Walt Disney

by Bob Thomas

  The elder Disneys continued to live in Portland until 1938, when Roy and Walt convinced their parents that the Southern California climate would be better for them.

  The sons paid $8,300 for a comfortable bungalow in North Hollywood, a short distance from the house of Roy and Edna and their son Roy Edward, who was then eight years old.

  New Year’s Day of 1938 was a joyous celebration for the whole Disney family; it was the golden wedding anniversary of Flora and Elias. All of their sons gathered for the event. Herb now lived in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter; he still worked for the post office. Ray had moved west from Kansas City and was running an insurance business. Ruth remained in Portland, where she had married Theodore Beecher and had a son. At the anniversary celebration Walt recorded a mock interview with his parents, and it demonstrates the raillery within the family.

  WALT: Well, you folks are almost ready to celebrate your fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  FLORA: We’re not a-gonna celebrate.

  WALT: Why not?

  FLORA: Oh, what’s the use?

  WALT: Well, Dad likes to celebrate. He’s always enjoyed a good time.

  FLORA: We’ve been celebratin’ for fifty years. Gettin’ tired of it.

  WALT: What about you, Dad? Don’t you want to make whoopee on your golden wedding anniversary?

  ELIAS: Oh, we don’t want to go to any extremes a-tall.

  WALT: Well, I hoped you wouldn’t go to any extremes if you’re whoopeeing it up.

  FLORA: He don’t know how to make whoopee.

  WALT: Mother, how was it to live with a guy for fifty years? That’s an awful long time.

  FLORA: Well, it was a long time, but—

  WALT: I think he was kind of ornery at times, wasn’t he, huh?

  FLORA: Sure, he was ornery. You know a little bit about that yourself, don’t you? Do you remember the time you painted the whole side of the house when we went to town?

  WALT: Me?

  FLORA and Elias: Yes, you!

  WALT: Oh, that was Roy or somebody. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.

  FLORA: No, it was you.

  WALT: Well, it must have been Roy, because I couldn’t think of myself doing a thing like that.

  Home movies of the Disney family were taken during the 1930s, and they afford a revealing portrait of the elder Disneys in their late years. Flora Disney appears better-looking than in still photographs, which accent the deep, hollow eyes. She has a twinkle in the movies, especially when she is teased by Walt. Elias seems different, too, not the somber person of the photographs. Posing for the cameraman on a lawn swing, he tries to force a kiss on Flora, but she objects and places a pillow between them. He seems unmarked by his lifetime of disappointments. Indeed, he retained his socialist idealism to the end of his life. Walt, who had supported Franklin Roosevelt but was growing more conservative, once asked, “Dad, how do you feel about having voted fifty years for candidates who never won anything?”

  “Walter, I feel fine,” Elias replied. “We have won. We’ve won a lot. I’ve found out that things don’t always come about in the form you have advocated. But you keep fighting and they come about in some way or another. Today, everything I fought for in those early days has been absorbed into the platforms of both the major parties. Now I feel pretty good about that.”

  Elias Disney was in his seventies when he discovered that he had been voting illegally all his life. His voting status was challenged, and it was discovered that he was an alien in the eyes of the law. When the family had moved from Canada to Kansas, his father had taken out naturalization papers; when he achieved his citizenship, his minor children became citizens, too. But Elias had come of age before the process had been completed, and he remained a Canadian citizen. Although born in Ohio, Flora Disney was also an alien because of marriage.

  “I raised my family here; this country has been good to me,” Elias announced. “I’m going to die an American citizen.” And so he and Flora spent long hours re-studying the Constitution and American history for their citizenship examinations. When they appeared in court, the judge remarked, “Mr. Disney, you won’t have to go through this,” and Elias and Flora were declared naturalized.

  The elder Disneys had been in their new home less than a month when tragedy struck. A defective furnace caused Flora’s death by asphyxiation on the night of November 26, 1938. Walt and Roy were devastated, blaming themselves because their mother’s death had happened in the house they had bought. Walt was sensitive about the tragedy until the end of his life. Twenty years later, one of his secretaries casually mentioned his mother’s death. “I don’t want that ever brought up in this office again,” Walt said sternly, and he hurried out of the room.

  The cry of distributors and exhibitors after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the same that greeted the hit of Three Little Pigs: “More pigs!” Now the movie men implored: “Give us more Dwarfs!” Walt Disney refused to repeat himself. He embarked on three new animated features that were totally different in content and style.

  Pinocchio came first. The picaresque tale, written by Carlo Lorenzini under the pen name of Carlo Collodi in 1880, seemed like an ideal subject for a feature cartoon, and Walt pursued the new project almost demonically. He was determined to make it even greater than Snow White. During a story meeting on March 15, 1938, he was exploding with ideas for the sequence in which Pinocchio was swallowed by the whale:

  Pinocchio should use every ounce of force he has in his swimming to escape the whale. This should be built to terrific suspense. It should be the equivalent of the storm and the chase of the Queen in Snow White….

