Wrecks didn’t bother Disney himself, “for repairing wrecks is part of the fun,” Lillian said in the McCall’s article. “He came home from England last summer [1952] with two new engines—a ten-foot locomotive and a switch engine. I heard him enthusing to actor George Murphy, who loves to train too, ‘Boy, we’re sure to have wrecks now!’ ”64 But wrecks in which guests were injured were another matter. One wreck in the spring of 1953 “knocked off the safety valve and it threw out a jet of steam and burned a kid’s leg,” Broggie said. “Walt said, ‘Well, I can’t tell these people that they don’t know really what they’re doing unless they have a lesson or two.’ . . . At the last occurrence . . . when it dumped over, he said, ‘This is the end of it.’ . . . There were problems with kids, and some of the kids were his relatives. . . . What he finally realized was that the average person doesn’t understand what a potential case of dynamite a locomotive boiler is.”65
After less than three years, the CP was out of business. Disney ordered the damaged Lilly Belle—“the cabin was all broken up and the safety valve busted off,” Broggie said—into storage. His interest in trains had not been extinguished, however. “His ideas always grew and grew,” Ollie Johnston said of Disney’s mushrooming interest in trains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “He used to say, ‘I’ve got to have a project all the time, something new to work on.’ ”66
In the late 1940s, Disney’s interest in trains was growing alongside his work on Cinderella, a less satisfying project. The meeting notes for that film—usually, but not always, stenographic transcripts—show him filling his usual role, as a shrewd and decisive story editor, although that role was a little more ambiguous than usual. In a January 15, 1948, meeting, for example, Disney was responding to what was already up on the storyboards. The transcript shows him repeatedly identifying crucial story points and leading the way toward resolving problems satisfactorily. He seems to be going well beyond what was already on the storyboards, but it is impossible to be sure. (He also offered ideas that didn’t wind up in the film, but they were not bad ideas, only superfluous.)
As the story moved toward animation, it became clear that Cinderella and Disney’s role in it were both significantly different than anything that had come before. For one thing, Disney was using live action more extensively than ever to guide the animation of the human characters. Most of the film was shot in live action, on bare-bones sets, with actors playing the parts of Cinderella, her stepmother, the stepsisters, and other human characters. Disney had turned to live action as an aid to animation not only during work on Snow White but for Pinocchio, too, and for parts of Fantasia. In 1938, he had spoken of building a larger sound stage to shoot “more and more live action” for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.67 But now live action seemed less like a useful tool and more like an indispensable crutch.
Said Frank Thomas, who animated Cinderella’s cruel stepmother: “I sensed this lack of confidence, lack of knowing where he was going, what he wanted to do with the picture. So, he relied heavily on live action to set his staging, his timing, and the business. . . . [The live action] looked pretty silly, you know, with no backgrounds, but you could follow it and say, ‘Well, this is dragging, this is not.’ . . . So, this helped him and it helped the story people immeasurably”68—even though it hobbled the animators. As Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote: “Everyone’s imagination as to how a scene might be staged was limited by the placement of the camera, for once a scene had been shot it was very hard to switch to a whole new point of view.”69
Disney was uneasy with the results. He said in a December 13, 1948, meeting, after he saw animation of Cinderella for the start of the film: “I think the boys on Cinderella have to watch, as they go along, to take more freedom—they’re all good animators and don’t have to literally follow those Photostats” blown up from the frames of live-action film.70
Marc Davis, who animated much of the Cinderella character, said that if the animator participated in shooting the live action for his scenes, “it really amounted to doing your first rough animation through the performer.”71 That was exactly the purpose that the live action of Snow White had served, a dozen years earlier, but now the live action was more confining. “Cinderella was a real girl,” Frank Thomas said, “and the stepsisters and everybody who worked with her, particularly the Prince and the stepmother, to my way of thinking had to be just as real as she was. You couldn’t let up and have them half-cartoon.”72 There had been just such a gulf between Snow White—a “real girl”—and the dwarfs—who were considerably more than half cartoon—but Disney himself, in collaboration with animators like Bill Tytla, Fred Moore, and Ham Luske, had bridged it through a new kind of animation acting. In Cinderella, though, the “straight” characters, like Cinderella and her stepmother, rarely shared the screen with true cartoon characters that could pull them away from their live-action origins.
