The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  But Disney’s layer of first-rate talent was still thin. The Mickey Mouse cartoons that followed Playful Pluto in 1934 do not suggest that anyone learned very quickly from what Norm Ferguson had done. Only in Mickey Plays Papa, a September release, is there any animation that seems to take Ferguson’s Playful Pluto animation as its model. In that animation, by Dick Lundy, Mickey struggles to remove a rubber nipple from his nose—but there is no sign of the clearly visible, rapidly changing mental states that distinguished Ferguson’s animation. There is instead only an elaborate prop gag.

  As the Disney animators struggled to absorb the techniques and insights that their most creative colleagues had come up with, they often had to apply those techniques and insights to stories that resisted them. The gap between what Ferguson had shown to be possible and what was actually being done was perhaps at its widest in the tableau that closes Mickey’s Steamroller, released in June 1934. Two young mice have used a steamroller to wreak havoc, finally destroying a hotel. Mickey rises from the rubble with the little mice teeter-tottering on his head—and he grins witlessly. It is all too obvious that some imperative—for a “happy ending,” perhaps—has overridden, easily, any faint impulse toward emotional plausibility.

  Disney had shown some awareness of the problem. Early in 1934, he offered fifty dollars to anyone outside the story department who came up with a usable story idea. He was explicit in wanting more than just a title or a setting. “A story is not merely a bunch of situations thrown together in any form, just to allow an opportunity for action,” he wrote in a memorandum distributed to the staff. “A good story should contain a lesson or have a moral—or it should definitely tell something interesting which leads up to a climax that will have a punch and impress an audience. . . . Your story should deal mostly with personalities.” He offered Three Little Pigs as the prime example of what he was after: “The biggest hit to date in cartoon form and yet so simple that it only contains four characters, with no large objects”—that is, big machines like trains or boats—“to detract or take away from the personalities of these characters.”19

  By the time he wrote that memo, Disney had good reason to know how difficult it would be to adhere to its precepts. Toward the end of 1933, he had dictated a three-page outline for “A Silly Symphony Idea, Based on the Lives of the Little Penguins in the Far-Off Artic [sic] Land.” That idea, as rewritten three times by Bill Cottrell, eventually resulted in Peculiar Penguins, a Silly Symphony released in September 1934. The film itself is an insipid romance, nothing but a more elaborate version of such very early Silly Symphonies as Monkey Melodies (1930)—boy and girl characters cuddle and dance in the first half of the cartoon and dispatch a menace of some kind in the second half—but Disney’s outline was even worse, loading up the story with a rival to its hero, “Peter Penguin,” and concluding with a wedding.20

  There is no record of who worked with Disney on the story for The Golden Touch in the spring of 1934, but he clearly was deeply involved (his comments—in distinctive hand-blocked characters—show up on a heavily reworked treatment or preliminary script).21 He began handing out animation for The Golden Touch in June 1934, and it was more than six months before Moore and Ferguson delivered their last scenes. The film itself reached theaters in March 1935.

  Surprisingly, considering Disney’s plans, the completed Golden Touch signals immediately that its director is recycling old ideas more than testing new ones. King Midas and his cat are indistinguishable from characters Ferguson animated in earlier films. The king tips his crown and winks at the camera before breaking into a very deliberately articulated song (this was one of the first Silly Symphonies with a lot of dialogue recorded in advance), accompanied by very broad, shallow, stagey gestures. Midas is an unattractive character because he is so greedy, but to make things worse, he performs in a highly artificial manner sharply at odds with the more realistic acting style that was emerging in live-action films. Whatever sympathy or interest an audience might want to feel is put to the test right away.

  Neither is it easy to like Goldie, the elf who bestows the golden touch. Moore animated all of his scenes, just as Ferguson animated almost all of Midas’s, but there is in the animation of Goldie none of Moore’s vaunted charm. Goldie’s gestures, like a waggling index finger, are as hackneyed as Midas’s, and he responds to the distraught Midas’s plea for a hamburger by asking, in a nasty tone of voice, “With or without onions?”

