The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Whatever the exact motives for Babbitt’s layoff, it was not an isolated event. The Disney studio announced the same day that it was laying off a total of two hundred employees, shrinking its staff to 530, less than half the prestrike total.62 Although Dumbo was doing well and Bambi was all but ready for release, the studio’s most substantial work on hand was the short cartoons on South American themes. Then, on December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and everything changed.

  The army moved hundreds of troops—Disney put the figure at more than seven hundred—into the studio. “These soldiers were part of the anti-aircraft force that were stationed all around,” Disney said. “They had these guns all over the hills everywhere, because of the aircraft factories and things”—Burbank was home to Lockheed Aircraft. Disney remembered that soldiers began arriving uninvited on December 7, but Variety reported that troops did not move into the animation building until a week after Pearl Harbor, at the studio’s invitation.63 The army also occupied the studio’s sound stage, Disney said, “because they could close the stage up and work in a blackout.”

  This impromptu conversion of part of the lot lasted for what Disney said was eight months, but his involvement with the war effort lasted much longer. Disney had begun seeking defense-related work in March 1941, but not too eagerly, and with only limited success. His most important commissions came from the National Film Board of Canada, which ordered four cartoons, all using old animation, to promote the sale of war bonds, as well as a training film on the Boys MK-1 antitank rifle. Production of those five films began on May 28, 1941, and continued until early in 1942,64 by which time Disney’s war work for his own government had increased dramatically.

  As soon as the United States entered the war, the navy moved swiftly, commissioning Disney to make twenty films to help sailors identify enemy aircraft and ships. So closely did the navy and Disney work together that Captain Raymond F. Farwell, author of Rules of the Nautical Road (translated into film by the Disney artists), lived in Disney’s office suite for months. “He did his washing in there and everything,” Disney recalled.

  With much of the Burbank studio empty, Disney leased space to Lockheed for use by production illustrators. As Robert Perine, who was one of them, later wrote, “Rows of animators were simply replaced by rows of technical artists, turning out complicated, two- and three-point perspective drawings of aircraft parts.”65

  In February 1942, at the annual Academy Awards ceremony, Disney received the Irving Thalberg Award, given not for a particular film but for a consistently high level of quality. The stress of the previous two years caught up with Disney as he accepted the award from the producer David O. Selznick, and he wept openly. “It was difficult for anyone to hear Disney clearly,” Daily Variety reported. “He found it difficult to speak and was only able to say, with great emotion: ‘I want to thank everybody here. This is a vote of confidence from the whole industry.’ ”66

  In the spring of 1942, work on the twelve South American—themed shorts was moving forward rapidly—understandably so, since the writing of all those shorts began before the 1941 trip did, and the people who did most of the work on them were not part of El Grupo, the studio contingent that accompanied Disney to South America. Disney attributed to his distributor, RKO, the idea of combining four of the shorts into a sort of feature, to overcome the difficulty of selling a Brazilian-themed short in Argentina, and so on. “They said, ‘You’ve got to put these together somehow. So I didn’t know how to put ’em together but I had taken 16mm film of our trip. . . . I took the 16mm film, blew it up to 35, used it as connections between the four subjects and presented it as a tour of my artists around.”

  Saludos, as the forty-two-minute result was called for its release in Spanish-speaking Latin America, included cartoons that placed familiar Disney characters in South American settings (Donald Duck in Bolivia and Brazil, Goofy in Argentina) and introduced new Latin-flavored characters (José Carioca, a Brazilian parrot, and Pedro, an anthropomorphic mail plane). The film played to enthusiastic crowds throughout Latin America. In Buenos Aires, a representative of the coordinator’s office reported, “the sequences, particularly those dealing with Argentina, amazed the audience with their authenticity, their charm and their humor. . . . There was little doubt that the Brazilian sequence and particularly José Carioca were considered [even] more enjoyable than the Argentine sequences—and this in Buenos Aires is news.”67 Retitled for its domestic release, Saludos Amigos opened in the United States in February 1943. It returned rentals to the studio of $623,000, more than twice its negative cost of less than $300,000.68

  By the summer of 1942, the Disney studio still had only around 500 to 550 employees,69 but war work was beginning to take up the slack left by the dormant feature program. That work accelerated the Disney studio’s turn away from being strictly or even mainly a cartoon producer. By 1943, about half the film footage the studio produced was live action, most of it for defense series like Aircraft Production Methods.70 In order to get his men who were making military films deferred, Disney brought members of draft boards to the studio—where, he said, they could not get security clearances to see some of the most sensitive work being done.

