by Neal Gabler
Yet even while he was analyzing and then refining the gag, Walt was also changing the basic narrative unit of his cartoons. He had begun to think not just in terms of gags but in terms of a story to which the gags would be subordinated, which may have been as revolutionary an advance in animation as his overlapping action. (Indeed, story was the very thing Walt himself had disdained while working for Mintz.) When he hired Ted Sears in 1930—the old Fleischer animator who, one colleague said, wore a high collar, plastered his hair on his head, spoke out of the side of his mouth, and looked like a “defrocked priest”—Walt had appointed him head of a new story department, something unheard of at any other animation studio. It consisted of Bill Cottrell, the ink-and-paint-man-turned-camera-operator-turned-animator, Webb Smith, a former newspaperman, and Pinto Colvig, who would later become the voice of the character Goofy. These men were initially charged with helping devise better gags without the responsibility of having to animate them. Walt would toss them a situation—say, Mickey’s pet dog Pluto getting stuck on flypaper—and then let them develop it. “I came back in two days,” Walt recalled of having given Webb Smith that instruction, “and there was a whole wall full of things that would happen to that dog if he got mixed up with flypaper, see? So then the process would be of sitting down with that, taking some of those ideas, copying them if we could, putting them into some kind of routine and continuity.”
It was the continuity on which the storymen, with Walt’s blessing, now began to concentrate. Walt wanted the story and gags to be as polished as the animation itself. To elevate the status of the story, Walt, rather than have the gagmen move from animator to animator with their ideas, installed them in their own room, where the entire staff would congregate at a cartoon’s launch to discuss the storyline and gags, and where directors would later repair to flesh out the stories and convert them to visuals. Meanwhile one of the storymen—some sources credit Webb Smith, others Ted Sears—came up with the idea of laying out the entire cartoon scene by scene in a series of rough sketches, the plot equivalent of the pencil tests, and pinning them on a large four-by-eight-foot corkboard—a “storyboard,” it was called—that permitted the storymen, the animators, and Walt to get an overview of the narrative flow of the film.* Now Walt could study the cartoon even before it had been put into pencil tests. As one animator said, “You get the feeling that every last frame of that thing has been worked over until it’s perfect!”
Whenever one element changed, it set off a chain reaction. The new regard for story demanded a new approach to the animated figures. So long as cartoons simply linked slapstick gags, characters were little more than foils. Even the early Mickey Mouse was a device that accommodated the comic situation—leering when the circumstances demanded leering, fearful when they demanded fear, swashbuckling when they demanded courage, merry when they required merriment. But the more elaborated stories that Sears’s department began turning out at Walt’s behest required more elaborated characters as well—actors rather than enactors. “The big reason nobody remembers what happened in the early days was that there was no real story and no personality,” one animator observed. “That’s why everybody thinks that Walt Disney invented the cartoon.”
A character like Felix the Cat, Walt once told Frank Thomas, had “little bits of personality here and there,” and Walt himself had attempted to forge a personality for Oswald the Rabbit and later Mickey Mouse, but he felt that these bits were not sufficient. Walt, who was always trying to nudge animation closer to the live-action films of Chaplin or Keaton, understood that the audience needed involvement. They needed to care about the characters on the screen, not just to laugh at them, and he began stressing to his animators the importance of creating characters who could elicit emotional reactions from the viewers. “It was the uppermost thing,” Wilfred Jackson remembered of this period, “and it all came about because Walt wanted to make the cartoon characters believable to the audience. Right from the start he didn’t want them to be just something moving around on the screen and doing funny things.” “[Y]our characters had to be the kind of characters that people could relate to,” Eric Larson concurred. As Walt himself later put it in a succinct formulation of his aesthetic, “The most important aim of any of the fine arts is to get a purely emotional response from the beholder.”
The only way to elicit that response, Walt believed, was through personality—a set of characteristics that were unique to the character and that coalesced to define him. At the Disney studio the edict came down from Walt that animated figures were no longer to be simply functional for the gag. They had to be full-bodied or, as one animator described it, “believable in motion and emotion.” Aside from the general aspiration to excellence, of all the numerous contributions and innovations that Walt Disney bequeathed to animation, this may very well have been the single most important because it was the one that changed animation most radically, not just in its physical appearance or in its narrative amplitude but in its fundamental relationship to the viewer, and it was the one that most distinguished Disney animation from its forebears: all characters had to be treated as if they were not merely animated but living—an approach that came to be called “personality animation.” “Everything in his cartoons had to have a personality,” animator Ward Kimball said. “He insisted that if a tree was bashful, it had to act like it was bashful. If it was a villainous tree, it had to behave like a villain. He always demanded complete character delineation from his animators.” At one story session Walt asked, “How would a piano feel if Mickey bangs on it too hard?”