Instead, Disney cultivated a parallel conflict, between the stepmother’s cat, Lucifer, and the mice that are Cinderella’s friends, to match the conflict between Cinderella and her stepmother. The two essentially independent stories were expertly braided together, so that, for instance, the film’s initial encounter between mice and cat nests snugly with the first humiliation of Cinderella by her stepmother and stepsisters. Gus the mouse has hidden from Lucifer under a teacup that Cinderella unwittingly delivers to the stepsisters, and they accuse her of a malicious trick.
There was only a hint of the cat-and-mouse conflict in a March 25, 1947, treatment, but it was emerging as an important element by the time of the January 15, 1948, meeting on Cinderella. Disney said that the story as it existed then “doesn’t do justice to what we have. . . . We have to pull out a lot of gags that are just in as gags.”73 Shortly thereafter, he put Bill Peet—who was largely responsible for writing the animated segments in Song of the South—in charge of the cat-and-mouse segments.
It was as those segments took shape, on the storyboards and then in animation, principally by Ward Kimball, that Disney showed rare enthusiasm for what he was seeing. “Thing’s looking awfully good,” he said during a February 28, 1949, meeting, after seeing John Lounsbery’s animation showing the mice as they elude Lucifer while gathering beads and buttons for Cinderella’s dress. (That episode appeared on the storyboards relatively late, added probably in anticipation of the animals’ audience appeal.)74
Otherwise, Disney was more often reacting cautiously to what his people did than prodding them to realize ideas of his own. He wanted Cinderella’s fairy godmother to be a “tall, regal” type, Frank Thomas said—in effect, a new version of the fairy in Pinocchio—instead of a small, plump woman: “Boy, he wasn’t sure of that. He just wasn’t sure to the very end. But when he saw [Milt Kahl’s] animation on it he finally bought it.”75
There was a sort of casting by character on Cinderella, as with Thomas’s animation of the stepmother and Johnston’s animation of the stepsisters, but the heavy reliance on live action reduced the importance of such casting. When a character like Cinderella herself was parceled out among two or more animators, reconciling the different versions was less a matter of achieving consistent acting than of smoothing out variations in drawing. Eric Larson said that his and Marc Davis’s versions of Cinderella herself weren’t the same because “the character models hadn’t been set. Usually, those things never get set until hundreds of feet of animation have been done.”76 Assistant animators were responsible for ironing out such differences, once there was a final version of a character.
By the late 1940s, Disney’s role in feature production had shrunk noticeably. He no longer dropped in every day or two for brief, unannounced visits between more formal meetings, while the director was preparing his part of a cartoon for animation. The directors were left to exercise their own judgment more on details.77 A director like Wilfred Jackson “would have noticed [Disney’s] absence a lot more than [the animators] would,” Ollie Johnston said, “because he was probably in and out of Jackson
’s room two or three times a week, while we might see him once every three or four weeks.”78 Jackson, one of Cinderella’s three directors, lamented the change. “Walt was a very inspiring person,” he said, “and it was much more exciting and a lot more fun to work on a picture where I was in direct contact with him every few days than it was when he would let us go further ahead . . . and only check up on us at less frequent intervals.”79
