by Neal Gabler
And while the animators were dividing into camps over the general approach to the feature, another division opened over Snow White herself. Everyone at the studio recognized that the greatest visual challenge in making the feature was drawing the humans. The studio had attempted human characterizations in The Pied Piper in 1933, but Walt was disappointed. When I. Klein submitted a storyboard with human characters that fall, Ted Sears wrote him that “we have come to the conclusion that our best screen values are in small cute animal characters, we haven’t advanced far enough to handle humans properly and make them perform well enough to compete with real actors.” The next year, obviously with Snow White in mind, the studio attempted The Goddess of Spring, which featured Persephone being captured by the devil. Again the animation was unsatisfactory, the humans too stiff, and Les Clark felt obligated to apologize to Walt, who simply said, “I guess we could do better the next time.”
Not too much later Walt entrusted Ham Luske with the critical job of designing Snow White. By that time he had also hired Grim Natwick, who early in 1935 tested his own prowess in drawing more humanlike figures by animating the scene of the Cookie Girl being transformed into the Cookie Queen in a Silly Symphony titled The Cookie Carnival, and who, despite complaints that he was slow and disorganized and technically deficient, was assigned the task of animating scenes of Snow White, presumably from Luske’s model sheets. From the first it was an unhappy partnership. Luske saw Snow White as young and innocent, essentially a child, and he had drawn her with slightly cartoonish proportions and soft, round, oversize features to convey those qualities. Natwick conceived of her very differently. Befitting the man who had made his reputation animating the sex siren Betty Boop, he saw her as mature and womanly, and he dismissed Luske’s models, griping that they displayed no sense of anatomy—no spine, as he put it.
That these two conceptions competed for months, with animators lining up behind one or the other, was yet another example of how the studio was groping its way on the feature, learning as it went. Was Snow White to be a fanciful, traditional cartoon character or an edgier, more realistic one? Walt again was loath to make a decision, though he finally sided with Luske, in part because Walt had always spoken of her as a girl himself, in part because Luske’s Snow White was easier to draw. But even after siding with Luske, he discarded most of Luske’s trial animation and had Natwick, and later Luske’s assistant Jack Campbell, redraw Snow White to make her leaner, sharper, less cartoonish, and more realistic. Natwick complied, later claiming, in a complete reversal, that “Snow White was a sweet and graceful little girl and we just tried not to clown her up.” Even so Natwick was so uncertain about what Walt really wanted that by his own estimate he animated twenty-six scenes before showing any of them to Walt.
But for all the head-butting between Luske and Natwick, Snow White had become, in some ways, the least of Walt’s problems. A much bigger concern was the dwarfs. It had taken nearly two years to winnow the list of possibilities, and as late as November 1935, when he was already assigning animation for models and roughs, Walt had still not finalized the names of the dwarfs or their personalities. It was late that month that Walt seemed to decide that Dopey would be mute (Doc: “That’s Dopey! He don’t talk!”), and it wasn’t until sometime in January 1936 that a dwarf named Deafy, described as a “happy sort of fellow” who nevertheless takes umbrage at what he misconstrues, due to his deafness, as criticisms and who had often been used interchangeably with Dopey, was jettisoned for Sneezy.
With the deadline rapidly approaching, Walt knew he needed help in establishing the dwarfs, some handle for the animators to grasp. As early as the summer of 1935 he had asked the gravel-voiced character actor James Gleason, one of Walt’s polo compatriots, if he would recommend comedians who could be used to help shape the dwarfs by serving as models. In January 1936, apparently at Ward Kimball’s suggestion, a short burlesque comedian named Eddie Collins came to the studio to perform pantomimes as Dopey in the hopes of inspiring the animators. “[H]e did all these inspirational movements with his tongue,” Kimball remembered, “which was great for the soup sequence.” Walt sent other animators to see Joe Jackson and His Bicycle for ideas on how the dwarfs might move. That same month actors were being auditioned for the dwarfs’ voices. In February Fred Moore and Bill Tytla produced a model sheet, which was a kind of template for the animators. (Walt always took a malicious joy in pairing opposites, as he did with the fiery Tytla and the phlegmatic Moore, hoping that there might be sparks.) But it wasn’t until November, little more than a year before the feature was now scheduled to open, that Walt, realizing that time was running out and that he had still not conquered the problem, assembled his staff to discuss the dwarfs yet again.
