The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Notes from a screening for Disney of what was probably a rough cut of The Living Desert show him approaching the music for that True-Life Adventure as he would have approached the music for any other live-action film. He was telling the composer, Paul Smith, what he wanted in the score.

  In sequence where tortoises are courting, . . . they look like knights in armor, old knights in battle. Give the audience a music cue, a tongue-in-cheek fanfare. The winner will claim his lady fair. . . .

  Pepsis wasp and tarantula sequence: Our heavy is the tarantula. Odd that the wasp is decreed by nature to conquer the tarantula. When her time comes to lay eggs, she must go out and find a tarantula. Not strength, but skill helps her beat Mr. Tarantula. . . .

  Then the hawk and the snake. Our other heavy is the snake. . . . With wasp and tarantula it’s a ballet—or more like a couple of wrestlers. The hawk should follow. Tarantula gets his and then Mr. Snake gets his. . . . Pepsis wasp doesn’t use brute strength, but science and skill. Should be ballet music. Hawk uses force and violence. One could follow the other and have a different musical theme as contrast.98

  Smith followed Disney’s instructions all too well: his tightly synchronized music, like Winston Hibler’s jocular narration, gives The Living Desert a frivolous tone at odds with the grimness of much of what is on the screen. That incongruity was a nagging problem in the True-Life Adventures, but the frequent manipulation of both animals and film—the Seal Island pattern, imposing a story on the material whenever possible—was even more troublesome. And yet if Disney were to be more scrupulous, the result on-screen would inevitably be a harsher view of nature. That is pretty much what happens in The African Lion, the third True-Life feature, released in September 1955 and made when Disney was preoccupied with the construction of Disneyland. Manipulation is minimal, at least compared with earlier films in the series, and there is a straightforward emphasis on just how much killing the big cats do (swaddled in reassuring narration about “nature’s way”).

  Although Disney made three more True-Life features, this was not an avenue that he could pursue very far, and so he began to turn toward live-action animal stories—that is, fiction films with real animals. He was speaking of making such films in early 1953,99 and in 1957 he finally completed one: Perri, based on a story about a squirrel by Felix Salten, author of Bambi. Disney called Perri a “True-Life Fantasy”—the only time he used that designation for a live-action animal story—and the film is an unsettling mix of sugary sentiment and real death, as when a marten chases and kills the squirrel that is supposedly the heroine’s father. As to how many squirrels died in the filming, that was a subject that the film’s producer, Winston Hibler, preferred to avoid.100

  Real life was a stubbornly resistant subject for Disney films. The People and Places series of half-hour short subjects, which Disney launched in 1953 as a companion to the True-Life Adventures, boasted on a title card that “All scenes are authentic and the stories are factual,” but the air of contrivance was even stronger than in the animal films. In Switzerland (1955), a goatherd tracks down and retrieves a lost kid in staged action, but what is ultimately most disturbing about the film is the pretense that it is eavesdropping (with CinemaScope cameras!) on unspoiled village life—making cheese, plowing a field with horses, practicing traditional crafts at Christmas. Not just in Switzerland, but in People and Places shorts made in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan, the sense is not that traditional ways have survived World War II, but that World War II never happened.

  Perri was released in August 1957, just before Walt and Lillian Disney left for a two-month trip to Europe.101 It was their first trip there in four years, since Walt had immersed himself in the planning and construction of Disneyland. In contrast to their earlier trips, this was a true vacation. They drove most of the time, visiting England, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. It was “just too much all at once,” Disney wrote to his sister,102 but his appetite for Europe—and for filming there—had been whetted. Earlier in the year he had bought the rights to Banner in the Sky, a James Ramsey Ullman novel about the first ascent of the Matterhorn, as a vehicle for his new young star James MacArthur.103 His production manager, Bill Anderson, hired Ken Annakin to direct and scouted locations on a trip to Europe. Annakin then came to Burbank for several months of preproduction work with Disney and Anderson.

