Disney spoke of working “off the cuff. Don’t have any script but just go along and nobody knows what’s going to happen until it’s happened.” He had not made films in anything like that way since the 1920s, but he may have been measuring Fantasia, which required so much preparation, against the film he was then promoting; it had its premiere in New York on October 23, 1941, succeeding Fantasia at the Broadway Theatre. Fifteen years later, Disney described Dumbo as “the most spontaneous thing we’ve ever done. . . . It started with a little idea, and as we kept working with it we kept adding and before we knew it we had a feature.”
Dumbo, the story of a baby circus elephant that learns to fly using its very large ears, originated as a very short children’s book, which may never have been published in its original form (the Disney studio purchased “the name and basic story,” apparently while the book was still in manuscript).39 It was one of the dozens of properties the studio scooped up in 1938 and 1939, after Snow White’s success provided both the money and the incentive to acquire suitable stories. Although the idea at first was to make Dumbo as a short, in January 1940 Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, the team that had supervised the writing of Fantasia, began writing a feature treatment, a book-length version broken down into chapters. Disney was immediately enthusiastic, and by late in February 1940, with chapters of the treatment still arriving in his office, Dumbo had won a place on the feature schedule.40
From that point on, the film did indeed fly through production, especially as measured by the pace set by Pinocchio and Bambi. It took only about six months to put up storyboards for Dumbo and iron out a few kinks in the Grant-Huemer treatment, and animation was under way by October 1940. The film was finished, except for some rerecording of the sound track, when the strike began.41
By the time of Dumbo’s premiere, Pinocchio and then Fantasia had failed at the box office, the war in Europe had wiped out a large part of Disney’s foreign market, and the studio had been roiled by Disney’s standoff with the Screen Cartoonists Guild. Dumbo, with its modest budget—at around $786,000,42 its cost was close to the $700,000 limit Disney had agreed to accept in the spring of 1941—had acquired an importance in the Disney scheme of things out of proportion not only to its cost but also to its length. It was sixty-eight minutes long, barely acceptable for a feature—but it was the only kind of feature that Disney’s finances would permit him even to consider making in the fall of 1941.
Dumbo won uniformly favorable reviews and a warm reception in theaters. Not all was smooth sailing—a planned cover feature in Time in early December was bumped by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—but it ultimately returned a profit to the Disney studio of about a half million dollars on its initial release. Here was a way for Disney to continue making features—and at the same time escape from the trap that has snared so many American popular artists.
Such artists have always found it difficult to sustain growth in their work for more than a few years without losing much of their audience. Most often they are trapped by their own success; the public demands repetition, not change. Film directors of whom the public was only half aware, like John Ford and Howard Hawks, could over a long span of years make films that satisfied both themselves and their audiences, but the more visible Frank Capra was not so lucky when he tried to advance beyond his huge popular successes of the 1930s. Disney had been nimbler than most, but, with Fantasia especially—two hours of animation set to classical music—he had run up against that seemingly iron law. Now, with Dumbo, he had begun winning his audience back.
There was a problem, though, one that Disney himself identified when he read the paean to Dumbo that ultimately appeared in Time’s issue of December 29, 1941. Unusually, that article dwelled at length on the contributions of people like Grant, Huemer, and the animator Bill Tytla. Disney himself was mentioned relatively little. “Walt didn’t like that writeup,” Huemer said. “He said, ‘Hell, it looks like I didn’t do anything on this picture.’ ”43
Measuring Disney’s contribution to Dumbo is harder than usual because the documentary record is scantier than usual. Although Disney’s desk diary shows him attending dozens of meetings on Dumbo in 1940, none of those meetings were transcribed. In the increasingly harsh financial climate—and with a story that needed only minor adjustments—a stenographer’s time was an expendable luxury. There are many hints in Dumbo itself, though, that other hands played a larger part in shaping it than was usually the case. Ben Sharpsteen supervised Dumbo, and in its economy and clarity, Dumbo recalls the best of the short cartoons (Mickey’s Circus, Moving Day, On Ice) that Sharpsteen directed for Disney before he directed part of Snow White and supervised all of Pinocchio. Then there is the casting, with all that it implies about the animators’ control over their characters.
As with no Disney film since the shorts that preceded Snow White, Dumbo’s animators were cast by character, most notably Bill Tytla, who animated the title character. In many scenes one man animated several characters, but usually those were scenes like Tytla’s of the circus elephants, or Ward Kimball’s of the crows—tiny communities so tightly knit that sensible casting could mean, in those cases, giving a single animator the entire group. Only one major character—Timothy, the mouse who serves as Dumbo’s faithful retainer—was divided between two animators, Wolfgang Reitherman and Fred Moore. Timothy was a special case because Moore by then was sliding into full-blown alcoholism. Perhaps for that reason, Disney never followed through on his original plan to make Moore one of the principal animators of Bambi; Moore did not work on that film at all.
