The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Harry Tytle recorded what he said was the “only . . . mention [in his diary] of Walt not meticulously working on the product that he was doing”: a Sleeping Beauty meeting at 10 A.M. on August 22, 1957, “showing the whole picture.” This meeting took place just before Disney left on his long driving vacation in Europe. Tytle wrote that Disney “seems to be tired, has so much on his mind; he didn’t give this the treatment he would have in years past, where he’d go in for a couple of days and fine-tooth comb the whole picture. . . . He hit more from a broad aspect than from small specifics, like he used to.”12

  Disney complained constantly about the cost of his cartoon features. The problem was, as Tytle said, that where the features were concerned, “Walt alone could determine how much to spend and where to spend it.” Disney’s complaints were in fact directed at himself. Anyone who took his complaints seriously and tried to act on them risked being handed his head. “Sooner or later,” Tytle wrote, “the suggestions you would make for simplification or cost savings were going to interfere with Walt’s efforts in building a cartoon feature, and you’d be switched, in Walt’s eyes, from the role of lovable Jiminy Cricket to an evil Stromboli. The cost-savings approach would only work if it was your picture being produced and Walt was calling for changes. The reverse was a no-win deal.”13

  In other words, Sleeping Beauty was doomed from the start. It was a hapless relic from what now seemed like a very distant period in the Disney studio’s history.

  Disney read Sleeping Beauty’s failure not as owing to his own distracted role in its production but as evidence that animation should play an even smaller role in the company. He had been gradually turning away from animation since World War II; now he did so decisively. He reduced the animation staff sharply, dismissing studio veterans with twenty or thirty years of service.

  It was, ironically, around this time that the members of Disney’s animation board began to acquire a modest celebrity.14 By 1950, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written, “the board had settled down to a permanent group of nine supervising animators”—the “nine old men,” as Disney called them, a joking reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s denigration of the Supreme Court in the 1930s. The nine were, in addition to Thomas and Johnston, Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, and Marc Davis.15 By late in the decade, most of the “nine old men” had moved on to direction or Disneyland or other projects at the studio (and they were all well into middle age), but they remained the ultimate authorities where animation was concerned. Their continuing preeminence was a sign of animation’s diminished status: there were no longer any younger men rising in the ranks who could be considered likely successors to some of the nine.

  Not that membership in the “nine old men” was any sort of guarantee. Around 1960, Marc Davis recalled, “Ken Anderson, myself, and a couple of others worked on some cartoon stories, and I don’t think we could have sold anything, no matter how good. We put together a story on Chanticleer, and when we had a meeting, the answer was no! The excuse was that you can’t make a personality out of a chicken.” Disney’s dismissal of “Chanticleer” was actually not that abrupt. In the August 24, 1960, meeting that Davis was probably remembering, Disney remarked that the problem with making a rooster a leading character was that “[you] don’t feel like picking a rooster up and petting it.” Disney took “Chanticleer” seriously as a feature possibility—the August 24 meeting followed other “Chanticleer” meetings in 1960—but the eventual outcome was as Davis said.16

  One Hundred and One Dalmatians had already been in production for a couple of years by then, and it was turning out to be radically different from Sleeping Beauty. For one thing, the writing was entirely in Bill Peet’s hands—he wrote the screenplay and then developed and sketched all the storyboards (he also directed the recording of the voices).17 But Dalmatians promised to be most different in how it looked on the screen.

  Ken Peterson, the head of the animation department, wrote to Walt Disney on May 21, 1958: “Ken Anderson is making some very interesting experiments on a new style of background and layout handling for this picture. Everyone is very enthusiastic over the possibilities.”18 Anderson, who was principally responsible for Dalmatians’ design, remembered that “I got to fooling around with the cost people, and asking them various things about the cost of the pictures, and it turned out that if we were to eliminate the ink and paint process, we would save over half the cost of a picture. I thought, gee, that’s attractive, and I went to Walt with it, and he said, ‘Ah, yeah, yeah, you can fool around all you want to.’ ” Anderson was thinking about using the Xerox process to transfer the animators’ drawings directly from paper to celluloid—a technique used only sparingly in Sleeping Beauty, in the animation of a thorn forest—but he wanted to do more than that, by unifying the drawing styles of the animation and the backgrounds. He had in mind a reversal of what had happened on Sleeping Beauty, where Eyvind Earle’s bejeweled background paintings dominated the animation. In Dalmatians, the animators’ pencil lines would be echoed in the backgrounds.

