by Bob Thomas
Walt was the devoted guardian of Mickey’s integrity. Many times he said in story conferences, “Mickey wouldn’t do that.” He had an unerring sense of detecting when the gag men were going too far, when they were reaching for comedy business which would perhaps draw bellylaughs but would be at variance with the naturalness of Mickey’s character. That is why Mickey Mouse captured the world’s affection as had no other cartoon character: he remained himself, an enormously likable figure.
The success of Mickey Mouse was bringing many changes to the Hyperion studio. The physical plant underwent the first of its many mutations, with additions to the front, side and rear of the original building in 1929 and 1930. New offices were constructed in 1930, and the following year brought the completion of a new two-storied Animation Building and a sound stage. Walt, who had sometimes answered the studio telephone himself in the early years, now had a second-floor office with an oriental rug over planked flooring, stained-glass windows and a handsome wood desk.
Studio personnel was expanding rapidly. Veteran animators and story men left the New York cartoon studios to join the exciting things that were happening at Disney’s. Among them were Dave Hand, Rudy Zamora, Tom Palmer, Ted Sears, Bert Gillett, Jack King, Webb Smith. Bert Lewis took over the music department after Carl Stalling left for another cartoon studio. Frank Churchill joined the studio as a pianist-composer. The infusion of new talent prompted Walt to set increasingly higher standards for the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies.
As each new cartoon approached, Walt issued hortatory memos to the staff. A July 20, 1931, message called for suggestions for the eighteenth Mickey, The Barnyard Broadcast. By this time Mickey and Minnie had been joined by other cast regulars, Pluto the Pup, Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow. Walt announced a forthcoming meeting to discuss the cartoon and outlined the plot:
Story to be built around a Barnyard Broadcasting idea. Action will center on the efforts of Mickey and his gang trying to broadcast. Probably work in piano playing, quartet in goofy numbers, the “Swiss Yodelers.” Mickey could do a solo number on his banjo and Minnie could play a solo on the harp. The barnyard birds come in and sing, whistle and chirp while Minnie is playing the harp. Possible to use the same little canary singing all through the broadcast or use the little barn swallows instead.
Clarabelle and Horsecollar could do a dance together or individually. Possibly use Pluto in the story, carrying him in his characteristic dumb style. Could cut back to all the barnyard animals listening in on their respective radio sets. The chickens in their chicken coops, hens laying eggs to the radio reception, pigs in their pens dancing, etc., sheep in the pasture, birds in the trees with their little nests fixed up like homes, all listening in on their sets.
Mickey could be the announcer. Could work up a hillbilly act with Clarabelle, Horsecollar, Mickey and Minnie as the hillbillies.
I expect everyone to contribute some ideas to this Gag Meeting. The ideas must be built around the group of characters as suggested above, and in such a way as to tie them in with the ideas as outlined. Any ideas that you work up to submit at the meeting should be accompanied by small sketches to illustrate the gags. Kindly have such material prepared and ready to hand in at the beginning of the meeting. Supply yourself with a pad and pencil for the purpose of making notes or sketching out any ideas that might present themselves during the course of the meeting.
Everyone give this some deep thought and see if we can’t come up with a good peppy meeting.
Walt and his artists were developing new techniques for the animation industry. The drawback to cartoon making had always been that the animator could not judge the effectiveness of his work until it was completed and on the screen. In their eagerness to please Walt, his animators developed a process which would permit a preliminary view of what the action would be. As the animator completed key poses, his assistant, or in-betweener, photographed the drawings, developing the print himself and drying it on a revolving drum. When enough of the drawings had been completed, the film was spliced onto a loop. Then the animator could get a visual impression of how his character would move. The films were projected in a small, unventilated closet, and thus the place for preliminary review of animation was dubbed “the sweatbox.”
Another important new technique was the storyboard.
