In the meantime, as work continued on Fantasia, there was evident the same attention to detail, but from different motives, to burnish a jewel rather than rescue a mistake. Disney’s commands “sometimes added hours to our work” in the inking and painting department, Marcellite Garner said, “as for instance in a scene from Fantasia, we did long sliding cels of mud bubbling up. Must have been hundreds on a cel, and we used about five different shades of colored ink, so close in hue that we could hardly tell them apart.”47
Fantasia was the beneficiary—and the studio the victim—of a subtler form of extravagance. During work on the film, as the effects animator Cornett Wood said, “effects techniques were invented on the spot, scene by scene,” the “effects” being things like the bubbles (for “The Rite of Spring”). “Everything depended on the needs of the scene,” Wood said.48 Sometimes this constant improvisation extended beyond the effects animator’s own desk—the camera department and perhaps other members of the staff would be enlisted in the search for a certain effect, which might not be achieved until several tests had been shot. Once the desired effect was on film, no one bothered to write down the steps needed to produce it, except as a sort of personal reference, distinct from anything the studio required.49 The prevailing attitude, the effects animator George Rowley said of this ad hoc process, was that “it’s done and worked out all right, so that’s that.”50
Disney’s attention in the late 1930s was splintered among not just Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, but also other features in earlier stages of development. The work on those embryonic features was dominated by written material, to the exclusion of drawings.
Al Perkins’s highly detailed, 161-page “analysis” of Alice in Wonderland, dated September 6, 1938, is a particularly striking example. Perkins explains in a note at the front that his “chapter-by-chapter and scene-by-scene breakdown . . . has been prepared for the benefit of those in the Studio who may be called upon to work on the feature based on the book. Each scene or episode of the book has been summarized, and some preliminary exploration has been made into various ways in which the material might be treated. No attempt has been made to work out a story line, to find gags or amusing business, or to develop any of the many characters into real personalities.”51
Stories were developed as continuities and even scripts before they were visualized as story sketches. In the case of Alice, no drawings of any kind went up until May 1939, about six months after story work started, and even then the artwork was blowups of the Tenniel illustrations.
Disney himself began to take part in meetings on Alice in December 1938, around the time that Pinocchio’s most vexing story problems had been resolved. The meeting notes indicate that Disney did not read Lewis Carroll’s book until March 1939, and they reflect a great deal of frustration, confusion, and ambivalence on his part. On September 20, 1939, at a showing of a Leica reel for Alice, he spoke like a man trapped inside a mechanism he had designed himself but had come to dislike: “I don’t think the day will ever come when we can write our stories. Some of the best stuff comes after we get thoroughly acquainted with the characters.”52
Features had generated writing problems as great as the animation problems—and those problems were magnified the more remote Disney was from the story work. That was true of no feature more than Bambi. In June 1938, Disney spoke as if Bambi would be ready for release a year later.53 By the end of 1938, though, that timetable had slipped to the point that he was speaking of production taking another two years.54
From the start, the Bambi unit was at a distance from the rest of the Disney studio. It worked at first in the “annex,” a building across the street from the main studio that also housed the training department. In October 1938, a little more than a year after story work began, the unit moved to a building at 861 Seward Street, several miles away. That building had housed the Harman-Ising studio run by Walt Disney’s old colleagues Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who by then had given up independent production and were cartoon producers at MGM.
Disney himself, preoccupied with problems at the Hyperion Avenue plant, almost never visited the Seward Street operation. Since only he could make real decisions, work there proceeded at a snail’s pace under the supervision of Perce Pearce, who had been a key writer of both Snow White and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The unit was staffed mainly with strong draftsmen who knew how to draw animals. Drawing classes were held just for the Bambi unit, first at Seward Street and then over a cafeteria on Vine Street. Rico Lebrun, a Chouinard instructor and renowned animal artist, presided over classes in animal drawing for a year and a half.55
During story work, Carl Fallberg recalled, “we’d go out on field trips and look for animals and background material. It was all very, very scientific. . . . I even bought a pair of skunks from Minnesota and kept them over at Seward Street for a while.” (There were live deer on the Hyperion Avenue premises for a year or so, too. The state of Maine sent them to Disney in the summer of 1938.)56
When Disney did make a rare visit, he “knew what he wanted generally,” said Fallberg, who had worked under Pearce on “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and accompanied him to Seward Street. “But sometimes he couldn’t put it into words and he’d have to see something, so there was a period when we’d try something out and be groping ourselves, and hoping that would be it. That was particularly true on Bambi, of course. . . . We were all a little bit in awe of it . . . it was so different from everything that had been done before.”57
In August 1939, with work on Pinocchio winding down and the animation of Fantasia under way, Disney began tending to unfinished business. He put Dave Hand in charge of Bambi, with an unmistakable mandate to accelerate work on the story. At the end of the month, Disney attended his first Bambi story meeting in more than a year. He attended more meetings after that, and the detours that had multiplied under Perce Pearce were closed off.