  In the later months of 1942 and the early months of 1943, as war work ramped up, Disney somehow found time and money (receipts from Bambi no doubt helped) to make another feature, this one radically different from those he had made before the war. Although Disney is best remembered as a train enthusiast, he loved air travel, too, and in early 1942 his South American trip stimulated him to plan a bargain-basement feature on the history of aviation. Instead, that plan was subsumed in a largely animated version of Victory Through Air Power, Alexander de Seversky’s 1942 book advocating a reliance on long-range bombers to defeat the Axis powers.

  Disney’s artists had adapted rapidly to the new demands of the military training films, so far removed, both in graphics and as narrative, from anything they had done before. The maps and diagrams and symbols that make up much of Victory’s animation, illustrating Seversky’s ideas, were a further challenge, especially combined with Disney’s zeal for the subject matter. “I was confused” after a meeting on the film, said Herb Ryman, whose métier was the evocative sketch. “I could only see maps. Walt followed me out of [the] room. He hit the jamb of the door with the flat of his hand. ‘What’s the matter, Herbie? Is that a bad idea?’ ‘No . . . no . . . no . . .’ You couldn’t say no to Walt.”71

  Disney remembered getting pressure from both naval and army air corps officers during work on Victory Through Air Power. He made Victory, after all, in the midst of making training films for the navy, and Seversky’s book alarmed officers in both services, although its ultimate impact was slight. “It was just something that I believed in and for no other reason [than] that I did it,” Disney said. “It was a stupid thing to do as a business venture.” That was true. RKO sagely passed on the film, so in November 1942 Disney signed a distribution contract with United Artists instead. When Victory Through Air Power was released in July 1943, the Disney studio lost more than $450,000 on the film.72

  In other respects, too, the war was a trying and difficult time for Disney. During the war, he complained more than ten years after it ended, “the theaters had no time for Disney . . . and all the little brats Disney attracted. . . . Wartime was a poor time for us.” The theaters prospered without the “family trade,” he said, because “they were doing such a business with any old piece of cheese they’d put in.”

  Disney did not enjoy working with many of the military officers and government officials who had to pass on his films. “Some of those people, when they got a uniform on, it was like a pinning a badge on somebody,” he complained in 1956. “They just couldn’t hold it.” Frequent visits to Washington—he made five in 1942 alone—were a necessity but no pleasure. Sometimes, Disney said, he couldn’t find a hotel room, so “I went and sat through a movie several times to have a place to sit down.”

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bsp; Joe Grant remembered hearing Disney talk about his studio, on one of those trips to Washington, in terms that were in striking contrast to the conditions that prevailed by then. Perhaps Disney was speculating about some ideal arrangement, or about what might have been if the strike had not intervened. “He wanted a dormitory on the lot, he wanted people to live there,” Grant said. “I got that on a train ride back to Washington once. As [Henry] Ford did, when he had all of his employees living there; he had a perfect setup. He not only had a belt-line, but he had all the accessories to go with it, which were people.”73

  For all the jarring changes that Disney and his studio had endured in the last few years, outsiders could still find the man and the place refreshingly attractive compared with the rest of Hollywood.

  The novelist and screenwriter Eric Knight worked at the Disney studio in 1942, as a major in the army, when Disney was making animated inserts for the Why We Fight series produced by Frank Capra’s military film unit. Knight, in Hollywood since 1934, was by the time he met Disney disgusted with “the Hollywood idea . . . that a writer is the lowest form of life—a sort of stenographer.” Jaded though he was, Knight liked the Disney studio, marveling at its “offhandedness,” and, as he wrote to his wife on August 6, 1942, he found Walt himself “good fun. He is always trying to wangle an idea out of me. . . . He is a queer, quick, delightful gink with more capabilities rolled into one man than even me.”

