Walt Disney

by Bob Thomas

  WALT: There would be a lot of comedy in that chase if you had a group of little fauns. It would be better than only one, because he would be awfully busy. You would have an awful lot to show. You could show two or three little guys try to bulldog him and everything. You can accomplish more with half a dozen.

  TAYLOR: If Oscar sneaked up on the sleeping Pegasus on the ground, and it went up in the air with him on his back—

  WALT: Yes, he might sneak up on what he thinks is the rear end of a horse, lasso it, and it flies up. And here’s Oscar hanging on to it, and it dumps him in a pool. The whole last end of four minutes can be full of life. If we get stuck, we can ignore that part that is supposed to be love. The flying horse comes down, maybe to help the girls, and it flies down like a hummingbird. It can fly around and kick in the air while still flying.

  TAYLOR: Show Oscar terrified, going up and up and up and he sees what’s down below—something that is a reproduction of Greece in the history books….

  Walt felt dissatisfied that the playback of recordings could not duplicate the full, rich orchestral sound he heard in the recording studio. He assigned his Sound Department to develop a new system of multi-aural sound which could reproduce the actual performance in a concert hall—and then some. For Schubert’s Ave Maria, he wanted the voices of the choristers to sound as if they were in procession down the aisle of the theater.

  The result of the research was Fantasound, which recorded music with several microphones and reproduced it on an equal number of loudspeakers, creating a stereophonic effect. To get the best possible quality, Walt had Stokowski record the entire score at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, which was noted for its superb acoustics. The music bill alone for Fantasia amounted to more than $400,000, and when the long production ended, the total cost was $2,280,000.

  The third project Walt Disney chose to follow Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was Bambi. Although it was started at the same time as the other two, it was the last to be released.

  The Felix Salten book of a deer’s coming of age in the forest provided a natural vehicle for a cartoon feature; only through animation could the story be adequately told. But Bambi was different from anything Disney had ever attempted. It was far more serious than Snow White and Pinocchio, and the characters were all animals. Walt realized that to carry such a storyline, his animators would need to create characters that were realistic; the deer would have to be deer-like, the rabbits rabbitlike. Could his artists meet such a challenge and still create a film that would be entertaining?

  He determined to give them all the tools they needed. He hired a noted painter of animals, Rico LeBrun, to lecture on the structure of animals and how they moved. He sent a cameraman, Maurice Day, to Maine to photograph thousands of feet of forests, snowfall, rainstorms, spider webs, changes of light and seasons. The Maine Development Commission provided two live fawns for the Disney studio, and they were sketched and photographed as they grew. Rabbits, ducks, skunks, owls and other species were added until the studio resembled a small zoo. A local naturalist contributed hundreds of photographs of animals in action.

  During one of the first story conferences on Bambi, Walt outlined some of his ideas for the production:

  When it comes to the animation, we can do a lot with the rabbit. He has a certain mannerism that can be drawn. We might get him to twitch his nose….I don’t like to have us get off the track too much to show his life. Everything should be done through Bambi….The owl ought to be a stupid, silly thing. He is always trying to scare people. I like his crazy screech as it is described in the book. He might be a sort of Hugh Herbert [an eccentric movie comic] type….I would hate to see any of the characters too straight. You would want that in Bambi’s mother. You would want Bambi more or less straight in a way. The comedy would come from him as a kid through his questions and his curiosity. The rest of the characters I would like to see come out of life….I would like the Old Stag to say what he has to say in a direct way, and in such a voice that Bambi is unable to answer him. What he says will be sort of final. That can be put over through the voice….I like Faline’s character in the book. She is clever and she understands things. Bambi asks a lot of questions which she can answer. If we build her that way, we will be able to get a lot of stuff over when she and Bambi get together….Let us start moving on the thing and not drag it out too long. After we get our characters set, we should write all our business for the characters and build the first half. Then we should record it and get our sketches. We will shoot the sketches and make a music track all of which will make our story pretty tight. Our sound track will be a dummy track composed of a cello, a violin, a piano and an organ, which will be enough to give us an idea of the music. When we do that, we will have a chance to preview the thing before we go into layout and animation. That would include the first part of the picture, up to the end of the first winter.

  Walt tried to push ahead in a deliberate way, but Bambi simply would not be managed. Once again, he and his artists were pioneering. Even such a matter as the spots on the fawn’s skin provided complication. The best of animators had to spend forty-five minutes on each drawing; daily output would be eight drawings, half a foot of film, compared to a normal rate of ten feet per day. Less experienced animators required an hour and a half to draw the fawn.

  The storyline continued to present problems, and Walt realized that he could not maintain the same production pace as with Pinocchio and Fantasia. He formed a small unit of young animators—Frank Thomas, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson and Ollie Johnston—to concentrate on Bambi. “Don’t show me anything until you’re satisfied with it,” Walt instructed.

  Thomas went to work on the scene in which a butterfly lands on the tail of the young Bambi. Kahl drew a sequence of the fawn leaping over a log and falling in a tangle on top of Thumper. When the rough animation on both scenes was completed, Walt saw the result in a sweatbox. Tears filled his eyes. “Fellas, this is pure gold,” he remarked to Thomas and Kahl. He had at last seen what he wanted Bambi to be.