Jackson remarked on another change that was consistent with the greater reliance on live action: “Cinderella . . . was the first cartoon I worked on in which the musician, Ollie Wallace, composed his music for all the sequences I directed after the animation was finished and okayed for inking, with the exception, of course, of the ‘musical sequences’ ”—that is, the songs. This was a shift toward the way scores for live-action films were composed, without the careful synchronization of music and action that had characterized the Disney features until then—even though conspicuous “mickey-mousing,” as it was sometimes called, had all but disappeared by the time of the first Disney feature. For Jackson, the most musically involved of the directors, that change was occasion for regret: “It seemed to me that the time and effort I spent in pre-timing the action, working closely with the musician as he pre-composed the musical interpretation of it, was not only the very most delightful part of directing a cartoon, but also one of the most significant for [its] effectiveness.”80
Cinderella lacks the lavish detail of Pinocchio, in particular, but it was through attention to detail that Cinderella most strongly echoed the earlier features, in methods if not in results. The effects animator Edwin Parks recalled that the stepmother
had a cane, with a gold head on it, and there was a highlight that had to go down [the length of the gold head]. . . . We would have a conference about a thing like that. It would get into a quite detailed discussion, taking sometimes many hours, and tests, and color models—the whole works—on just whether this highlight should go from the top of the gold color down to where it ended, or maybe it should end just before it got to what would be a natural border. And those things always ended up that maybe it shouldn’t quite touch. So then you had the problem of cutting this thing off so it wouldn’t crawl back and forth [that is, so the bottom edge of the highlight wouldn’t appear to move]. We might do it, and it might be shot in final, but then they’d find out there’s too much crawling, and now we’ve got to go back and change them all and re-shoot the whole works—do it over in ink and paint. . . . We did it over [with the highlight still ending above the border], and it still crawled, and finally they just decided, well, why do it the hard way.81
Despite such occasional relapses into old ways, Cinderella still came in at a cost of $2.2 million—a full-length feature made for little more than the cost of each of the package features that preceded it. When the film opened in February 1950, it was greeted with a Newsweek cover and hailed almost universally as a return to form. Cinderella was Disney’s greatest box-office success since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with gross rentals of almost eight million dollars. The film’s heroine and her prince, her lovable friends, the story’s adroit expansion of its fairy-tale source—all of this recalled Snow White in the most satisfying way. Only a few critics discerned the troubling void at the center of the film, a void left by Disney’s own limited involvement and his compensating reliance on live action. John Mason Brown, in an extended review of Cinderella, saw in it the bottom of a long decline and dismissed Disney’s “heroes and heroines” as “bloodless transparencies cursed with wafer faces.”82
It was not just trains that distracted Disney from Cinderella. On June 11, 1949, he and his wife and daughters left on a trip to England, Ireland, and France that would keep him away from his studio until August 29.83 (On that Monday, his first day back, he sweatboxed the Cinderella sequences Ham Luske had directed and ordered many minor changes, as well as a significant reworking of the very end of the film.)84 Disney himself flew back to London on October 13, when production of Cinderella was essentially finished. He was gone three weeks.
The immediate occasion for Disney’s trips was the filming in England of his first wholly live-action film, Treasure Island. Making such a film was a way for Disney to use British earnings that he could not convert into dollars under postwar currency restrictions. Such an option was not available to him where animated features were concerned, since as a practical matter he could make those features only in Burbank. (David Hand had set up a British animation studio a few years earlier for the J. Arthur Rank organization, but despite Hand’s best efforts the results fell short of Disney standards in every respect. Rank closed the studio after two years.) RKO, which had blocked sterling of its own, shared the production costs of Treasure Island.