  The old man [Geppetto, already swallowed by the whale] should get excited when the whale starts after the fish. When the fish start coming in, he could look toward the whale’s mouth and say, “Tuna!” Pinocchio could be swimming with the fish, and the whale swallows them all. As the old man is fishing inside the whale, he pulls out one fish after another, and finally pulls out Pinocchio, without realizing it. The cat sees Pinocchio, gets excited and meows at the old man, but the old man goes right on fishing. Finally Pinocchio calls, “Father!” The old man realizes who it is and shouts, “Pinocchio! My son!”

  We can get comedy out of the whale sneezing with Pinocchio and Geppetto inside. They should react in a certain way—it would be the equivalent to the hiccups in the giant’s mouth. The whale would quiver before the sneeze and shake them around, throwing them off their feet onto the floor. They would be shouting over the noise of the whale. When he sneezed, it would slosh the water all around, and up on the sides, and it would drop down on Geppetto and Pinocchio like a shower. The sneeze stirs the water up so when they escape, the water is already rough and stormy.

  They get ready, and the sneeze blows them out. Then as the whale comes into another sneeze and the inhale starts drawing them back, they have to paddle hard against it….

  The underwater stuff is a swell place for the multiplane, diffusing and putting haze in between, with shafts of light coming down. I would like to see a lot of multiplane on this.

  Because of what Walt and his staff had learned on Snow White, they should have had an easier time with Pinocchio. But they didn’t. The story had splendid elements of adventure, but Pinocchio lacked the appealing characters of Snow White. Pinocchio himself was a nettling problem. He was a puppet come to life, and he could not be animated as a normal boy would be; his moves had to be simple and unsophisticated, as though he had known no previous history. His face was expressionless, and he lacked the boyish qualities that could make such a character engaging. After six months, Walt called a halt in production. He realized that new elements had to be added before Pinocchio could come to life.

  The answer was to surround Pinocchio with intriguing, flamboyant characters. The most important was Jiminy Cricket. In the book, the cricket had played a brief role as admonisher of the errant puppet, only to be rewarded by being crushed under Pinocchio’s foot. For the film, the cricket was i
nstalled as the boy’s conscience, trying to guide him away from evil companions and the pitfalls of pleasure-seeking. But how could an ugly insect be converted into a likable character? And how could he be large enough to play in scenes with human figures?

  Several artists attempted concepts of the cricket, complete with antennae. Walt rejected them all. He sent for one of the younger animators, Ward Kimball. When Kimball entered the boss’s office, he had every intention of resigning. His work for Snow White had been on the bed-building and soup-eating scenes, and both had been cut from the final version. Kimball tried to express his despair, but Walt started one of his spellbinding narratives, describing the adventures of Pinocchio and his voice of conscience, Jiminy Cricket. By the end of the recital, Kimball had forgotten his resolve to quit. He accepted Walt’s assignment to produce a workable cricket, and Kimball’s Jiminy was appealing and uncricketlike. The problem of size was resolved by skillful use of camera angles. Jiminy Cricket’s success was assured with the addition of two hit songs for him to sing, “When You Wish Upon a Star” and “Give a Little Whistle.” They were composed by Leigh Harline, with lyrics by Ned Washington, and sung by Cliff Edwards.

  The sticklike figure of Pinocchio became more rounded and boy-like, and he was presented as a boy who was easily swayed by bad influences, rather than a determined delinquent. The interplay between him and Jiminy worked perfectly, although no one ever solved the fundamental problem of a hero with no will of his own. Pinocchio was literally a puppet who was alternately drawn between good and evil; hence he could never match the human appeal of Snow White.

  With Pinocchio at last on the right track, Walt ordered the film into full production, and his staff shared Walt’s resolve to make the second feature greater than the first. If anything, there was an overabundance of zeal, with the directorial units competing to make their sequences the most important and effective in the movie. Walt had to maintain control, lest Pinocchio end up three times its desired length. He indulged his artists in the use of special effects and the multiplane camera for visual images that far exceeded those of Snow White. The results were highly effective artistically—and expensive. When Pinocchio was finally completed, it had cost a stunning $2,600,000.

  Fantasia came into being because of Walt Disney’s concern for the career of Mickey Mouse. Walt retained his almost mystical attachment to Mickey; to him the Mouse was not merely a revenue-producing cartoon character nor even a good-luck talisman. Walt was Mickey’s voice, his alter ego, and it troubled Walt to see the Mickey Mouse career decline. It had been inevitable. Mickey had been an international attraction for a decade, and few movie stars could sustain their careers for that long a time.

  In the beginning, Mickey Mouse could do anything. He was drawn with a series of circles of varying sizes, and he moved with what animators call the “rubberhose technique”—action with little relation to human or animal movement. As cartoons became more sophisticated, so did Mickey. Freddy Moore was the first to apply the “squash-and-stretch technique” to the animation of Mickey, making him more human and appealing. Moore gave the face more character and definition; for the first time, Mickey had a cheek when his teeth went together.

