by Bob Thomas
Ferguson could turn out up to forty feet of animation a day—the average was ten to fifteen—and he knew his worth. He asked Walt to pay him $300 a week. “But that’s as much as I’m getting, Fergie,” Walt protested. But he agreed to pay Ferguson $300 a week.
Walt seldom surveyed his animators’ work while they were creating. He understood the fragile nature of the creative process, and he wouldn’t intrude. But there was nothing to stop him after the animator had left for the day. Walt’s nighttime visits to the offices became legendary, and animators often left their best work on the drawing table overnight, anticipating that Walt would inspect it. But sometimes they arrived in the morning to find crumpled sheets of paper rescued from wastebaskets and pinned on a storyboard with the notation in the unmistakable Disney script: “Quit throwing the good stuff away!”
WALT DISNEY realized that the creative energies of his young artists could not be satisfied by the grinding out of eight-minute, gag-packed cartoons, nor was he content with the repetition of well-worn formulas for familiar characters. Besides, the economic basis for cartoon shorts was deteriorating, despite the continuing popularity of Mickey Mouse and the emergence of new Disney stars: Pluto, the ingenuous hound, who first appeared in a Mickey Mouse, The Chain Gang, in 1930; the affable, dim-witted Goofy, who started in Mickey’s Revue in 1932; and the explosive Donald Duck, who made his debut in a 1934 Silly Symphony, The Wise Little Hen. The Depression had forced theaters to offer more and more entertainment to lure customers, and exhibitors had adopted the double feature—two full-length films on one bill. That meant there was little left in each theater’s budget or running time for short subjects. Despite the fact that Walt Disney cartoons drew more people to the movies than many features, bookings for the cartoons became more difficult. At the same time, the cost of the cartoons continued to climb.
Walt had long recognized the inevitability of the cartoon feature. All of his planning had aimed in that direction: developing greater drawing skill with the art school; experimenting with color and photographic innovations; using the Silly Symphonies as proving ground for new techniques and themes. In 1934 he decided it was time to move ahead on the feature. His decision was unilateral. Roy was acutely aware of the narrowing gap between the cost of cartoons and the fiscal returns, and he was alarmed by Walt’s plan to spend perhaps $500,000 on a feature. Lilly was apprehensive too. But Walt could not be dissuaded.
He could never explain why he had chosen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the first feature. He liked to recall how he, along with other Kansas City newsboys, had been invited in 1915 to the silent version of Snow White, starring Marguerite Clark, at the Convention. Hall. The movie was projected on four screens in the huge auditorium, and from where he was sitting, Walt could watch two of them. It had been his most vivid early memory of attending the movies. But his choice of Snow White was more pragmatic than sentimental. He recognized it as a splendid tale for animation, containing all the necessary ingredients: an appealing heroine and hero; a villainess of classic proportions; the Dwarfs for sympathy and comic relief; a folklore plot that touched the hearts of human beings everywhere.
Disney animators first learned of the project one evening when several of them returned from dinner at a café across Hyperion Avenue. They found Walt waiting for them, and he said, “C’mon in the sound stage; I’ve got something to tell you.” They followed him onto the bare stage, lighted by a single naked bulb, and they took chairs in a semicircle before him. He began to tell them the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as it might be animated on the screen. He acted out each part, his eyebrows ascending as he mixed dread potions as the evil Queen, his face beaming when he depicted the merry Dwarfs. The performance took two hours, and at the end, when the Prince’s kiss awakened the sleeping Snow White, there were tears in the eyes of his listeners. “That’s going to be our first feature,” Walt announced.
He began by installing a small unit of story men and artists in an office adjoining his. By late 1934, Walt’s original story had been transferred into an outline of the characters and a suggested plot. Snow White was described in terms of Janet Gaynor, fourteen years old; the Prince an eighteen-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The Queen received the most detailed description: “A mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf. Her beauty is sinister, mature, plenty of curves. She becomes ugly and menacing when scheming and mixing her poisons. Magic fluids transform her into an old witchlike hag. Her dialogue and action are over-melodramatic, verging on the ridiculous.”
