by Neal Gabler
He took the same approach to “The Nutcracker Suite.” He was looking for something that felt as if it had been dreamed. “It’s like something you see with your eyes half-closed,” he told his staff, waxing poetic. “You almost imagine them. The leaves begin to look like they’re dancing, and the blossoms floating on the water begin to look like ballet girls in skirts.” Sometimes at the story meetings he would play the music and just have the staff listen so they could discover what impressions it evoked in them. He always wanted more imagination. His fear was never that the animation would be too artful or esoteric for his audience. His fear was that he was determined to do so much in Fantasia he would overwhelm them. “[T]here’s a theory I go on that an audience is always thrilled with something new,” he said at a story meeting, “but fire too many new things at them and they become restless.” At another meeting he advised that “things must be big, impressive but simple. Not too much stuff in there.”
Because Walt could do whatever he pleased without having to worry about a narrative or realistically representative drawings, Fantasia seemed to sail along that spring and summer of 1939 without any of the hurdles that he had encountered on Bambi and Pinocchio—except for one section. When Walt had jettisoned “Cydalise” for Beethoven’s “Pastorale,” he was fitting a preconception to the music. He had envisioned a section inspired by Greek mythology featuring the gods on Mount Olympus and the mythological creatures at the foot of the mountain—those centaurs and fauns. “We don’t get too serious because I don’t feel anything really serious,” he told his storymen that August as they were beginning to flesh out the segment; but he warned that “we’re not going to be slapstick; there is a certain refinement in the whole thing.” Walt was so eager to proceed that he promised to put the entire studio to work on the sequence.
Up to this point Stokowski, who attended many of the story meetings early that spring and late that summer, had been generally supportive of Walt’s ideas, even encouraging him to ignore the anticipated criticisms by classical music aficionados. But when it came to the “Pastorale,” Stokowski drew a line. “I don’t want to come out of my own field—I’m only a musician,” Stokowski said disingenuously at a story meeting that July, “but I think what you have there, the idea of great [sic] mythology, is not quite my idea of what this symphony is about. This is a nature symphony—it’s called Pastoral [sic].” He repeated his objection a few weeks later when it was suggested that the nature forms be eliminated altogether. “If you are going to leave out the trees and nature forms,” he said, “you’re going to leave out what it is.” When Walt seemed to brush aside his complaints, Stokowski, saying that he wanted to be “loyal to you and the picture,” nevertheless forcefully explained that Beethoven was “worshipped” and that if they strayed too far from his intent, they would be asking for trouble from offended music enthusiasts.
On this point Walt held his ground with Stokowski. He didn’t want to put nature up on the screen, he rebutted, because he thought it would be too conventional to have bucolic scenes. “I defy anybody to go out and shoot centaurs or gods making a storm,” he said. “That’s our medium, and that’s how I feel about this.” He thereby expressed, intentionally or not, that the real theme of the film was power—his power. And he insisted that in any case the liberties he was taking were slight. Instead of being about the woods outside Vienna, as Beethoven had intended, the sequence would be about the Elysian Fields, and instead of country dancing it would have Bacchus. “He brings all the centaurs and centaurettes to his gay party, and they are having a gay time.” And he made a pronouncement that critics would later use to lacerate him for his alleged philistinism and sense of cultural imperialism: “I think this thing will make Beethoven.”
Even as Walt was finalizing Fantasia, he still had Bambi to resolve. That spring he had begun pressing the crew to accelerate production. He expected them to have the death of Bambi’s mother animated in rough by May, and the entire film finished by August. The problem was that the crew on Seward Street, largely left to their own devices while Walt worked on Pinocchio and Fantasia, had yet to determine how they were going to proceed. After nearly a year and a half of Walt’s telling them to ruminate on the characters before animating them, he was now directing them to begin animating sections as soon as possible, review them in the Leica reels, and then revise them. Only then would they bring on the key animators, the “best animal animators we have in the studio,” as Perce Pearce put it, to set the characters in motion. As Pearce described the process at a story meeting that April, the Leica reels gave them an opportunity to experiment and discard what didn’t work. “There is no formula for any of it,” he said, essentially admitting that they hadn’t licked the project. “It’s only trial and error.”