For Walt, personality was not a function of physical behavior or even of the emotional responses that one could slap upon a character. The magic of animation, the magic of Disney animation, was that personality seemed to emerge from the drawings as if it had been internalized. “You have to portray not only [that] this thing is moving,” Walt once said, “but it is actually alive and thinks.” The idea of a thinking, feeling cartoon character, a character with psychology and emotional range, was a revelation even at the Disney studio, where just a few years before there was concern over whether an audience would accept a voice emanating from a drawing. When Norm Ferguson animated Webb Smith’s sequence of Pluto struggling with the flypaper in Playful Pluto in 1934, the effect on the studio was electric—the “one big one,” Wilfred Jackson called it. “It was a blockbuster because you could see the wheels going around in the character’s head,” Ward Kimball recalled. “And we were just more or less pulling out of that bouncing, dancing, musical age of Disney shorts, where all of our characters with big smiles on their faces kept time to the music or played an instrument. Here comes a character that gets stuck with a situation and keeps building, almost like a Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd, or a Chaplin sequence.” Ferguson, whose animation had already won Walt’s admiration for its fluidity, now won further admiration for its psychology and depth. “Fergy, you’re a great actor,” Walt announced in front of the staff one day, and when Ferguson simpered and shrank in embarrassment, Walt insisted, “Yes, you are. That’s why your animation is so good, because you feel. You feel what these characters feel.”
Walt Disney would be credited—and often criticized as well—for bringing greater realism to animation; and he almost single-handedly broke the long-standing tradition, to which he himself had once subscribed, of self-reflexive cartoons in which one saw the animator’s hand, in favor of a new aesthetic in which the cartoon world was presented as self-contained. But the visual realism he encouraged was actually a product of the psychological and emotional realism he demanded, not a source. Walt wanted a credible visual field for his more credible animated characters in order to forge that emotional bond with the audience—an animated universe he called the “plausible impossible” that stretched natural laws without breaking them entirely.
As a result of this new imperative and of the analysis of scenes through pencil tests, Disney animators began to abandon the prevailing, tried-and-true style of an
imation disparagingly named “rubber hose,” which forsook realism and its difficulties for ease of drawing. In “rubber hose” animation, when the shape of a figure or an object changed, so would its volume, as if it were made of rubber. There was no consideration of gravity or weight. This bothered Walt. He felt that the lack of realism compromised the psychological and emotional reality of the characters and snapped the emotional bond to the viewer. “As Walt began to bear down a little bit on making his characters believable,” Jackson said, “all this [rubber hose] had to go.” Now gravity entered the cartoon world for the first time, and so did “secondary actions,” or the response of things like hair and clothes and leaves to gravity. Prior to Disney, Dick Huemer recalled, “[n]o one thought of clothing following through, sweeping out, and dropping a few frames later, which is what it does naturally.” At the Disney studio, everyone began to think of these things, and the force of gravity became an obsession. Among the many signs that hung on the animators’ walls was one that read: “Does your drawing have weight, depth and balance?”
Sometimes, however, the animators simply were not good enough. To meet the new standards for realism, they knew they had to improve their skills. “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real unless we first know the real,” Walt had advised. They needed training. As early as 1929 Walt would drive several of his animators to downtown Los Angeles to attend Friday night classes at the Chouinard Art Institute, then go to the studio to work, and then return to pick them up. Sometime in 1931 he contracted with Chouinard to train a dozen or so of his artists one night a week. One of them, Art Babbitt, decided that it would be more efficient for the artists to gather at his house near the Hollywood Bowl for informal drawing sessions with live models, and in the late summer or early fall of 1932 he began hosting these get-togethers. The first week he invited eight artists, and fourteen arrived. The next week he invited the fourteen, and twenty-two appeared. Several weeks later Walt called Babbitt to his office. “Suppose it got in the newspapers that a bunch of Disney artists were drawing naked women in a private home,” he said. “It wouldn’t sit very well.” Instead, obviously hoping to attract even more of the staff, he offered them the studio soundstage and free materials. After Walt’s proposal another young animator who had been attending the sessions at Babbitt’s house, Hardie Gramatky, suggested they formalize the instruction by inviting the man who had conducted the Chouinard classes, Donald Graham, to serve as the teacher. Babbitt contacted Graham, and on November 15 the “great Disney Art School,” as Graham called it, held its first class.
At first the group met on the soundstage just two evenings a week, with twenty to thirty men in attendance. Within a month the numbers had swelled, compelling Graham to call in another instructor, Phil Dike, and divide the class in two. Over the next two years weekly attendance averaged better than fifty per session, and Graham occasionally had to enlist a third instructor to accommodate the group. Soon they were meeting five nights a week, and though attendance initially was not mandatory, as Babbitt put it, “you’d better go!”