Moore had been one of the four “supervising animators” on Snow White, along with Tytla, Ham Luske, and Norm Ferguson. Together, they had been responsible for the film’s principal characters. All four men suffered, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote, because “animation took a direction that demanded a refinement no longer compatible with their styles. . . . Their work was easy to understand, to recognize, and to study. But as new men with formal art training came along, and Walt’s thinking turned toward an increasingly sophisticated type of animation, a more subtle kind of action with more complex acting and more meaningful expressions developed.”44
Thomas and Johnston were writing about Bambi, most of all. While work on Dumbo proceeded smoothly, Bambi lumbered toward the finish line. “Everybody [on Dumbo] was having fun,” Eric Larson recalled, “and we were working our tails off to get deer walking around right.”45 By the time of Dumbo’s premiere, though, Bambi was, at long last, all but finished.
There was in Dumbo a strong sense of caricature, of exactly the kind that Walt Disney had once espoused but that was almost totally lacking in Bambi. The animators were different, too. Of the four supervising animators on Snow White, only Bill Tytla was still active as an animator, and his animation in Dumbo—devoted above all to giving Dumbo and his mother an emotional presence on the screen—was in striking contrast to the more “sophisticated” animation in Bambi by the younger animators, like Thomas and Milt Kahl.
The “subtlety” and “complexity” that Bambi’s animators embraced, and that required their control over sequences rather than characters, left no room for the identification between actor and character that occurs in the best acting on stage and in live-action films. “While the actor can rely on his inner feelings to build his portrayal,” Thomas and Johnston wrote years later, “the animator must be objectively analytical if he is to reach out and touch the audience.”46 That had already been disproved by others among the Disney animators, and by Tytla, above all.
Tytla had animated large, powerful characters in Pinocchio (the puppet master Stromboli) and Fantasia (the demon Tchernabog, in “Night on Bald Mountain”), so the elephants were a natural fit—but not necessarily the baby elephant, Dumbo. Tytla had, however, based his animation of Dumbo not on his knowledge of elephants, but on what he knew about human children, especially his own two-year-old. “I’ve bawled my kid out for pestering me when I’m reading or something,
” he told Time, “and he doesn’t know what to make of it. He’ll just stand there and maybe grab my hand and cry. . . . I tried to put all those things in Dumbo.”47
Through the animation of its characters, Dumbo validated and extended Walt Disney’s own great central achievement in Snow White. The ideas that Disney had so often expressed and that had shaped the earlier film—the “caricature of life”—were even stronger in Dumbo. But success had come at a fatal cost. It was clear from Dumbo, as it had not been from Snow White, that vivid characterization could be achieved through intelligent casting and sensitive direction—but, as a result, Walt Disney’s own close involvement had ceased to be essential, a development Disney could not have welcomed. Moreover, in Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, Disney had already embraced different ideas about his animated features. Other things were now more important than the immediacy of animation like Tytla’s.
(Disney rewarded those animators whose work was most consistent with his new priorities. As of November 1941, when the dust from the strike was settling, he was paying Tytla $191.25 a week, but Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl, the principal animators of Bambi, were making $212.50 a week. Only Ham Luske and Fred Moore were paid more, at $255 a week, and their salaries reflected the wider responsibilities of each man in the years just after Snow White.)48
Disney had once been enthusiastic about low-budget projects like Dumbo, seeing in them a way to use characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck in films that would be more profitable than short subjects. Low-budget features would also be good vehicles for staff artists who were not suited for Disney’s more ambitious features, like Fantasia and Bambi. Story work on a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” with Mickey and Donald was under way by late in 1939, around the time that Dumbo, too, emerged as a potential feature.49
In a February 27, 1940, meeting on Bambi, Disney spoke of Dumbo’s “great possibilities. . . . The personalities are the type of thing we can get hold of . . . that everybody can get hold of.” He referred to Dumbo as “an obvious straight cartoon. I’ll deliberately make it that way. It’s the type to do that with. It’s caricature all the way through. I’ve got the men for it. They don’t fit here,” that is, in work on Bambi.50 He was still enthusiastic in an April 2, 1940, meeting on Alice in Wonderland: “If Dumbo can prove . . . that you don’t have to have birds and bunnies and [a] wishing well, it would be the picture.”51
By May 1940, with Pinocchio unquestionably a failure and Hitler’s army wiping out European markets, movies of Dumbo’s dimensions were starting to look altogether different than they had a few months before: less like auxiliaries to the big-deal features like Bambi than like potential lifesavers. Disney still approached them with apparent enthusiasm. In meetings on “Jack and the Beanstalk” that month, he spilled out a stream of ideas, almost as if he found working on that story relaxing, a welcome change from more serious stories. But in a meeting on May 14, 1940, he was frank about the reasons for his intense interest: “The main idea is that we are trying to get a feature out of here in a hell of a hurry. . . . It’s a long story but it can be told in a few words—mainly that our European market is shot—which you’re all aware of, and we have to get something out of here that can go out and make some money on just the American market alone.”52
Even though Disney spoke of completing the “Beanstalk” feature in four months, story work dragged, and the film did not go into animation until early in 1941. It was unfinished when the strike began. So was another low-budget feature, The Wind in the Willows, based on Kenneth Grahame’s book; animation did not begin until April 1941. Neither film was ever released as a feature, although animation from both was salvaged and reused in postwar “package” features. “Jack and the Beanstalk” was the first casualty, shelved soon after Disney’s return from South America in October 1941. RKO’s reluctance to distribute the film was probably decisive, but Disney himself decided to halt production of Wind in the Willows. From all accounts, both films threatened to be fatally thin and dull if released as features.
