Michael had heard of Mary Blair, of course, but he’d never realized the potency of her art. He asked a few of the senior animators what they knew about her, but the group no longer included those who’d worked alongside her. The Nine Old Men were now truly old and mostly retired. The current senior animators were a kind of second-string lineup, and they swiftly brushed Mary’s talents aside. They knew little of the female artist and didn’t care to know more.
The bold art directors who had reigned during Walt’s lifetime were gone, and the studio had moved to a more uniform style, each film looking much like the last. Yet as Michael viewed Mary’s art, he felt he was receiving a graduate education in design. Clutching the box in his arms, he decided that he would live with Mary Blair’s art as long as possible. He pinned her paintings up to a storyboard, a practice almost as old as the studio itself, and immersed himself in the scenes of joy and melancholy before him.
Chapter 17
Part of Your World
Retta gazed into Mary’s face and saw evidence of the passage of time. It was 1978 and they were both now in their sixties, but if she looked past the wrinkles that pinched the corners of Mary’s eyes, she still recognized the young woman she had once been. She was staying at Mary’s house for the weekend, and the two were reminiscing about living together thirty years earlier when they had been immersed in their work at the studio; Retta had been single, and Mary’s husband had been thousands of miles away.
They laughed at the reversal of fortune that the movies they had crafted at the Walt Disney Studios were experiencing. The company, now run by Walt’s son-in-law Ron Miller, had started rereleasing features they had created in the 1940s and 1950s. Those films, such as Pinocchio, Bambi, Dumbo, Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland, and Lady and the Tramp, once considered financial flops, were now raking in millions at the box office.
As they gleefully contemplated the twist of fate that had brought their work back to movie theaters, Lee sat sociably with them. He was sober now. After getting out of jail, he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous. While his relationship with Mary had mellowed, and he no longer frequently erupted in violence, the repeated abuse had taken its toll on her.
Retta spent the night with her friend, and she was outwardly silly and affectionate, but privately she felt concerned. Mary appeared weaker than Retta remembered her. Retta saw reflections of her own anguish as the two drained their glasses and indulged in blissful nostalgia. The past decades had brought them both unexpected hardships.
Like Mary, Retta had been drowning her disappointments. Every day she’d drink wine at the kitchen table and try to feel like herself again. Her marriage had deteriorated and then collapsed; her husband left her as soon as their two boys were out of high school. She had lost herself these past few years, and she realized that she wanted to reconnect with the artist she had been most of her life.
With this new impetus, Retta began seeking a job in animation. She was living in Northern California and so began informing her connections in the Bay Area that she was looking for work. In 1980 she received a call from Martin Rosen, head of Nepenthe Productions in San Francisco. During the phone interview he told her that he could hire her only as an assistant animator. Retta was not deterred by the junior nature of the position. She knew from experience that she could work her way up. On her first day, she walked into the animation studio with the confidence that comes only from experience. She was sixty-five and it had been years since she’d sat at an animator’s desk, but she was ready to feel the paper under her pencil again.
Rosen had already made the animated film Watership Down, based on the novel by Richard Adams and released to critical acclaim in 1978. He was now making The Plague Dogs, based on the 1977 novel by the same author that follows the lives of two dogs as they escape the perilous world of animal research in Great Britain. It was an ideal project for Retta, given her vast experience animating dogs for Bambi decades earlier.
Working alongside Retta was an animator who’d just been fired from the Walt Disney Studios. Brad Bird (who would later be known for his work as a writer and director on hit films such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille), was then in his early twenties, a graduate of CalArts who was happy to be employed as an animator after his short, tumultuous career in Burbank. Bird had spent a few years at the Walt Disney Studios, but he was disappointed by the skill of the animators he worked alongside. He saw the animation studio as being in decline, devoid of the artistic talent that had once distinguished it. “These bunglers tended to play everything safe, which is a bore,” he would later say of the experience. By contrast, he cherished working with Milt Kahl, one of Walt’s Nine Old Men, whom Bird described as “incredibly exacting.”
Not all the young people were aware of Retta’s history at the Walt Disney Studios, but they were soon impressed with her work. Her lines were clean and sharp, the result of years of practice. Her work ethic was from an earlier era. She came in early, stayed focused at her desk, and created stacks of completed drawings at a rapid pace. Finally, she was back where she belonged.
As Retta found success in Northern California, Ed Catmull was moving to the region. Word of his dexterity in computer graphics had made an impression on a young director named George Lucas. His movie Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope opened in 1977 and stunned audiences with its story of adventure and heroism as well as its special effects, makeup, and costumes. Yet many of the Star Wars trilogy’s stunning visual effects belonged to an earlier era. The team adapted stop-motion animation, where objects are photographed frame by frame as they are moved ever so slightly to create the illusion of motion. With this technique, first used in film in the late 1800s, Lucas’s team made plastic models of alien monsters battling in a game of holographic chess between Chewbacca and R2-D2 aboard the Millennium Falcon. Similarly, the films relied on cel animation and optical printers to create mind-bending scenes, superimposing a light-saber fight between the villain Darth Vader and hero Luke Skywalker onto a perilous catwalk high over Cloud City. To craft the legendary duel, Lucas used the same sodium-vapor process Walt Disney Studios had pioneered a decade earlier to make Mary Poppins fly. Walt’s technology was on display throughout the Star Wars trilogy, including the use of a quad optical printer. The device incorporated four projection heads, allowing the filmmakers to assemble multiple shots at one time and thereby send TIE fighters careening through the galaxy.
