The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Walt and Lillian Disney outside the Disney Brothers Studio on Kingswell Avenue around the time of their marriage in 1925. Courtesy Rudolph Ising.

  Disney holds a movie magazine’s award for best short subject of 1933, won by Three Little Pigs. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

  Disney played polo at the desert resort of Palm Springs in the 1930s. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

  Lillian and Walt Disney disembark in New York from the Italian liner Rex on August 1, 1935, returning from their triumphant tour of Europe. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

  Disney and child star Shirley Temple admire the special Academy Award—with seven statuettes representing the Seven Dwarfs—he received in 1939 for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Cliff Wesselmann Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills. Courtesy Gregory Paul Williams.

  Lillian and Walt Disney arrive for the premiere of Fantasia at the Broadway Theatre in New York on November 13, 1940. The theater was known as the Colony when Steamboat Willie premiered there twelve years earlier. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

  The picket line at the Disney studio in 1941 often reflected the artistic ingenuity of the striking employees. Art Babbitt is standing at left. Courtesy Art Babbitt.

  Lillian and Walt Disney, on the Queen Elizabeth’s sun deck, arrive in a rainy England in the fall of 1946. It was their first visit to Europe since the end of World War II. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

  Disney testifies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947. He condemned what he called the Communist role in the 1941 strike at his studio. AP Photo.

  The Disneys—Lillian, Walt, Diane, and Sharon—return to Los Angeles from England on August 28, 1949. AP Photo.

  By developing such animators, Disney had solved the worrisome question of how to assign them. Thomas, Johnston, and Kahl ultimately wound up animating many scenes apiece with Pinocchio, and there are no significant differences in how their work looks on the screen. That uniformity was owing not just to the animators’ skills but also to the character himself. In his concern that Pinocchio be “warm,” Disney had made him bland and passive, robbing him of anything that made him interesting. The same fretting over warmth and “cuteness” transformed another character, Pinocchio’s “conscience,” Jiminy Cricket, from a caricatured insect into a miniature man. “They call him a cricket, so he’s a cricket,” said Ward Kimball, who as another of the rising young animators struggled with the design for the character. “He’s small, so I guess he can’t be anything else.”22

  Even as he surrendered himself to the search for “cuteness,” Disney acknowledged the value in leaving even a relatively minor character with the same director and animator who handled him in earlier sequences. “That keeps the coachman’s personality the same,” he said in a December 8, 1938, Pinocchio meeting.23 But by then such considerations were shrinking rapidly in importance.

  While Disney was struggling with Pinocchio and to a lesser extent with Bambi, plans for another feature were taking shape in his mind. The new feature was the outgrowth of his decision in 1937 to make a musically more ambitious short than any he had made before—a sort of super Silly Symphony based on Paul Dukas’s symphonic poem The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Mickey Mouse in the title role.

  Dukas’s music told a story, one that had itself originated in another medium; Disney’s greatest challenge was thus to come up with images that were more than superfluous. That challenge must have seemed manageable for a cartoon studio that had already provided a striking visual complement to Rossini’s William Tell overture in The Band Concert, a Mickey Mouse cartoon released almost three years earlier.

  Soon after he bought the rights to the Dukas music in July 1937, Disney ran into Leopold Stokowski, the former conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and a Hollywood celebrity in his own right, at a Los Angeles restaurant. “I was alone having dinner at a table near him and he called across to me ‘why don’t we sit together,’ ” Stokowski wrote to Richard Hubler in 1967. “Then he began to tell me how he was interested in Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a possible short, and did I like the music. I said I liked it very much and would be happy to co-operate with him.”24 Disney may have been slow to follow up, but in October, Gregory Dickson, one of Disney’s New York representatives, reported that he had run into Stokowski on the train to New York and had found him not only serious about working on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice but also “a very charming person and not at all the ‘prima donna’ that various publicity stories have made him out to be.”25 Dickson’s letter set Disney on fire: “I am greatly enthused over the idea and believe that the union of Stokowski and his music, together with the best of our medium, would be the means of a great success and should lead to a new style of motion picture presentation. . . . Through this combined medium, we could do things that would be impossible through any other form of motion picture now available.”26

  Stokowski conducted the music for the sound track with a Hollywood orchestra on January 10, 1938. The recording, at the David O. Selznick studio, began at midnight and ended a little over three hours later. Bill Garity was not impressed by Stokowski’s performance: “My positive conclusion is that all we are getting for this very expensive work is Stokowski’s name on the main title and that the musical results which may be spectacular and satisfactory to the average audience do not even approximate the perfection which we had expected would result from this effort and expense.”27

  As it turned out, Walt Disney did not share Garity’s skepticism—quite the opposite. Work on the animated version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice proceeded slowly and expensively during 1938. It was not substantially complete until November 4, 1938, when a “rough preview” was held for studio employees.28 By the time that preview was held, sketches for a whole feature made up of animation set to classical music were beginning to appear on storyboards. Over the course of 1938, Disney’s ambitions had grown. He spoke early in that year of making a series of short cartoons based on classical pieces, but by the end of the summer he was planning a whole “concert feature” in which Stokowski would be heavily involved. Disney’s “Apprentice” would not be released as a special short, but as a small part of the concert feature.

