by Neal Gabler
This was always the injunction. It had to be different, better in all respects, and while Walt was seeking a way to make Snow White musically distinctive, he was also pressing to make it visually distinctive, not only in the style of its animation but in its palette too. Walt had worked for years to improve the colors on his cartoons. Though after much trial and error he used water opaque paints manufactured by the F. R. Miller Paint Company, inkers and painters complained of mildew, streaking, tackiness, lack of intensity, lumpiness, limited range, and staining. Walt sought to devise a solution. Eventually the studio developed its own binder, which held the paint together, with a gum arabic base that was even rewettable so that painters could correct mistakes. The studio also ground all of its own paint with a set of disk mills that had once been used to grind food, and it installed a spectraphotometer, one of only twenty in the world at the time, to measure colors exactly. By one count the Disney painting department had twelve hundred distinct pigments. Knowing that Technicolor couldn’t reproduce them exactly, Walt had a large chart on the wall, some six or seven feet high, showing how the colors would register on the screen.
Ever since Flowers and Trees, color had been a preoccupation of Walt’s, and some critics would credit him with being the first film artist to use color expressively rather than realistically, which usually meant that he deployed bright pop colors that one couldn’t find in nature. That may have been perfectly acceptable for shorts, but for Snow White he had something else in mind. Speaking of a Harman-Ising cartoon he had seen recently, Walt told his layout men that he was striving for a more artistic effect. “They got colors everywhere,” he said, “and it looks cheap. There is nothing subtle about it at all. It’s just poster-like. A lot of people think that’s what a cartoon should have. I think we are trying to achieve something different here. We are not going after the comic supplement coloring. We have to strive for a certain depth and realism.” The color of the shorts, he instructed, would “begin to wear you out,” were they to be used in a feature. Rather he needed a more muted palette, more earth tones, and some darker sequences where one could rest one’s eyes. He even thought the application of the color had to be different in Snow White than in the shorts; where the colors in the shorts were typically bold and unsculptured, requiring that the paint girls simply fill in the outlines, Snow White had a soft, modeled, chiaroscuro effect that broke sharply with animation tradition and required more care. It was painterly.
To achieve the “depth and realism” he wanted, Walt also relied on his layout men to provide rich, detailed backgrounds: “For Snow White,…they had draftsmen working with the different storymen, and each gag man had his draftsman who did a beautiful, detailed drawing of the simplest gag,” artist Carl Barks told an interviewer. “If it was nothing more than Dopey wriggling his nose, there was a $2,000 painting.” The man chiefly responsible for conceptualizing these paintings, if not actually putting the brush to the canvas, was the longtime studio sketch artist Albert Hurter, who had drawn the initial sketches of the little pigs that Fred Moore rounded into the final characters. Even among the eccentrics at Hyperion, the Swiss-born Hurter, one of the oldest employees at just over fifty, was known for his peculiarities. “He’d just sit all day and scribble,” recalled Eric Larson. “He didn’t want to be involved in detailed layouts or the detailed this or that, but he wanted to be an inspiration.” By one account, Hurter produced fifty to one hundred sketches each day—everything from Snow White herself to the dwarfs’ cottage to the furniture inside the cottage to the forest. Obsessed with his drawings and lashed to his board, he arrived at the studio punctually at eight o’clock each morning, drew frantically and chain-smoked cigars, stayed until exactly five o’clock each afternoon, and never socialized with the staff or apparently had much of a life beyond his work, though some believed it was because he suffered from severe heart disease and felt he had to conserve his energy. On weekend excursions Larson and his wife occasionally ran into Hurter driving furiously across the desert, seemingly headed nowhere.