The planning and construction of a new Disney studio in Burbank had been another demand on Disney’s time (as well as the profits from Snow White). The Bambi group was the among the first to move to the Burbank studio, late in 1939, before the buildings were finished.58 Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl began experimental animation of the deer around the same time. Clair Weeks recalled that the Bambi story crew—heavily influenced by the realistic sketches drawn by Bernard Garbutt, perhaps the strongest draftsman working on the film—felt some resentment when the animators took over. “I felt, well, now these guys are going to make cartoony figures out of all this research and all this drawing that we have been putting into the story,” he said. “They’re going to lose this.”59
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote years later as if the Bambi animators had done just that: “The more an animator goes toward caricaturing the animal, the more he seems to be capturing the essence of that animal, and the more he is creating possibilities of acting. . . . If we had drawn real deer in Bambi there would have been so little acting potential that no one would have believed the deer really existed as characters. But because we drew what people imagine a deer looks like, with a personality to match, the audience accepted our drawings as being completely real.”60
The deer in Bambi—as designed by Milt Kahl—were, however, not “cartoony” at all. Neither is there anything about them that suggests “caricature” in the normal sense. Kahl did not exaggerate characteristics of real deer. Instead, he departed from the real mainly by giving the deer eyes and mouths that could be manipulated more freely. Crucially, he drew the fawn Bambi and other young animals—rabbits, skunk—in a way that maximized their cuteness, their resemblance to human children, by giving them large heads and wide eyes. Such designs would presumably enhance the characters’ immediate appeal to the audience.
Bambi’s deer wound up neither real nor unreal but stranded somewhere in between, and thus perfectly suited for a highly sentimental version of Salten’s story, one in which death enters an idyllic forest only by way of hunters’ guns. The Kahl-designed deer were al
so made to order for a kind of animation that departed fundamentally from the animation in Snow White but was a natural outgrowth of the way Disney had been building his studio. Kahl initiated the change by proposing at a Bambi meeting on September 9, 1939, that the animators be cast by sequence—becoming in effect sub-directors when Bambi went into animation.61
Kahl was one of the four animators whom Disney had already tabbed as his key animators on Bambi—the others were Frank Thomas, Eric Larson, and Fred Moore, all of whom were winding up assignments on Pinocchio (Moore animated the character Lampwick near the end of work on that film). In making his suggestion Kahl was motivated largely by boredom—as one of the principal animators of Pinocchio, he had gotten tired of the character. That was hardly surprising, since the puppet had been reduced to a neuter before animation began, thanks in part to Kahl himself.
Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in their book on Disney animation, single out a Bambi sequence on a frozen pond as one of the first to benefit from giving a supervising animator control over a sequence. That sequence echoed much earlier Disney animation, as Walt Disney himself recognized. In a 1939 story meeting he said of the Bambi sequence, “It is the same situation” as in a 1935 Mickey Mouse cartoon, On Ice, when the dog Pluto struggled to right himself on ice skates.62 Norm Ferguson animated Pluto, who was alone on the screen. In the feature, though, there were two characters, the fawn Bambi and the young rabbit Thumper, on the ice. The feature sequence had “a character relationship with strong beginnings in the story department,” Thomas and Johnston wrote, adding: “Developing this relationship . . . only could have been done by one person [Frank Thomas] handling both characters and completely controlling every single bit of action, timing, and cutting.”63
Other films are persuasive evidence that control could be divided among a director and two or more animators with entirely satisfactory results, but younger animators like Thomas and Kahl could hardly be blamed for seeking more control for themselves. Walt Disney had cultivated these talented and highly flexible artists, but now he was spread so thin that he could not work with them as he had worked with his animators on Snow White.
More than that, he was recoiling from character animation’s difficulties and seeking refuge in cinematic embellishments of many kinds. At a February 3, 1940, meeting on Bambi, Disney complained of “too literal” a handling of color in that film. He wanted something more subjective, color that strengthened a mood rather than copying nature.64 In an April 19 meeting he talked about “road-showing” Bambi, presenting it in a limited number of performances each day and with the same sort of elaborate sound system he also envisioned for Fantasia.65
As in work on Pinocchio, the appetite for perfection seemed to know no limits in work on Bambi. “There was one scene in Bambi that I shot fourteen tests of,” the effects animator Cornett Wood said. “They wanted Bambi to be scared, and he looks up, and it’s starting to rain, with the thunder and everything, and he doesn’t know what that is. He looks up, and there’s this rain coming down at him. They wanted a shot [looking] up like that, of the rain coming down. Fourteen times we did it. That’s the way they worked in the effects department, they really tried. I always had the feeling they tried too hard.”66
There were experiments in giving more roundness to the characters, the layout artist Dave Hilberman recalled: “For a while, we were exposing the original hard character, and then double-exposing over that a second, softer treatment—the shadows, and color, and everything else, to get this softness. . . . This was a very expensive experiment—if they had tried to do the feature that way, it would have cost an enormous amount of money. It meant at least four times the normal amount of work, right down the line—inking, painting, camera, everything. Except for some of the romantic musical sequences, where some of it was carried on, we just had to settle for the simplest solution, putting airbrush [that is, spray paint using a compressed-air atomizer] on some of the lower parts.”67
As work on Fantasia and Bambi proceeded, Pinocchio’s performance was a growing shadow over the studio. Pinocchio opened at the Center Theatre in New York on February 7, 1940, to favorable reviews but also to what soon proved to be disappointing results at the box office. RKO had wanted to show Pinocchio at Radio City Music Hall, but the music hall, in an act of foresight, would not guarantee an unprecedented ten-week run.68 (The Center, a huge theater—thirty-two hundred seats—was also part of Rockefeller Center, but it was a decidedly less prestigious venue.)
