The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  To further complicate matters, Disney planned to shoot parts of Snow White on the new multiplane camera, a gargantuan device his technicians had designed to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality. For those scenes, the cels, background paintings, and overlay paintings might be on as many as six different levels, with the backgrounds and overlays painted on sheets of glass mounted several inches apart. As the camera moved—trucking in and out or panning—different levels would come in and out of focus, as if they were being photographed by a live-action camera. Hand worried aloud that multiplane scenes might stack up late in production.82

  Disney’s attention to detail extended to such matters as well as to the characters. In a September 3, 1936, story meeting on Snow White’s encounter with the animals in the woods, a stenographer recorded these comments, probably directed mostly at the layout artist Charles Philippi, one of the participants: “In the long shots, work in the larger animals in the foreground. Also work in shadows of leaves against the trees wherever possible. Work in mushrooms through this sequence—different colored mushrooms that you see in Europe.”83

  A month later, talking about the dwarfs’ march home from their mine, he said he wanted “different settings as they walk along—some trees that have lost part of their bark and stand out white in spots—have them go through a bunch of pines and come out in an aspen grove—or birches . . . and spots where there are big rocks with moss on them of different colors—young and green and old, dark and dried.”84

  Disney’s conception of his film matured so remarkably over the two years of production that he was able to resist even the strong temptation to pump up the brief sequence in which the dwarfs mourn Snow White at her bedside. Almost a year after the film was finished, Dave Hand was still speculating about how, “had we been clever enough, and analyzed the situation more thoroughly, we could have obtained a stronger audience reaction.” Hand pointed to the pies that Snow White was making when the queen interrupted her and tempted her into eating the poisoned apple: “Might we not have used these uneaten pies as a touch in there to draw a little more of a tear from the audience? By a deep analysis of our situation, might we not convey the idea to the audience a little stronger, instead of this crude way of presenting Snow White dead and the dwarfs around her crying?”

  Hand was speaking to a studio audience, and some of his auditors got into the spirit of things, suggesting that the sequence could have been made even more affecting if the soup and bed-building sequences had been left in the film: “It would have been a touching thing to have shown Snow White on that bed—the dwarfs wanted to build it for her, then got it ready only in time for her death.”85

  That sort of overemphasis, so common in Hollywood live-action features, threatened to invade Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs throughout its production. Work on the film was less a search for such weak ideas—they were there from the start, as with the “tear-jerker” of a prayer that Disney himself initially thought that Doc should deliver—than a continuing struggle to keep them out. Disney not only had to work free of his own mistakes, but he also had to resist well-meant but potentially deadly suggestions from members of his staff. He had to exclude from his film anything that might amount to an expression of doubt that animated characters could ever command an audience’s attention for the length of a feature film.

  Disney’s firmest expressions of confidence in his medium came during work on the grieving sequence, which was written and animated in the spring and summer of 1937, late in production of the film. He insisted, in effect, that the dwarfs could win the audience’s sympathy without begging for it. “Each one should do a simple thing,” he said. “If you try to do too much with the scene you will run into trouble.” He wanted his audience to see his characters plain. When the layout artist Ken Anderson voiced concern that the dwarfs “might look funny crying,” Disney replied, “I think you’ll really feel for them. . . . You’ll miss something if you don’t show close-ups, I think.”86

  Disney never expressed any second thoughts about the deliberate pacing and tight framing of that sequence, but he did regret that he had not slowed the pace a little at other points in the film, as when Snow White prays for the “little men.” “Before we finished Snow White,” he said in 1938, “I was talking to Charlie Chaplin about it, and he said, ‘Don’t be afraid to let your audience wait for a few things in your picture—don’t be afraid to let your tempo go slow here and there.’ Well, I thought he did it too much, because I used to get itchy from watching his pictures. But it’s the truth—they appreciate things more when you don’t fire them too fast.”87