Walt recognized from the outset the difficulty of establishing Seven Dwarfs, each with a recognizable and endearing quality. The solution was to name them for their most recognizable characteristics. The outline listed them, with tentative names for all but one:
HAPPY—A glad boy. Sentimental, addicted to happy proverbs. His jaw slips out of its socket when he talks, thus producing a goofy speech mannerism.
SLEEPY—Sterling Holloway. Always going to sleep. Always swatting at a fly on the end of his nose.
DOC—The leader and spokesman of the Dwarfs. Pompous, wordy, great dignity. Feels his superiority, but is more or less of a windbag.
BASHFUL—Has a high peaked skull which makes him ashamed to take off his hat. Blushing, hesitating, squirmy, giggly.
JUMPY—Joe Twerp. Like a chap in constant fear of being goosed. Nervous, excited. His words and sentences mixed up.
GRUMPY—Typical dyspeptic and grouch. Pessimist, woman-hater. The last to make friends with Snow White.
SEVENTH—Deaf, always listening intently, happy. Quick movements. Spry.
Walt worked with the Snow White unit through 1935, while maintaining his supervision of the short cartoons. His seemingly limitless energies again faltered, and he complained of the same lack of concentration that had presaged his nervous breakdown in 1931. A doctor gave him injections for thyroid deficiency, and the treatment seemed to increase his nervousness. Roy perceived the danger signs in his brother, and he suggested, “Why don’t we take the girls to Europe for a vacation? It’s the tenth wedding anniversary for both of us, and I think Lilly and Edna deserve it for putting up with us.” Walt agreed, and the four Disneys embarked for a tour of England, France, Switzerland, Italy and Holland.
Walt in later years wrote to a friend about an incident on the trip: “My brother Roy and I were in London prior to going to Paris to receive a medal from the League of Nations for Mickey Mouse. Under much protest, being strictly the sports clothes type myself, we were persuaded to have morning suits made. We were told that other attire would be inappropriate since it was to be an important occasion with ambassadors and other dignitaries in attendance. The fitting itself was a panic, with Roy’s coat on me and mine on him, my pants on Roy and someone else’s pants on me. The place was in a turmoil. Anyway, we went to the affair in Paris properly attired only to find that everyone there had wanted the boys from Hollywood to feel at home, so they came in casual clothes! I haven’t had the thing on since!”
Walt enjoyed driving through the places he had known as a Red Cross driver, including Strasbourg, where he was again fascinated by the mechanical figures that appeared at the striking of the town clock. He tried to gain entrance to the workings of the clock so he could see how it operated, but the local officials wouldn’t allow it.
Everywhere the Disneys went in Europe they saw evidence of the appeal of the Disney cartoons. Crowds greeted them at railway stations; reporters came to the hotels for interviews. In Rome, the Disneys were received by Benito Mussolini in his huge office. For Walt, the most significant part of his European trip was seeing a theater in Paris that played six of his cartoons and nothing else. That convinced him more than ever that audiences would accept and welcome a cartoon the length of a live-action feature.
After eleven weeks abroad, Walt returned to the studio with renewed energy. When the doctor telephoned to remind him of his thyroid injections, Walt told his secretary: “Tell him I’m cured. He can shoot those th
ings in his own butt from now on.”
Walt was bristling with ideas after his European trip. He brought with him children’s books with illustrations of little people, bees and small insects, and he told his staff in a memo: “This quaint atmosphere fascinates me and I was trying to think of how we could build some little story that would incorporate all of these cute little characters.” In a long memo to Ted Sears and the Story Department on the day before Christmas 1935, Walt outlined a score of ideas for future cartoon subjects. Most of them were for Silly Symphonies, which afforded greater freedom in the choice of story material, but he also had ideas for Mickey Mouse, including “a burlesque on Tarzan, with Mickey as the ape man and have him live in the jungle with the wild animals for his friends.”