  Disney struggled with his film. The animation of The Golden Touch bumped along slowly, with pauses and delays, and it stopped completely late in the summer while Disney reworked the middle of the story. It was apparently not until October 1934 that The Golden Touch was sufficiently under control that Disney could begin leading meetings devoted to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Notes survive from four meetings held that month.

  One artist, Albert Hurter, took part in at least one of the October meetings, but Disney was working mostly with writers who did not draw. Just as with the silent Alices and Oswalds, there is nothing to indicate that sketches played a very important part in early story work. Most of the Disney cartoons made in 1934 still had very little dialogue, but Snow White in its early stages threatened to become a dialogue-heavy film, as if Disney and his writers could not help but measure themselves against live-action features. Dick Creedon in particular dictated many pages of dialogue in the days just after he circulated an eighteen-page outline dated October 22.22 What Creedon wrote betrayed his origins as a radio writer, telling too much—as if the action the dialogue accompanied would not be visible—and revealing too little. Creedon’s dialogue for a “lodge meeting” of the dwarfs even resembled an episode of Amos ’n Andy, complete with such ludicrous “lodge” titles as “the Much Most Exalted Mastodonic and Majestic Mammoth.”

  The dwarfs, readily imaginable as cartoon characters, were at the center of this early effort. Everyone had trouble getting a grip on the other characters, the queen in particular, and on the story as a whole. It demanded a serious approach that was alien to writers and artists who had always been concerned with gags and whose first impulse was to find ways to give Snow White a pervasive comic tone.

  More outlines and a large meeting followed in November, but then the record trails away. Disney made several stabs at dictating a detailed continuity—essentially, a greatly expanded outline—in December, with the final twenty-six-page version dated December 26, 1934.23 Insistent on simplicity and directness in his short cartoons, Disney now had trouble meeting the same demands in his Snow White continuity. This was especially evident in his handling of the scenes with the queen, which he saw as dominated by heavy-handed scare, and some of the sequences with the dwarfs, who were to eat soup and build a bed for Snow White in what looked like long digressions. His continuity was D.W. Griffith–inspired—in the worst melodramatic sense—in its handling of the prince, as it described him breaking out of the queen’s dungeon and racing to Snow White’s rescue.

  By early 1935, Disney’s confident predictions of a few months earlier about Snow White—he had foreseen release late in 1935 or early in 1936—had been called into question by events. The writing of the story was not proceeding smoothly, and Disney’s own work as a director had disappointed him and his colleagues. And there was something else. While Disney was making The Golden Touch, Wilfred Jackson was directing The Goddess of Spring, a Silly Symphony whose cast was dominated by more or less realistically drawn human characters of exactly the sort that would be so important in Snow White.

  Goddess was released in November 1934. That month, Jackson said in a studio publication that “the characters selected for the leading roles were not a definite enough type for the broad treatment which must be used in cartoon drawings.”24 Those characters, the goddess Persephone and the god Pluto, were spongy in appearance and movement, the drawing and the animation weak and tentative. Disney never explicitly identified The Goddess of Spring as a trial run for Snow White, but it could not have encouraged him to p
roceed with the feature.

  Against these setbacks, Disney was making progress on other fronts. The Tortoise and the Hare, released in January 1935, took a long step forward in its animation, particularly the scenes of the hare animated by Hamilton Luske. An athlete himself, Luske did not just give the hare natural movements that recalled a real athlete’s; he also edited those movements in a way that emphasized the hare’s fantastic speed. He exaggerated the anticipation and the follow-through in the hare’s swing, for example, as the hare played tennis with himself—but because the swing itself looks natural, the hare’s speed wins acceptance on its own terms. This was not just comic exaggeration, but true caricature of movement.