  “This time,” Annakin wrote in his autobiography, “Walt seemed to have such confidence in me that so long as he was convinced that I knew exactly his approach to the story and how he envisioned the characters and scenes, he was not demanding the whole script should be storyboarded. He allocated three of his sketch artists to work with me, but we only sketched out the key scenes.”104

  Most of the film was shot in the summer of 1958, in and around the ancient Swiss village of Zermatt at the foot of the Matterhorn. Disney himself had visited Zermatt—a picturesque place from which most motorized vehicles are barred—on earlier trips to Europe, the first time probably in 1952. He and Lillian spent several weeks on location in 1958, lodging at the town’s oldest and most distinguished hotel, the Zermatterh of (he conceived the Matterhorn ride for Disneyland on that visit). In September, the cast and crew moved to London for a few weeks of soundstage filming.105

  The film, released in November 1959 as Third Man on the Mountain, was a startling anomaly in a Disney theatrical program dominated increasingly by shallow, mechanical films. The scenery and the climbing scenes (many of these the actors themselves performed; others made artful use of doubles) were spectacular, but what really set the film apart was Annakin’s direction. His skill with actors was here at its peak, so that the cast forms a true ensemble in a way that the actors do in no other Disney film; only a couple of Annakin’s other Disney films come close. As Annakin’s direction—along with the excellent screenplay, credited to Eleanore Griffin—makes clear, there are no villains in this story, only a group of fundamentally good people, bumping into one another as real people do.

  Third Man on the Mountain was a Disney live-action film that bore comparison with some of the better Disney animated features. Unfortunately, it did not do particularly well at the box office, with gross rentals of $2.4 million versus a cost of $1.6 million. Eight months earlier, in March 1959, The Shaggy Dog, produced at a cost of a little over a million dollars, had become Disney’s highest-grossing picture ever in the United States and Canada, with gross rentals of more than nine million dollars. The animated feature Sleeping Beauty, released in January 1959 in a seventy-millimeter wide-screen process called Technirama, and with much ballyhoo, cost much more—roughly six million dollars—and was weaker at the box office, returning $7.7 million in gross rentals.

  The combined effect of Shaggy Dog’s spectacular success and the relatively poor performance of the other two features was to cement into place Disney’s reliance on television-flavored films and on people whose experience was mostly in TV. Disney had conceived of The Shaggy Dog as a television series—what Bill Walsh called “a modernized teenage thing”—and he made it as a feature only after ABC turned it down.106 (It was based on The Hound of Florence, the Felix Salten story that Disney had considered filming in live action almost twenty years earlier.) “I was mad,” Disney said in 1964, “so I went back to the studio and called in Bill Walsh and said, ‘Let’s make a feature of this.’ He said, ‘That’s what I’ve been telling you all the time.’ ‘Let’s go.’ ”107 As a black-and-white theatrical release directed by Charles Barton—who was, like Bill Beaudine, a veteran of decades of work in low-budget movies and TV—The Shaggy Dog is powerfully reminiscent of the popular TV situation comedies of the late 1950s. That association presumably encouraged audiences to forgive its slack pacing and flatly played scenes. Disney recalled that its star, the veteran actor Fred MacMurray, complained that a policeman in an incidental comic role had a better part than he did; MacMurray had a point.

  Disney had entered television in 1954 thinking that he could bend it to his purposes, but fi
ve years later it was he who was bowing to TV’s demands. He may have underestimated just how voracious TV would be. By 1957, after only three years on the air, the weekly Disney TV show had already consumed most of the usable inventory of animated shorts. (Mickey Mouse Club was showing a cartoon almost every day, but many of those, particularly the black-and-white cartoons from the early 1930s, had always been deemed too antiquated for use on the weekly show.) As Harry Tytle wrote, “Walt was caught in a bind.”108 If fewer of the old shorts were used, the difference had to be made up with new animation—a very costly alternative, in TV terms, if it was to resemble the old animation—or with live action that might be an awkward fit with the cartoons. Disney’s freedom of action was thus severely limited, exactly the sort of situation that he disliked.

  As it happened, television’s imperatives forced him to scale back his shows with animation, old or new, and rely more heavily on live action instead. In the 1957–58 season, NBC scheduled a star-heavy western called Wagon Train on Wednesday nights against Disneyland, whose ratings suffered. Such westerns were the most popular shows on TV, and Disney loaded his schedule with westerns in the 1958–59 season because, he said, “I had to,” at the insistence of ABC and a sponsor. His preoccupation with “control” did not inoculate him from such pressures, certainly not when his ratings were affected.