But Walt valued him and early on entrusted him with designing virtually everything in the film, even having him provide preliminary sketches of the characters. “I remember quite clearly [Walt] looking at some old things [Hurter had drawn],” Eric Larson said, “and he’d just go hog wild and give Albert a lot more things for Albert to work out.” That made Hurter the closest thing to a visual mastermind on Snow White—the one who devised the overall Germanic look of the film by incorporating European illustration and painting techniques into the animation. In effect, he served as set designer, set decorator and costumer, and though Dave Hand as supervising director gave the head of the layout department, Sam Armstrong, nominal authority on “all prop coloring, background, figures, etc.,” Hurter had specific authority to approve the style and the characters from scene to scene and make sure they were consistent. As Hand put it when Walt objected to some rocks in a background that Hurter had not okayed, “Albert knows the character of the picture better than anyone.”
But if Hurter was the mastermind, he was nevertheless part of a team that was dedicated to Walt’s vision of a more sophisticated visual field. Another European-born artist, Hungarian Ferdinand Horvath, provided preliminary drawings, and by the time animation was under way in 1936, Hurter and Horvath had been joined by the highly regarded Swedish-born illustrator Gustaf Tenggren, who helped conceptualize Snow White’s flight in the forest and the dwarfs’ pursuit of the peddler woman. Because these artists’ renderings were so much more detailed than the backgrounds of the shorts, the studio had to introduce a new size of animation paper—from 9½ by 12 inches to 12½ by 12 inches—to accommodate them, and because they were so much more painterly the studio created a new texture by wetting the paper, squeezing off the excess moisture, and then applying watercolor with washes.
Yet however much the muted palette and detailed layouts contributed to realism and however much they suggested depth, when Walt spoke of the latter he was not only being figurative. He meant “depth” literally as well—another means of shaping a more fully realized environment, for a man who was always seeking to shape his environment to his own specifications. He was also thinking of the audience, which was accustomed to depth from live-action films.* “He was afraid eighty minutes of flat, one-dimensional animation would prove too hard for the public to take,” his daughter Diane would write, reiterating Walt’s argument about the need for subtler colors. Audiences needed more visual variety in a feature than they got in animated shorts.
The problem with traditional animation was that it was virtually impossible to replicate the changing perspectives of real life without constantly changing the size of the backgrounds in relation to the animated figures—a task that was prohibitively expensive. Ken Anderson remembered Walt, in discussions on Snow White as early as 1935, pushing for better ways to create the illusion of depth, and that year he had Anderson draw both the figures and the backgrounds in a scene for a Silly Symphony titled Three Orphan Kittens, apparently just so Walt could see what a more realistic, ever-changing perspective would look like. Wanting to push further for Snow White, Walt assigned Anderson to work with special effects animator Cy Young, lighting expert Hal Halvenston, and engineer Bill Garity to create actual layers of action for a test of the peddler woman in the forest—layers that would convey actual depth and perspective that a single cel set onto a background could not convey. As Anderson recalled it, they modeled trees from clay in the foreground and then drew three planes of animated trees receding into the frame, which they placed on large glass plates. The trees, the plates, and the camera were then mounted on sawhorses as the crew experimented with distances. Walt was pleased with the result and ordered another test—this time of the dwarfs’ cottage and Snow White. The real showcase, however, came when Walt, in a ruling reminiscent of the switch of Flowers and Trees from black-and-white to color, decided early in 1937 to transform a Silly Symphony then in production called The Old Mill from a traditio
nal two-dimensional, celon-background short into one deploying planes of action like the tests.
It was difficult enough to photograph a cel on a background with a static camera. Photographing several planes of cels—from foreground to middle ground to background—while a camera seemed to move through them may have been the most imposing feat of animation to date. Also seeking to simulate three-dimensionality, Ub Iwerks had already built a “multiplane” camera at his own studio out of old Chevrolet parts, but it was so technically daunting to use that he deployed it infrequently. Walt was not so easily dissuaded. For The Old Mill, which was essentially a tone poem about animals nesting in an abandoned mill as a storm approaches, he had his machine shop construct its own multiplane camera. It was a huge, heavy, vertical box-shaped contraption, standing nearly twelve feet tall on four metal stanchions with one level at the top for the camera and four levels or shelves below for four layers of animation, and it required at least four men to operate it—though depending on the difficulty of the shot, there could be as many as eight men clambering around on it, each cranking his level one-hundredth of an inch forward to simulate a dolly or left and right to simulate a pan. Because each level had to be separately lit—by eight five-hundred-watt bulbs—and because the multiplane was necessarily situated in a closed dark room, the heat was unbearable. Moreover, since the staff had no experience with the camera, shooting on The Old Mill was painfully slow—more painful to Walt because he wanted to see results as soon as possible so that he could use the camera for Snow White, which was already deep into animation.
