The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  On June 1, 1935, Disney sent memoranda to thirteen of his animators, criticizing their work individually. There is a tremendous gap between Disney’s cheerleading of three years earlier and the cool, direct language he addressed to his troops in these memos. This paragraph preceded each memo: “The following suggestions are offered in the sense of constructive criticism only. In our apparent avoidence [sic] of your good points and stress on your weaknesses, we have not lost sight of any of your virtues. But praise accomplishes nothing but a feeling to a small extent of self-confidence. It is just as likely to be a dangerous factor and be of more harm than good to you. Therefore, take these in the sense in which they are offered, as constructive criticism and let’s try to benefit by them.”

  There was not a memo for every animator—Ham Luske apparently did not get one—but of those who did, no one escaped unscathed. Dick Huemer was losing interest in his animation after the first pencil test. Dick Lundy was not drawing well enough. Bill Tytla and Grim Natwick were guilty of a lack of system. To Bob Wickersham he addressed these comments:

  It has been observed that you lack an understanding of the proper portrayal of gags. The development of showmanship is a valuable thing and plays a great part in one’s analytical ability. Your sense of timing is limited and needs to be developed. Likewise, your resourcefulness in handling a personality has need of improvement. There is an approaching danger of a laxity in the general systematic handling of your work. Be sure to watch for every opportunity of making your drawings foolproof, from the assistant’s and inbetween’s standpoint. Don’t lose sight of the fact that confusion at any point in a scene’s progress, be it on your board or the assistant’s or the inkers, makes for loss of time and an increase in animation cost.42

  The memo for Art Babbitt was unique in that Disney’s comments were addressed mainly not to his animation, but to the way he conducted himself: “It is up to the animators to maintain the morale of the plant by setting the examples for the younger men. In your own case, it has been observed that you have set bad examples many times by maintaining social relations during business hours, that, though of a dignified nature, have a tendency to create a non-professional makeup in younger and less experienced men. I believe we can count on your cooperation in this respect if only [i]n appreciation of the recent evidence of our faith in your ability.”43

  When Disney wrote those memos, he was preparing to leave on a trip to Europe with Roy, Lillian, and Edna. He was not fleeing the studio in doubt and despair, as he had in 1931. There was a medical aspect to the trip—Roy said many years later that “Walt was having treatment for what the doctors said was a defective thyroid,” and Roy thought that getting away from the studio would be better for his brother than the injections he was receiving—and there was a business side, too, since Walt would accept an award from the League of Nations in Paris. But otherwise it was to be a true vacation, a tenth wedding anniversary trip for both couples, with visits to a half dozen countries. It was the first time either Walt or Roy had been to Europe since just after the war, and neither of their wives had ever been.

  The Disneys arrived in London on June 12, on the boat train from Plymouth, and the Associated Press reported that “a throng that included many children” greeted them so enthusiastically that “police had to intervene to protect them from the crush.”44 In the weeks afterward, they saw England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Holland, and Italy, driving much of the time. “Walt was quite a tourist,” Roy said. “One of the things at Strasbourg—the mechanical clock up there [in the cathedral]. . . . Walt was intrigued with that clock in Strasbourg and made sketches of it and went to quite a bit of effort to try to get up in the tower to try to see how it worked. He wasn’t successful in that. But things like that intrigued him very much.”

  On July 20, the Disneys traveled from Venice to Rome, where they had audiences with Premier Benito Mussolini and the pope.45 Roy spoke of Mussolini’s office in terms that all but cry out for cartoon treatment: “You know, he had a real big office—real big. He was back in the corner. We had to walk across that. The fellow that was taking us in had the squeaky Italian shoes that you may have heard. So, down there, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak all the way to Mussolini. He was sitting there and he has the spotlight on you and he sits in the relative shadow. You sat in the chair and you were right under a spotlight. But he was most pleasant, most cordial.”46

  On August 1, after six weeks in Europe, the Disneys arrived back in New York on the Italian liner Rex.47 Four days later, they disembarked at the Santa Fe station in Pasadena, where, the Los Angeles Examiner reported, Walt was “immediately rushed by autograph seekers.”48

  Disney’s absence from the studio did not mean that cartoons were released without his involvement. The production records indicate that the cartoons released during and just after his trip were far along in work before he left, so he could have seen and approved the rough animation, at least. As for the cartoons in production, when he returned, Bill Tytla wrote, “some of the pictures took a beating—some parts had to be done over,” but Tytla himself managed “to get by with very little changes.”49

  Disney had been reassured by the success in Europe of programs made up of five or six of his shorts—their success boded well for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Disney’s enthusiasm for the picture had been rekindled after a long dormant period. In an interview with Louella Parsons just after his return, he spoke in terms highly similar to those he had used with Douglas Churchill the year before. He expected to devote fifteen months to the production of Snow White—he was still thinking of having it ready for release at Christmas 1936, in other words—and to spend more on it “than we have ever spent on any four of our other pictures.”50

  On the evening of October 8, 1935, Don Graham held the first of a series of classes in “action analysis.” The idea, Disney said in an October 17 memo, was to study the movements of the human body, and to hear at times from animators who would describe “any advancement or improvement that they have been able to make in the handling of their animation.”51 Observation of the real world, of how people and things actually looked and moved, had been a priority at the Disney studio since Graham’s classes began in 1932, but now, with the feature in prospect, such study would become more intense.