  Even with a more pliable face and figure, Mickey presented problems. He was cuter, but he lacked the primitive vitality of the early cartoons. With his shy manner, he was essentially a latent character, not the instigator of comic happenings. That function befell the broader characters who supported Mickey in the cartoons. Inevitably, they became stars of their own series—Donald Duck and Pluto in 1937, Goofy in 1939. The sizes of all three made them easy to work with; Donald was the height of a duck, and Pluto and Goofy could be portrayed dog-size. But the Mickey story men and animators were faced with the recurrent problem: “What can you do with a four-foot mouse?”

  In 1938, Walt decided to star Mickey Mouse in a cartoon presentation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an old fairy tale which had been interpreted as a poem by Goethe and a concert piece by the French composer Paul Dukas. Mickey was cast as the apprentice whose misuse of the sorcerer’s powers wreaks disaster. The entire action would be done in pantomime to the Dukas music. Walt seemed pleased that no dialogue would be required; he suspected that Mickey’s (Walt’s) hesitant falsetto contributed to the character’s difficulty in playing varied roles.

  Walt planned to release The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a two-reeler, but that changed after a chance meeting with Leopold Stokowski, the distinguished conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. During a conversation at a party, Walt mentioned that he was starring Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Stokowski, a devoted follower of the Disney cartoons, volunteered to conduct the Dukas music for Walt.

  Stokowski visited the studio and was overwhelmed by everything he saw. He was especially fascinated with the recording of sound and the ability of technicians to alter and combine various tracks of music. When Stokowski began the score, he recorded each section at a time—woodwinds, brass, percussion, etc. He spent hours at the mixing board, combining the sections in varying degrees of volume. “This is the ultimate in conducting,” he said delightedly.

  Stokowski suggested other musical works which could be interpreted in animation. Walt listened to the recordings and his imagination soared. He announced that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice would not be released as a two-reeler, but would be part of a full-length film that would feature other works of serious music as well. The new project was given the working title of The Concert Feature.

  One of Stokowski’s suggestions was the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Bach. Walt did some reading about Bach and discovered that the composer had been a church organist who had often improvised his works in flights of creativity. Why not illustrate the Toccata and Fugue, he suggested, in the same free manner? He tested his theory by listening to the Bach composition again and again, and he and Stokowski discussed their reactions. A loud crescendo seemed to Walt “like coming out of a dark tunnel and a big splash of light coming in on you.” A passage suggested orange to Walt. “Oh, no, I see it as purple,” said Stokowski. A woodwind portion gave Walt the image of a hot kettle with spaghetti floating in it. Walt was amused later when highbrow critics professed to see profundities in the abstractions created for the Toccata and Fugue.

  He wasn’t aiming at anything highbrow. Nor was he trying to bring classical music to the mass audience. He was simply trying to use serious music as another tool for animation. Always he stressed the visual. “I remember when I used to go to a concert when I was a kid,” he told his artists. “I can still see the orchestra tuning up, and then the conductor coming out and starting the music, and the violin bows going up and down in unison.” It had been a visual experience for him—the images of the players on the stage, and the mental pictures that the music had inspired.

  In most cases, the music for The Concert Feature was selected first, and the visual image applied afterward. For one sequence, it was the reverse. Walt wanted to depict the creation and evolution of Earth, and he instructed Dick Huemer to find a suitable piece of music. Huemer had been assigned to The Concert Feature because of his taste for classical music—Walt often introduced him: “Meet Dick Huemer; he goes to operas.” Huemer could locate only a second-class work called Creation, and Walt explained his problem to Stokowski. “Why don’t we do the Sacre?” the conductor exclaimed.

  “‘Socker?’ What’s that?” Walt asked.

  “Sacre de Printemps—Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky,” said Stokowski. He told how Stravinsky had depicted the primitive people of the Russian steppes with weird dissonances; the music could easily portray the earth’s paroxysms during its birth and early history, Stokowski declared. Walt listened to a recording of the composition, and he immediately agreed.

  Walt hired Deems Taylor, the noted music commentator, to advise on The Concert Feature and later to perform the narration. Like Stokowski, Taylor was enchanted by the inner workings of the Disney studio. One day when Walt complained that somet
imes he believed his artists had never grown up, Taylor replied: “How can you grow up in this atmosphere, for God’s sake? It’s like living in Santa Claus’s workshop.”

  Taylor and Stokowski joined Walt and his story personnel in conferences about the selection and treatment of the music. On September 30, 1938, they were discussing the Arcadian sequence to accompany Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony in the film:

  STOKOWSKI: In listening to this music, it seemed to come in three large masses: The first is the faun school, and so forth; the second is the little feminine one; the third is very excited, where something is all jumbled up together. That’s the general plan of the music—if you keep it in three big masses.

  WALT: There’s a theme that comes in with the dancing—the flute—then the dancing lesson. Then the beauty, or love, or water and swimming, and then comes what I would call the chase excitement. It really is four.

  STOKOWSKI: I think beauty, love, excitement is part of the chase. It’s in the music—and part of the chase. So it’s the flute playing; the fauns dancing with or around the girls and the excitement.