  With three features and the regular program of shorts in production, the Hyperion studio was filled to overflowing. The Bambi unit moved to a rented building at 861 North Seward Street in Hollywood. The story-research, promotion, engineering, comic-strip and training departments occupied the second floor of a building at 1717 North Vine Street. Walt was anxiously looking forward to the time when he could have all of the studio departments at the new headquarters in Burbank.

  Planning the new studio was a fresh and immensely stimulating experience for Walt. For a dozen years he had endured the chaotically makeshift studio on Hyperion Avenue, where animators worked in cluttered, poorly lighted rooms through the chill of winter and the summer’s heat. He was determined to build a new studio where he and his fellow workers could create in an atmosphere of comfort and congeniality.

  Walt involved himself with every aspect of planning, conferring with architects, draftsmen, furniture designers, interior decorators, landscapers, acoustic experts, carpenters and plumbers. One day Otto Englander burst into Walt’s office with an idea for ending the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony in Fantasia. Englander found Walt seated on the floor of his office amid a clutter of chromium tubes and blue leatherette cushions. Walt explained sheepishly that he was considering a new design for an animator’s chair, and he was taking it apart to see how it was constructed. Walt listened as Englander explained his idea (having two cupids draw a curtain before the audience), approved it, and returned to his dissection of the chair.

  The new studio, Walt insisted, would need to be big enough to accommodate his maximum production. That meant the regular program of eighteen to twenty short cartoons, plus the features. If he released one feature a year, he would need facilities for three features, since they seemed to require three years to produce. If he increased his output to two a year, then six features would be in production at one time.

  The center of the production process would be the Animation Building
, where the various phases of animation could flow smoothly from one to the other in a movie-making assembly line. It would house the Story Department, directors, layout men, animators, assistant animators and in-betweeners. When the animation had been completed, the work would move through an underground tunnel to the Inking and Painting Building, then to the Camera Building and beyond to the Cutting Building. Three stages would be built, one for recording music, the other two for dialogue and sound effects. There would also be a theater, a process laboratory for experimenting with film methods and a restaurant.

  A key element in the planning was air conditioning. At the Hyperion Avenue studio, Walt had often grumbled because dust on cels and lenses interferred with production. Variation in humidity was also a problem, since the water paints cracked and chipped off the celluloid in dry weather and smeared when it was humid. Walt also realized that the summer weather was much hotter in the San Fernando Valley, and he wanted his employees to work in comfort the year round. Walt invited engineers of General Electric to confer with architects and structural engineers during the planning stages, rather than try to install air conditioning after the buildings had been erected. A system was devised to pipe fresh, cool air to every office.

  “But what if someone opens a window—that’ll destroy the whole system,” Walt reasoned. The solution: remove the window cranks.

  The extent of the planning presaged Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Water for the air-conditioning system, as well as the Process Laboratory, lawn sprinkling, toilets and other uses, came from two wells sunk three hundred feet into the earth. Not only were the major buildings connected by tunnels; the utilities were placed underground as well. The studio would become a miniature city, with its own streets, storm drains, sewage system, fire hydrants, telephone exchange and electric distribution system. The sizes of the streets, conduits and pipes were all calculated to provide for future expansion without interfering with studio production.

  Walt lavished his most concentrated planning on the Animation Building. It was designed as a three-story structure with eight wings connected to a central corridor. The wings would be on a true east-west axis, each office with an outside view. The plan provided a maximum of rooms with north light; those facing the sun would be shielded with venetian blinds that could be adjusted to lessen the glare. Because Burbank was close to earth faults, the building would be constructed in ten separate units which would move independently in case of earthquake.

  Everything was designed for the comfort of the Disney animators. Each piece of furniture was planned to combine function with graceful modern appearance. The animation desk was redesigned to eliminate waste time and motion, and carpets and drapes in harmonizing pastel colors would help provide a restful, quiet atmosphere. The sweatbox would be abolished, although the cognomen remained; animators would be able to review their work in comfortable projection rooms.

  Walt aimed to make the Burbank studio a worker’s paradise. The buildings would be surrounded by broad lawns, where the employees could play baseball, badminton and volleyball during their lunch hours. They would be able to eat in a modern restaurant where the appetizing meals would be served at prices below the studio’s cost. If an animator felt the need for a malted milk or a cup of coffee during the day, he would need only to call the snack shop on the first floor and it would be delivered to him. The penthouse of the Animation Building would be the equivalent of a gentleman’s club, where the animators and executives could make use of a lounge, soda fountain, sun deck, gymnasium and showers. Except for after-work parties, no liquor was served. Walt himself never drank until after the workday was over, and he disapproved of those who took long lunch breaks at nearby bars.