  In his memo to Don Graham, Disney had used the phrase “a caricature of life” to describe what he wanted from animation, but he dwelled mostly on the caricaturing of physical action. It was in work on Snow White, and particularly in his shaping of the animation of the dwarfs, that Disney embraced a broader conception of such caricature, one that encompassed the mind as well as the body. Bill Tytla’s animation of Grumpy was the purest expression of such caricature. Tytla drew extraordinarily well, and he preserved in his animation the sense of a consistent character while representing accurately a tremendous fluidity of thoughts and emotions. “It is the change of shape that shows the character is thinking,”88 Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written—a point made especially clear by the changes in Grumpy’s face in Tytla’s animation. Grumpy was still a cartoon character, with a cartoon character’s exaggerated features, a big nose especially, but Tytla took advantage of those features by using them to make the tumult inside Grumpy’s head wholly visible.

  Grumpy was the dwarf who at once most strongly resisted Snow White but also cared most for her. Tytla conveyed that mix of emotions with extraordinary vividness, so that, for example, when he sticks his tongue out, Grumpy is not so much hostile to Snow White as indignant and resentful that he cares about her. Tytla was, in effect, a “method actor” in animation. He owned Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons, the 1933 book that introduced to many Americans the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky’s ideas about acting, and he pursued Stanislavsky’s goal of an emotional identification with his character—something that simply had not existed in animation before.

  It was through such animation that Disney reconciled his impulse to make a comic film—one organized around gags, as his shorts had been—with the serious nature of the story itself. The dwarfs were, in their appearance and their actions, unmistakably comic characters, and Snow White itself had a clear comic structure, in a way that the original story did not. (In the film, Snow White’s return to life is truly the happy ending, whereas the Grimms’ story saves for the last the queen’s gruesome death, the penalty she pays for trying to cling to youth and beauty.) But the film was also as serious, in its way, as a comic opera by Mozart, because the best animation of the dwarfs was so emotionally rich, the range of their emotions so persuasively broad. They were funny and endearing little men, not little men who did funny things.

  Snow White was important to the studio, Don Graham said while work on the film was still under way, because it knocked down ideas about what could and could not be done in animation. Difficulties lay not in “the limitations of animation,” he said, “but the inability of the animator to handle it or to understand the problem.”89 It was in Tytla’s animation—which Graham admired tremendously—that animation’s horizons opened widest, but others among the Disney animators were not far behind.

  In the closing weeks of 1937, no one had time to consider the implications of what Tytla had done in his animation, and of what Disney had done in the entire film. Years later, Disney lamented Snow White’s rough edges. “We were really not ready,” he said in 1956. “We needed another two or three years to do what we wanted to do on Snow White.” Some shortcomings, like the weak rotoscoped animation of the prince, were beyond remedy, for lack of time, money, and adequate skills, but Disney could correct another mistake. In November, just weeks before the film’s scheduled premi
ere, he cut two minutes from Moore’s sequence—the first one he animated—in which the dwarfs confront Snow White in their bedroom. Perce Pearce, a writer and then a director of part of Snow White, suggested in 1939 that Disney paid a price for relying heavily on written scripts in the early work on Snow White, when the bedroom sequence was written. Because it is difficult to describe pantomime action adequately, but easy to get the same point across through dialogue, “you just naturally go after it [by] over-writing dialogue,” Pearce said.90 The deleted minutes were heavy with dialogue made superfluous by Moore’s animation of the rest of the sequence.

