The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  He also continued to ride, and for several years starting in the late 1930s he rode with Los Rancheros Visitadores—“the visiting ranchers,” a group composed of dozens of mostly wealthy and famous horsemen who made an annual weeklong trek through the Santa Ynez Valley, north of Santa Barbara, camping out each night. Frank Bogert, who played polo with Disney at Palm Springs and shared a camp with him on those rides, remembered him as a man who could give and take practical jokes:

  There was a guy named Clyde Forsythe, who was one of the leading Western artists. . . . We were riding way out, a whole bunch of guys, and Walt came over and told me, “We’re going to play a gag on Clyde.” He said to Clyde, “There’s a beautiful view over here. Come on out with us.” So we went away from the ride, way out on a point. Clyde was stone deaf, and he had a great big battery hanging down on his chest. Walt and I started talking but never saying anything. Clyde said, “Oh, shit, I’m off the air.” And he took out his battery and threw it down the hill.

  The next year, Walt had a little pup tent he slept in, one of those little bitty things, and Clyde brought up a descented skunk and stuck it in Walt’s tent. Walt knew something was in there. He got his flashlight and found out it was a skunk, and he ripped that tent apart trying to get out. He said, “The son of a bitch got even with me.”5

  Even on his rides with the Rancheros, Disney never left his work wholly behind. David Hand recalled that when he accompanied Disney on one such trip, Disney “would talk at me, all the time . . . what we should do on some picture or problem,” thinking aloud until Hand got “so full and so confused, with his changing his mind,” that he began avoiding his boss.6

  Walt and Roy Disney shared their prosperity with their parents, who in early 1938 moved from Oregon to a new home their sons built for them in the Los Angeles suburb of Toluca Lake, near Roy’s home. The new house had a defective gas furnace. On the morning of November 26, 1938, Bill Garity, the studio’s chief engineer, noted in his “daily report”: “George Morris called me to advise that Walt’s and Roy’s mother had passed away in the morning from gas poisoning of some kind.”7 Flora had been overcome by the concentration of gas in her bathroom. Elias too was rendered unconscious by the gas, but the elder Disneys’ housekeeper found him in time to revive him. Flora was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery on November 28.8

  As deeply as both brothers were affected by their mother’s death—years later, Walt Disney could not bring himself to speak of it—they could not pause in their work for long. Walt’s success in the late 1930s meant that the demands his studio was imposing on him were actually growing, as he said in 1956: “As soon as Snow White hit, I said, ‘Well, we’ve got to go into features. We’ve got to begin to make features.’ And there was no denying it after it grossed eight million dollars.” In the Hollywood of 1938 it was an all but inevitable step for Disney to make his studio into a feature-film factory, even though his first feature owed its distinctive character to its being nothing like the products of the MGM or Warner Brothers assembly lines. By 1938, almost none of Disney’s Hollywood peers were making films one at a time, the way he had made Snow White. Chaplin worked that way, but Chaplin’s films—still silent, with music tracks—were increasingly eccentric in the Hollywood scheme of things. His most recent one, Modern Times, had lost money in its domestic release in 1936.9

  For five years, from 1932 to 1937, Disney’s short cartoons were distributed by United Artists, a company founded by Chaplin, among others, as a distributor for films made by independent producers. When Disney went into feature production himself, he adhered not to Chaplin’s model but to that of a United Artists producer of another kind—Samuel Goldwyn, who made a small number of relatively expensive and prestigious features each year.

  Disney broke with UA over its insistence on controlling the television rights to his cartoons.10 On March 2, 1936, he signed new distribution contracts for the short cartoons and Snow White with RKO Radio Pictures, not one of Hollywood’s biggest major studios, but a major studio nevertheless. Both contracts—each of which Disney signed twice, as an individual and as president of Walt Disney Productions—reflected how much Disney’s stature in the film industry had grown in just a few years. RKO would advance $43,500 for the production costs of each short and as much as $23,000 for prints and advertising, and split the revenue from distribution fifty-fifty after recovering its costs. The Snow White contract gave Disney 75 percent of domestic revenues, and smaller but still very high percentages of foreign revenues.11 The financing for Disney’s features would come not through advances from his distributor, but through a line of credit from the Bank of America.

  Disney began work on two more features before he completed Snow White. Some of his writers were studying Felix Salten’s novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods by the summer of 1937, and Disney attended a Bambi story meeting in August. The writing of a feature version of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio was under way by late November 1937, a month before Snow White’s premiere.

  Disney undertook this expanded schedule without making any corresponding changes in his own role, which was in critical respects more demanding than that of the typical producer of live-action films. He retained control of his films not just as an impresario, the ultimate authority, but as an artistic arbiter who could be, as in the case of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, even more intensely involved in day-to-day work than a film’s nominal director. A live-action director like John Ford could make a film that was really his own even while he was working under the aegis of so assertive a producer as Darryl Zanuck. No Disney director could do that.