Animators had long been hampered in story sessions by the necessity of verbalizing what was essentially a visual medium. They brought sketches or created them on the spot, but there was no way to present the complete continuity of what would appear on the screen. The storyboard provided that. It was simplicity itself: a large fiber board four feet by eight, on which sketches were pinned. Thus Walt could see at a glance how the action would progress. If scenes were eliminated, they could be unpinned and discarded. New scenes could be added. When the final sequence was decided upon, Walt and his animators could visualize the cartoon from beginning to end.
With his staff expanding, Walt Disney began to establish the attitudes and modes of operation that would continue throughout his professional career. Not yet thirty, he had been in the animation business a dozen years, and his maturity belied his years. Some of his underlings had worked longer in New York cartoons, but all viewed Walt Disney as a leader to be followed, and obeyed. Away from the studio he could indulge in horseplay and be “one of the boys.” But during work hours his attitude precluded casual intimacy. He was incapable of small talk. His employees learned not to engage him in the banter that animators used as relief from the tedium of drawing. His mind was too involved with the problems of the moment—a storyline that defied solution; a cartoon that failed to evoke laughs at the preview; an overdue check from Columbia Pictures that threatened next week’s payroll. His workers learned not to be offended if he passed them in the hallway without a word; they knew that he was preoccupied with a studio problem.
Walt was developing one of his most valuable traits: the ability to recognize a man’s creative potential and force him to achieve it.
Wilfred Jackson was a rawboned student from Otis Art Institute when he applied for a job at the Disney studio in 1928. He was so eager to learn animation that he offered to work for nothing—or even pay tuition. He was assigned to help the janitor wash paint off cels. Soon he was animating, drawing a cycle of Minnie running along the riverbank in Steamboat Willie. Each time he proved himself in a new challenge, Walt promoted him to a job of greater responsibility. To Jackson it seemed that he was being pushed beyond his capacities; but he was so anxious to prove himself to Walt that he tried ever harder. One day he remarked to Walt: “I’d sure like it if you would let me handle a whole picture myself.”
Jackson meant that he wanted to animate an entire cartoon; Walt had other ideas. He told Jackson: “You know, I’ve got a lot of loose ends that have been cut out of the Mickeys. Why don’t you work up some kind of story that would tie all of them together?” Jackson didn’t like being handed bits and pieces of other animators’ work instead of creating his own subject. But he concocted a story with Mickey being stranded on a desert island with a piano—one of the film fragments conveniently had a piano sequence—and dreaming of previous episodes in his life. The result was an entertaining cartoon, The Castaway. Jackson had proved to Walt that he could be a director, which was not what he intended to be. But he recognized later, as Walt had already concluded, that he could not compete with the accomplished animators from New York. He proved to be an expert director, and he remained one for more than thirty years.
Ben Sharpsteen had worked for Max Fleischer on Happy Hooligan and Out of the Inkwell before coming to work for Walt in 1929. After the New York invasion began in full force, Sharpsteen grew discouraged over his ability to keep up with the new animators. Walt recognized Sharpsteen’s capacity for working with young talent, and he suggested, “We’ve got to teach these new boys all about animation; you do it.” Sharpsteen found himself in charge of training the fledgling artists, laying the groundwork for an educ
ational expansion in the mid-Thirties. After Sharpsteen had the program in motion, Walt needed another director. He chose Ben Sharpsteen.
Walt’s work was all-consuming. He seemed to think and talk about nothing else. One evening Sharpsteen met Walt and Lilly at a drugstore near the studio. Walt had been thinking about another barnyard adventure for Mickey, and he unburdened himself of the entire plot, enacting in the doorway of the drugstore the roles of cats, pigs, goats and Mickey himself.
No source of story material was overlooked. When Walt received a traffic ticket for speeding, he related the incident to those he met in the studio hallways. With each recounting, the encounter with the law became more embellished, until the story proved too good for private telling. It became the basis for the next Mickey Mouse cartoon, Traffic Troubles.