There was clearly a sense of urgency. Throughout November and December a group of storymen and animators met regularly for hours at night in Projection Room No. 4 down the hall from Walt’s office, frequently with Walt in attendance, with the express purpose, as Dave Hand told them, of working up the “characteristics of the dwarfs.” “There are seven of them,” he warned, “and it is indeed difficult to get a hold of each.” As always Walt would act out the dwarfs at these sessions, often becoming so involved that, Thomas and Johnston said, “he forgot we were there.” But despite Walt’s performances and despite his repeated descriptions, the animators still wrestled with how to make each dwarf emotionally and psychologically unique while making them all look basically alike. “[T]he animators themselves don’t know yet how to draw them after working all this time,” Tytla admitted to a class at the time, and Tytla had designed the dwarfs with Moore.
Increasingly desperate, the animators tried impasting quirks onto the dwarfs to individualize them—“[W]e have got to have characteristics for each dwarf so that we can get a hold of them, and every time we have that fellow, we will pull that characteristic,” said Dave Hand at one meeting—and after weeks of fruitless debate, they hired a real-life dwarf named Major George and two midgets named Erny and Tom to perform on film to suggest some poses, but Walt was unimpressed. “To me, Erny, Tom and Major George are not very cute,” Walt wrote his stymied staff. “I can’t help but feel sorry for them. I believe, of course, that certain characteristics should be taken from these guys, but restricted, so that their actions are not caused by deformities.” Of his own dwarfs, he said, “I can’t help but feel that these guys are imaginary. They are creatures of the imagination.” As the animators struggled to find signature behaviors, Art Babbitt recommended they eschew the “superficial mannerism.” “You have to go deeper than that,” he said, sounding very much like Walt. “You have to go inside, how he feels.” Walt agreed. What he really wanted was what he always wanted: personality-driven animation. “I think you have to know these fellows definitely before you can draw them,” he now advised the animators.
But it was no simpler to find a personality than it was to invent little habits or tics. Trying to work from the inside out, the animators began imagining real-life analogues who seemed to capture the dwarfs: actor Roy Atwell for Doc, whom the studio had already selected to “voice” that character in the film (“He is, like Doc, a windbag type,” Walt wrote. “He loves to talk of the good old days when…”), Otis Harlan for Happy (“Harlan has a characteristic of listening with eagerness and anticipation. His face seems to become suddenly very blank when spoken to…. This is contrasted by a lighting up in his face as soon as he registers what has been said.”), black comic actor Stepin Fetchit for Sneezy, Will Rogers for Bashful, and at Walt’s suggestion the baby-faced silent film comedian Harry Langdon for Dopey. To break the logjam, at one meeting that December Fred Moore got up and, working from notes that Perce Pearce had transcribed in conversations with Walt, began drawing poses for each of the dwarfs that he thought would express their core selves and subtly distinguish them from one another based largely on the way they carried their weight. Doc: “He is a pompous guy. Even though he is big, he has to maintain a shape.” Happy: “Hap
py is fatter and lets his weight slip and fall down, while Doc is holding his weight up.” Grumpy: “Grumpy is a chesty little guy with his chest out and a pert fanny—bow-legged. He is a very aggressive type.” Bashful: “Bashful, as Walt likes him, has short legs and is plump. He is the one that always carries his head down and looks out of the corner of his eyes with chin on his chest.” Sleepy: “Sleepy has a long body, leaning forward almost as though he was off balance…. His head seemed to be tilted up when looking, but when in a kind of slump position, his head would fall down.” Sneezy: “Sneezy’s head should be drawn in sort of an oblong shape with more or less pretty good-sized nose stuck up in the air with a long upper lip.” And Dopey: “His sleeves hang down covering his hands…. He has a kid personality with small nose and eyes fairly large with a little outward slant to make them elfish.”
