Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Walt clearly loved the combination of drawing and technology. He had always liked to tinker, and in his last spring in Kansas City before leaving for Chicago he had even bought the parts to construct a car chassis with the intention of putting Roy’s old motorcycle engine under the hood, until Roy inadvertently scuttled the plan by selling the cycle when he joined the navy. But to the go-getter in Walt, and to the Disney in him, animation had another appeal. It was a way to make his mark since, unlike newspaper cartooning, animation was something that Walt thought he might do better than anyone else because so few people at the time were doing it and so few people had any expertise in it, and the idea of being the best, the most noted, clearly appealed to him.

  Walt Disney seldom dabbled. Everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity; when something intrigued him, he focused himself entirely as if it were the only thing that mattered. Now animation mattered. That spring he began an intensive self-education in the medium, using the Slide Co. as his school. It might not have seemed a likely place to matriculate. Tall, burly, and lantern-jawed, A.V. Cauger was physically imposing, and he had a gruff voice and brusque manner that further intimidated; one employee recalled that A.V. would issue instructions or orders while simultaneously spitting in the drinking fountain. But to those who got to know him, his manner was less terrorizing than informal, and he ran his shop more or less democratically, which meant that Walt had extraordinary latitude for an eighteen-year-old. He had been there only a relatively short time when he convinced Cauger, as an economy measure, to let him write and shoot his own ads rather than rely on the copy department. (Already Walt had a facility with quips. For an ad promoting a company that refurbished canvas car tops, he had a man address the owner of a reconditioned car: “Hi, old top, new car?” “No, new top, old car.”) And it was not long after that that Walt prodded Cauger into letting him borrow an old mahogany camera he had found in the office sitting on a shelf, overcoming Cauger’s objections that the company might need the camera for some emergency by promising that he would return it immediately should that situation arise.

  But if the Slide Co. was his school, he still needed a studio in which to practice making cartoons. He found one in his own backyard. That same spring Elias and Flora returned to the Bellefontaine house from Chicago, once again having failed. O-Zell had gone bankrupt—by one account due to the financial chicanery of its officers, which sent them to Joliet Federal Penitentiary, though this seems unlikely since the Disneys maintained cordial relations with the family of O-Zell’s president, Earl Scrogin, for years afterward. Walt, obviously wanting to impress his family and always enamored of the grand gesture, greeted his parents and sister at Union Station in a rented touring car. His parents had no automobile of their own, but not long after his arrival Elias decided to build a garage in the yard behind the Bellefontaine house with the intention of making some additional money by renting it out. He had barely begun construction when Walt told him that he would rent it himself and offered his father five dollars a month, which, Roy would say, Walt never paid.

  The garage, roughly fifteen feet square and dominating the small yard, became Walt’s first studio. Inside he and Roy rigged Cauger’s camera into an overhead camera stand with incandescent lights. Already during his short time at Pesmen-Rubin, Walt had, according to Louis Pesmen, borrowed a glass negative camera that he had found in the studio and begun experimenting in Pesmen’s sister’s garage with photographic images, possibly, Pesmen speculated, making slides of his own. (His sister was less than enthusiastic, Pesmen said, about the mess Walt left.) Focused now on animation virtually to the exclusion of everything else—“Walt was a focused man from childhood,” his niece, Dorothy, who lived at the Bellefontaine house at the time, would say—he would repair to the garage after work each day, emerge for dinner, then return to his camera stand. “When he’d come home and long after everybody else was [in] bed,” Roy remembered, “Walt was out there still, puttering away, working away, experimenting, trying this and that, drawing, and so on.” “He was just busy every second,” said Dorothy, though no one in the family paid much attention to him. “We didn’t think it was any big deal.”

  But for Walt the nights tinkering out back were a big deal, and they signified a sea change in his ambitions. What his family did not seem to notice was that Walt Disney, who for years had been determined to become a newspaper cartoonist, was now suddenly just as determined to become something that to most outsiders was even more impractical, something for which he had had no real training and something for which a job did not even seem to exist. He wanted to become an animator.

  II

  He did not have a lot of catching up to do. In 1920, when he began puttering in his garage, animation was scarcely two decades old, and it had not evolved much in that time, in part because the idea of moving drawings was still so novel that it required very little besides movement to entertain audiences. The earliest animators, like the Frenchman Émile Cohl and the Englishman Stuart Blackton, borrowed from the stage tradition of “lightning sketchers”—performers who stood at an easel and, while lecturing, drew very rapidly, constantly transforming their drawings as they spoke. Taking advantage of the inherent nature of motion pictures to make continuous action out of a string of static images, animation pioneers did lightning sketching one better. Their films often self-reflexively showed the cartoonist’s hand sketching the image before magically setting it in motion, calling attention to the technological gimmick and in doing so turning animation into a form of trickery. In effect, these first animations were about nothing more than the thrill of animation itself.