(The Reluctant Dragon, the live-action studio tour with animated inserts, was completed before the strike and released in the summer of 1941, just in time for its portrait of a cheerful studio to collide with the reality of the strike. Even though its cost was lower even than Dumbo’s, around $635,000, rental receipts fell almost $100,000 short of covering that cost.)53
Bambi was finally released in August 1942—it opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York on August 13, after a premiere in London five days earlier. The Disney studio’s share of the rental receipts ultimately fell short of the film’s cost by about $60,000.54 Dumbo did not return as much in rentals, about $400,000 less than Bambi, but its much lower cost made it highly profitable. In other words, the public would turn out for a Bambi, the kind of film that Disney now wanted to make, but not quite in numbers that were large enough. (Bambi played at Radio City for only two weeks.)
It was one thing to make low-budget features as part of a broader program, each “B” picture alongside a big-budget “A,” but low-budget films were confining when there was nothing else. People who had been animating on more expensive films with what one of Disney’s directors, Bill Roberts, called “straight drawing” were not necessarily well equipped to make the transition. For instance, James Algar, who directed much of Wind in the Willows, came to that film after directing not only part of Bambi but also the extravagantly expensive “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” in Fantasia. The artists Disney called “caricaturists”—the ones who dominated work on Dumbo—were better suited to making cartoons whose characters emerged as if in swift strokes, but by 1941 Disney’s allegiance had shifted decisively toward artists of the “straight drawing” kind. What he saw on the screen in the two shelved cartoons, and in Dumbo itself, could only make him more aware of what was no longer possible for him.
Roy Disney met Walt in New York when he returned from South America in October 1941. Before the Santa Clara arrived he wrote a memorandum to his brother, to bring him up to date on what he would find when he returned to the studio. “You will possibly find a lot of things that will be very annoying to you,” Roy wrote, “but please try to understand that we were facing a terrible situation and we did the best we could to make the best of it.”55
One annoyance was the presence of Art Babbitt, back on the staff with other rehired strikers. Disney and Babbitt had never been friends, but in the years before the strike Babbitt had been a valued if willful and rather eccentric animator, one whose work Disney praised on more than one occasion. As late as March 3, 1941, Disney wrote to the director Wilfred Jackson about the need to help Babbitt get rid of the “stiff old-fashioned” quality that afflicted his animation in the short Baggage Buster of the dim-witted dog character Goofy—a character that had been defined largely by Babbitt in earlier cartoons. “Babbitt is capable of good results if you work very closely with him and not let him have his way too much,” Disney wrote. “He’s a very stubborn punk, but we’ve got to get him out of the groove he’s in.”56
In the months before the strike, though, Babbitt became the magnet for all of Disney’s anger and frustration, which Babbitt himself did little to relieve. A few weeks before the strike, Babbitt called Disney to ask for a raise for one of his assistants, Chuck Shaw—hardly a sensible thing to do under the circumstances. Disney responded, in Babbitt’s account (which neither Disney nor his attorneys challenged): “Why don’t you mind your own goddamn business. . . . If you stopped messing around in other people’s business and stopped carrying the torch for a bunch of guys who don’t deserve to be fought for in the first place, you would be a hell of a lot better off.” Disney said of Shaw: “Well, if he doesn’t like it here he can go work in a service station.”57
Babbitt also described a confrontation in a corridor of the animation building on the morning of May 5, 1941, with Disney again boiling with anger: “If you don’t cut out organizing my employees you are going to get yourself into trouble. . . . I don’t ca
re if you keep your goddamn nose glued to the board all day or how much work you turn out or what kind of work it is, if you don’t stop organizing my employees I am going to throw you right the hell out of the front gate.”58
Babbitt’s accounts, even if not word for word accurate, certainly reflected the hostility to the union, and to Babbitt in particular, that Disney voiced on other occasions. A few weeks after Disney returned to the studio, Babbitt’s work started to dry up. He spoke of “trying desperately to get some work” for about ten days, until finally he was laid off on November 24, 1941.59 Babbitt immediately challenged his dismissal as unjustified. A year later, a trial examiner for the NLRB agreed. Babbitt himself wrote to a friend around that time that Disney had “lost his halo and tinsle [sic] as far as I’m concerned. I think he’s a confused mixture of a country bumpkin and a 1st degree fascist.”60
Disney’s intense dislike for Babbitt, and for Dave Hilberman, the other leader of the strike, is one source of the persistent claims that he was anti-Semitic. (Although Babbitt questioned the characterization, both he and Hilberman were Jewish.) There is simply no persuasive evidence that Walt Disney was ever in thrall to such prejudices. Roy Disney expressed some wonder at his brother’s tolerance in an interview with Richard Hubler not long after Walt’s death: “For an artist that had delivered, Walt didn’t care how he combed his hair, or how he lived his life or what color he was or anything. A good artist to Walt was just a good artist and invaluable.”61
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