  The Disneys’ relations with ABC soured early in 1959, when, Roy Disney wrote, “ABC insisted on terms and conditions for the Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro shows which were totally unacceptable to us,” then refused to let Disney take the shows to other networks.109 (For his part, ABC’s Leonard Goldenson dismissed the Disneys as “terrible business partners” because they preferred to reinvest Disneyland’s profits.)110

  Consumed by his roles as proprietor of an amusement park and overseer of a studio churning out mediocre live-action movies, Walt Disney had surrendered his role as artist. There is sometimes the sense, in the recollections of people who worked with him on his best films and were still on his staff in the 1950s, that their presence could be an annoying reminder of what he had left behind.

  “When he got off on the park,” Ward Kimball said, “there was no stopping him; you couldn’t get him in to look at something. He’d just say, ‘Go ahead and do it.’ ” Kimball himself benefited from Disney’s inattention when he made several Tomorrowland shows about space travel for Disneyland. Kimball’s shows were inventive and mostly serious in their approach to the subject, but they departed sharply from the mid-1950s Disney norm in their knowing use of modern design and their occasionally flippant tone.

  Kimball was aware of how unusual—and how hazardous—his situation was: “This was a risk you never ran before; you never dared go ahead on your own, without the OK. What could you do? He was interested in something else.”111

  * Another example was a weekly Zorro show—that unrealized project of Disney’s private company—which began running on ABC in the fall of 1957.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Where I Am Happy”

  Restless in the Magic Kingdom

  1959–1965

  In the 1960s, Walt Disney drove himself to work from Holmby Hills to Burbank, first in a Ford Thunderbird and then, from 1964 on, in a Mercedes-Benz 230 SL. His normal route took him right onto Carolwood Drive from his driveway, then left onto Sunset Boulevard, east toward Beverly Hills. He turned left onto Beverly Drive, soon bearing right at a V onto Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. From Coldwater he turned right onto the Ventura Freeway, recently completed across the San Fernando Valley, and headed east toward the Buena Vista Street exit in Burbank.1

  He usually arrived at his studio by 8:30 A.M. and parked in a double slot under a parking shed that he shared with Roy (Walt’s slot was on the left, where it was easier for him to get in and out of his car). “I don’t think I ever got down ahead of Walt,” Roy Disney said. “Walt’s car was always in the stall next to mine and he was there when I came in the morning, and his car was there when I left at night. He was a bear for work.”2

  The Disney brothers presided over a studio that had undergone a dramatic transformation in the previous decade. As Walt Disney remarked in 1961, “in the last ten years we’ve gone into three big businesses—the [live-action] feature field, the amusement park field,* and TV. If it were just animated cartoons, it’d be a cinch.”3

  Sleeping Beauty’s poor box-office returns had proved, of course, that cartoons were anything but a cinch. For fiscal 1960, Walt Disney Productions showed a loss of $1,342,037, after a $6 million write-down of inventories. Gross income, which had shot up since the opening of Disneyland, fell to around $46.4 million from $58.4 million the previous year. Film revenue fell by more than $7 million, largely a reflection of Sleeping Beauty’s performance, and television revenue by $4.6 million, thanks to ABC’s cancellation of Zorro and Mickey Mouse Club. Only Disneyland’s revenue was up.4

  In one respect, the opening of the Disneyland park—and its almost immediate success—had been a great boon to the people working on Disney’s feature cartoons. “It took the pressure off,” Ollie Johnston said. “It was a big relief, because before Disneyland we’d always wonder if we would make another film, and that can be a tough way to have to live.” But the TV show and the park not only diverted Walt Disney himself from Sleeping Beauty, they also took away talented people who would otherwise have been available for the feature. Said Rolly Crump, who was an assistant animator in the late 1950s when he was recruited to work at WED: “One guy in particular used to refer to WED as ‘cannibal island’ because of the way it would eat up studio employees.”5