Having for the first time seen the cartoons in foreign lands, Walt observed: “The more pictures we can make without dialogue, the better it will be for our foreign market. We have to depend on the foreign market very strongly now on account of the necessity of having larger grosses. However, I wouldn’t let this stand in the way of any good plot or idea that had dialogue in it.”
Walt concluded the memo by urging improvement of the Story Department:
Let’s not take any Tom, Dick or Harry that shows up. Let’s be very discriminating about it. See if we can’t really find someone who has the qualifications. How about this fellow in Portland who sent in the Lion and Mouse story? Have you heard any more about him? Let’s try to make arrangements with the people; get them in here and let’s try them out.
I honestly feel that the heart of our organization is the Story Department. We must have good stories—we must have them well worked out—we must have people in there who can not only think up ideas but who can carry them through and sell them to the people who have to do with the completion of the thing. The only way we can develop this Story Department is by starting in and trying to find these people—then we must get them in and try them out—we must try to develop them. If they don’t prove up, we must get rid of them before it is too late. We don’t want to get the place cluttered up with a lot of people who are only so-so. I also feel that the Story Department is one of our weakest spots today when it should be one of our strongest. I think you should make a drive to get more gagmen like [Harry] Reeves and [Roy] Williams—men who can really produce something. Only, if it is possible, we must get gagmen who have a little more feeling for situation gags, for personality gags and who have a little showmanship in their system. They might develop into men who will be capable of carrying a story through to completion.
Walt started to grapple with the technical problems of the feature he envisioned. Only the most caricatured of human figures had been portrayed in the Disney cartoons; more realistic drawing would be needed to establish the credibility of Snow White and the Prince. An attempt had been made in a 1934 Silly Symphony, The Goddess of Spring, to portray Persephone as a realistic girl, a prototype for Snow White. The result was unconvincing, but Walt was not discouraged. “We’ll get it next time,” he assured the animators. The solution, he decided, was to photograph a girl in actions such as would be needed in the film. A young Los Angeles dancer, Marjorie Belcher—known later as Marge Champion—was hired to walk and spin and dance before the camera, and her movements provided keys for the animators to follow.
Another problem was the essential flatness of the animated film. Audiences would accept the cavortings of two-dimensional pigs and wolves against painted backgrounds for an eight-minute span, but eighty minutes would emphasize the artifice of the animation process.
The answer was the multiplane camera. It developed into a towering device with a camera pointed downward through four or five layers of paintings. The various levels depicted planes of vision, and the lens focus could be moved through the planes, creating the same effect of a moving camera in live action. Again, Walt used the Silly Symphony as testing ground for the multiplane camera. It was first employed in The Old Mill. Walt described the short as “just a poetic thing, nothing but music. No dialogue or anything. The setting of an old mill at sunset. The cows going home. And then what happens at the old mill at night. The spider coming out and weaving its web. The birds nesting, and then the storm coming up and the old mill going on a rampage. And with the morning the cows come back, the spider web was all shattered, and all that. It was just a poetic thing.”
The Old Mill was an exceptional success, winning critical praise and an Academy Award. It showed the Disney artists what could be accomplished in terms of mood and visual imagery.
The work on characters and story for Snow White continued. Jumpy was renamed Sneezy, and the unnamed Dwarf became a dim-witted mute. His was the last name to evolve. Walt advocated Dopey, but others objected that it sounded too modern and connoted narcotic addiction. Walt discovered that the word had appeared in Shakespeare, and he decreed that the seventh Dwarf would be called Dopey.