  Walt and Roy asked their father to supervise the carpentry in the building of the new studio, hoping the work would help alleviate the despondency he had felt since the death of Flora. Although he was eighty, Elias Disney donned work clothes and spent a full day overseeing the carpenters and pounding nails himself. As he watched the construction grow, he expressed his concern to his youngest son: “Walter, how on earth are you going to support this big place with those cartoons of yours? Aren’t you afraid you’ll go broke?” Walt replied, “Well, if I do fail, Dad, I can get out easy. You notice how this place is built, with rooms along long corridors? If I go broke with my cartoons, I can always sell it for a hospital.” Elias Disney was greatly relieved by the explanation.

  Walt followed each phase of the planning and drove to the Burbank property almost every day during the excavation and construction. With his studio operation now scattered from Hyperion to Hollywood, he was anxious to have the new studio completed. The Camera Building was finished first, and filming began there on Pinocchio in August of 1939. When the lease on the Seward property ran out in the fall, the Bambi unit occupied part of the uncompleted Animation Building. On the day after Christmas, the major part of the studio began the move from Hyperion to Burbank, a few of the departments following in the spring.

  For his own office, Walt chose a suite on the third floor in the far northeast corner of the Animation Building. The suite contained an outer office, an office for his secretary (Dolores Voght), Walt’s own spacious office, a conference room and a room where he could sleep if he had to remain overnight at the studio.

  Such an occasion arose a month after he had moved into the new studio. He later related his experience: “I was all set to go to sleep about ten-thirty when all of a sudden the air conditioning shut off for the night. ‘Whoooooooo’—it was like submerging in a submarine. There was plenty of air in the room, but I had this feeling that I was suffocating. I yelled, but there was nobody around. I ran over to the window and clawed and scratched, trying to get it open; all I did was cut up my fingers. Me—the guy who told them to take all the handles off the windows! I finally had to break the window so I could breathe.”

  THE newfound prosperity of Walt Disney Productions started to end in September of 1939 with the beginning of the Second World War. Forty-five percent of the company’s income flowed from overseas; now such important markets as Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia were closed to the Disney product, and income from England and France was frozen. The film market was changing at home, too. With Europe at war and America’s young men being drafted into military service, the tempo of the nation was quickening, and movie audiences were less intrigued with the fairy tales of Walt Disney. When Pinocchio was released in February 1940, it was inevitably compared to Snow White. Walt was convinced that Pinocchio was a greater artistic achievement, but audiences did not warm to the characters as they had to Snow White and the Dwarfs. Business was good, but far short of what was needed to offset the heavy cost of production.

  Fantasia presented special problems. Moviegoers had known little experience with classical music in films, and they were not prepared for this new kind of Disney film. Walt insisted that Fantasia would be released under the best possible conditions. “We can do a better job than RKO,” Walt said. RKO, which had little enthusiasm for selling a “longhair musical,” readily agreed to relax its exclusive distribution contract. Walt set up a special unit headed by a young film salesman named Irving Ludwig. Walt instructed Ludwig to engage prestige theaters in the major cities and equip them with sound systems to accommodate the stereophonic Fantasound. The theaters were also outfitted with special lighting and curtain controls so that each sequence in the film would be presented as an individual unit. The theater staffs were hired and trained by Disney.

  Fantasia opened November 13, 1940, at New York’s Broadway Theater, the same place, then named the Colony, where Mickey Mouse had made his debut in Steamboat Willie. Movie critics generally hailed Fantasia for its imaginative innovation; classical-music critics looked down their noses. Audiences were responsive, both in New York and Los Angeles, where the film played the Carthay Circle. In San Francisco, a projection booth had to be built in the Geary Theater, which normally presented stage attractions. Walt was nervous at
the opening in San Francisco, which was the headquarters for his creditor, the Bank of America. He remarked to Ludwig: “There will be a lot of bankers here tonight; be sure to tell them we’re doing very well with this picture.”

  The film succeeded in its initial engagements; it also opened in Boston, Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit with full stereophonic sound. But except in New York, where Fantasia ran for a year, the engagements were not sustained. Parents balked at paying roadshow prices for their children; those who did complained that Fantasia was not the standard Disney film. Some claimed that their children were frightened by the Night on Bald Mountain sequence.

  Diminishing returns made it impractical to attempt more of the Fantasound installations, which cost $30,000 per unit; at any rate, electronic equipment was growing scarce because of the government’s defense needs. RKO wanted to put Fantasia into general release in a shorter version. Walt fought for the uncut film, but he was forced to give in; he needed all the income he could find to keep the new studio going. Finding it too painful to cut the film into which he had poured his creative strength, he told the RKO executives: “You can get anybody you want to edit it—I can’t do it.”

  Fantasia was reduced from two hours to eighty-one minutes and released on a double bill with a Western. Fantasia, which had cost $2,280,000, produced an even greater loss than Pinocchio.

  In 1940, Walt realized that he would have to scale down his ambitions for feature films. While Bambi moved slowly through the production process, Walt began work on two features which could be made at more realistic costs. One was The Reluctant Dragon, the studio’s first venture into live action. The humorist Robert Benchley portrayed a visitor to the Disney studio, and during the film he met Walt, learned how cartoons were made and how the studio operated. The device tied together three short cartoons, Baby Weems, How to Ride a Horse, starring Goofy, and The Reluctant Dragon. The film did not earn quite enough to recover its $600,000 cost.