  On August 17, 1942, Disney wanted to know what Knight thought of a possible film about “Gremlins and Fifinellas and Widgets. Gremlins ride on [Royal Air Force] planes with suction cup boots and drill holes in planes. Fifinellas are girl Gremlins—all cousins to a leprechaun. Widgets are young Gremlins born in a nest. . . . So we laugh at lunch and I can kid him any way I want. . . . Then back after lunch to maps and more maps . . . and Walt comes in popping open the door once in a while to give valuable technical suggestions.”74

  Disney no doubt found Knight unusually congenial company when so much of his time was taken up with far more mundane matters. During the war, “the technical films we were making didn’t call for the type of meetings that Walt liked,” the animator Ollie Johnston said.75 Transcripts have survived from some of the meetings on “technical films” that Disney attended. For example, on April 15, 1942, he and members of his staff devoted most of the afternoon to two meetings with Earl Bressman, director of the agricultural division in the office of the coordinator of inter-American affairs. They reviewed storyboards for two of a series of 16mm educational films commissioned by the coordinator’s office for showing in Latin America. One film, ultimately titled The Grain That Built a Hemisphere (1943), was about corn and corn products. The other film, The Soy Bean, was never completed. The tone of the meetings differed sharply from that of the meetings on the prewar features and shorts. Although Disney occasionally expanded on an idea, it was always Bressman’s wishes that were paramount, rather than Disney’s.76

  It was through his association with the coordinator’s office, though, that Disney kept a toehold in the market for entertainment features. Plans for a second feature combining four shorts on Latin American themes were under way by June 1942,77 and the success of Saludos Amigos cemented those plans. Mexico was an obvious candidate for inclusion in the new film. (Six members of El Grupo had spent four days in Mexico City on the way back from South America, but none of the cartoons in Saludos Amigos had a Mexican theme.) The coordinator’s office paid for a three-week trip to Mexico in December 1942 by Disney, his wife, and ten members of his staff.78 By then, as a Mexican publication reported early in 1943, Disney already had “a new creation in mind, typifying the national character of Mexico. This is to be represented on the screen by a peripatetic, swaggering little rooster.”79 Members of the Disney staff made two more trips to Mexico by mid-1943. First referred to as Surprise Package, the film ultimately was named The Three Caballeros, the three being Donald Duck, José Carioca, and the new Mexican character, a rooster named Panchito.

  By the time it was finished, in the fall of 1944, The Three Caballeros bore little resemblance to Saludos Amigos. It was almost a half hour longer. It included two short subjects that had always been planned as part of a second group of Latin American shorts, and most of the rest of the film was assigned two short-subject production numbers, but the newer “shorts” were much longer and more elaborate than the other two. Far more ambitious than Saludos Amigos, Three Caballeros was for much of its length a sort of travelogue in which Donald and José, and then Panchito, mingled with live-action performers from Brazil and Mexico. Disney had mixed animation and live action occasionally since his Alice comedies in the 1920s, but never so extensively as in Caballeros, and never before in Technicolor.

  It was during the war that he got interested in combining live action and animation again, Disney said years later, because “we did not have enough artists and animators to work on the full-length subjects.”80 Of course, Three Caballeros in its genesis was not to be a “full-length subject,” but a collection of shorts. By transforming such a modest idea into a film bursting with elaborate and frenzied combinations of live action and animation, Disney showed in Three Caballeros just how frustrating it was for him not to be making those “full-length subjects.”