By late August, Walt, who said he didn’t want to sit in on long story meetings, had reviewed the first four Leica reels, and he wasn’t happy. Some of the action was too slow, there was too little tension in a scene when Man enters the forest, and the voices were inadequate. Still, he instructed the crew to begin animating in the hope that the characters would thereby be solidified. “[W]e’ve found that out in Pinocchio,” he told the staff, in a reversal of the method on Snow White and of what he had been telling the Bambi crew, “that you don’t find your character until you begin to do a little animation on them.” But the question of how to animate lingered. Did you assign an animator to a character throughout the film, as they had done on Pinocchio, or did you assign him to a single scene in which he would draw all the characters? Did you divide the film into sequences with their own story crews and animation crews, or did you have a single story crew and animation crew working on the whole film?
The answers came during a daylong meeting in the sweatbox on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland—an event that seemed to have no effect on the studio. Walt, acting on a suggestion from Milt Kahl, who protested that he had grown stale animating only Pinocchio, decided to break the logjam by assigning Kahl, Fred Moore, and Frank Thomas to the project as a team because “they have a very analytical mind,” even though Kahl and Thomas were still preoccupied with Pinocchio and wouldn’t be available for another two months. A week later Larson had replaced Moore, but the idea still held that instead of parceling out the animation to individuals, as Walt had done on Snow White and Pinocchio and as he was doing on Fantasia, these three animators, acting together, would control the entire animation of the film—conceptualizing the characters, blocking the action, and then supervising the additional animators needed to finish the project. Again reversing course, he advised that they begin as they had on Snow White by concentrating on a single scene, the scene in which Bambi learns to walk, then master it as a guide for the animators to come.
It was a longer process—just letting the animators draw and animate until they got the feel of the characters—but Walt had already conceded that Bambi wasn’t going to be ready anytime soon and that Fantasia would be released after Pinocchio and that he would then release what he called “feature shorts,” which would be three long cartoons packaged as a feature, and then another feature, and then, “maybe,” he said, Bambi. “There would be a disaster here if we started rushing everybody on this picture,” he told the staff. When Kahl asked Walt when he anticipated that actual production would start, Walt replied that it would start whenever Kahl and his team felt they were ready to start. He was through pushing them. “It’s wise to move easy,” he said, citing his experience on Pinocchio, “and everybody get a chance to feel what they’re doing.”
The animators used some of the time to study deer. In Snow White, Eric Larson commented, the deer had been “sacks of wheat” because the staff hadn’t yet acquired the technique to draw them properly. For Bambi the animators spent three or four months just concentrating on drawing deer. Walt had collected thousands of feet of film of deer, borrowing some from other studios and hiring a photographer of his own, Maurice Day, to go to Maine to shoot studies, including one of a fa
wn being born—“quite an assortment of deer stuff,” as Walt put it. To provide even more guidance, Day eventually sent two does to the studio, where they were kept in a pen outside the animation building, which led to adventures when a rutting buck descended and had to be lassoed by an assistant director, and then when the deer themselves escaped into the hills and the animators were sent to recover them. Meanwhile artist Rico Lebrun conducted classes in the late afternoon to analyze deer anatomy. He had gotten a fresh carcass from a forest ranger, and at each session he would remove another layer of the skin or muscle until he finally reached the bone—by which time Eric Larson was the only one of the staff who could tolerate the stench, so Larson made drawings and distributed them. “[H]e just drilled us and drilled us to understand what the anatomy was, what the bone structure was…what happened when a leg lifted, what happened when the body weight went on that leg,” Larson said of Lebrun’s classes.
For most of this time Walt paid scant attention to Bambi. But Perce Pearce, the nominal supervisor, obviously taking his cues from Walt, moved so slowly and fixated on such small details that he was beginning to frustrate the staff, and Walt assigned Dave Hand, who had coordinated Snow White, to oversee Pearce. Hand was correct when he later said that some major decisions were made without Walt’s input. It was Ham Luske, for example, who suggested at a meeting that September that they centralize one of the bunnies to act as a kind of guide, just as Jiminy Cricket had done in Pinocchio. That gave Bambi’s friend Thumper a much enlarged role and changed Bambi’s introduction to the forest. As Thomas and Johnston later described it, “[N]ow the first part of the picture began to be about wonderful children who happened to be animals, innocent and unaware of the realities of their futures.”
