The Animated Man

by Michael Barrier

  Disney emerged from his experience with the New York fair skeptical of world’s fairs in general. They were out of date, he said, and of benefit only to hotels and restaurants.86 Neither had his skepticism about working with big corporations been much eased. Ford decided not to come into Disneyland as the sponsor of an exhibit, despite what Marty Sklar, who had been writing promotional material of various kinds since Disneyland opened, called “a major effort” by Disney himself. “I went back with Walt for the Ford presentation. . . . Walt had Bob and Dick Sherman write a song, called ‘Get the Feel of the Wheel of a Ford.’ . . . It was a fabulous piece, and it would have been the greatest commercial for Ford. We went back there, and we made this pitch, and the end of the presentation was this song. And they turned us down. Walt couldn’t understand, and he was really upset on the plane going back to New York. When Walt got involved with somebody, he did it all the way.”87

  Once the fair was out of the way, Disney shifted his attention back to how the technology the fair had nurtured could improve Disneyland. Walt Disney Productions purchased its first aircraft, a Beechcraft Queen Air, in January 1963, and took delivery of second plane, a Grumman Gulfstream, in March 1964.88 Disney used the Gulfstream for short trips inside California and the Queen Air for longer trips out of state (it was replaced in July 1965 by a Beechcraft King Air). By mid-1965, according to Business Week, Disney was flying south to Disneyland about once a week. But he was driving several times a week to WED in Glendale to keep tabs on the development of Audio-Animatronics figures.89

  Audio-Animatronics, based on Marc Davis’s designs, transformed the Jungle Cruise in particular. The elephants bathing in the river were sly comedians now, as were the hyenas laughing at the five members of a safari trapped atop a pole by a rhinoceros.

  Davis recalled designing a walk-through attraction on a pirate theme after talking about one with Disney, evidently in the early 1960s. “But the funny thing was, Walt was never quite ready to look at these drawings. He’d come into my room and not look at the walls and boards. He’d come in and he’d talk to me about pirates, but he would deliberately not look at the storyboards. It was annoying as hell to me, because I knew I had some work that I thought was pretty good, and also, I wanted to know what he thought about them. This went on until we went back to New York . . . and I think when we came back from there, Walt knew what he wanted to do”—not a walk-through attraction under New Orleans Square but a much more elaborate ride.90

  The idea at that time, the designer Claude Coats said in 1991, was to confine the new ride within an underground space inside the park. “A big hole in the ground was there, and the steel was up for two or three years while we did the World’s Fair shows. Then, when we came back and I started working on what might be in that space,” after Disney had decided on a ride, “it was very, very small and very tight. We had a model going on it and Walt came around and looked at it one day, and then finally said, ‘We’re just going to go under the railroad track and into a big building outside the berm. There are too many ideas happening that are too confined in this small space.’ ”91

  This was the ride eventually known as Pirates of the Caribbean, a dazzling display of how rapidly Disney’s “Imagineers,” as he called the designers at WED, had mastered their new technological opportunities. A total of sixty-five animated figures—pirates, townspeople, animals—made up the cast, moving more or less freely. The “E” Ticket explained some of what was involved in generating that movement:

  In developing and programming figural movement for the original Pirates ride, Imagineers used a coded reference system to plan and track the animation of each figure, and the [pirates’] captain has eleven of the functions. These codes represent broad motions like “left arm swing” and “right arm forward,” “torso twist,” “body side sway” and “body foresway.” The function codes range up to 37 movements for the body (including ten codes for the fingers) and another 13 codes for the head. Examples of the “head functions” include “eye blink,” “mouth pinch right” and “smile left.” Another group of 37 codes is used for the animals, birds and sea creatures within the ride. Some of the pirates have as few as three or four motions, while most have about seven or eight. When Pirates of the Caribbean opened, there were twelve pirates and villagers with ten or more of these animation functions.92

  The central episode of the many that spectators see, as they pass through Pirates of the Caribbean in boats, is one in which the pirate captain auctions off the women of the town. The “audio” half of Audio-Animatronics comes very much into play as pirate voices call for “the redhead,” a voluptuous young woman who is to be next on the auction block. “Walt added the auctioneer scene kind of late,” Claude Coats said. “He came in one time and even said, ‘This will be all right, won’t it?’ He was just a little doubtful of auctioning off the girls. Was that quite ‘Disney’ or not? We added some other signs around, buy a bride or something like that, that augmented the auction scene as though it was a special big event. . . . The way the girls were done it’s not an offensive scene at all, but it probably could have been if it hadn’t been handled in a very interesting way.”93

  As it is, there is an undertone of rape, but the sheer lavishness of the scene encourages the squeamish spectator to put such doubts aside. “We had made the auctioneer pirate so sophisticated that you could watch him move and it was as good as watching Lincoln,” Marc Davis said. “He had all the little mouth movements and all that, and I mentioned to Walt that I thought it was a ‘hell of a waste.’ Walt said, ‘No, Marc, it’s not a waste . . . we do so much return business down here, and the next time people come in they’ll see something they hadn’t noticed before.’ ”94