  Advances like Luske’s may not have been immediately applicable to the challenges that Snow White posed, but they encouraged other advances. In mid-1935, an unsigned memo asked for “stronger and better gag situations” and offered rewards of twenty-five to fifty dollars for usable ideas. The “gag situations” the anonymous author had in mind were ones that animators could exploit effectively: “In many cases some impossible gag was made to look plausible. Audiences laugh at the Hare’s one-man tennis game because it is made to look possible by exaggerated speed and realistic action.”25 A gag writer might ask for that “exaggerated speed and realistic action,” but only the animator could provide it.

  Where such animation advances were concerned, the Disney animators worked in an atmosphere that was strikingly generous and open, especially compared with those studios where animators jealously hoarded their bags of tricks. “It was not at all unusual for one animator to help another, or to tell him of a discovery,” Art Babbitt said. “For instance, I learned of flexibility in the face when a character is speaking; the guys who hammered it home to me were Ham Luske and Freddie Moore. Before that, it was sort of hit and miss for me. Sometimes I did it right, and sometimes I didn’t. But now I knew.”26

  Character animators like Luske and Moore had shed more and more routine duties as the years had gone by, passing them along to two or three layers of assistants. By 1935 the transition was complete. The character animators worked on only the most important drawings, and those “in the rough”—a procedure alien to most of the animation industry. As Disney methods changed, the studio’s doors gradually closed to experienced animators from the outside, people steeped in other ways of making cartoons.

  One of the few outside animators to win a place on the staff after the early 1930s was Bill Tytla, who followed his friend Babbitt from the Terrytoons studio in New York in November 1934. Tytla might have joined Disney a year earlier than he did, but for Disney’s reluctance to pay Tytla as much as the studio’s top animators were already making. He wanted Tytla to first prove himself on Disney films. (It is unclear who finally gave in.)27 The dancer and actress Marge Champion—who as Marjorie Belcher married Babbitt in the summer of 1937—remembered Tytla as “this incredible Slavic creature” who cultivated a sort of peasant exterior: “It always surprised me that he was as sophisticated as he was,” she said, “because his pretense was always [that he was] like the farmer, the working person, the immigrant.” Tytla was “colorful,” she said, “because he was so passionate.”28

  Tytla’s was a passion so distinctively ethnic (he was the child of Ukrainian immigrants) that it may have made Walt Disney a little uneasy. Even as Tytla emerged as one of the studio’s best animators, Disney’s sympathies were clearly weighted toward the sort of animation Fred Moore was giving him—that is, animation that was immediately appealing, even if it purchased that appeal by sacrificing some of the complexity suggested in the best animation by Tytla and Babbitt.

  Disney clearly admired Tytla, but “he and Tytla didn’t fit together in the same way that he and Fred [Moore] did,” Ollie Johnston said. “Walt and Fred didn’t seem to have any problem communicating with each other,” whereas Moore could be more difficult for others to understand. He talked in a sort of verbal shorthand that required a frame of reference to comprehend fully—and Disney obviously had it.29

  Disney was now raising up animators to take the places that once would have been filled by older men who had worked at places like the Fleischer and Mintz studios. By 1935, the inbetween department had become a full-fledged training department, and, Don Graham said, “classes of a dozen or so new employees got six to eight weeks of instruction in drawing and animation,” the first two weeks of it entirely in Graham’s life classes. They were also encouraged to attend the night classes.30

  As the studio grew—by 1935 it had more than 250 employees—Walt Disney himself became a remote and even intimidating figure to some of his employees. Eric Larson, as a junior animator in the middle 1930s, typically saw Disney only in the sweatbox: “He’d go in the sweatbox, and he’d tear things apart, and he’d go out, in a matter of a half hour. . . . I had some demoralizing experiences with him right off the bat, when I started animating. For instance, in On Ice [which was being animated in the spring of 1935], Mickey and Minnie were skating and had these big smiles on their faces—they were happy—and I didn’t take them off. Walt was sitting there next to me, watching this, and he turned to me and said, ‘Can’t they ever shut their damned mouths?’ . . . I bet I hadn’t even gotten to my room when somebody stopped me on the way and said, ‘I hear Walt wants you to shut Mickey and Minnie’s mouths.’ ”31