  Not until 1910, when Winsor McCay originated a vaudeville act in which he (on stage) interacted with his animations (on screen), did the quality of the drawing dramatically improve and the integrity of the drawing as a separate reality rather than a trick become established. McCay had been an illustrator and cartoonist for the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune and then the Enquirer before defecting to the New York Herald and Evening Telegram, where he created several comic strips, most famously “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” which brought him national fame and a vaudeville contract. Inspired by a “flip book” that his son brought home, in which riffling the pages set figures in motion, he converted “Nemo” into a short animation to be shown during his act. By the time he made his second film, How a Mosquito Operates, in 1912, he was declaring animation a “new school of art that will revolutionize the entire field,” and when he drew “Gertie the Dinosaur” two years later, also for his vaudeville act, he accelerated that revolution by laying, in the words of one animation historian, the “foundations of character animation, the art of delineating a character’s personality through a unique style of movement.”

  Where McCay led, many illustrators and cartoonists followed, until animation gradually emerged as a new film genre emphasizing characters rather than magic. Late in 1914 or early 1915 a French-Canadian illustrator named Raoul Barré and a longtime magazine and newspaper artist named John Randolph Bray opened the first animation studios in New York, and within a few years they had at least a dozen rivals there hoping to reap the profits of this novelty. For these pioneers the primary challenge was not artistic; it was technical. McCay, making only two-minute films, drew each of the roughly four thousand pictures his animations required on a separate sheet of paper with both character and background included and then had each one of them photographed. (His sole efficiency was in tracing the backgrounds.) But this was hopelessly time-consuming if one intended to produce animations of any length and in any quantity. As a matter of economizing, the goal was to separate the moving characters in the foreground, which had to be continuously redrawn, from the background, which did not move and thus could be drawn just once. Bray devised an alternative system to McCay’s in which he printed multiple copies of the background and then removed those parts that would be obscured by the action, either by scratching them off or blanking them out. Barré, realizing that the background
and action did not have to be put on the same sheet since the camera could combine them in a single frame, invented what came to be called the “slash and tear” method of animation because he would place the background on one sheet and then tear holes in it to reveal the action on a second sheet laid beneath the first. But it was another old newspaper cartoonist-turned-animator, Earl Hurd, who most successfully solved the problem by drawing the moving characters on sheets of translucent paper, later transparent celluloid, and placing them over a second sheet on which the background was painted, eliminating the need for tearing holes.* This gave rise to the term cel to refer to the individual celluloid sheets with their animation drawings. It was so efficient a system that it would remain the basic animation technique for more than eighty years, or until the rise of computer-generated images in the late twentieth century.

  But if cel animation made animating much easier, it did not, it turned out, make it any more artistic. Drawings and movement were rudimentary, in part because animators had to feel their way along a trail that had yet to be blazed. Most of them were eager young print cartoonists like Walt who had no training in animating figures; at best they studied books—there were a handful of them in the postwar period—that purported to explain how to make pictures move. “Animators were scarce,” Grim Natwick, an early cartoonist, recalled. “There was no one to tell them how to do it. They sharpened a fist full of pencils, sat down at a drawing board and started animating.”

  And what was true of the drawing was equally true of the stories the drawings told. Based primarily on familiar comic strips, early animations had no more narrative refinement than a day’s installment of those strips—no real attempt to tell a story, much less create an arc. Usually when the animators began drawing, they did not even have any narrative master plan to follow. “The scenario would probably be on a single sheet of paper,” Dick Huemer, an animator who had worked at Barré’s studio back in 1916, said, “without any models, sketches, or anything; you made it up as you went along.” Some twenty years after the introduction of animation, it was still largely its novelty that held the appeal, though that appeal was waning. “We got very few laughs,” Huemer added. “I can remember taking my family to see some bit of animation I was particularly proud of, and just as it went on, somebody behind me said, ‘Oh, I hate these things.’”

  But if very little visual or narrative craft was involved, animation nevertheless had a powerful subtext that would slowly emerge and at least subliminally resonate with the public, a subtext of which the first animators themselves may not even have been aware. Most had come to animation as a lark—typically a way to take advantage of the movie boom for financial gain. Their “distinctive features,” as one eminent animation historian described this pioneering group, were a “background in journalism, a compulsion to sketch, ‘workaholic’ tendencies, and a well developed but idiosyncratic sense of humor.” Except for the journalism experience, for which he had once so achingly yearned, Walt Disney certainly fit this characterization. But Walt’s growing attachment to animation seemed to be impelled by something beyond the inertia from print to film that ostensibly motivated so many other animators, or the prospect of money, or the technological appeal of the medium, or the possibility of success, or even the attention it might get him—all of which may have been the initial lures. Walt Disney also had a psychological connection to animation, a connection forged by his childhood experiences.

  The process of animation was a process of giving life, of literally taking the inanimate and making it animate. It was, at base, a hubristic process in which the animator assumed and exercised godlike control over his materials, which was why it also offered a feeling of empowerment to its viewers who sensed the control. In Walt Disney’s case the surge of empowerment was so great one might even have concluded that animation took the place of religion for him, since in his adulthood he showed little or no interest in formal religion and never attended church. Indeed, the animator created his own world—an alternative reality of his imagination in which the laws of physics and logic could be suspended. Though Walt Disney could never fully articulate why he was attracted to animation, falling back instead on vague generalities, it always had these two great and unmistakable blandishments. For a young man who had chafed within the stern, moralistic, anhedonic world of his father, animation provided escape, and for someone who had always been subjugated by that father, it provided absolute control. In animation Walt Disney had a world of his own. In animation Walt Disney could be the power.