  As the animation changed, one casualty was the flicker marks around a character’s head that Disney himself used to add. Such marks, Ham Luske wrote in 1935, “should no longer be used.”52

  In the run-up to the feature, Disney’s key people were committing their thoughts to paper in a way that was new. In August, Ted Sears wrote a memo on “Disney Characters at Their Best” (“Mickey is most amusing when in a serious predicament trying to accomplish some purpose under difficulties or against time”), and at the end of the year Ferguson, Babbitt, and other animators described how they animated the characters Sears had discussed from a story point of view. Disney intended that such memoranda would guide those members of the staff left behind on the shorts when he put what he considered his best animators to work on the feature.

  Toward the end of the year, Disney himself reduced his thoughts to paper in several long memoranda, extraordinarily detailed compared with anything of the kind he had written before.

  Even though the memo titled “Production Notes—Shorts” is unsigned and undated, it clearly was written around the end of the year, and the “I” who speaks in it is unmistakably Disney. (Neither is there any indication to whom the memo is addressed, although its content suggests that it went to the directors and a few other members of the staff who worked closely with him.) Disney dismissed two of the more inventive cartoons of the preceding year: Music Land, a musical fantasy in which humanized musical instruments from the “Land of Symphony” war with their counterparts on the “Isle of Jazz,” and Cock o’the Walk, in which barnyard fowl, in astonishing numbers, parody the elaborate Busby Berkeley dance numbers in such live-action musicals as Gold Diggers of 1935.

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��True,” Disney wrote of those cartoons, “a lot of people will like these pictures, but the vast public that we are appealing to will not like them as a whole. . . . They are not the type of picture that we want to make, because we are making . . . pictures to appeal to the masses.” The best cartoons, he said, as if laying out a credo for his feature, appealed both to specialized tastes and to “the masses.” Writing in terms that applied at least as much to his feature as to the shorts, he fastened on the importance of the animators to successful films: “An animator should not be allowed to start on a scene until he has not only the mechanics and routine of the business, but the feeling and the idea behind the scene thoroughly in mind.” Animators’ time in story meetings should be devoted “to finding out what possibilities the scene presents to the animator, stirring up his imagination, stirring up his vision, stimulating his thought regarding what can be done in the scene.”53

  In a December 20, 1935, memorandum evaluating Bill Tytla’s animation in Cock o’ the Walk, he emphasized caricature, calling it “the thing we are striving for.” He offered this advice: “On any future stuff where we use human action, first, study it for the mechanics, then look at it from the angle of what these humans could do if they weren’t held down by the limitations of the human body and gravity.” He expressed a strong preference for “doing things . . . which humans are unable to do.”54

  Disney emphasized caricature again in a memo he wrote to Don Graham three days later, to lay the groundwork for more extensive training: “The first duty of the cartoon is not to picture or duplicate real action or things as they actually happen—but to give a caricature of life and action.”55

  There was, in short, a lot of intensive self-examination by Disney and his people, “with the thought in mind,” as Disney said in his October 17 memo, “to prepare ourselves now for the future.” The question was, as work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began to pick up speed again, whether Walt Disney’s stubbornly personal working methods were really compatible with the industrial apparatus he had assembled and would need now to make a feature.

  As in previous years, the increase in employees’ numbers did not bring a significant change in the number of releases; only eighteen Disney shorts came out in 1935, one more than the year before. New employees were further dividing work that was already being done, as with the animators who now specialized in “special effects” like rain and fire, or they were doing jobs that had not been done before, as with the sound-effects department that Disney set up in 1934. It started with two members and soon grew to five.

  Inevitably, the studio was growing more bureaucratic as it grew larger, but Disney—like many an entrepreneur at the head of a rapidly growing small business—continued to regard the studio as an extension of himself. Wilfred Jackson explained how that worked: “When [Walt] got ideas, he visualized the whole thing, 100 percent. . . . He’d give you a little action, he’d describe something the Mouse should do, and you’d think you had the whole idea of what Mickey was supposed to do, and you’d show him the drawings, and he’d say, ‘No, Jack, we talked this all over, his tail shouldn’t be back there, it should be up like this.’ ”56

  However problematical Disney’s intensely personal approach to filmmaking may have been in some respects, it also contributed immensely to the success of his films, for reasons suggested by Douglas Churchill in his 1934 article. “When he talks of a picture or a plot,” Churchill wrote of Disney, “he becomes animated, intense; his mimicry leaps out; he moves about impersonating the characters, making grotesque faces to stress his point.”57 This was a side of Disney’s involvement that his animators found particularly appealing, and particularly helpful. Said Ward Kimball, who witnessed such performances in later years: “When he took the parts of . . . any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything—he all of a sudden was a valet, just as good, we said, as Chaplin, for that moment, in the room, showing us how it ought to be done.”58

  That side of Disney’s involvement is also particularly hard to grasp now. The transcripts of story meetings rarely give any sense of how he might have been portraying a character. The closest thing to a window on Disney’s performances is probably a radio program heard only on the West Coast, the Hind’s Hall of Fame Christmas show of December 23, 1934.59 At the time, he was wrestling with the continuity for Snow White, but the radio show is a romp, with Disney pretending to banter with his cartoon characters (all represented by the people who gave them their voices on the screen, like Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, and Pinto Colvig, the voice of Goofy).