  Disney had made few cartoons at all comparable to what he had in mind now. In 1937, though, shortly before the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he made a short called The Old Mill. Essentially plotless, it simply showed a storm’s effects on an old windmill and the small animals and birds that lived in it. The Old Mill was the first Disney cartoon to be filmed in part with a multiplane camera, but Disney did not conceive of the film as a test of the camera. It was instead, its director Wilfred Jackson said, to be a cartoon “that depended more on the pictorial aspects of it than on characterization of personalities. . . . I was made to feel that there was more involved than just trying to see if a camera would work.”29

  Now the whole concert feature—or Fantasia, as it was being called by the fall of 1938—would depend on the “pictorial aspects.” In September meetings on the new film, Disney was clearly much more excited by Fantasia’s visual possibilities than he was by Pinocchio’s nagging problems. He even foresaw the “pictorial aspects” being expanded to embrace manipulation of the sound track. “We can make a truck shot of that mountain and come right back,” he said on September 14, 1938, talking about a closing sequence whose music would be Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” “At the same time the whole chorus comes right down the sides of the theater,” seeming to enter a church just ahead of the camera.30

  Disney relished the task of populating the miniature world of fairies, flowers
, insects, and tiny animals that he envisioned for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, at one point demonstrating how a Chinese turtle should dance by moving in a stiff-jointed way and jerking his head back and forth in what a stenographer described as a “wooden tempo.”31 He was even enthusiastic about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, premiered barely twenty years before and still very much “modern music.” But the violent music—which probably would have repelled him had he heard it for the first time in a concert hall—sounded altogether different when he was reading a continuity that envisioned it as the accompaniment to a screen full of animated volcanoes. “This fits right to a tee, doesn’t it?” he said in an October 19, 1938, meeting. “Stravinsky will say: ‘Jesus! I didn’t know I wrote that music!’ ”32

  While Disney was enjoying a sort of busman’s holiday on Fantasia, Pinocchio suffered. His words about Pinocchio had a curiously distracted sound. On January 14, 1939, in one of the earliest story meetings on Alice in Wonderland, he spoke as someone who was already looking back ruefully at Pinocchio— even though the writing of the film was still not finished, and the animation of the principal character had resumed only a few months earlier. He expressed regret at not sticking closer to the Collodi book: “We didn’t explore what was in Pinocchio.”33

  Two days earlier, Ham Luske had gathered two dozen animators and layout men to go over extensive revisions in Pinocchio’s opening sequence—costly changes attributable only to how distracted and indecisive Disney had become in work on that film. Disney wanted some scenes added and others dropped, and many changes would have to be made in scenes that had already been committed to film, in pencil-test animation. Even though Disney had delayed much of the animation for seven months so that the story could be reworked, some aspects of it—specifically, the handling of Jiminy Cricket—remained so unsettled that weeks of work had to be discarded or redone when he finally made up his mind.34

  Disney was not indifferent to costs but instead voiced concern about them repeatedly, as when he told Ben Sharpsteen, in regard to the preparation of what were called Leica reels—in effect, slide films made up of story sketches for Pinocchio, keyed to an accompanying sound track—not to let his artists “get too fancy. . . . I would rather see a good expressive sketch than an attempt at animation.” Early in the writing of Pinocchio, he warned against ideas that would eat up running time and so raise costs.35 But he had never shown comparable restraint when it came to elaborations that did not add to a film’s length but made it look richer. The man who liked to dress well himself also liked to see his cartoons well dressed on the screen. When the effects animator Ugo D’Orsi hand-painted (in oils) the animation of a waterfall for the short cartoon Little Hiawatha (1937), “he was like one thousand percent over budget,” the layout artist Gordon Legg said. “When Walt saw the stuff on the screen, he said, ‘That’s beautiful, that’s terrific, give him a bonus.’ And he got a big fat bonus. Walt was interested in results. . . . He was encouraging good work.”36

  Disney’s concern with his cartoons’ appearance extended to the inked lines on the cels. “Walt was very particular as to how the inking was done,” Marcellite Garner said, “and we had to use [tapered] lines instead of the rather heavy lines used in other studios. He often said that people might not notice all the little details that he required, but would miss them if they were left out.”37

  In work on Pinocchio, Disney resorted repeatedly to the sort of “noodling” he had criticized in his animators’ work—expensive embellishments, like the delicate rendering of the whale Monstro, that might conceal other problems. Pinocchio’s story weaknesses “did cause the overall costs to rise,” said Ben Sharpsteen, Disney’s straw boss for the film, and “encouraged more elaborate production methods and practices,” like extensive use of the multiplane camera.38

  The writing of Pinocchio suffered persistently from Disney’s insistence that his leading character be so passive. As the story reached the screen, Pinocchio springs to active life only when he decides to rescue Geppetto from Monstro, more than an hour into the film. From all appearances, Pinocchio has spent only a single night on Pleasure Island, and yet when he returns to Geppetto’s shop the cobwebs tell of a long absence—and Geppetto has in fact been gone long enough to be swallowed by Monstro and brought close to starvation. There is more fudging of this kind—the sort of thing that can subtly erode an audience’s sympathy—throughout Pinocchio’s closing sequences.