  In speaking about the films he made during these years, Disney often slipped into the first person, saying of the multiplane camera, for instance, that he had made “very good use of it in Bambi, especially, where I had [the camera move] between the trees.” Or on the origins of Donald Duck: “I put him in this picture where Mickey had a little amateur show to be presented. . . . The gag I worked there was the kids booed him off the stage and he never got to do his recitation, you know? And from there he evolved into a pal of Mickey’s and I worked him in with Mickey in stories and eventually we decided to set him up in his own pictures.”

  In other words, he saw no real distinction between himself and his studio, even though it had grown to around 675 employees by February 1938, shortly after Snow White was released.12 Given his intensely personal conception of his studio, as well as the realities of the motion picture industry in 1938—not to mention his desire to retain the staff he had assembled and trained—Disney had no obviously good choices other than to proceed as he did.

  Even though Disney felt compelled to retain complete control over several new features, he could not give them anything like the attention he had given to Snow White and most of the shorts that preceded it. He did make one stab at delegating authority in 1938, by making Dave Hand, fresh from success as the supervising director of Snow White, the studio’s general manager. Hand took charge of the short subjects—and Disney really did give him control, if only for a while—and tried to organize the rest of the studio along conventional lines of authority. Ben Sharpsteen remembered that Hand “had the attitude that [if] Walt gives me a job to do certain things, and outlines it that way, that’s it—it’s going to be that way. But Dave would no sooner turn his back than he’d find out Walt had given part of his job to somebody else. Walt had no regard for protocol.”13

  Hand said that Disney’s violations of the chain of command came in the form of orders to people removed physically from the director who was nominally in charge of a particular film: “It would be an animator, or his assistant (most likely), or special effects, or maybe background. Or it could even be in the camera department—or in ink and paint, ordering a change of character color (and that could cause trouble). Walt’s decisions would then have to move back up the chain of command, and word of the change get to everyone who needed to know.”14

  Disney’s personality, so entrepreneurial at its core, made it di
fficult for him to delegate authority of any kind, particularly where the features were concerned. He complained at times that he did not have enough really good animators to go around, but by expanding his studio’s output so rapidly, he all but guaranteed that he would be short of the help he most needed.

  Even the best of Disney’s animators were not equal to every possible challenge. In the wake of Snow White’s success, some members of the Disney staff were more acutely aware of the limitations of their medium as they had developed it to that point. Ham Luske listed such shortcomings in a lecture to members of the staff on October 6, 1938: “We can’t manage slow movements, it’s hard for us to handle long speeches, long holds are necessary but tough, trick camera angles and perspective problems are difficult to combine with drawn acting. Long shots are a problem. It’s hard to make our transitions of thought subtle, easier to get broad transitions.”15

  In short, the Disney studio was a surprisingly perilous environment in late 1937 for the kind of character animation that Disney and some of his animators had pioneered. In mid-1937, Disney was speaking of Bambi as his second feature, evidently because he thought his animators would be more comfortable with animal characters than with the humans who would make up most of Pinocchio’s cast. Salten’s Bambi, which dealt with the life of a deer, threatened to be difficult to adapt, though—it was grim and bloody over much of its length—and Disney had decided by the fall to push ahead with Pinocchio.

  Beyond the narrow question of whether animals or humans would be easier to draw, both Bambi and Pinocchio were intimidating subjects for animation of the sort that Disney had nursed into existence in Snow White. There were no characters at the center of either story who could engage an audience’s sympathies in the way that the dwarfs had, unless the stories were drastically rebuilt. Moreover, Collodi’s Pinocchio was a picaresque tale, and such stories are intrinsically difficult to film. Episodes must be pared away if the resulting movie is not to be intolerably long; but editing can so compromise the episodic character of the story that organizing its remaining pieces into some kind of plot becomes unavoidable.

  For all the challenges that both Bambi and Pinocchio posed, Disney may not have seen the alternative story possibilities as any less daunting. Few traditional fairy tales lent themselves to expansion in the way that the Grimms’ “Snow White” did, and other classics of fantasy literature did not promise to pose fewer difficulties than Bambi and Pinocchio would.

  In any case, Disney was in a hurry. When work on Snow White was all but finished, and a large crew was waiting, he was anxious to put his artists to work. On December 3, 1937, at what seems to have been the second story meeting on Pinocchio that Disney himself attended, Otto Englander, the “story supervisor,” read aloud what was probably a very rough continuity for the entire film. Disney gave it his blessing and told his writers to break the story down into sequences.16

  On December 11, 1937, at his third meeting on Pinocchio, Disney outlined a plan to move through the story sequence after sequence, developing material that could be used in a later sequence if not in the one at hand. He was concerned mainly with getting something ready to animate, but he presented his plan as a way to deal with the book’s picaresque structure, too. “That way,” he said, “we’ll gradually arrive at a continuity as we work along. In a story like this it’s impossible to complete a continuity before you work out a situation and its possibilities.”17

  Disney also began to sound a theme that would lead him away from the book’s version of Pinocchio himself. That character, who is most definitely a puppet and not a boy, is a rather nasty little creature. It is thanks only to his misbehavior, though, that the book can lead the reader out into a world teeming with talking insects, enormous fish, and donkeys that once were children; and it is only because Pinocchio is so disagreeable at the start—and so firmly separated from humanity—that his eventual transformation into a real boy gives the rambling story a true resolution. The danger in such a character is that the audience will never grow to like him, and Disney did not care for such risks. In work on Snow White, he had shown a strong bias toward characters that were immediately appealing—like the dwarfs as designed by Fred Moore—and the same bias soon showed itself during work on Pinocchio.