  “I had the idea that we could do a whole damned picture without ever painting a background,” Anderson said.

  My idea was that it would all be one style. You’d have drawings in the background, and you’d see the animators’ drawings—which they liked. . . . I thought Walt knew about it; he’d always butt in if he could. I had him lined up [for meetings], but he kept ducking me. . . .

  There was no attempt to disguise the lines; I knew they were going to be a half foot across on a big screen, but they were good-looking lines, and [because] they were animators’ lines they always had more life than tracings. The animators were high on it; everybody was high on the thing. Except Walt never would see this thing; he wouldn’t believe that I was doing that. So I showed him [a pilot scene, evidently]—I had done the animation, too, so the animators wouldn’t have to be responsible for it. He objected to [putting the drawings for the] backgrounds on cels; I went along with him but put the backgrounds on cels anyway.19

  Jack Cutting, who had worked for Disney since 1929 in various capacities, could have had such a situation in mind when he said: “Walt would sometimes say . . . ‘I’m busy, go ahead and take care of that, do that.’ Well, if you were going to be a survivor, you had to stop and think, just what does he mean? . . . With Walt, if you went too far, that was too far. Even if he had opened the way for you to do it.”20

  That is exactly what happened to Anderson. “After [Dalmatians] came out [in January 1961], he went to Europe,” Anderson said. “When he came back, he seemed rather strange. Everybody loved [the film] but Walt. He really hurt me; I was in a meeting with the animators and Walt, and he said, ‘We’re never gonna do another one of those goddamned things like Ken did.’ This was in front of me, and in front of my friends. It couldn’t have been any worse. And he didn’t talk to me for about a year.”21 Anderson received screen credit for art direction on the next Disney animated feature, The Sword in the Stone (1963), but there is no sense, as in Dalmatians, that the boundary between characters and backgrounds has been erased.

  Disney had always divided his animated features among several directors, but after Dalmatians he put one of them, Woolie Reitherman, completely in charge of The Sword in the Stone. As to why Disney would have delegated so much authority over the animated features to Reitherman, whose forte for years had been the broadest sort of comedy (his segments in Dalmatians are heavy-handed compared with the rest of the film), the animator Bob Carlson offered this clue: “I was in a room once when Walt was discussing certain things, and in the course of the conversation he started talking about Woolie. He said, ‘Whenever I want to know what the public thinks about a film I’m making, I ask Woolie, because in a way he’s the All-American boy. . . . If Woolie approves of a certain thing, or makes a suggestion, I consider it very favorably.’ ”22

  Bill Peet remembered that Disney now came to story meetings cold—he had not
already seen the boards on one of his nighttime rambles through the studio, as he would have in earlier years—and would not take into account how his increasingly troubled physical state affected his response to stories. On one occasion, he came into a meeting saying, in Peet’s recollection, “My head feels like it’s full of cement. Now, what the hell ya got here?”23 Peet’s exasperation mirrored the way others on the staff felt. “No one had an easy time with Walt or found him particularly comfortable to be around,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote, “and anyone as argumentative as Bill [Peet] was bound to compound the problem. . . . Walt’s passing moods had a profound effect on both his judgment and his behavior, and on his dark days he was apt to rip a storyboard apart for no apparent reason.”24