In 1979, Lucas hired Catmull to lead the Lucasfilm computer division. What Catmull offered Lucas was an opportunity for the company to forge its own path in animation and special effects. It was a tantalizing concept, but the reality was complicated. Catmull was developing software and technologies that created complex three-dimensional images. One of the first projects his group worked on was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, due to be released in 1983. They were creating a scene where a dead planet is brought back to life through the use of a “genesis device.” The scene of rapid terraforming, where the dead gray surface of a planet is set ablaze and then becomes Earth-like, was a remarkable achievement in computer graphics. Yet Catmull couldn’t get the quality he wanted—Lucasfilm computers simply didn’t have the muscle. Catmull realized he needed to focus on the hardware before he did anything else. If he was going to be able to produce graphics with higher resolution, he needed more computational power.
Lucasfilm, however, was no longer the right home for Catmull’s ambitions. The company was experiencing financial stress and could no longer pour money into developing computers. Members of the computer division decided that their best option was to stay together and form their own enterprise. Pursuing this goal, in 1986 Catmull and his team formed Pixar, with Steve Jobs, recently ousted from Apple, as a majority investor.
They weren’t the only ones changing names; in Burbank, corporate restructuring had also caused a shift. The group was now the Walt Disney Company, with Walt Disney Feature Animation becoming a subsidiary of their film division, the Walt Disney Studios. In the midst of this reo
rganization, the company had, once again, declined to invest in Catmull’s company and its enticing new technology.
No matter the name, the Walt Disney Company was in turmoil. In 1984, Walt’s nephew Roy E. Disney had left the board of directors in frustration over the studio’s neglect of its film division. In the eighteen years since Walt had died, none of the films released by the studio had earned as much critical acclaim or financial success as those produced prior to 1966. Many of the old-timers, including the Nine Old Men, had retired. With the dearth of talent and lack of creative freedom, droves of younger animators were also leaving the studio. This included Heidi Guedel, who, along with eleven others, left to start a new animation company headed by animator Don Bluth.
Roy E. Disney, who believed, much like his uncle Walt, that animation was the heart of the business, launched a campaign to rescue it. In a dramatic move, he rejoined the board of directors, pushed out Ron Miller, Walt’s son-in-law and the current president and CEO, and brought in Michael Eisner to take charge of the operation. Eisner, coming from his position as CEO of Paramount Pictures, brought Jeffrey Katzenberg with him as chairman to reinvigorate the company’s motion pictures.
In 1985, The Black Cauldron lost twenty-one million dollars, and Eisner was forced to consider shutting down the animation department altogether. It was an undeniable low point, akin to the desperation felt after 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. It was clear that a major cultural shift in the company had to occur in order for animation to survive. Roy E. Disney, as the new chairman of feature animation, was ready to roll the dice and invest in innovation. For the first time in decades, a man named Disney was pushing the company to take significant risk in both artistry and technology.
Even as Roy E. Disney was plotting new investments, Eisner was looking for bold cost-cutting measures. While he decided not to shutter the animation department completely, he took away its home. The building itself was considered precious, but only because it attracted live-action filmmakers who preferred to work on the studio lot. The rooms and offices where ideas had blossomed were swept clean, and the animation department—now consisting of only one hundred and fifty artists—moved off the lot to a set of trailers surrounding an old warehouse on Flower Street in Glendale, a town four miles from Burbank. The humble setting was reminiscent of the conditions on Hyperion Avenue where Walt and his artists had started out sixty years earlier.
Meanwhile, the new studio executives were examining Pixar with fresh eyes. With Pixar’s sustained focus on hardware, the company’s first product was a computer. It looked much like other desk-size personal computers of the age: a gray box that held the computer’s hardware, a display monitor, and a keyboard. Unlike its competitors, however, the Pixar Image Computer had an unusually powerful processing speed and the capability to produce very high-resolution images. Although advanced for its time, its price tag of $135,000 meant that it did not sell particularly well. In 1986, Pixar’s first customer was Walt Disney Feature Animation. Next, Pixar would sell the product to government agencies and research labs, yet by 1988, it had sold only a little over a hundred of the machines. IBM was offering personal computers at $1,565, a more modest price point, and it was selling approximately a computer a minute. For Pixar, it was not a promising beginning.
Ellen Woodbury grew up disliking Disney movies; she found them overly sentimental. She preferred Warner Brothers cartoons, which matched her own silly sense of humor. Despite this, when she was a high school student in Corning, New York, and her best friend begged her to come see the 1972 reissue of The Sword in the Stone, Ellen reluctantly agreed to go. She had just finished T. H. White’s tetralogy The Once and Future King on which the movie was loosely based, and she didn’t have high expectations. The film, originally released to poor reviews and little profit, tells the story of a young King Arthur’s rise to power. Although she expected little, Ellen was stunned by what she witnessed on-screen. It was overwhelming to consider that artists had hand-drawn all the beautiful scenes before her.