  In the atmosphere that surrounded work on Pinocchio, the merely painstaking could degenerate rapidly into nitpicking, or into something even more pernicious. There was, for example, the case of Hugh Fraser, who animated under Norm Ferguson and Thornton Hee (known, of course, as T. Hee) when they were directing part of Pinocchio. “I think I have the record on pencil tests,” Fraser said. “I did forty-eight pencil tests on a six-foot scene”—one in which the villainous fox, Honest John, speaking to the coachman who is to carry Pinocchio to Pleasure Island, asks, “Now, coachman, what’s your proposition?” “I did forty-eight different ways of saying that,” Fraser said, “and they took the third one I did. T. Hee and Fergy would say, ‘Well, let’s try another one.’ . . . They wanted the best there was.”39

  Using live action to guide the animation was part of the Pinocchio plan from the beginning—Thomas and Johnston used it for their pilot scenes in early 1938—and the animators wound up working with a great deal of it. Although he allowed the use of live action for Snow White’s animation, Disney had been cool to it, at least where the dwarfs were concerned; now he welcomed it as a crutch. When he spoke about live action at a Bambi meeting on September 1, 1939, his words echoed what Dave Hand had said at a meeting for the animators of the dwarfs, almost three years earlier. “The nice thing about it,” Disney said, “is that it eliminates the back-breaking work in the sweatbox. There’s so much done ahead of time that when an animator picks up, he’s got hold of his character.” In other words, if different animators were relying on live-action film of the same actor—Christian Rub, say, who portrayed Geppetto in live action as well as providing his voice—their work might have something like the same consistency that could have been gained by assigning one animator to the character.

  By then, work on Pinocchio was winding down, and the animation of Fantasia was just getting under way. Disney dwelled in that Bambi meeting on the problems that had accompanied the production of Pinocchio, especially when he tried to push work through into the hands of his animators. “We’ve tried to take care of the whole plant in Pinocchio,” he said, “and there’s where we got into trouble. Not having a thing prepared. Trying to build a story before we ever even knew it. . . . We didn’t know the story. We had to live with it.”40

  His remarks about Fantasia were very different, and often far more ambitious, in keeping with the scale of what he and Stokowski were attempting. In a meeting on August 8, 1939, on the sequence based on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Disney spoke of the power of the screen’s giving visible form to what has only been imagined: “When it’s common on up here [“indicating brain,” the stenographer noted] but hasn’t been seen on the screen, then you have something. Then it hits everybody in that audience. . . . You couldn’t ask anybody these things, but the minute you see them on the screen, they know. There is some contact. Even an ignorant so-and-so like me—I get the idea.”41

  In May 1939, Stokowski recorded the rest of the music for Fantasia with his old orchestra, in Philadelphia; Disney attended the recording sessions. At a meeting on July 14, 1939, the artists working on each sequence listened to the new recordings and suggested adjustments in the sound—bringing it up or down, altering the emphasis given various instruments—so that it would work more effectively with the images.42

  Musical comedies aside, music had always played a fundamentally supporting role in films of all kinds, even in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, whose songs were carefully integrated into the story. By elevating music to such importance in Fantasia, and suppressing sound of other ki
nds, Disney greatly aggravated the danger that the film would resemble nothing so much as a silent feature with orchestral accompaniment, except that most of Fantasia would lack a strong narrative. Let daylight slip between the music and the drawings on the screen, let there be lost the sense of what Disney had called “action controlled by a musical pattern,” so that the audience became even dimly aware of sound and images as separate entities, and the results could be disastrous. As Stokowski said in one of the early Fantasia meetings, on September 26, 1938, “The big masses of people don’t like concerts and they don’t like lectures”—and, it could be assumed, they wouldn’t care much for a concert accompanied by extraneous pictures.43

  It was increasingly important to the Disney studio that Pinocchio be a hit. The studio’s income went skidding down after Snow White: from $4.346 million in the first nine months of 1938, to $3.844 million in the next twelve months, to $272,000 in the last three months of 1939—lower even at an annual rate than in the pre–Snow White years. The studio showed a loss in that quarter.44 In June 1938, Disney floated the idea of paying his employees a very large bonus from the profits of Snow White—as much as a million dollars, compared with around $120,000 that was actually paid that year in “salary adjustments”—but by the fall of 1939, he had spent the money Snow White had brought him.45 Money was still pouring out—into Pinocchio, into Fantasia, and into a new studio in Burbank that was nearing completion.

  Sharpsteen said many years later that Disney’s unease about Pinocchio, voiced so often during production, had grown into distinct misgivings by the time the film was previewed in January 1940. The endless touching up continued even then, as Milt Kahl redrew the scenes at the end of the film showing Pinocchio as a “real boy.” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston drew the inbetweens for Kahl’s animation. “As I recall,” Thomas said, “we had less than a full day to complete our drawings and get them over to ink and paint.”46