Still, Walt revered his multiplane, regarding it as the ultimate toy—both a key to his much-desired realism and a monument to his own success. “It was always my ambition to own a swell camera,” he joked to Time the week Snow White opened, “and now, goddammit, I got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operate it, and remembering how I used to have to make ’em out of baling wire.” Of course, it was what the multiplane did that made it so impressive. As the camera seemed to move through the layers or panned across them, animation gained for the first time a sense of real perspective and a three-dimensionality so astonishing that Thomas and Johnston said of the basically plotless The Old Mill that it demonstrated that “an audience could be swept up by sheer subtlety and become deeply involved in an animated film.” Eric Larson gushed over the cartoon—the way the multiplane combined with the effects “to give you the beauty of the wind,” or the way the raindrops “had not the hard outline feeling to them, but the real feeling of the rain,” or the way the clouds were “soft and moving and…in their density went from real heavy clouds to light clouds to blue sky in such a subtle way.” One observer fretted that the multiplane might prove too powerful, too much an end in itself. “Even in the eyes of the Studio,” he wrote, “it is considered an instrument so loaded with artistic dynamite that, if not properly handled, it may blast the animated sound picture completely off its course.”
But that was not Walt Disney’s concern. For him, the multiplane was blasting Snow White further along its course, beyond animation to where it could challenge and even surpass live-action films. For him, the multiplane brought Snow White closer to realism and closer to his own fully realized world.
VI
It had become an incessant refrain: time was running out. In the late winter of 1936 Walt and Roy had closed a new distribution deal with RKO, a much larger operation than United Artists and one with more clout in the marketplace, which was what the Disneys needed. “[T]he big studios that have their own cartoons practically give away their cartoons with their feature pictures,” Roy wrote his parents shortly after signing with RKO. “We, all of the time, have to stand on our own feet without any tie-in with any other product.” Walt had been dissatisfied with UA for some time, complaining that the distributor was taking too big a share of the foreign receipts and insisting that while “competitive cartoons are falling by the wayside fast,” Disney cartoons were “steadily increasing in audience value.” When Roy importuned Walt to give UA a chance, Walt wrote back disgustedly, “If you would resign from U.A. and come over and work for Disney for a while, we might be able to make some headway…. In repentance, I suggest that you give them the plant, our trademarks, patents and copyrights, and work for them on a salary—or if perhaps they are not satisfied with this, I can go and get a job with Mintz and you can sell vacuum cleaners, again.” In the end, with the blessings of the united artists themselves—Chaplin wrote Lessing that “I don’t want to make any money on Walt, and anything I can ever do for him I will gladly perform”—the Disneys departed. One of the stated reasons for severing ties with UA was that it had wanted to retain television rights, and Walt, who had taken an early and avid interest in television, refused to grant them. A more likely reason, though, was that Walt and finally Roy too wanted the power of RKO behind Snow White, and RKO’s chairman, M. H. Aylesworth, in announcing the compact with Disney, said, “[P]ersonally I have seen enough of his first feature length cartoon, ‘Snow White,’ to realize that it will rate as one of the most unusual features ever turned out in the field of animated cartoons.”
Of course Aylesworth couldn’t have seen much of Snow White at that point because there was very little to show. But Walt was eager to please his new distributor, which was apparently one of the reasons he embarked on The Old Mill—to make a big splash. In contracting to provide six Silly Symphonies and twelve Mickey Mouses (these included Donald Duck cartoons as well) for the coming year, after he had fulfilled his UA obligations, Walt intended “to make at least half of the Symphonies of the very beautiful, charming type, with musical, fantasy stuff,” and urged RKO to sell them as a block, which “enables us to put in subjects about which we may feel inspired” rather than just slapstick comedies. But if Walt was determined to impress RKO, RKO was determined to get Snow White, and Walt had committed himself to presenting a print in November 1937 for a Christmas release. Now he was under tremendous pressure to deliver.
