by Neal Gabler
But if Walt was using The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to express his own concerns, he had another, more prosaic incentive for making the short: his dedication to one of his most stalwart supporters. Actress Helen Hayes recalled visiting the studio in 1937 and Walt showing her a new Mickey Mouse cartoon. “Of course you know Donald is the big thing now,” Walt told her, “but it won’t last. Mickey is forever. He’ll have his moments in the shade, but he’ll always come out in the bright lights again.” In truth, if anything the shade had grown even darker for Mickey Mouse. The early Mickey Mouse had been, as John Updike described him, “America as it feels to itself—plucky, put-upon, inventive, resilient, good-natured, game.” But as he had become increasingly domesticated, he had also become increasingly a cipher. “Our dilemma became one of trying to find new, logical material for Mickey, more sophisticated material, if you will,” Ward Kimball reflected. “As we got more personality and character into the other cartoons, it became more and more difficult to cope with Mickey…. Mickey was really an abstraction. He wasn’t based on anything that was remotely real.” Animator Friz Freleng agreed: “Mickey Mouse was a nothing, really. After the novelty of animation was over, there was nothing left but a black-and-white drawing moving around. You really don’t associate yourself with that character at all.” Directors and animators began referring to him as a “Boy Scout” in reference to his lack of spikiness—his blandness.
Walt was not willing to surrender Mickey so easily. He asked Jack Kinney to develop Mickey narratively into something more than a supporting player to Donald Duck, and he charged Fred Moore and Ward Kimball (by one account Moore acted on his own initiative) with redesigning Mickey to make him look more appealing, which was Moore’s stock in trade. As Thomas and Johnston reported it, Walt watched footage of Moore’s newly redesigned Mickey in the sweatbox, demanding that it be run repeatedly until he finally paused, turned to Moore, and said, “Now that’s the way I want Mickey to be drawn from now on!” Moore had made Mickey softer. Where the mouse had previously been constructed as a series of circles, which made him easy to draw, Moore now suggested that the “body is to be drawn as somewhat pear shape, fairly short and plump” so that Mickey had more curve and less rigidity.* He also further enlarged the head and shrank the body. “Mickey is cuter when drawn with small shoulders with a suggestion of stomach and fanny and I like him pigeon-toed,” he told an action analysis class.
Mickey gained mass and weight—“counter movements, counter thrusts,” in Kimball’s words. His cheeks began to move with his mouth, and Kimball himself converted Mickey’s eyes from large, inexpressive black pupils to ovals surrounding pupils. All of these changes made Mickey even more childlike and less rodentlike, which had always been the direction of his evolution anyway. Though children’s heads obviously become smaller in relation to their bodies as they grow, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould observed that Mickey had “traveled this ontogenetic pathway in reverse”: the animators infantilized his appearance by enlarging his head, lowering his pants line, and covering his legs to shorten them, thickening his snout and moving his ears back on his head to make the forehead larger and more rounded.
This new Mickey was indisputably cuter, as Moore had said, than the old Mickey, and cute seemed to be the order of the day. “I think people think of Mickey as a cute character,” Walt would tell a story meeting after the redesign. “[H]e is a cute character—and he should be more likable in everything he does.” But in making him cuter and more of a child, the animators had removed the last remnants of his rude energy—“his vitality, his alertness, his bug-eyed cartoon readiness for adventure,” in Updike’s words. The old Chaplinesque devilry was completely expunged. (In truth, Chaplin had lost most of his devilry too.) If he became more expressive, he had less to be expressive about. As Updike wrote, referring specifically to Mickey’s new eyes but equally applicable to the entire redesign, “It made him less abstract, less iconic, more merely cute and dwarfish.”
Though he had approved the redesign, Walt understood that it had not solved the Mickey problem. (Years later he would say of Mickey’s demise, “We got tired & we had new characters to play with.”) Mickey needed something more to survive. He needed a vehicle. Ben Sharpsteen denied that Walt had decided to make The Sorcerer’s Apprentice because he thought it was a way to rehabilitate Mickey, saying that Dopey had been considered initially. Still, apparently very early in the process, storyman Chester S. Cobb had been assigned to investigate possibilities for the film and concluded, “It would be difficult to invent an interesting apprentice—a kid wouldn’t be comic enough.” But, Cobb went on, “Mickey or the Goof [referring to a subsidiary character] in a good imaginative atmosphere would have a lot more audience value as the apprentice than any symphony-type character we might invent.” Stokowski wasn’t persuaded. “What would you think of creating an entirely new personality for this film instead of Mickey?” he wrote Walt in November 1937. “A personality which could represent You and Me—in other words, someone that would represent in the mind and heart of everyone seeing the film their own personality, so that they would enter into all the drama and emotional changes of the film in a most intense manner.” It was one of the few times Walt disregarded a Stokowski suggestion. Walt did think of Mickey Mouse as “you and me,” and in a last-ditch rescue mission, he had decided that the sorcerer’s apprentice would be his alter ego.