His clarity of vision can be seen by his comments in story conferences during the preparation of Snow White (Walt had prudently begun the practice of having a secretary make verbatim transcripts of the conferences):
Snow White is visited in the cottage by the Queen in her witch’s disguise:
…At the time the menace comes in, Snow White should be doing something that shows she is happy and that she is trying to do something nice for these little men. That’s the time the menace should strike. It’s most powerful when it strikes when people are most happy. It’s dramatic….
She’s taken aback when she first sees the Queen. She doesn’t suspect the Queen, but there’s a lunatic around somewhere and he approaches you; you have that funny feeling. It’s nothing you can put your finger on. You wouldn’t have the police come, but you’d be on your guard.
That’s the point we ought to bring out with the animals. They are dumb but they have a certain sense like a dog who knows that somebody is not a friend. When the birds see that old witch they know that everything is not right and they’re alarmed and back out of the way, retreat quietly. It has just dampened everything.
But when the birds see the vultures that have followed her, that tells them something that even a human won’t recognize….
Conclusion:
…Fade in on her in the glass coffin, maybe shaded by a big tree. It’s built on sort of a little pedestal, torches are burning, two dwarfs on either side with things like guards would have, others are coming up and putting flowers on the coffin. It’s all decked with flowers. The birds fly up and drop flowers. Shots of the birds; show them sad. Snow White is beautiful in the coffin.
Then you hear the Prince. The birds, dwarfs, everyone hear him offscreen. As they turn to look, here he is silhouetted against the hill with his horse. As he walks down the hill singing the song, cut to Snow White in the coffin. As he approaches, everyone sort of steps back as if he had a right there. He goes up to the coffin and finishes the song. As he finishes the song, he lifts the glass lid of the coffin and maybe there’s a hesitation, then he kisses her. From the kiss he drops down and buries his head in his hands in a sad position, and all the dwarfs see it and every dwarf drops his head.
All the animals are sad, but then Snow White begins to wake up like she’s coming out of a sleep and begins to sit up. Nobody notices at first. One dwarf looks up and sees it, takes it, then several of them take it maybe. She sits up. The Prince comes back and sees it. He springs to his feet. The music begins to pick up, the birds take it and go crazy, the dwarfs go crazy, hug each other. As he carries her along, they are all happy, following along. The music gets bright. The birds and animals are cutting capers….
Story men and animators made contributions at the conferences, but it was always Walt’s voice that dominated, suggesting camera angles, indicating moods, and, most valuable of all, acting out his concept of the dialogue and action. Sometimes he made contributions from his own experience. In 1936 he was invited to the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club, a San Francisco organization of artists and civic figures. The rit
ual consisted of wining, feasting and camping out in a redwood grove north of San Francisco Bay. When Walt returned to the studio, he complained of being unable to sleep because of the symphony of snores in nearby tents. He described and reproduced each of the snores to the hilarity of his story men. The result was the snoring sequence in the Dwarfs’ cottage.
As always, Walt paid close attention to the music. Except for an abortive attempt at learning the violin as a boy, he had had no real experience with music. Yet he had an uncanny knack for picking music that would appeal to the public. He liked melody, and he preferred music that wasn’t too loud or too high-pitched (composers and arrangers learned not to use piccolos in Disney scores).
Early attempts at Snow White songs did not please him. He complained that they followed the pattern of Hollywood musicals, which introduced songs and dances at regular intervals without regard to the progression of the story. “We should set a new pattern, a new way to use music,” he argued. “Weave it into the story so somebody just doesn’t burst into song.”
Nor was Walt satisfied with the voices that he auditioned for the role of Snow White. His office was connected to the sound stage by wire so he could listen to auditioning singers. None possessed the childlike quality Walt was seeking. One day his talent man assured him that the next candidate would be perfect; she was a fourteen-year-old with a bell-like soprano. Walt listened and commented: “She’s too mature; she sounds between twenty and thirty.” The girl was Deanna Durbin. Finally Walt heard a voice that made him say, “That’s the girl! That’s Snow White.” She was eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti, who had been family-trained in Italian opera.