The releasing contract with Columbia Pictures had proved unsatisfactory. Walt and Roy had no quarrel with Harry Cohn, the Hollywood autocrat of Columbia’s fortunes, but they felt they were being mistreated by the distribution office in New York. Columbia exacted 35 percent of all revenue from the cartoons, and deducted the costs of prints, transportation, insurance, advertising, etc. The contract provided for Columbia and Disney to take equal shares of the remainder, minus the $7,000 Columbia advanced for each cartoon. But nothing ever remained. In two years Columbia released fifty Disney films and all were charged with a deficit because of the original $50,000 that Columbia had advanced to pay off Powers.
With income restricted and costs constantly mounting, Roy Disney sometimes found it difficult to meet the payroll. On one payday each worker found only a $10 goldpiece in his envelope. When Roy complained to his brother about their limited resources, Walt replied, “Don’t worry.” Even when the nation’s banks were closed by President Roosevelt in 1933, Walt refused to share Roy’s concern. “Why should money be so important?” Walt reasoned. “Maybe potatoes will become the medium of exchange, and we can pay the boys in potatoes.”
Walt realized the studio could not produce cartoons at a perpetual loss. The Disneys asked Columbia to increase the advance on each cartoon to $15,000. Columbia declined.
The veteran producer Sol Lesser had become a friend of the Disneys, and he mentioned their distribution problems to Joseph Schenck, president of United Artists. Schenck told the Disneys, “You are producers; we are a company of producers. We will sell your cartoons on their own. We don’t sell any other shorts, so your product won’t be released with a bunch of others in block-booking. We’ll give you fifteen thousand dollars advance on each cartoon. We also have a close connection with the Bank of America, and we can help you get financing.”
The proposal was extremely attractive to Walt, not merely because of the terms. United Artists represented the Tiffany’s of the movie business; its partners were Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin and Samuel Goldwyn. Walt was especially thrilled at the prospect of being associated with the great Chaplin. The comedian proved to be as much of a fan of the Disney cartoons as Walt had been of Chaplin’s comedies. “You’re going to develop more; you’re getting ahold of your medium,” Chaplin told Walt. “But to protect your independence, you’ve got to do as I have done—own every picture you make.” Walt agreed with the advice.
With the association with United Artists agreed upon, Walt determined to add a new element to animation: color.
For years Walt had been intrigued with the notion of adding color to his cartoons. He had told his technicians to experiment with nitrates and other elements that might provide color on the screen. But nothing proved practical, except for the primitive technique of using blue film stock for night scenes, green for underwater, and red for fire. Then in the early 1930s, Technicolor developed a method of combining three negatives of the primary colors. By 1932 the process had not been perfected for live-action photography, but it could be applied to cartoons. Technicolor showed a test reel to Walt Disney, and he was convinced. Roy wasn’t.
“We’d be crazy to take on the expense of color just after we’ve made a deal with United Artists,” Roy argued. “They won’t advance us any more money for color.”
“Yes, but don’t you see, Roy?” Walt replied. “Maybe United Artists won’t give us any more dough, but the pictures will create so much excitement that we’ll get longer playdates and bigger rentals. That’ll bring the money back eventually.”
“Eventually! It’ll be years before we see that money, with all the advances that are charged against us already. We can’t do it.”
Roy added his fears that the colors might not stick to the celluloid or would chip off. Walt’s answer: “Then we’ll develop paints that will stick and won’t chip.” Roy remained unconvinced. He asked others in the studio to dissuade his brother from his disastrous course. Walt heard their arguments and became more certain that color would raise animation to new levels of creativity. He saw color as a means of establishing the Silly Symphonies. From the beginning, they had been a kind of stepsister to the enormously popular Mickey Mouse series. United Artists had been reluctant to take on the Symphonies and did so only when Walt agreed to borrow on his star’s name with the billing “Mickey Mouse Presents a Walt Disney Silly Symphony.”
Walt used his brother’s reluctance to evoke a concession from Technicolor. “Roy says color is going to cost us a lot of money that we’ll never get back,” Walt argued. “So if we take a chance on it, you’ve got to assure us that every other cartoon producer isn’t going to rush into the theaters with Technicolor.” The company agreed to grant Disney two years’ exclusive use of the three-color process. Roy grumblingly consented to a contract.