  Disney read scripts on any number of radio shows in the 1930s, always stiffly, but on the Hall of Fame he seems for once to lose himself in a role, that of the boss of a gang of unruly cartoon characters. Disney’s sparring with Donald Duck and the others is not really acting so much as it is playacting—enthusiastic and spontaneous make-believe. He is playing “Walt Disney,” of course, but with striking emotional openness, and it was surely that openness, more than any acting skills, that made his performances so valuable to the animators and writers who watched him. There may be awkwardness in Disney’s radio playacting, but there is no hesitation or embarrassment. Though Dolores Voght, Disney’s secretary for many years, was not thinking of such performances when she said, “There was nothing subtle about that man at all, believe me,”60 her words sum up their particular virtues.

  By 1934, the Disney cartoons were relying increasingly on dialogue recorded before the animation began—an aid to more realistic acting, because now the animator could be stimulated by what he heard in the character’s voice. Disney himself had recorded Mickey’s falsetto dialogue for years (after a long struggle in the first year or two to come up with a suitable voice), and he was joined in voice recordings by Marcellite Garner, a member of the ink and paint staff who provided Minnie Mouse’s voice. In recording sessions, Garner said, Disney “would go through a whole situation and act out all the characters and explain the mood, ’til I really felt the part. Burt Gillett did the same if it wasn’t necessary for Walt to be there. However, no one else could just simply become all the characters as Walt did.”61

  In November 1935, Disney still intended to direct Snow White himself, but it is not clear just how much of the nuts-and-bolts work of a director he expected to do. A piece under his name that was published while Snow White was in production said that a cartoon director was “primarily an expert technician, versed in the mechanics of picture-making,” and Disney looked upon much of the director’s work as “pretty routine,” Ben Sharpsteen said.62 But Disney clearly thought that the studio could absorb work on Snow White without serious disruption. As of late 1935, he intended, as he wrote in his memorandum titled “Production Notes—Shorts,” that “short subject directors and crews [that is, their layout artists and assistant directors] will remain practically as they are” during work on Snow White.63

  In a November 25, 1935, memorandum, Disney listed how he expected to assign about a dozen of his animators to Snow White. He envisioned spreading the characters among the animators, so that Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, Bill Roberts, and Dick Lundy would all be animating the dwarfs. Likewise, although Ham Luske was to be in charge of Snow White herself, Disney planned to have Les Clark animating the girl, too, with Grim Natwick and another animator, Eddie Strickland, acting “in a way as assistants to Ham, handling [action] scenes under his direction, with Ham concentrating on personality entirely. I feel sure that both Natwick and Strickland will gain a great deal of knowledge by working this way with Ham.”64

  In other words, Disney planned to cast his animators in only the most general terms, departing from a pattern he had already established in his short subjects. From the start of the United Artists release, Disney had encouraged more sustained and thoughtful work by his animators, giving many of them sequences lasting a minute or so on the screen. With Three Little Pigs he had gone a step further, casting his animators not just by sequence but by character. He had continued casting the
m in that fashion on many of the cartoons that followed, the Silly Symphonies especially.

  In Broken Toys, whose animation was completed just a few weeks before Disney wrote his November 25 memo, the animators were cast very thoroughly by character, to the point that most scenes have only one character in them. A girl doll was wholly Natwick’s, just as other characters belonged to Bill Tytla, Art Babbitt, and Dick Huemer. The doll was convincingly feminine in both drawing and animation, like other characters Natwick had animated, and she could only have reinforced Disney’s intention to assign Natwick to Snow White herself.

  Other cartoons had been cast by character almost as thoroughly, and animators often shared scenes. But Snow White was going to be a much longer film, with many more characters, and Disney most likely shrugged off the idea of casting by character as hopelessly impractical, the sort of thing that might drag out production months longer. The alternative—smoothing out inconsistencies in the different animators’ handling of the same character—must have seemed like the easier road to take.

  Disney was, however, pitting his new film not against other short cartoons but against live-action features, with casts made up of real people. To hold an audience’s attention, his characters’ screen presence would have to be comparable to that of the live actors who would be their true competition. In a short cartoon, color and music and cleverness could easily outweigh minor differences in the way a character looked and moved after being drawn by several different animators. In a feature there was a much greater danger that such a character would seem superficial or even incoherent, a mere mannequin defined mostly by voice and design.