  In inking and painting, particularly, the pressure in the final weeks was intense, as some of the women who worked there remembered many years later. Toward the end of work on Snow White, Les Clark’s sister Marceil said, “it was almost as if you were in a trance, all the time, like an automaton, getting the stuff out.”91 In the drive to finish the film on time, Mary Eastman said, “the girls almost got a little hysterical over it. It was this great community effort, and we were the ones who were putting it through—for Walt, who had such charisma. . . . The girls had a worshipful attitude toward him.”92 Said Margaret Smith: “We’d go in at seven and work until ten three days, and until five on the other two days. We worked all day Saturdays, and sometimes we’d work Sundays.”93 At the peak of work on Snow White, Dodie Monahan said, the inkers and painters were working “from seven in the morning until eleven at night. . . . I never heard anybody complaining; it was kind of a thrill to work there at that time, on the first feature.”94

  Women were restricted to such work as a matter of studio policy, as a 1938 handbook for potential employees made clear: “All inking and painting of celluloids, and all tracing done in the Studio, is performed exclusively by a large staff of girls known as Inkers and Painters. This work, exacting in character, calls for great skill in the handling of pen and brush. This is the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists.”95 The boundaries were not as rigid as that statement might suggest—Dorothy Ann Blank received screen credit as one of Snow White’s writers, for example—but the assumption was widespread that women were suited only for “exacting” work, and not for animation.

  Snow White’s negative cost (the total cost before any release prints were made) grew ultimately to almost $1.5 million, just a little less than the Disney’s studio’s total revenues in 1937, the year the film was completed.96 Disney liked to talk as if he were flirting with disaster in the last months Snow White was in production. “Roy has the greatest confidence in me, in our medium and in our future,” he wrote in 1940, “but he is a business man and doesn’t like to live dangerously twelve months out of the year.”97 Despite the scale of the borrowing required to finish the film, there was probably never any serious risk that the money would run out. When Roy Disney arranged for a Bank of America executive to see an incomplete version of Snow White on September 11, 1937, he told Walt the previous day: “The bank matter is all set.” The banker was going to see the film with an executive from RKO Radio Pictures, Disney’s new distributor, “purely for a little support of their own opinions and judgment,” Roy told his brother.98

  As to whether the studio could survive failure in the marketplace—that was another matter. “I recall the preview of Snow White [at a theater in Pomona],” Wilfred Jackson said, “the first time the picture was shown to an audience. About two-thirds of the way through the picture quite a number of people got up and walked out of the theater all at about the same time. It was an awful moment. We, all of us from the studio, just about died on the spot. But then, after this fairly large group had left, no one else walked out until the end of the picture. Afterward, we learned there had been a large number of students in the audience from some nearby school dormitory where they had a curfew, so they had to leave to keep out of trouble. But, for a few moments, it looked as though the people who had warned Walt, ‘No one will sit through a feature-length cartoon’ were right.”99

  Throughout the 1930s, critics commonly paired Disney with Chaplin as the two great motion-picture artists. By the time Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened at the Carthay Circle Theatre on December 21, 1937, it was perhaps the most widely anticipated film ever—not only because Disney had made it, but also because no one could be absolutely sure that the audiences that loved Disney’s short cartoons would love a cartoon ten times as long.

  As soon as the film opened, first in Los Angeles and then a few weeks later in New York and Miami, the answer was not in doubt. Critics as well as audiences adored Snow White, which was praised as much in intellectual journals as in the mainstream press. Disney had so thoroughly transformed animation in just a few years that sophisticates who would have yawned at the old silent cartoons found themselves weeping with the dwarfs at Snow White’s bedside.

  Disney had become a father again in the midst of work on Snow White. In January 1937, after Lillian—who was now approaching forty—had suffered another miscarriage, the Disneys adopted a two-week-old baby girl they named Sharon Mae. There would be no Walt Disney Jr. As the father of two young girls, Disney expressed a certain wry satisfaction in censors’ occasional classification of Snow White as too intense for younger children. “Before seven or eight,” he told a reporter, “a child shouldn’t be in a theater at all. But I didn’t make the picture for children. I made it for adults—for the child that exists in all adults.”100

  Snow White radically altered the Disney studio’s financial status. In 1937, total income was $1.565 million, including $1.187 million in film rentals. In 1938, in the first nine months alone, total income was almost three times greater, at $4.346 million.101