After what had amounted to years of deliberation and procrastination, he had reached the winter of 1937 with virtually the entire film left to animate and less than ten months to do so. Indeed, though the animation had begun in 1936, the first cels weren’t sent to ink and paint until January 4, 1937, and didn’t reach the camera department until March 13. “Many felt that to have the finished picture ready for showing by Christmas 1937 was impossible,” Dave Hand later confessed, “but we responsible ones never wavered.” Walt spent the spring either sweatboxing roughs for hours on end, usually whenever an animator had finished enough to show him, even if the entire scene was not complete, or meeting for long stretches with the storymen to refine sequences that had not yet gone to animation, once again line by line, inflection by inflection. The scene in which the dwarfs enter their cottage thinking it is inhabited by ghosts, one of the first discussed and one that had already been subjected to dozens of meetings, was the subject of another twenty meetings from early January to the end of September, many of them at night, and those were only the sessions with Walt in attendance. By July, Walt was in the sweatbox all day long, day after day, examining roughs. There was no detail, not a nod, a wink, an emphasis, or a posture, that wasn’t still being analyzed.
The animators felt “tremendous pressure,” Ollie Johnston said, and tempers began to flare. Dave Hand, the supervising director, reached the point where he couldn’t talk to an animator without screaming. When Les Clark had trouble with a scene and tried to explain his problems, Hand exploded, knocking the drawing board into the air and bellowing, “We gotta get the picture out!” Aware that he was becoming a target of the animators’ wrath, Hand protested, “My criticism is all impersonal and I don’t hesitate to criticize anybody in the Studio excepting Walt.” But tensions ran so high that Hand did criticize Walt. Hand had objected that one prospective scene played too long, and when Walt offered to perform it to prove that it wasn’t too long, Hand secretly started a stopwatch in his pocket, then pulled it out to s
how by how much Walt had exceeded the allotted time. By Hand’s own admission, Walt was “boiling mad” and stalked out of the room.
Trying to avoid these confrontations, Hal Adelquist, who had been named the head assistant director early in February, advised his staff not to take issues to Hand or Walt unless they absolutely had to. “We must avoid taking up the time of men who are making more money and whose time is therefore worth more,” he said. But this created another problem. Employees doubted whether the orders they received had really come from Walt, prompting one department head to ask Walt to give his staff a pep talk. Walt responded by offering to throw them a dinner as a way both of asserting his authority and of lessening tensions, since a dinner “might put them in a more receptive mood and make the evening more beneficial to them.” It wasn’t the only time Walt had to boost flagging spirits. Many of the animators were now despairing of ever completing the project satisfactorily, and Walt complained that once scenes were finished and ready for cleanup, the animators seemed to lose the initiative in assuring that everything was ready for the camera. “This picture is a tremendous thing,” Adelquist told the assistant directors, delivering instructions from Walt. “You think you will never be finished. There seems to be twice as much work on your desk at night when you leave, but if you will just keep plugging and checking I am sure you will find that things will work out all right.”
Once again, needing more in-betweeners to rush the animation through, the studio was calling for trainees, taking out ads in magazines or recruiting at art schools—George Drake went to Chouinard himself to enlist artists—and running the prospects through an expedited program, all the while reinforcing how important their mission was in getting out Snow White. But with all the emphasis on speed, there was always the contradictory message of quality. At one class that June, Bill Tytla, indoctrinating the students in the Disney method, told them, “The work now being planned and the work they will continue to do here will call for men who can draw to beat hell, not just in the conventional sense, but men who have absolute control over what they are trying to do. The men who are surviving realize this.” And he continued, “Today we are really on the verge of something that is new. It will take a lot of real drawing, not clever, slick, superficial fine-looking stuff but real solid, fine drawing to achieve these results.”