  Three Caballeros premiered in Mexico City on December 21, 1944, and in New York on February 3, 1945. G. S. Eyssell, Radio City Music Hall’s managing director—a former Kansas Citian whom Roy Disney had known as a schoolmate81—rejected Three Caballeros harshly as an attraction for that theater. “Of all the Disney feature length pictures,” he wrote to Nelson Rockefeller on November 29, 1944, “this one I feel will have the most limited appeal. . . . It seems to me that aside from its lack of story and continuity, it is a boisterous bore. Even when it becomes an animated travelogue it misses its mark because one gets but a confused and sketchy picture of Latin America.” He was not impressed by the film’s pyrotechnics, dismissing them as “dull demonstrations of technical virtuosity.”82

  The Three Caballeros performed indifferently at the box office, its returns to the studio falling almost $200,000 short of its cost.83 A third Latin American feature, Cuban Carnival, was in the works throughout 1944, but it fell out of the studio’s plans after Three Caballeros’s disappointing results. Disney himself smarted under reviews that compared his new films unfavorably with the features he made before the United States entered the war. “I had a lot of people just hoping that it was the end” of the Disney studio, he said in 1956.

  Throughout the war, Disney could do no better than assign a few people to work briefly on stories for possible films that had long figured in the studio’s plans, like Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland. (Story work on Peter Pan was halted “to make room,” an internal Disney publication said, for Victory Through Air Power.)84 Of Alice in particular, Disney said in 1943 that production might be postponed until, in a contemporary report’s paraphrase, “further development of methods which would sharply reduce” production time—and thus keep costs under control.85

  Any return to full-length animated features of the Pinocchio or Bambi kind would require financial muscle that was simply not evident in the studio’s annual reports to its stockholders. The idea of making cheaper features at the Dumbo level, with budgets under a million dollars, never quite died, but Disney continued to regard such projects with little enthusiasm. In May 1943, one possible cheap feature dropped away when Disney and RKO canceled the dormant distribution contract for the Mickey Mouse “beanstalk” feature.86

  By 1945, the Disney studio had begun to devote “substantially all of its facilities to entertainment product,” as the company’s annual report for that year said, because of the “general lessening” of the government’s demand for training films.87 But, for the moment, Disney had embraced the idea that animated educational and training films could be a mainstay of his studio’s operations in peacetime, too. Such films could speed up training, he said, and help trainees retain more of what they
learned. “The screen cartoon,” he told a writer for Look early in 1945, “has become so improved and refined that no technical problem is unsurmountable [sic].”88 Disney had set up an industrial film division by November 1943, when he visited Owens-Illinois Glass Company in Toledo, Ohio, on what the Wall Street Journal called a “preliminary investigation . . . of the place of motion pictures in the postwar industrial world.”89 Five large corporations contracted for Disney training films by November 1944.90

  In September 1945, as the Disneys emerged from the war’s hard grind, they hired two professional managers to share some of their responsibilities. The move made sense, given the nature of the postwar studio as the Disneys envisioned it. John F. Reeder assumed Roy’s titles of vice president and general manager. Reeder had been vice president of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency, and he was thus accustomed to dealing with big businesses of the kind that were the likeliest customers for the studio’s industrial and educational films.

  Fred Leahy, the new production manager, had worked in “production control” for eighteen years at MGM and Paramount, the biggest and most prestigious of the Hollywood studios. He would in effect serve as Walt’s stand-in during work on films that inevitably would be, when measured against the prewar shorts and features, too dry and routine to absorb much of Walt’s interest. Walt himself gave up his title of president, surrendering it to Roy.91 He was going to devote himself to new features.

  “Commercial work answered our prayers,” wrote Harry Tytle, who managed Disney’s short subjects, “as it not only supplied badly needed capital during the war, but also because the companies that were our clients gave us greater access to film and other rationed materials. . . . But while the studio made money with this type of product . . . it was not a field either Walt or Roy were happy to be in. Their reasoning was sound. We didn’t own the product or the characters we produced for other companies; there was absolutely no residual value. If the picture was successful, the owners of the film got the rerun value. If the films were unsuccessful, it could be detrimental to our reputation. Worse, we were at the whim of the client; at each stage of production we had to twiddle our thumbs and await approval before we could venture on to the next step.”92