Canadian-born and trained at Stanford as an engineer before taking instruction himself at Chouinard and committing to art, Graham was only twenty-nine when he took the helm—a handsome, compact man with dark wavy hair, a square jaw, deepset eyes, ropy arms, and the long fingers of an artist. He stood at the front of the cavernous room holding a lit cigarette that he kept passing from hand to hand as he talked, riveting the class as the ash edged closer to those fingers. The task that he set for himself was, in one student’s words, “necessarily impossible.” He had no training in animation himself, but it wasn’t animation that Walt wanted him to teach. Rather, he taught a group of crusty New York animators, former newspaper cartoonists, sometime art students, and talented dabblers the art of figurative drawing without, said one animator, imposing a single style on them. He was laying a foundation, teaching them how to draw, really draw, which meant, as one animator came to realize, that “he was single-handedly attacking the traditional concept of animation as simply moving comic strips” and trading it for realism. It was Graham who now painstakingly showed them the effect of gravity on mass, and how flesh and muscle move, and the role of secondary effects. Art Babbitt said that Graham was the one who taught him “to analyze” and taught him as well that “only the slightest little offbeat element in a person’s movement makes him a distinctly different character.” Another animator, Shamus Culhane, went so far as to say that after Walt Disney himself, Don Graham had the “greatest impact on the philosophy of the medium [by trying to] create a group of sophisticated filmmakers educated in the theories of the Old Masters, modern art, acting, and the scientific principles of movement.”
At a studio dedicated to excellence, Graham became a kind of hero for prodding the animators toward fine art. As the students drew and Graham wandered among them, gazing over their shoulders at their pads, he had only two assessments. Either he asked, “Having problems?” or he said, “Looks like you’re having fun.” The second, according to one animator, was the “supreme apothegm, the supreme tribute, the ne plus ultra, because having fun meant that something was sinking in; the lessons were bearing fruit. I would rather hear Don Graham say, ‘Having fun?’” the animator said, “than win an Academy Award.”
In due course Graham would be added to the studio payroll full-time, teaching three days and two nights each week, while the studio school expanded to five nights a week with 150 students at a cost, it was estimated, of $100,000 a year. Meanwhile Walt complemented Graham’s instruction by commissioning slow-motion photographic studies, he said, of “glass breaking, bubbles forming and popping, water drops falling into a tub,” even smoke swirling, for the animators to analyze; by instituting a studio library that eventually grew to two thousand volumes where a staff of three provided drawings and photographs for the animators; by having photostats of human movement sized to fit the animation board so that the animators could draw over the photos and discover for themselves the basis of action; even by having certain animators attend acting classes. Animators at other studios would grouse that had they been given the time Disney animators had, they could have produced work just as good, but the mentality was the difference, not the time. William Tytla, who had worked for Paul Terry in New York before joining the Disney studio, said that when he suggested Terry hire a model to help them improve their technique, he was told to get one himself and that Terry dismissed the idea of hiring an instructor like Graham. Finally Tytla abandoned the effort, complaining, “[T]hey said anyone who goes to art school is a ‘homo Bolshevik.’” Shamus Culhane had a similar experience at the Fleischer studio. “They could never accept the fact that time wasn’t the factor; it was education,” he wrote. “Fleischer people were operating from instinct and a scornful rejection of the idea that principles of writing and animation even existed.”
Now that realism was the basis of the rapidly evolving Disney animation, providing a connection for the audience that more rudimentary cartoons could not provide and permitting them to recognize themselves in Disney characters as they recognized themselves in live-action stars or the characters in literature, Walt Disney was in the business of creating life. “Most people think the word ‘animation’ means movement,” Ken Peterson, a Disney animator, once explained, “but it doesn’t. It comes from ‘animus’ which means ‘life’ or ‘to live.’ Making it move is not animation, but just the mechanics of it.” “We invest them with life,” Walt told a reporter of his animated creations.
Disney animations were of life, but they were larger than life too. What Walt sought was not an imitation of life as it was, which live-action films could do better than animation, but life as one could exaggerate it—a “caricature of life,” as Walt called it, rooted in realism but expanding upon it. Walt’s animated reality would not only be more outsized than real life, it would be simpler, clearer, sharper, and finally better. “Our actors must be more interesting and more unusual
than you and [me],” Ham Luske, one of the studio’s top animators in the 1930s, advised in a dictum to the staff. “Their thought process must be quicker than ours, and their uninteresting progressions from one situation to another must be skipped.” And in this may have been the nub for Walt Disney. For all the prospective commercial benefits of animated realism, it had this deeply personal benefit for a man who had spent his young life creating an alternative reality as a compensation for the hurts he felt he had suffered: realism further allowed him to simplify and perfect his world and intensify his control over it. Realism allowed him to create a wonderful world of the plausibly impossible.
And what was realism without color? Even before he had begun exploring sound, Walt Disney had been captivated by the idea of color animations. He was so eager to improve the visual image of his animations that in January 1930 the studio began using the more sensitive positive film stock rather than negative even though it cost them $1,000 more per cartoon. Shortly thereafter Walt assigned Bill Cottrell, then in the camera department, to conduct an experiment for an atmospheric Silly Symphony titled Night. At Walt’s instruction, Cottrell put silver nitrate on the film to see what effect he could achieve, then printed the cartoon on blue stock to imbue it with an inky tonality that approximated the color of the night sky. A fire sequence was printed on red stock, and an underwater scene on green. “I guess he was hoping that something would come up that we could do something [with] that would create a color picture,” Cottrell later said.