Production had been half completed on a Silly Symphony called Flowers and Trees, an idyll in which plants animated to the music of Mendelssohn and Schubert. Walt ordered the black-and-white backgrounds repainted and all of the action restaged in color. A special camera stand was constructed to photograph the colored cels. Roy’s fears were confirmed: the dried paint did chip off the celluloid and colors faded under the hot lights. Walt worked night and day with his laboratory technicians until they developed an adhering paint of stable colors.
After the first few scenes had been completed, Walt showed them to a friend, Rob Wagner, publisher of a literary magazine in Beverly Hills. Wagner was so impressed that he invited Sid Grauman, impresario of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, to see the film. The film lasted only a minute, but Grauman said he wanted Flowers and Trees to open with his next attraction, Strange Interlude, starring Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. Walt worked his animators overtime to finish ahead of schedule, and Technicolor speeded the processing. When Flowers and Trees appeared at the Chinese, in July 1932, it created the sensation that Walt had hoped for. No longer was the Silly Symphony the neglected half of the Disney product; Flowers and Trees got as many bookings as the hottest Mickey Mouse cartoon. Walt decreed that all future Symphonies would be in color.
The staff continued to grow, but Walt realized that simply adding more animators and background artists and story men would not achieve the quality he sought. The veteran animators from New York were good for the slambang Mickey Mouse action, but they didn’t understand what Walt wanted in Silly Symphonies.
A new kind of artist was coming to the Disney studio. Unlike the self-made cartoonist from New York, the newcomers were college men or graduates of art schools, drawn to the creative ferment of the Disney studio. Many came to Disney because jobs for artists and architects were as scarce as Cadillacs in Depression America. Walt often remarked that the Depression was his greatest ally in assembling a staff of topflight talent.
In 1931, Walt arranged with Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles for his artists to attend night classes, with the studio paying the tuition. Since many of the young employees couldn’t afford cars, Walt himself drove them downtown to the school, returned to the studio for an evening’s work, then picked up the students when the classes were over. When the United Artists contract assured a greater flow of funds into the studio, Walt decided
to establish a school at the studio. He asked a Chouinard teacher, Don Graham, to conduct classes two nights a week on the studio sound stage. The first class of the Disney Art School was held on the night of November 15, 1932, with twenty-five artists in attendance. The number of students grew, especially when others learned that Graham demonstrated motion with the aid of a nude female model.
Graham was admittedly unschooled in animation, and some of his students resisted his instruction. Scornful cartoons appeared on the studio bulletin board, depicting Mickey Mouse with an anatomically detailed pelvis. But as time went on, each side learned from the other. Graham and the other teachers realized the animator’s peculiar problem of creating characters that were both convincing and entertaining. The animators discovered that their instructors could be helpful in providing keys to the movement of human beings and animals. The art school began to fulfill the function that Walt had designed for it: to develop the talent that would carry animation to heights that only he then envisioned.
Animation—and Walt Disney Productions—took a great step forward with Three Little Pigs in 1933.
It began merely as the thirty-sixth Silly Symphony, a variation of the old fable. As Walt pointed out in his initial memo, the original tale could not be followed exactly; in it the wolf ate the two pigs who made their houses of straw and sticks, then the industrious pig feasted on the wolf after it fell into boiling water. Walt outlined the basic elements of the story and added:
These little pig characters look as if they would work up very cute and we should be able to develop quite a bit of personality in them. Use cute voices that could work into harmony and chorus effects when they talk together….The building of the houses holds chances for a lot of good gags. All this action would be set within rhythm and should work out very effectively….Pull quite a few gags of the wolf trying to get into the little houses, and the pigs’ attempts to get rid of him. Chance for funny ways in which the little pigs attack him, the different household props they would use….The idea of the three pigs having musical instruments gives us a chance to work in the singing and dancing angles for the finish of the story….Might try to stress the angle of the little pig who worked the hardest, received the reward, or some little story that would teach a moral. Someone might have some angles on how we could bring this moral out in a direct way without having to go into too much detail. This angle might be given some careful consideration, for things of this sort woven into a story give it depth and feeling.