Whatever appeal The Sorcerer’s Apprentice held for him, Walt, usually so painstakingly deliberate, moved with uncharacteristic haste, most likely because he needed something to advance. In July 1937 he had secured the rights to the music, and by late August storyman Otto Englander had submitted an outline, with Walt insisting that “we should try to follow out the idea of the music as much as possible and not change it any more than necessary.” Once Stokowski had entered the picture, Walt was especially energized—“all steamed up,” as he put it in a letter to Gregory Dickson, an RKO publicity executive who had happened to meet Stokowski on a train and discussed the project with him. “We would all like, very much, to have the opportunity of working with him on this picture and, if possible, to get started on it immediately,” Walt continued, offering to put “the finest men in the plant, from color men down to animators, on THE SORCERER.” He closed, “I am greatly enthused over the idea and believe that the union of Stokowski and his music, together with the best of our medium, would be the means of a great success and should lead to a new style of motion picture presentation.” He asked Dickson again to see if he could convince Stokowski to begin work on the film as soon as possible. The next week Stokowski wrote Walt, equally excited—“you have no more enthusiastic admirer in the world than I am”—and saying he would be making a preliminary recording of the score in a few days.
While Stokowski made his recordings in Philadelphia, where he led the Philadelphia Orchestra, Walt hurried the story crew through a treatment and began soliciting suggestions from the staff, though he advised them to “avoid slapstick gags.” “I have never been more enthused over anything in my life,” Walt wrote Stokowski in mid-November, informing him that “while anxiously awaiting your arrival[,] to get the wheels of production turning we are preparing a story which we hope will meet with your approval.” Stokowski arrived in Los Angeles on January 2, 1938, with great fanfare—Walt was not above suggesting that Dickson exploit Stokowski’s recent divorce and reputed romance with actress Greta Garbo for publicity—to approve the story and record the final score. The Hyperion soundstage was too small for the eighty-five musicians whom Stokowski had personally selected, so Walt rented the Selznick studio, and at midnight on Sunday, January 9, Stokowski conducted Dukas’s score. (He chose nighttime, he said, because the musicians had to drink coffee to stay awake, which he felt made them more alert.) The conductor was so galvanic that the entire session—recorded, at Stokowski’s insistence, on six separate tracks—lasted only three hours. As one observer recalled, when it was over, Stokowski stepped down from the podium
drenched in perspiration. It took two bath towels to dry him.
But the collaboration only began there. Stokowski had arrived in Los Angeles armed with what one associate would later call a “sizable portion of his repertory,” and he was apparently lobbying Walt to go beyond Apprentice. Within weeks of the recording session, no doubt as a result of discussions that Walt and Stokowski held through the end of January, Walt came to a decision: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice would now be just one segment of a feature that would set animation to classical music, just as Stokowski had allegedly described his vision to Walt at Chasen’s. Again Walt moved quickly, perhaps fearing that Stokowski’s passion might ebb. By February the studio had canceled Stokowski’s Apprentice contract, which called for 10 percent of the gross, and drafted a new contract paying him $125,000 to conduct the score for and appear in the new Concert Feature.
Exactly why Walt had moved so rapidly on a new feature when he already had Bambi and Pinocchio in production and was doing preliminary work on Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland may not have been readily apparent to those at the studio. Sharpsteen would say that it was a matter of economic expediency. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was simply too long and too expensive to be either theatrically or financially viable as a short, and Stokowski’s compilation feature gave him a way out. Sharpsteen may have been right that economics were a consideration—Walt said that he needed to make another challenging feature or his animators might get bored and restless and decide to leave—but it hardly seemed the major one. Walt had always wanted to do more poetic, musically inclined shorts, and throughout 1935, 1936, and 1937 he kept returning to an idea for a Silly Symphony he called Flower Ballet, for which he explicitly argued against a tight story in favor of something tonal. Even with Snow White in high gear, Walt couldn’t seem to let it go.
His growing animus toward conventional narrative and his predilection for this kind of animation was another example of Walt’s ongoing need for a challenge, his need to make sure that he wasn’t stagnating and was still the very best, his need to enlarge his creative world and fend off incursions from pretenders to his throne. “I can’t get into a rut or let my boys get into ruts,” he would tell a reporter. “If we quit growing mentally and artistically we will begin to die.” During the preparation for The Concert Feature Walt would sound this idea again and again, just as he had throughout his career: They need to grow. They need to outdo themselves. They need to keep “plussing.” Asked by one storyman if Walt felt they were taking full advantage of the cartoon medium, he riposted, “This is not the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here…. We’ve got more in this medium than making people laugh.” The gags that had been so integral to his shorts, the gags around which the entire studio had once seemed to orbit, now infuriated him. “[I]t’s a continual fight around this place to get away from slapping somebody on the fanny or having somebody swallow something,” he complained to his staff. “It’s going to take time to get ourselves up to the point where we can really get some humor in our stuff, rather than just belly laughs; and get beauty in it, rather than just a flashy postcard.” Another time, speaking of The Concert Feature, he exhorted, “[W]e’re not making an ordinary cartoon and I feel that we’ve got the wrong slant on this stuff,” then bluntly added what would have been heresy even a few years earlier: “I don’t believe in this gag stuff.”