However difficult the other dwarfs were, Dopey was the most challenging because, as Walt put it, he was the one “we are depending upon to carry most of the belly laughs.” There were even some qualms about the name itself. Some objected to its being too slangy and modern or possibly suggesting a “hop-head,” as Walt put it, though Walt deflected those criticisms by saying that Shakespeare had used the word and that he couldn’t take seriously the connotations of drug use because “[t]hat’s not the way my mind works.” As for delineating the character, everyone continued to search for a peg. “Dopey has some Harpo [Marx] in him,” Perce Pearce declared at one meeting, picking up on what Walt himself had said back in April, “and Walt says he is made up of Harry Langdon, a little bit of Buster Keaton, and a little trace of Chaplin in the fellow. What I am getting to is that Dopey has a little bit of everything in him.” The problem with this characterization was that there was only a thin line between being a little bit of everything and being nothing at all.
“The boys couldn’t seem to get him at all,” Walt would say years later. “They tried to make him too much of an imbecile, which was not what we had in mind,” though Walt himself had contributed to this notion. “He is slow at figuring things out, the way [Stan] Laurel does,” Walt said at an extended discussion of Dopey that December. “Dopey can’t even get the spoon right. He has a hold of it in such a manner that when he dips the spoon down in the soup, he brought it up in such a way that it would be upside down with no soup in it.” And he invoked Harry Langdon once again, recalling a scene where the comedian is invited to tag along with a group of coworkers at a factory, and he is so pleased to be with them that he keeps running ahead of them and looking back, beaming. But if Walt described Dopey as eager and addled, like Walt’s old uncle Ed, he also insisted that he be cute. “I think the thing that expresses Dopey best is that he hasn’t grown up—sort of childish,” he told one meeting, which didn’t seem to help the animators much. In a sign of their floundering, Dave Hand, again grasping at straws, suggested they invite Eddie Collins back to the studio to act out Dopey’s part in the hope that he might stimulate them.
As Walt described it, the breakthrough came when they decided to think of Dopey not as an elf or as an innocent or as a child but as a “human with dog mannerisms and intellect,” thus reverting to an idea in a note he had sent his staff a year earlier describing Dopey as “in a way like Pluto.” “You know the way a dog will be so intent on sniffing a trail that he doesn’t see the rabbit right in front of him,” Walt said, “—and when the rabbit scurries away the dog does a delayed take? That’s the way Dopey was. We made him able to move one ear independently of the other, the way a dog can shake off a fly. And when Dopey had a dream, he pawed with his hand the way a dog does while sleeping.” With that decision, the dwarfs were finally solved, albeit provisionally, since everything on Snow White was provisional, and on January 8, 1937, Walt was able to issue a memo that had been a long time coming: “Details that Are to Be on Dwarfs, OK’d by Walt.” Now the real work of bringing the vision to the screen could begin.
V
All the months during which Walt and the staff had been fine-tuning the script and ruminating about the dwarfs, they had had other, equally urgent tasks to complete if the feature was to be ready for its scheduled premiere in December 1937. For one thing, the animators drew to the voice track, so before they could animate any of the scenes in which characters spoke, voices had to be cast and the dialogue recorded. Early in 1936, several of the dwarfs had been cast with the actors who had inspired them—Atwell for Doc and Harlan for Happy—though storyman Pinto Colvig, who had done a live reel of Grumpy for Tytla, did two voices, Grumpy and Sleepy, veteran movie comedian Billy Gilbert who had a trademark sneeze voiced Sneezy, and longtime movie bit player Scotty Mattraw performed Bashful.