  In the years just before he left the staff, Peet said—he quit on January 29, 1964, in the midst of the writing of The Jungle Book—“Walt was involved in so many varieties of projects he couldn’t concentrate on any one thing. I didn’t expect him to put much thought into the cartoon features and I felt many of his suggestions were wrong—so I disagreed quite often. . . . How could he be sharp in a story meeting with his head full of all the other stuff. Such was Walt’s ego, he often said, ‘I’m the little honeybee who goes flying around sprinkling pollen here and there to keep everything going.’ And so he believed his snap judgment was not to be questioned. If the little bee gave you a bum steer, then went buzzing off to bigger things, you were stuck with it.”25

  Floyd Norman, who helped write The Jungle Book as a young member of the Disney staff, remembered that Disney shrugged off Peet’s departure. “Walt said the movie was too dark anyway. He didn’t like Bill’s vision of the film. He said, ‘I want to have some fun stuff. Make the film fun. It’s just too dark.’ . . . He was very much against the film being too serious. He said, ‘I just want to have fun. Make it fun. More laughs, more personality stuff.’ ” Always, Norman said, Disney had to sign off on whatever was done, even if that meant the writers marked time for weeks. “Nothing got past him. If he hadn’t seen it yet, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. We would simply have to wait until he had time to give it his OK. It truly was a one-man studio. Everything had Walt’s touch.”26

  By the middle 1960s, Disney had turned his back on serious retellings of classic stories. “We do better with our own stories where we have greater latitude,” he said in 1965. “People keep urging us to do Don Quixote”—a story that Disney had contemplated making as early as 1940, when Bill Tytla was anxious to work on it.27 “We’d be crucified if that didn’t turn out just right—especially in the Latin countries. I got trapped into making Alice in Wonderland against my better judgment and it was a terrible disappointment. Frankly, I always liked the Tenniel illustrations in Alice but I never exactly died laughing over the story. It’s terribly tough to transfer whimsy to the screen.”28

  Woolie Reitherman’s boisterous, careless kind of comedy bore a general resemblance to much of what passed for comedy on television at the time, and the thinking behind the Disney feature cartoons and the occasional short subject now resembled the thought that went into TV situation comedies. But there was no mistaking one of those films for a television product; in the 1960s, as in earlier decades, the level of craftsmanship remained stubbornly high. That was not the case where Disney’s live-action films were concerned.

  By the early 1960s, Disney was no longer speaking of television as a means of promoting his theatrical films. Instead, he had begun to regard most of the films he made as interchangeable, suitable for either venue, as the need arose, the Johnny Tremain precedent expanded to encompass most of the studio’s output. “Some of our pictures will be for theaters and others for TV,” he said in 1960. “I’ll make up my mind about that later.”29 The decisive step came in 1961, when Disney switched networks, from ABC to NBC. It is not clear who courted whom, but Disney and NBC were a good match, in any case. NBC was the network most aggressively programming in color, and Disney, after seven years in black and white on ABC, badly wanted color. The NBC show, telecast on Sunday evening as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, was devoted largely to multipart live-action films that were at least barely imaginable as theatrical releases and were often released theatrically overseas.

  The New York Times explained the strategy: “By parlaying television into movies—[and] the other way around—Mr. Disney believes he has found the most sensible way to make television shows of quality and still earn a profit.” Disney himself told the Times: “Once you are in television, it’s like operating a slaughter house. Nothing must go to waste. You have to figure ways to make glue out of the hoofs.”30 Animation survived on the NBC show mainly through the presence of a hyperactive, Viennese-accented character called Ludwig Von Drake, who was presented as Donald Duck’s uncle. (Donald was named Duck, rather than Drake, Disney explained in 1961—not on TV—because “he was a little bastard and he took his mother’s name.”) Von Drake, a self-proclaimed expert on almost everything, served as the guest host for programs pieced together from short films like those in the People and Places series. He filled a role that might otherwise have demanded more of Disney’s time than the very brief introductions he filmed for most of the shows.