He was aspiring to something much higher than gags—much higher even than the sentimental fantasy of Snow White and Pinocchio or the realism of Bambi. In extending his hand to Walt, Stokowski, who carefully cultivated the romantic image of a long-haired artiste for popular consumption, was trying to forge a union between the classical and the mass as a way of popularizing not only classical music but also, and not incidentally, himself. Walt was working for the same union, only from the other side. This time he was explicitly bidding to join forces with high art and pry the cartoon from its origins in popular culture, where he felt it was doomed to be crude and juvenile. Walt would have never called himself an artist—he was too skeptical of culture and too plainspoken for that—but he did want to make art, if only because that was the natural evolution for him, and The Concert Feature was, he thought, certifiably art. “[T]hey’re worried about the highbrow angle,” Walt groused at a story meeting after having lunch with RKO counsel Neil Spitz. “The only thing I’m worried about is that it might be a little too low-brow…. If you put Dopey in it they would say swell.”
Like Stokowski, Walt seemed to take pride in serving as the conduit between the classical composers and his unaffected American audience. Classical music, he thought, had been made to seem rarefied and inaccessible. In The Concert Feature he and Stokowski would demystify the music by visualizing it. “I wouldn’t worry a damn bit about the stiff shirts that are supposed to be the ones that this music is created for,” Walt told his storymen at one session, recalling a recent visit to the opera. “There’s a great mass of people who would appreciate this music if they didn’t have to sit through stuff like that—like the opera. They want excitement.” At another meeting, discussing his reasons for doing The Concert Feature, he cited Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” one of the pieces he was considering. “There are things in that music that the general public will not understand until they see the things on the screen representing that music,” he said, taking the view that the music had a visual analogue. “Then they will feel the depth in the music. Our object is to reach the very people who have walked out on this ‘Toccata and Fugue’ because they didn’t understand it. I am one of those people; but when I understand it, I like it.”
For Walt it was, once again, a mission much more than a commercial venture, and he would not allow it to be compromised by commercial considerations. When Roy asked during a discussion of possible scores why they couldn’t select some music that “just the ordinary guy like me can like,” Walt flashed him an icy stare and ordered him out of the room, telling him, “Go back down and keep the books.” The importance of the piece was educating the audience and expanding the medium. “Even if the thing’s a flop,” he told his staff, “we’ll have gained a thorough appreciation of what can be done with music.”
But as enthused as he was over The Concert Feature—and it seemed to reenergize him after the enervating difficulties on Bambi and Pinocchio—he was proceeding cautiously again once The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was recorded and Stokowski had left the studio to resume his duties with the orchestra. “I am up to my neck in PINOCCHIO,” Walt wrote the music critic Deems Taylor, whom he was consulting on the new project, “and with BAMBI just getting started and the new studio under way, I do not believe I am going to have much time to devote to the musical feature that I discussed with you while in New York.”
Indeed, no sooner had Walt returned from his trip east to receive his honorary degrees than he plunged back into the stalled features, though if he remained the governing spirit, reviewing the scripts and approving the roughs, he was no longer the presiding spirit. That October, with Hyperion unable to accommodate physically all the production staffs working simultaneously, the Bambi crew had been shuffled first across the street and then to a rented warren of tiny rooms in a building on Seward Street in Hollywood where Harman-Ising had had their offices. (It was, Marc Davis remembered, enjoying the incongruity, across the street from a pornographic film studio.) According to Thomas and Johnston, the staff was initially resentful at being furloughed; it removed them from the excitement of the studio. But in time they realized they had an advantage in not being at Hyperion: no one would be bothering them. Marc Davis guessed Walt appeared there maybe only three, four, or five times. Instead, pipe-sucking Perce Pearce conducted the story sessions and guided the production, very much in the spirit of Walt, acting out scenes and elaborating the continuity with his story crew. Significantly, Walt did not attend any of these sessions.
For a studio now in desperate need of a new feature, progress was agonizingly incremental. Fra
nk Churchill, who had written the music for Snow White, had been signed to compose the score for Bambi, though he was a melancholic and unreliable alcoholic, and storyman Larry Morey was, as Gunther Lessing put it, “riding herd on him.” The studio was also importing animals for the animators to study, while sending other animators to reserves to observe deer. At the same time a young Chinese-born artist named Ty Wong, who had been hired as an in-betweener on Pinocchio, had on his own initiative submitted drawings for Bambi that, with Walt’s approval, soon became the basis for the style of the film, just as Albert Hurter’s inspirational drawings had set the style for Snow White. Suggestive rather than highly realistic, Wong’s design provided a visual breakthrough for the artists.