  During work on Sleeping Beauty, Frank Thomas said, “Walt was not supporting us. And you couldn’t figure out what he didn’t like. Why he said the things he did. And we didn’t feel it was personal condemnation, it was more that there was something in the way he saw the picture that he couldn’t get over to us. Now, this happened many times. . . . Fergy [Norm Ferguson] said, when [I] first came here, ‘Don’t do what Walt says, do what Walt means.’ And I said, ‘How are you supposed to know?’ And he said, ‘Well, you’ll find out in a hurry.’ ”6

  That worrisome lack of specificity is not something that turns up in the memories of people whose time then was devoted to Disneyland. For that matter, Disney’s critiques in the middle to late 1930s were always clear enough in their intent. It was all a matter of where his interest was keenest at the time. He was vaguer the further he got from that center—but since his control did not slacken even as his interest did, he generated problems for his animators in particular. Sleeping Beauty is full of lapses of a kind that Disney would not have tolerated twenty years earlier. In one scene, to cite a small example, Prince Phillip picks up his father, King Hubert, and swings him through the air in a circle, effortlessly. Live action was no aid here—as Frank Thomas said, “Who’s strong enough to pick up a man who weighs 250 pounds and dance with him?”7 The scene had to be convincing on other terms, but it is not; instead, the king becomes, temporarily, a sort of human beach ball.

  “We were on that for five years,” Ollie Johnston said of Sleeping Beauty, “and that was all because we couldn’t get Walt to come into any of the meetings. You’d eventually get him, but you couldn’t move anything.”8 But if there was one thing worse than Walt Disney’s not paying enough attention to his animated features, it was his paying too much of the wrong kind of attention. Disney damaged the film most not by neglecting it but by insisting that it adhere to a certain kind of design. That design was set by the background painter Eyvind Earle, whose early sketches showed that he wanted the film to echo medieval tapestries and miniatures in its general feeling (one sketch was modeled on a unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval galleries in upper Manhattan, another on a page from the book of hours of the duc de Berry).

  Sleeping Beauty resembled Snow White in its general shape, and in some particulars it recalled ideas that Disney had considered for Snow White and then rejected. The early story
outlines for Snow White placed great emphasis on the prince (“Doug Fairbanks type”) and his highly intelligent horse (“Like Tom Mix’s Horse Tony”); they were to be “great pals.”9 The prince and his horse in Sleeping Beauty matched those descriptions precisely. As with Cinderella ten years earlier, Disney sought a safe haven, in effect, by remaking Snow White. But Disney’s intention to make yet another version of Snow White could not be reconciled with his embrace of Earle’s background paintings.

  Those paintings have, at their strongest, a hallucinatory clarity, but they have no emotional content—they never reflect or reinforce the emotions the characters are supposed to be feeling. The practical problem the backgrounds posed for the animators, Frank Thomas wrote more than thirty years later, was that “we had to find designs that enabled us to get some kind of life in the characters, but still recognize that they would have to ‘work’ against the busy detail of the backgrounds and hold their own graphically regardless of the choices Eyvind made for the colors on the costumes.”10

  Earle was a particularly striking specimen of the kind of artist who has a splendid technique but nothing much to say. Such artists are highly useful to someone who does have something to say but must rely on others’ skills. By the late 1950s, the Disney studio employed many accomplished artists of the same general kind. Under other circumstances, Disney might have found some way to bend Earle’s designs to broader purposes; but what recommended Earle’s work to him now was simply its forwardness.

  Of the artists with strong personalities still left on the staff, the most important was probably the writer Bill Peet, who was skillful not only at constructing narratives but at drawing cartoon characters as well. Although Disney allowed himself one burst of enthusiasm for his storyboards, Peet recalled, “after a few months Walt lost touch with the project and also seemed to resent spending time to discuss Sleeping Beauty. . . . He kicked me downstairs to work on TV commercials.” Eyvind Earle remembered Peet’s storyboards as “extraordinarily funny, wonderful stuff,” all of it thrown out by Disney, “without a trace of it left. Because Walt was too busy; and in story, Walt wanted to have a part of it or he wouldn’t accept it. It had nothing to do with whether it was good or not.”11