  ABC had been a part owner of the Disneyland park, but the Disneys severed that tie before the ABC show ran its course. Disneyland became a wholly owned subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions during the 1960 fiscal year, with the purchase of ABC’s 34.48 percent share for $7.5 million. Walt Disney Productions had already exercised options to buy the ownership interests of Western Printing and Lithographing Company and Walt himself, for much less than they were worth by the time of the sales, in 1957. It had no such option to buy ABC’s share, and so Roy Disney had no choice but to haggle with the network. In May 1961, Disneyland, Incorporated, was merged into the parent company.31

  ABC’s part ownership of Disneyland disturbed Roy more than it did him, Walt said in 1961: “It was an obsession with him to get them out.” Roy said a few years later: “They were not likeable, workable people.”32 Such judgments carried extra weight because Walt Disney Productions’ personal flavor was still so strong: as late as 1966, Walt and Lillian Disney still owned more than 16 percent of the company’s common stock, Roy and Edna Disney almost 8 percent.33

  After the shooting of Third Man on the Mountain, Disney warmed to the idea of much more filming in Europe, and by the fall of 1959 a half dozen projects were under way. Over the next few years, he made several dozen films in Europe, most of them bearing the marks of the relatively short shooting schedules—and relatively low costs—that made it possible to think of theatrical and TV films as interchangeable. Thanks to jets, which halved the flight time to Europe starting in 1959, his overseas visits were now more frequent. He and Lillian visited Europe four times in 1960, stopping in London each time. They were in Vienna twice that year and were there again in 1961, when they also visited London (three times) and Paris. In August 1962 they visited Lisbon, and then London in September.34 Disney found ocean voyages to Europe tedious, his daughter Diane said in 1956—“Daddy when he gets away from the studio, and has nothing to do except sightsee and walk around and talk to people, he gets bored”35—so the greater speed of air travel was made to order for him.

  More and more of the films made in the United States were television-flavored, too, not just in their obvious back-lot shooting, flat lighting, hamfisted music, and reliance on TV-bred actors, but in their tendency to instruct the audience how to respond to what was happening on the screen, through reaction shots at supposedly funny or touching moments. Movies like Toby Tyler (1960) are as curiously airless as many TV shows of the time; there is little or no sense that the movie’s events are part of life going on outside the screen. Disney was pleased, though, with the hack TV directors he hired to direct more and more of his theatrical features. “I like young talent,” he said in 1963. “When people get to be institutions, they direct pictures with their left hand and do something else with their right.�
��36 Those reaction shots in Toby Tyler were probably his editing choices.

  In live action, as in animation, Disney was spread thinner than ever before, and in consequence he made careless, self-indulgent decisions that undermined films he cared about. Pollyanna (1960) may have been fatally hobbled by its title, as Disney himself believed; but it is also much too long, and according to its director, David Swift, Disney rejected his efforts to trim twenty minutes from the film and restructure a sequence devoted to a turn-of-the-century bazaar. The effect would have been to strengthen the film’s narrative line and make it less of a nostalgic bath, but Disney insisted that it be the latter.37

  Pollyanna was Disney’s first film with Hayley Mills, a young (thirteen at the time of filming) British actress who all but rescues it. The illusion of spontaneity in her performance is complete—and vital, because any sense of calculation, whether originating with the actor or imposed by the director, would be deadly. Instead, Pollyanna’s goodness (which is most emphatically not the same as sweetness) seems natural and unforced, and is thus wholly winning. It was no wonder that Disney signed her to a multipicture contract.

  Mills and her parents, the actor John Mills and writer Mary Hayley Bell, were British film people who, like Richard Todd and Ken Annakin, were guests in Disney’s home. (Fess Parker and James MacArthur, the two young American actors who succeeded Todd as the principal leading man in Disney films, both spoke warmly of Disney, but neither was ever invited to Holmby Hills.) “I loved going to his home in Hollywood [sic],” Hayley Mills said in an interview published in 1968. “In most Hollywood houses, there are those private viewing theaters for the latest films, and you sit back in those comfortable chairs with a drink in your hand, and the Renoirs disappear, and the screen comes down. But at his house, he didn’t have a bar in his screening room. He had a soda fountain, and all through a movie, you’d hear pshissh, squirt, bubble bubble—he was behind there concocting all those wonderful sodas and sundaes.”38