  The film’s success, artistically and financially, altered Disney’s own status as well. On successive days in June 1938, he received honorary degrees from Yale and Harvard Universities (neither degree a doctorate, but rather a master of arts).102 Talking to reporters after the Harvard ceremony, Disney expressed uncharacteristic regret that he had never had a college education himself: “I’ll always wish I’d had the chance to go through college in the regular way and earn a plain bachelor of arts like the thousands of kids nobody ever heard of who are being graduated today.”103

  Disney recalled in 1956 that when he was on the train to California in 1923—“in my pants and coat that didn’t match but I was riding first class”—he fell into conversation with some fellow passengers and told them that he made animated cartoons. “It was like saying ‘I sweep up the latrines’ or something, you know.” As he acknowledged, those anonymous skeptics meant nothing to him; but remembering them contributed to the satisfaction he felt at the success of Snow White.

  In a piece published under Disney’s name in 1937—and that does seem to reflect his thought—he articulated his growing ambitions for animation, invoking “caricature” as his goal. “While we have improved greatly in our handling of human figures,” he said, “it will be many years before we can draw them as convincingly as we can animals. . . . The audience knows exactly how a human character looks and acts, but is rather hazy regarding animals, and therefore accepts our caricatured interpretations of animals without reservation. Some day our medium will produce great artists capable of portraying all emotions through the human figure. But it will still be the art of caricature and not a mere imitation of great acting on stage or screen.”104

  In another interview with the New York Times’s Churchill, published early in March 1938, just as the dimensions of Snow Whites huge success were becoming apparent, Disney again used the crucial phase “a caricature of life”: “Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters. We don’t want them to be just shadows, for merely as moving figures they would provoke no emotional response from the public. Nor do we want them to parallel or assume the aspects of human beings or human actions. We invest them with life by endowing them with human weaknesses which we exaggerate in a humorous way. Rather than a caricature of individuals, our work is a
caricature of life.”105

  “Caricature” has a parasitic sound, though, and by the time Disney was finishing Snow White he was actually up to something rather different. He was working his way through the artificial elements of animation—all its elements—so as to emerge with an art form that was unmistakably artificial, did not turn its back on animation’s fundamental characteristics, but still had the breadth and impact of those rare live-action films—Jean Renoir’s, say—that had fully captured life on film.

  The subversive thought that Snow White encouraged was that hand-drawn animation’s capacity for artistic expression might equal if not exceed that of live-action films. In live action, it is ultimately the actors who must win the audience’s allegiance, by seeming to become the characters they portray. Snow White proved that on this ground the animators could compete as equals. There was no reason that animation as powerful as the best of that in Snow White had to be restricted to animal stories and fairy tales.

  The critic Otis Ferguson, writing in the New Republic, was among the many who rejoiced in Snow White, but with this caveat: “There is this to be said of Disney, however: he is appreciated by all ages, but he is granted the license and simplification of those who tell tales for children, because that is his elected medium to start with. It is not easy to do amusing things for children, but the more complex field of adult relations is far severer in its demands.”106 By the time Snow White was released, Disney had already decided not to deal with such demands, at least not yet.

  CHAPTER 5

  “A Drawing Factory”

  Ambition’s Price

  1938–1941

  By 1938, Walt Disney’s life resembled more closely the lives of other successful movie people. He and Lillian had begun visiting the desert resort of Palm Springs—he played polo there at first—and he was helping finance a ski resort, Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe in Northern California. He was one of dozens of Hollywood celebrities who financed Hollywood Park, a new race track near Los Angeles.1 From playing sandlot polo with members of his staff, he had graduated to playing the game with movie stars at the Riviera Country Club in Brentwood—at one point he owned nineteen polo ponies.2 That figure may seem surprisingly large, but as the actor Robert Stack, one of Disney’s fellow players, explained, “You have to have a lot of horses because if you play a lot, they get damaged a bit and they get tired.”3 Disney himself got “damaged a bit”; he had given up polo by early 1938, after injuring his neck in a match.4 For exercise he turned to badminton.