  By late spring, still determined to master animation, he had immersed himself completely. He had taken out a book from the Kansas City Library—“there was only this one book in the library [on animation]”—and devoured it. The book, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, by Edwin G. Lutz, had just been published, but it immediately became, in one animation historian’s words, the “vulgate of modern industrial animation.” Lutz essentially brought the latest animation techniques of New York to the hinterlands like Kansas City. He described how one could draw backgrounds on a single sheet of celluloid and then place them over the animated action, and he suggested that one draw the static portions of a figure on the celluloid as well and animate the parts that moved on a paper beneath. He also explained how a putative animator, using a lightbox with two pegs at the top to hold the paper in place—if successive papers were unaligned, the image would shimmy—could sketch the extremes of an action and then have what he called a “tracer” fill in the pictures in between (what animators would call “working to extremes”), as most of the New York professionals did. Lutz even delineated the kind of person most likely to succeed in animation: someone with a “notion of form,” someone who was “an untiring and courageous worker,” and someone who possessed “skill as a manager.”

  Even though Walt would later dismiss the Lutz book as “not very profound” and “just something the guy had put together to make a buck,” his associates said they all pored over it, and its effect on him too was nearly a revelation. At the Slide Co. he had been deploying the rudimentary cutout system of animation with moving limbs. Now he began experimenting with cel animation—real animation. He also began picking the brain of a former Slide Co. animator named “Scarfoot” McCory who had left to run an animation school in New York but who returned occasionally to Kansas City, and he may have taken a correspondence course offered by a prominent New York animator named Bill Nolan. To improve the quality of his work, Walt studied motion as well as technique. Iwwerks had taken out from the library a copy of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of animal movements so that he could trace a greyhound’s gait from the photos for an ad he was assigned, and Walt wound up making a photostat of the book for his own collection. Of the greyhound ad, Iwwerks later said it was “the best animation scene I ever did, before and since.” And Walt began attending night classes again at the Kansas City Art Institute with Iwwerks and other colleagues from the Slide Co.

  Still, the hours drawing at the Slide Co., and the hours more drawing and shooting with the camera afterward in the backyard garage, and the time studying Lutz, Muybridge, and Nolan, and the nights at the Art Institute, were not enough for him. He was besotted with animation. He needed more. By the summer the Slide Co. had moved to a new, more spacious building at 2449 Charlotte Street, a little over a mile southwest of the old headquarters, in what was called the hospital district, and had changed its name to the Kansas City Film Ad Co. to reflect the shift in business from slides to movies. With the passion of a convert, Walt attempted to wheedle Cauger into trying cel animation, but Cauger was a traditionalist. Rebuffed, Walt decided to pursue it on his own, and late that summer or early in the fall he recruited Fred Harman, the older brother of Hugh Harman, one of Walt’s Film Ad Co. coworkers, to team with him on drawing an animation they called “The Little Artist” in which an artist and his easel came to life.

  This was just a little learning exercise, but if Walt was obsessed, h
e was also ambitious. In his book Lutz suggested that would-be animators think topically: “For news picture reels it has been found judicious for variety’s sake, as well as for business reasons, to combine with them cartoons satirizing topics of the hour.” Walt and Harman had already made one live-action film they titled Kansas City Journal Screen Review, apparently hoping to interest the newspaper in a film adjunct. Though that did not pay off, Walt, no doubt inspired by Lutz’s suggestion, decided to try making a short editorial cartoon and see if he could sell it to the three-theater Newman chain, for which he had illustrated programs at Pesmen-Rubin. Whose idea it was to go to Newman is impossible to say. Louis Pesmen later remembered that Walt invited him to see the cartoons, which commented humorously on Kansas City’s slow streetcar service. One showed a daisy growing on a woman’s hosiery as she waited for her trolley, only to have her engulfed in flowers by the time it arrived; another had a young man growing a beard by the time his trolley arrived. Pesmen said he laughed “long and hard,” then suggested Walt show them to their old client, Frank L. Newman.

  Newman was the “big showman in Kansas City at that time,” according to Elias Disney, and he looked the part. He was a big, beefy man with dark hair brilliantined back on his head, a prominent nose, and a square jaw. And if Newman looked like the king of Kansas City show business, his Newman Theater, which he had opened the previous year on Main Street, certainly looked like his palace. Seating one thousand and ranging over one hundred feet from the stage to the entrance and with seventy-five-foot ceilings, the Newman was done in Italian Renaissance style with “every square foot of floor space…of either terrazzo or white marble,” according to the Newman Theater Magazine. Abandoning its motif, the theater even featured a Louis XV restroom, which, it boasted, was “unquestionably the most beautiful room of its kind ever constructed.”