  Campbell Grant, who started as an inbetweener in 1934 after working in a federal arts project, recalled: “The whole philosophy at that time . . . was exemplified by Ben Sharpsteen, who once told me flat out, ‘Listen, you artists are a dime a dozen, and don’t forget it.’ He was pretty close to it; there were a lot of guys, and some damned fine artists, that were having a hard time.”32

  With other jobs scarce, newer members of the staff had every incentive to try to find ways to catch Disney’s attention. Thor Putnam, who joined the staff in 1934 and began working in layout the next year, remembered that one of the first things he learned was that “you always left a good drawing on your board” because Disney so often prowled the studio at night.33 In the story department, Homer Brightman said, the office politics were fierce, with real danger that good gags would be stolen. The only sure way to get credit, he said, was “to pull a terrific gag in front of Walt.”34 Joe Grant attracted Disney’s eye with story sketches that incorporated color and were sometimes more finished than the norm. “Your whole focus was appealing to Walt to stimulate him,” he said. “And also to raise yourself in his esteem; after all, I was new.”35

  In the middle 1930s, Disney’s relationships with those employees who had known him since the studio was much smaller began to change irrevocably. It was not that their affection or regard for Disney diminished. Wilfred Jackson even speculated that Disney’s cigarette cough was in part genuine and in part “consideration”: “I think he liked to let us know he was there. Anyway, there was that cough, and you’d always come to attention.”36 Grim Natwick recalled that when he came to the Disney studio in 1934, Disney “play[ed] handball with the guys, and even used to get out and play softball. . . . Walt was just like anybody else.”37 But Disney was becoming a celebrated man—he monopolized the Academy Awards for animated short subjects after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established that category in 1932—and his growing fame, along with his prosperity and his new baby, combined to make socializing with his employees increasingly what Dick Huemer called “an unnatural arrangement. . . . One by one everybody dropped out of the little coterie.”38 Disney did visit some of his employees’ homes in later years (usually with a specific purpose in mind), and he occasionally recruited one of them as a traveling companion when Lillian was not available. But there was never any sense that he was “just like anybody else.”

  Disney’s separation from his employees coincided with his emergence as an artist, and the two developments were closely related.

  “Nobody took offense at the slightest criticism,” Huemer told Joe Adamson. “We asked for it, we’d go to Walt and say, �
�Walt, in the last picture, I wasn’t satisfied with something. What was wrong?’ And he would try to tell you. . . . We had that interest in our product. It was a like a crusade to do the best, and it never seemed good enough.”39 Such traffic was to be in one direction, of course. Disney was not interested in revisiting even his most recent failures. Early in March 1935, the veteran animator Johnny Cannon sent him two typewritten pages on how The Golden Touch might have been improved—a gratuitous exercise, to say the least, but Disney responded graciously:

  Some of the thoughts expressed sound very good and might have helped considerably to pep up the picture. However, at this stage it is too late. I know the picture is not good, but it is impossible to make any radical changes in it at this time. It is unfortunate that we missed on MIDAS as I felt that it had possibilities of being a very good cartoon. About the best thing we can do at this stage is to profit by our mistakes in the making of future pictures.40

  Not only was “the best” to be as Disney defined it, but by 1935 he was articulating what “the best” meant to him as he never had before, at least on the record. If in the early 1930s the cartoons had advanced mainly thanks to the trading of ideas among the animators themselves—exchanges that took place in an environment that Disney created, of course—he had now more than caught up. Disney was always a man who wanted to be in charge, even in someone else’s home. “You tried to be the host—it was your house, and your food—and he made it impossible for you to be the host,” said Kenneth Anderson, a highly versatile artist and trained architect who joined the staff in 1934. Instead, Disney took over and dictated how things should be done.41 For him not to be taking the lead was, from his point of view, simply an unnatural situation.