Filming began in July 1949 at Bristol harbor.85 Disney had hired an American director, Byron Haskin, another of the very ordinary, relatively inexpensive directors he was coming to rely on. Haskin’s most valuable credential may have been his work in special effects on such 1930s swashbucklers as Captain Blood. The producer—Perce Pearce, from Disney’s Burbank staff—was American, too, as was one of the stars, the boy Bobby Driscoll. The bulk of the cast was made up of veteran British character actors, most notably Robert Newton as Long John Silver. In the film, Newton makes an arresting John Silver, his face constantly in motion as if he were some sly animal. Haskin, in a book-length interview with Joe Adamson, complained that Newton’s performances in rehearsal were more vivid, and that he throttled back during the actual filming, but if so, Newton knew what he was doing.86
In that interview, Haskin described a Disney almost wholly detached from the film, the writing and editing included. Such a Disney is radically at odds with the Disney seen by other people in work on other films, a Disney intensely concerned with details. It is thus easier to credit Gus Walker, the Scot who was in charge of building the sets for Treasure Island. He remembered that Disney had trouble believing that the tiles on a roof in the Bristol harbor set were painted, and not the real thing: “I had to get a ladder for Walt to go up . . . and have a look. . . . He hadn’t had a lot of experience of construction for films. It was something new for him.”87
Treasure Island differs strikingly from earlier Disney films in its matter-of-fact handling of the story’s violence (at one point, the film follows the book by having Driscoll, as Jim Hawkins, shoot a pirate full in the face). For the most part the violence is neither glossed over nor dwelled upon, just as in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel itself. Treasure Island’s tone—serious and often foreboding—was new for a Disney feature, and it may be owing mainly either to Haskin or to Lawrence Edward Watkin, the former Virginia college professor who wrote the screenplay; but there is no reason to believe that Disney was not fully aware of it or that it did not have his approval.
Disney’s attention to details was evident in his preparations for the 1949 trip itself, which reflected his concern about postwar shortages. “I remember Daddy sent over a whole lot of food,” Sharon Disney Brown told Richard Hubler. “All this canned bacon and canned hamburgers. You just couldn’t get meat. . . . We stayed in London the whole trip. . . . And we stayed at the Dorchester Hotel almost the whole time because Daddy was making a picture. I remember the waiter was so nice. Every so often he’d come over and say, ‘Mr. Disney, I have two eggs.’ And it was the biggest moment!”
The Disneys made driving or flying trips to northern England, Ireland, and the continent. But, Sharon said, “most of the trips were short ones. . . . He was there for a purpose and he didn’t want to spend six months just traveling around. . . . We ate most of our meals at the hotel because he was tired at night and wanted to go to bed early. . . . He was an all day worker. He didn’t slow down at all. But he wanted his sleep at night and he was always in bed early. He was always in bed by ten o’clock.”88
Treasure Island was released in July 1950 to mixed reviews. It returned to the Disney studio and RKO gross rentals of $4.8 million, about two-thirds of Cinderella
’s total, and almost three times its negative cost ($1.8 million). Making Treasure Island consumed all of Disney’s blocked sterling,89 but making films in Britain had proved its worth on other grounds, and Disney and RKO set out to make another in 1951.
For The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men, Disney cut back the American contingent to three: the producer, Pearce; the writer, Watkin; and the studio’s production manager, Fred Leahy, all of whom sailed to England on the Queen Mary in January 1951.90 At first, Disney said later, the idea was to focus the story on Bobby Driscoll as “a young boy who hung around Robin’s camp. . . . But the plan simply wouldn’t jell.”91 (Legal considerations may have weighed against using Driscoll. In September 1949, deep into shooting of Treasure Island, the boy was fined a hundred pounds for working in England without a permit from the Ministry of Labor. By the time the fine was upheld on appeal, Driscoll had completed his role in the film.)92
By the fall of 1950, Disney had settled on Richard Todd, a young British star, as his Robin Hood. Todd remembered how Disney applied his charm when Todd visited the Burbank studio to talk about taking the role. “I didn’t want to do Robin Hood; I thought it was rather beneath me,” he said. “I didn’t want to be an Errol Flynn—I couldn’t be, anyway, physically. I wasn’t up to it, at all. Walt himself persuaded me by saying he didn’t want a heavyweight, he wanted a quick-witted, quick-moving welterweight, which is what I was.”93 After some hesitation, Todd accepted the role in January 1951.
When Pearce and Watkin arrived in London, Todd joined them in meetings to plan the film. “I was fascinated by the attention to detail,” he wrote in his autobiography. “At each [meeting] a sketch artist was present, and as each camera set-up was worked out and agreed, he produced a pencil-and-wash picture of exactly what would be in the camera lens. These sketches were photo-copied and bound into folders, and all of us at these meetings were eventually issued with the bound volumes, showing every single shot.”94
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