  On December 11, he spoke of an early scene in which Pinocchio would say bedtime prayers: “We ought to get all the comedy we can on the thing, because if he’s cute and likable and full of little tricks, they’re going to like him right away.” And on January 6, 1938: “All this [opening] sequence should win the audience to the little guy. The audience should be right with him.” He suggested in that meeting that Pinocchio pucker up to kiss the Blue Fairy who brought him to life, after she kissed him on the head. The dwarf Dopey had done the same thing in Snow White, but Disney identified Harpo Marx as his inspiration.18

  It had been in work on Snow White, ironically, that Disney faced a challenge at least as great as the one he faced in work on Pinocchio. There was nothing automatically likable about the dwarf Grumpy, in appearance or personality; but as soon as Bill Tytla’s scenes began to appear on the screen, Grumpy became intensely sympathetic. As a subject for filming, Collodi’s Pinocchio was much the same kind of character.

  Not only was Pinocchio impudent in his earliest Disney incarnations, he was also unmistakably a puppet, a creature drawn as if he were made of wood, and rather crudely at that. Fred Moore softened that design early in 1938, just before animation began. Moore was not animating at that point; instead, he and Ham Luske had become overseers of a sort, resources for the newer animators on the staff. Moore’s influence, so strong during work on Snow White, was now pervasive throughout the studio. He had redesigned Mickey Mouse—making Disney’s signature character rounder, softer, and, thanks to eyes that now had whites as well as pupils, more expressive—and Disney planned to make Moore one of the lead animators on Bambi when that film was finally ready to go into animation.

  Even Moore’s magic touch was not enough. Disney rushed Pinocchio into animation in mid-January 1938, about two months after story work began. When he saw the first animation of Pinocchio as a Moore-designed puppet, he immediately shut down production.

  That animation was by Frank Thomas, who had come to the studio from Stanford and had apprenticed under Fred Moore before animating on a few shorts and then on Snow White. Thomas had very quickly become one of the studio’s leading animators, and the difficult task of animating the grieving dwarfs fell to him. When animation of Pinocchio began, he and Ollie Johnston—his friend from Stanford and his successor as Fred Moore’s assistant—shared the pilot scenes.

  Dave Hand, speaking a few years later to a British audience, used Thomas as an example when he was explaining how such younger Disney animators differed from Norm Ferguson, one of the studio’s stars in the middle 1930s. (Hand did not identify either animator by name, but Ferguson and Thomas were unmistakable from his references to their work.)

  “[Ferguson’s] mind was what I would call an elementary mind; he hardly went above the fifth grade in school, and [Thomas] was a college graduate,” Hand said. “It was the refinement in [Thomas’s background] that came out in his drawings, against [Ferguson’s] heartier, cruder, if you will, representation.”19

  Ferguson was a comic actor through his animation. Frank Thomas, like Ollie Johnston and others among the newer animators, was more like a commercial artist of a highly responsive and intelligent kind. The difference lay not in talent—Thomas in particular had it in abundance—but in a cast of mind. Ferguson, and older animators like him, could not help but leave the impress of their own personalities on the characters they animated. Thomas and Johnston and others among the younger animators, most of whom had spent their entire professional lives at the Disney studio, were less distinctive but far more adaptable. They were prepared to be vehicles for whatever Walt Disney wanted to do.

  After Pinocchio’s animation had been stalled for six months, Milt Kahl, another of these gifted young anim
ators, came to the rescue by animating a scene with a Pinocchio who was even more of a Fred Moore character than those Moore himself had designed. This new Pinocchio was barely a puppet at all, but rather what Thomas and Johnston later described as a “chubby, naive little boy in [a] Tyrolean hat.”20 When “the first model sheets were made of the new Pinocchio,” Thomas said, “I was stunned, because no one had told me they weren’t going to do a wooden puppet.” Even though Thomas was in a sense a victim of Disney’s decision, he defended it. Before the changes in Pinocchio’s design, he said, “nobody [in the film’s cast] was warm. . . . When he put [Pinocchio] back into work, [it] was because he’d found now a warm little boy character that could . . . hold his own with Shirley Temple, who was big at the time.”21

  Advertising Laugh-O-grams in a parade of the South Central Business Association of Kansas City, circa 1922. Walt Disney is seated in the back seat, Rudolph Ising is behind the car, and Leslie Mace has his foot on the running board. Courtesy Rudolph Ising.

  Left to right: Rudolph Ising, Roy Disney, George Winkler, Margie Gay (“Alice”), and Walt Disney on the outdoor set where live action was shot for the Alice comedies, circa 1925. Courtesy C. G. Maxwell.