  There was, however, an intractable problem with Audio-Animatronics, even when its figures were as sophisticated—that is, programmed with as many movements—as the pirate captain and the robot Lincoln. The problem, the sculptor Blaine Gibson said, was “just how crude our medium is, relative to the human figure. There are a whole lot of muscles that allow a human actor to go from one expression to the other with extreme ease. You can’t program this into a machine, and we don’t have a material that can handle that.”95

  In short, the Audio-Animatronics figures were not really lifelike, and they could not be. As clever and intricate as it was, Pirates of the Caribbean was different only in degree, not in kind, from the tableaux that made up the rides in Fantasyland. As in the 1930s, Disney had forced the growth of a kind of animation, bringing to the movement of robotic figures a subtlety that had not existed before. In the 1930s, what he had achieved by the time he made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had opened up all kinds of possibilities for his medium—but in the middle 1960s, he was about to hit a brick wall. Audio-Animatronics was never going to make anyone weep. It was a kind of animation that could only remind Disney, as it became more sophisticated technologically, of what he had given up, a quarter century before, when he faltered in the face of the challenges and opportunities that the character animation in Snow White represented.

  “For years afterward,” Disney said in 1956, “I hated Snow White because every time I’d make a feature after that, they’d always compare it with Snow White, and it wasn’t as good as Snow White.”

  Wilfred Jackson, who was the most sympathetic and observant of Disney’s cartoon directors, confirmed that “Snow White was a source of great trouble to Walt in later years. . . . Years and years after he made Snow White, we were discussing some footage to go on TV. He said then that it didn’t seem possible to make a better picture than Snow White. I’m not sure it gave him a lot of pleasure to make that picture. He had a hard time trying to make a better one later on. . . . Other pictures have had better animation or better dialogue or better techniques in recording. These were not Walt’s criteria for a better picture. His criterion was the impact it had on the public. And that film was Snow White.”96

  Audio-Animatronics attractions were complex and challenging, but they—a
nd by extension theme parks themselves—were a dead end for someone whose ambitions were more than entrepreneurial, as Disney’s clearly were. As he had demonstrated repeatedly in work on Snow White and his other early films, he was a deeply serious man, but his life had run in reverse—Disneyland, for all its virtues, was simply not as serious an undertaking as his early features, and there was no way Audio-Animatronics could make it so. To wind up, in his sixties, “playing with his toys” was not where Walt Disney wanted to be.

  On the evening of July 17, 1965, exactly ten years after Disneyland opened, Walt and Roy Disney and their wives joined in a celebration with those employees who had been with the park since the beginning. Walt spoke to the group, characteristically blunt and profane, but his words conveyed none of the giddy happiness of ten years earlier. He was more like the truculent tycoon reporters had been surprised to encounter:

  Well, we had a lot of problems putting this thing together. There was pressure for money. A lot of people didn’t believe in what we were doing. And we were putting the squeeze play where we could. I remember we were dealing with all three networks, they wanted our television show. And I kept insisting I wanted an amusement park. And everybody said, “What the hell’s he want that damn amusement park for?” I couldn’t think of a good reason except, I don’t know, I wanted it. ABC needed the television show so damned bad that they bought the amusement park. . . . I just want to leave you with this thought, that it’s just been sort of a dress rehearsal and we’re just getting [started]. So if any of you start to rest on your laurels, I mean, just forget it.97

  There was no retracing his steps to become the artist he once was; and so Disney began devoting more and more of his time to projects that bore little resemblance to either his films or his park.

  One of those projects had its genesis in the mid-1950s, when Marc Davis, who had been teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute since 1947, received a phone call from its founder, Nelbert Chouinard. As a result of her call, Walt Disney sent two members of his financial staff, Royal Clark and Chuck Romero, to the school to, as Davis said, “kind of take a look at her financial problems,” which were severe. When Clark and Romero inspected the school’s books, they soon concluded that it had been swindled out of tens of thousands of dollars by its bookkeeper. Disney—perhaps energized by the honorary degree Chouinard gave him in May 1956—began taking a hand in the school’s messy business affairs that year. Even with honest books, Chouinard was losing money, and so, in 1957, Walt Disney Productions began subsidizing the school—and, in effect, took control of it.98 “Walt always said she had been wonderful to him,” Davis said. “This was the basis of him getting into that.”99

  By the late 1950s, Disney had seized on the idea of transforming Chouinard into what one alumnus, Robert Perine, called “a multi-disciplined school of the arts where the graphic arts, music, drama, and film could all be gathered under one roof and offered to especially talented students who wanted to partake of this unique cross-breeding of activities.”100 Millard Sheets, a highly respected watercolorist and a Chouinard instructor, explained Disney’s thinking to Perine, as Disney had explained it to him around 1960:

  Walt felt that a new art would be born, a new concept of motion pictures. This was his whole dream. This is what very few people seem to understand, that a new form would come out of it, if a school was designed where there was a school of dance, cinemaphotography [sic], drama, art, music, and eventually literature where they could develop writers. He felt that if all these things could be, as he used to say, “under one roof”—meaning they were really tied together physically—there’d be a cross-fertilization in the activities of the school and in the dormitories. . . . He felt that for a six-year program, which he envisaged, there’d be a totally new synthesis in the sense of mutual respect and understanding, and that it would make the motion picture art a new art.101

  In 1961, a study by Economic Research Associates—a new consulting firm that Price had established with Disney’s support—pinpointed the most desirable location for the new “university of the arts” as in the vicinity of the Hollywood Bowl. Disney “gave the green light to the design of a master plan,” Perine has written, “the eventual renderings for which showed the school nestled in a small valley just across the Hollywood Freeway from the Bowl.” By early 1962, the plan’s substance still amounted to no more than pulling together Chouinard and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music—another struggling institution—on one campus, with neither school’s name subsumed in the name of the other.102 In September 1962, though, they were merged into a new institution, the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts.