The two fat years after Snow White’s release were now emphatically over—not only was the domestic audience lukewarm toward Pinocchio, but in the spring of 1940 European markets disappeared under the boots of the German army. By the fall, seven months after it was released, Pinocchio had returned to the studio less than a million dollars in rentals, and Disney was forced to write off a million dollars of its cost. His misgivings had hardened into a feeling that Pinocchio should never have been made, Ben Sharpsteen said. (Sharpsteen himself was the target of recriminations; Ham Luske, in a mid-1950s interview, blamed him for selling Disney on the idea of making the film.)69
In the fall of 1938, when the studio was flush with money from Snow White, Disney scorned the idea of sharing ownership through a public sale of stock. “You see,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter, “this isn’t ‘business’ in the sense of primarily making money for shareholders who don’t work at it. My brother and I own all the stock and I keep a controlling interest. We won’t sell any to outsiders nor to employees. If either of them owned stock they might want the studio to make money first and good films would come second. We put the good films first.”70
As late as January 1940, Disney still resisted selling stock—“I wanted to build this in a different way,” he told some of his artists71—but by then his need for money was such that going public had become the lesser of evils. Preferred stock in Walt Disney Productions was offered to the public on April 2, 1940. The money raised helped pay for the Burbank studio ($1.6 million) and retired other debts (more than $2 million). The common stock remained in the Disneys’ hands. The company took out a $1.5 million insurance policy on Walt’s life.72
Disney remembered having lunch with Ford Motor Company executives a few days after the stock issue, when he passed through Detroit on his way back from New York. Henry Ford himself joined the group after lunch, and when Disney told the old autocrat about selling preferred stock, Ford said, “If you sell any of it, you should sell it all.” That remark, Disney said, “kind of left me thinking and wondering for a while.” Ford “wanted that control,” Disney said. “That’s what he meant by that.” Disney shared the sentiment, even in relatively small matters. On July 1, 1940, he told the studio’s publicity department: “From now on all publicity going out of this studio must have my O.K. before it is released. There shall be no exceptions to this rule.”73
People who joined the Disney staff after work on Snow White began typically saw very little of Walt himself. “I met him on a couple of occasions, in story meetings and so forth,” said Dan Noonan, who started as an inbetweener early in 1936 and eventually worked in the story department on Bambi. Said Marc Davis, who joined the staff in 1935: “Walt Disney was kind of an image; we might see him walking in or out. It was a long time before we got personal attention from him.”74
Disney added around five hundred people to his staff in the two years after Snow White, increasing its size in 1940 to roughly twelve hundred, half the industry’s total.75 He became correspondingly more remote, having little or no contact even with people whose roles were such that they would certainly have seen much of him in earlier years. Norman Tate joined the Disney staff in July 1936 and rose through the studio’s ranks to become an animator with screen credit on Pinocchio and a corresponding credit in the program book for Fantasia. But he never met Walt Disney, never spoke with him directly, until the two of them happened to be leaving the Burbank studio together—this was probably in the summer of 1940—and Disney, making conversatio
n, showed Tate the script for the feature called The Reluctant Dragon and asked him how he liked the studio commissary’s food.76
Even though many of the new employees barely knew Disney himself, Disney animation was for them a semimonastic vocation, and entering Walt Disney’s employ was a veritable taking of orders. The 1938 booklet sent to prospective employees made such devotion all but mandatory: “Walt Disney assumes that every artist who enters the studio plans to make animation his life work.” At the time of the early Disney features, the animator Howard Swift said, “animation to us was a religion. That’s all we talked. If we went to somebody’s house—a bunch of animators, we all had wives and we would have a little party, a barbecue—the guys, all they talked was animation.”77
The Hyperion Avenue studio “was a drawing factory,” said Martin Provensen, who worked in the model department. “Drawing was everywhere; the walls were plastered with drawings. . . . You developed a certain attitude toward drawing: You saw drawing as a way of talking, and a way of feeling. Instead of regarding an individual drawing as a sacred thing it was waste paper.” At the studio, he said, “you had youth, and you had immense talent, all over the place—talent was taken for granted, no one thought much about it one way or the other.”78
Some artists had trouble adjusting to life in the “drawing factory.” “I worked very hard,” said Herbert Ryman, whose first story work was on Pinocchio. “I’d try to do a piece of artwork. Of course, all that would happen would be, ‘Ah, we can’t use that.’ These things were yanked off and fell on the floor.”79 But most members of the staff got caught up in the studio’s rhythms.
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