The studio auditioned dozens of actresses for the Queen, most of whom, according to Bill Cottrell, had been fatally affected by a cackling witch on a popular radio program. When Lucille La Verne, who had played La Vengeance in David Selznick’s A Tale of Two Cities, auditioned, Cottrell offered her the storyboards to peruse, but she declined. “She read the lines,” Cottrell recalled. “You could have recorded it and used the first reading she gave, she was so good. And when she came to the transition [to the peddler], she concluded with a blood-chilling, maniacal laugh that rang all through the sound stage.” (According to Joe Grant, La Verne assumed the peddler woman’s voice by removing her false teeth.) She was hired immediately.
As for Snow White, by one account 150 girls were tested for the part, allegedly among them Deanna Durbin, who would later become an acclaimed child star at Universal but whom Walt rejected because he thought she sounded like a thirty-year-old woman. Virginia Davis, who had played Alice in the Alice comedies a decade earlier, said that she had done some preliminary live action for the character and was set to do the voice when she rejected the contract as unacceptable. The successful aspirant, eighteen-year-old Adriana Caselotti, would always tell the story of how her father, a voice teacher, was talking on the phone to a talent scout at the Disney studio when she overheard the conversation on the extension and recommended herself for the job. As Walt told it, his talent scout would bring candidates to the studio and have Walt paged when the man thought he had a possibility. Walt would then head to his office next to the soundstage and listen in on a speaker so that the candidate’s appearance wouldn’t affect his judgment. When he heard Caselotti, he remarked, “She sounds to me like a fourteen-year-old girl,” which was exactly what he had been looking for. She was signed for a nominal fee and recorded her first tracks on January 20, 1936.
At roughly the same time he was casting the voices, Walt was also working on the music, though like everything else on the project, the process dragged on for well over a year. Walt had always thought of Snow White in musical terms, even describing the dialogue poetically, “not rhymed or definite beat rhythm,” he told one story session, “but [it should] have meter, and at the right time, tie in with the music, so the whole thing has musical pattern…phrasing and fitting the mood to get away from straight dialogue.” The immediate question—and one that was another source of continuous debate—was what kind of music would best suit the film. Walt was suspicious of modern popular music. “I don’t like the Cab Calloway idea or too much OH DE OH DO,” he explained during a discussion of the sequence in which the dwarfs entertain Snow White. “Audiences hear a lot of hot stuff. If we can keep this quaint, it will appeal more than the hot stuff.”
As the staff worked to balance the quaint with the “peppy,” per Walt’s instructions, they also struggled with instrumentation. During one session where storyman and lyricist Larry Morey sang “You’re Never Too Old to Be Young,” which was later excised from the film, a long discussion ensued over how the dwarfs would present the song—Walt actually performed a Swiss dance, slapping his fanny to demonstrate what he imagined—and over what instruments they would play. To record an experimental track for the entertainment sequence, as Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston remembered it, about thirty employees gathered and were “blowing on bottles and jugs and strange homemade ins
truments.” Listening, Walt was pleased. “Yeah! That’s a happy song…a happy group!” he said, and added that the only thing missing was someone yodeling. Sound effects man Jim Macdonald did, creating what would become a memorable moment in the film.
The staff began recording the songs in January 1936 and continued into 1937, but Walt, who attended many of these sessions, was no more satisfied with the music than he had been with the animation. As late as spring 1937, he was still instructing his staff how he wanted the dwarfs to sing (“Bashful could half talk and half sing. You can bring their personalities in there”), still complaining that one track lacked rhythm, and still working on new verses for “The Silly Song,” even though the film was then less than six months from its completion date. In fact, he had sample verses played for the staff one afternoon and asked them to vote for their six favorites. (Walt even dragooned Lillian into voting.) But for all his refining and procrastinating in hopes of breaking new ground, he continued to be disappointed that the songs were not fully integrated into the film. “It’s still that influence from the musicals they have been doing for years,” Walt grumbled after reviewing a sequence. “Really we should set a new pattern. I hope we can do it in Bambi…a new way to use music; weave it into the story so somebody doesn’t just bust [sic] into song.”