in the past. “He was always a nice dresser,” Roy Disney said in 1967. “He had a good taste for clothes, according to the styles at the time. . . . Walt always liked sports, he always liked the outside, he always liked . . . the dressy nice sides of life.” His attire was almost always California casual—a 1935 interviewer found him wearing “a gray polo shirt, tieless and open at the neck, light gray slacks and brown suede sports oxfords”7—but in photos from the time, he is clearly a man who enjoys well-made clothes.

  In the middle 1930s, the studio itself was, in the eyes of many of the people who worked there, a place made warm and inviting by its new prosperity. James Culhane, who worked for the Fleischer and Van Beuren studios in New York before joining the Disney staff in 1935, was struck by how different the Hyperion studio looked: “Everything was painted in bright tints of raspberry, light blue, and gleaming white, no institutional greens or bilious browns like the other studios.”8

  There was also, at least in the upper ranks of animators and assistants, much less of the brute pressure for footage that was so common at other studios. That is not to say that Disney’s employees had no incentives to work hard. By 1934 he was paying semiannual bonuses, based on profits and on a rating determined by five factors, including “importance to the organization” and “production department rating as to footage and quality of work.” But Disney “was the first one to introduce the idea of relaxing the grim grind on people,” the animator Dick Huemer told Joe Adamson. “And as a result he got more work out of them, because they worked out of love for what they were doing. And the fact that they were doing something a lot of them thought would be imperishable.”9 So relaxed was the atmosphere in the middle 1930s, the animator Grim Natwick said, “at one time there was quite a lot of dice rolling in the animation rooms. We heard that it disturbed Walt, and Jack [Campbell], who was a rather astute fellow, came in one day with big rubber dice that you couldn’t hear rolling.”10

  The studio, until then populated almost entirely by people with no more than high school educations, was beginning to see an influx of new employees with college degrees. They tended to arrive in small waves, as word spread among friends—at Stanford University, for example—about the opportunities at Disney’s. In 1933 and 1934, beginners at Disney’s—one small group at a time, perhaps three or four men—got a brief “trial without pay.” They were trained to draw inbetweens by a man named George Drake, and at the end of a week, or perhaps two, were either dismissed or hired, at fifteen dollars a week.11

  There were variations in this pattern. When he started on June 1, 1933, George Goepper said, “it was sort of a revolving door, hiring and firing. Ben Sharpsteen would say to George Drake, ‘Who are we going to let go today?’ ” Goepper remembered Sharpsteen’s telling him, “If you want to try it for nothing, we’ll let you do that.” Goepper “started on a Wednesday, and at that time they worked until noon on Saturday, and paid then. It surprised me when I got a Mickey Mouse check, for eight or nine dollars.” When Sharpsteen asked him to work for nothing, Goepper concluded, “they were testing my attitude, too.”12

  The trainees were separated from the inbetweeners already on the payroll by what Eric Larson called “a little line of demarcation.” Larson, who also started on June 1, 1933, remembered being one of a handful of inbetweeners in this “bullpen,” “working like hell, waiting to be assigned to a unit, waiting for an animator to say, ‘I want that guy.’ ”

  It was during the “trial without pay”—and then in new hires’ continuing work as inbetweeners under Drake—that the Disney studio adhered to something like the old “grim grind.” Drake himself was disliked by most of his charges. As an inbetweener, “you’d be on the board with a drawing,” Larson said of Drake, “and he’d sit down and make a correction for you, and he couldn’t draw worth a damn. He’d make a correction—didn’t like it—he’d erase it. He’d make another one—erase it. Pretty soon, everything was so black, you couldn’t see what was on the board.”13

  Ben Sharpsteen described Drake—“a remote cousin-in-law from my mother’s side of the family” and previously an assistant animator of limited talents—as a victim of Walt Disney’s tendency to put people in jobs they were not capable of filling. As Sharpsteen put it, “Walt was often entirely too optimistic in the parceling out of responsibilities.”14 Said Ollie Johnston, one of the Stanford alumni who joined the Disney staff: “It was a strange thing about that studio. There were so many impossible people, and there was a genius like Walt who sometimes didn’t recognize these problems.”15

  Disney’s attitude was consistent with his entrepreneurial temperament: he was interested in what he wanted to do himself, not in assembling a management team, and he concerned himself with filling certain jobs only because someone had to be in them for the studio to function.

  In the late spring of 1934, the New York Times’s Douglas Churchill reported on a visit to Disney’s office, where he found an energetic man who was engrossed in his work. “Swimming, ice-skating, polo and riding are his diversions,” Churchill wrote. “Seven of his studio associates play polo with him, but purely for recreation, unlike those actors and executives on other lots to whom the game is serious business. He mixes little in Hollywood night life, feeling that he cannot do good work if he loses sleep.”16

  In a curious comment, Disney spoke dismissively to Churchill of “a professor” he had brought in “to lecture the boys on the psychology of humor. . .
. None of us knew what he was talking about.” He was undoubtedly referring to Boris V. Morkovin of the University of Southern California, who in April 1933 opened a ten-part lecture series at the Disney studio. Morkovin survived in the memories of some of his auditors as a heavy-handed pedant; his lectures bore such numbing titles as (for the sixth one) “cinematic treatment of characterization and externalization of mental states—normal and by distortion, by means of acting, mannerisms, symbolism, of animate and inanimate objects, atmosphere, contrast and different means of cinematic emphasis.” But Morkovin evidently impressed Disney. Later in 1933, at Disney’s request, he prepared a formal critique in which he worried to death an innocuous Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Steeplechase, and he continued to work at the studio for several more years.17

  Perhaps Disney was reluctant to admit to an outsider like Churchill just how seriously he was now approaching his work. He spoke to Churchill of making his first feature for only a quarter of a million dollars—that is, ten times the cost of a typical Silly Symphony, for a film about ten times as long—and, quite unbelievably, of destroying the feature if it didn’t please him. He was just a few weeks away from handing out scenes for The Golden Touch to the two animators he had chosen to animate that entire cartoon—Fred Moore and Norm Ferguson, the most admired members of his staff.

  It was those animators’ breakthroughs that were making a feature cartoon conceivable not just as a business proposition but as a piece of animation. In Three Little Pigs and then in The Flying Mouse—not yet released when Churchill interviewed Disney—Moore had animated characters that were warm and appealing like none before them. Ferguson, in the March 1934 release Playful Pluto, had through pointed changes in expression and posture successfully represented the flow of emotions in the title character’s dim canine brain as he struggled to free himself from flypaper. In other respects, too, the Disney films were advancing rapidly. By late 1933 and early 1934, production for some Silly Symphonies—The Flying Mouse, The Big Bad Wolf-— was taking six to eight months, with the added time paying off in richer surfaces and finer details.18