  By the fall of 1964, with his all-consuming work on the world’s fair behind him, Disney was speaking expansively and publicly about his hopes for the new school. “This is a really new, exciting idea—all the arts taught on one spread-out campus, the students of each getting together to broaden their knowledge and stimulate their creative powers,” he told an interviewer. “It grew out of our experience in the studio where a person might come in as an artist but wind up as a writer, a musician or an actor. This is something I’ve set my heart on and we have high-powered people ready to help it become reality. But it’s too good to go off half-cocked. We’ll hold our fire until some of these other big cultural projects here [he was referring to the Music Center and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles] are completed. Then watch us go.”103

  When Millard Sheets had lunch with Disney in 1964, he was taken aback by the scale of the architectural drawings Disney showed him: “I looked and said, ‘My God, this is a big university, not an art school! It’s a nice design, but . . .’ [Disney] said, ‘Well, this is what we’ll grow into. We’ll start simply, but this is the master plan.’ ” Marc Davis was also startled by the architectural drawings: “He told me a number of times . . .‘I don’t want to see this as an ivory tower type of school. I want to see this as a real practical thing.’ He talked the same about the buildings. . . . I made a comment after seeing the drawings on this and I said, ‘God, Walt, it would be marvelous if this had some one unique thing about it’ ” to give the school a distinct architectural identity. Disney responded more impatiently this time: “Oh, for Christ’s sake, goddamn it, Marc.”104

  Consistent with Sheets’s and Davis’s memories, the promotional material for CalArts emphasized its practical, even commercial side—there was a hint in it of Walt Disney’s earliest job as an artist, when he learned what he called “tricks.” A lavish, full-color, spiral-bound fundraising booklet for CalArts titled “To enrich the lives of all people . . . ” included a preface by Disney, who was chairman of the board of trustees. He said in part:

  The remarkable thing that’s taking place in almost every field of endeavor is an accelerating rate of dynamic growth and change. The arts, which have historically symbolized the advance of human progress, must match this growth if they are going to maintain their value in, and influence on, society.

  The talents of musicians, the self expression of the actor, and the techniques and applications of fine and commercial artists are being used more and more in today’s business, industry, entertainment and communications—not by themselves, but rather, in close association with each other.

  So artists who can operate in only one field are finding themselves limited and ill-equipped to meet the challenges and opportunities that come their way.

  What we must have, then, is a completely new approach to training in the arts—an entirely new educational concept which will properly prepare artists and give them the vital tools so necessary for working in, and drawing from, every field of creativity and performance.105

  On August 16, 1966, Disney called James Algar, once a cartoon director but now one of his live-action producers. He wanted to talk about a promotional film for CalArts, and about his doing an introduction for it like those he did for the weekly TV show. His ideas, as Algar summarized them, again emphasized the arts’ practical applicat
ions:

  Everyone says do we need artists? Let’s make the point that we need all the arts; in medical research, in space travel, we need artists to help visualize things. Notice how much of the moon story in the papers is visualized through artist’s renderings. . . .

  Walt would tell the need for artists, how important they are, the CalArts theory of education, his own experience at the studio in working with all the arts, never dreamed at the start he’d be this involved with all the arts; problems today in this complex world of communication, educational TV, world problems of illiteracy—pictures communicate instantaneously—the CalArts approach to professional competency, the training of teachers, professionals as practitioners, a College of Arts for tomorrow, heart of it talent.106

  Buzz Price, from the beginning a member of CalArts’ board, wrote of a Disney “whose personal art preference was representational and whose social values were essentially conservative, launching a complex inter-art school the stated intent of which was to be out-front in innovation, combination and presentation of art forms.”107 On the evidence of Disney’s own words, though, he envisioned not such a school but rather one that could produce people like those who had been so useful to him at Disneyland; that is, exceptionally versatile and flexible commercial artists whose skills extended across a range of disciplines.

  As for the school itself, ideas resembling Disney’s were in the air in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when performing-arts complexes like Lincoln Center in New York (with its Juilliard School component) and the Kennedy Center in Washington were being planned and built. Even earlier, the composer Richard Rodgers had pressed for an arts complex in New York.108 It was a given, in the demented city planning of the period, that it was desirable to segregate such functions into their own precinct, just as it was desirable to separate and isolate all the other strands of urban life—residential, commercial, governmental, and so on. It made sense, on such terms, not just to combine two schools that had very little in common but to seal them off from their surroundings.