Attending college at Syracuse University, Ellen had limited opportunity to study animation, and so she devised her own independent program. She read as many books about animation as she could find, including The Illusion of Life, published in 1981 by two of Walt’s Nine Old Men, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. In her zeal for the subject, she wrote to Frank Thomas, and he was kind enough to reply encouragingly. She treasured the letters from the famed animator and decided to follow in his footsteps—first art school and then on to Walt Disney Feature Animation.
Ellen earned her MFA in experimental animation at CalArts, a program that allowed students to pursue innovative techniques that pushed the boundaries of current animation practice. Yet when Ellen started at the Walt Disney Studios in 1985, her work seemed stuck in time. She was an assistant animator, taking the rough sketches of the senior animators and tracing over them with her own sharp, elegant lines. In doing so, she was connected to the generations of animators who had come before her at the studio. But that thread of hand-drawn tradition, as strong as it seemed to Ellen, was about to be broken.
In 1986 the Pixar Image Computer entered the studio along with new software exclusive to the Disney group. The software was called the Computer Animation Production System, or CAPS. Integral to its assimilation was Tina Price, an employee who had started as an inbetweener and was now the head of the newly formed computer animation department. The department was so new that no one had any idea what to call it. People referred to it simply as “Tina’s department.”
In Tina’s department, the CAPS software acted like a computerized Ink and Paint unit. Using the layers familiar to traditional animators, with the background and foreground separated, an artist wielded a computer mouse to form the lines and colors once made with india ink and gouache paint in an entirely digital format. Movement of the camera that once required a giant fifteen-foot crane could now be programmed using the “digital multiplane camera feature.” It was not the computer graphics revolution that Catmull had been dreaming of, as the resulting two-dimensional scenes still could not compare to the illusion of depth in Catmull’s 1972 video of his hand, but it was well suited to the more modest needs of the Walt Disney Company.
The program was so intuitive that traditional cel animators at Disney, like Ellen, were able to start using it immediately. Yet to those who had no computer experience, truly understanding the software and operating the computer hardware represented a challenge. For many of the artists, even using a computer mouse for the first time was awkward and frustrating. Ellen could see how the computers were changing the studio and so she organized classes for the animators at the new Disney computer lab. When the sessions began, Ellen was so enthusiastic that she helped design a training program specifically for newcomers.
Ellen was promoted to animator while working on their next feature, The Little Mermaid. The film was the studio’s first princess movie in thirty years. Not since Sleeping Beauty had a fairy tale with a female lead captivated the Disney team’s attention. It was part of a renewed vision for the animation department ushered in by Roy E. Disney, Eisner, and Katzenberg. After decades of languishing both artistically and technologically, the studio was about to enter what many would later call its renaissance era.
For the first time since Walt’s death, significant money and resources were put into an animated feature. The film’s budget initially was forty million dollars, considerably higher than any of the other four animated films made by the studio in the 1980s: The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, and Oliver and Company. However, with the added cost of the new CAPS, the film seemed likely to outstrip that already high price tag.
In addition to money and technology, the studio was also bringing back the central place of music. While films made during Walt’s lifetime frequently relied on the soundtrack to play an integral role in storytelling, from “Whistle While You Work” in Snow White to “A Spoonful of Sugar” in Mary Poppins, music had pl
ayed a lesser role in recent years. Some films, such as The Great Mouse Detective, had been released without any soundtrack at all.
Now Jeffrey Katzenberg, the new chairman of the studio, hired Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to write the score and lyrics, respectively. The duo had worked on numerous musicals together, including the off-Broadway play Little Shop of Horrors, later adapted into a 1986 film. While they had never written a movie score, they were inspired by their experiences in theater and intent on creating a work worthy to stand beside the soundtracks of classic Walt Disney films they remembered from their own childhoods, particularly Pinocchio and Peter Pan.
Menken and Ashman embedded themselves in the animation department in its new off-lot location and sat in on all the script discussions in the story department. These meetings had become vibrant again, a return to the collaborative environment that had pervaded the studio in prior decades.
In order to introduce his storytelling style to the group, one afternoon Ashman gathered the entire animation staff into the small theater in the warehouse on Flower Street. It was a moment as pivotal as when Walt collected his employees in the auditorium of the Hyperion studio in 1934 and acted out his vision for Snow White. Sitting on the stage in front of the full staff of artists, Ashman described both the evolution of the American musical and the progression of Walt Disney films. “It’s called the girl’s ‘I want’ song,” Ashman explained when he discussed a key tenet of both American musicals and the classic animated features. “You’re not going to miss what the film’s about. That’s the central issue of the entire film. By having her sing it, it makes that point indelible.” By connecting musicals such as My Fair Lady with animation classics such as Snow White, he clearly laid out a case for merging the storytelling mediums.
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