But contrary to Hand, Walt did spend a considerable amount of time that November and December reviewing continuities, and if he did not participate as actively as he had on Snow White or Pinocchio, he was nevertheless the primary sensibility who could devise an entire sequence in a sudden burst of inspiration. In the middle of one meeting Walt abruptly interjected what he called “just the flash that came to my mind here” and started describing a new opening for the film: “Say we open up with morning in the forest. Everything is getting up. And then you come to the old Owl and he’s going to sleep. And then we introduce the Squirrel and the Chipmunk. We introduce all the characters we want to in that morning.” And then “this noise breaks loose that it’s here—it’s happened—where they begin flying around, and the whole damned woods begins to fuss and swarm” with the birth of Bambi. The final version was very much as Walt described it at the meeting. A few weeks later, musing on the winter sequence, he came up with the idea of Bambi on the ice pond. “He has never been on ice before. It is like putting Pluto on ice with skates on him. He just can’t stand up. He is having a hell of a time.” This scene too wound up in the final film.
IV
That December as he was tinkering with Bambi, Walt Disney had yet one more imposing task before him: he was supervising the move from Hyperion to the new studio in Burbank. All the time that he was working on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, through the dozens upon dozens of meetings and sweatbox sessions, he had also been engaged in the planning and construction at Burbank, typically consulting with the engineers and architects three times a week and advancing the project in a trial-and-error manner not unlike that on Bambi. “All was nebulous then,” Frank Crowhurst, the general contractor, said of the various ideas they considered. “We hoped it would work.” They had broken ground on the Animation Building in late February 1939, with the intention of finishing everything but the Administration Building by October. Once again time was of the essence. With so many films in production, the studio couldn’t afford a protracted transition. “It is going to save the studio a lot of money if we can get all these buildings built and ready for occupancy as soon as possible and close to the same time, and causing as little loss of time or confusion as possible in the move over,” Roy wrote Crowhurst and Bill Garity, who was taking care of the technical details, with the idea that if they kept most of the work in house, they could expedite construction.
If time was of the essence, so was money. Even before the groundbreaking, Roy was debating whether, to cut costs, they could put the administrative offices in the Animation Building or whether to eliminate a wing of the Animation Building or whether they really needed a large soundstage and theater.* They also discussed whether they should keep the training program at Seward Street, where it had been temporarily installed, because space at the new studio would be at a premium and they wouldn’t have the resources to build anything new for years. In the end they cut surprisingly few corners, despite the fact that, with the production delays, money was no longer flowing into the studio as it had after Snow White. Instead Roy, at the urging of Joe Rosenberg and with the intervention of the Bank of America’s Doc Giannini, applied to the government for a Reconstruction Finance Loan in June 1939 and traveled to Washington later that month to press his case personally. “Any questions and discussions all seemed to be pointing to their trying to find reasons and excuses for presentation to the board of a recommendation that the loan be made,” Roy wrote George Morris after his meeting.
While Roy raised the money, Walt seemed to be relishing the construction as much as he had relished the planning. He visited the site often, sometimes taking Diane and Sharon, who loved to stand in the cavernous empty rooms and yell. (Walt cited his admonishments to them to a Bambi story crew to suggest behavior for the Owl.) He also brought his father there, hoping to jar him out of the depression into which he had sunk since Flora’s death. “I thought he would be excited by this big thing,” Walt later said, perhaps tipping his hand that the new studio was another demonstration of his success and power to a father who had so often denied him. But Elias was unimpressed. “What else is it good for?” he asked, prompting Walt to tell him that the entire facility could be converted into a hospital if the studio failed.
When it opened in December, three months late, it was as much a fulfillment as Fantasia promised to be. Now Walt had his physical utopia. Saying that he eschewed aesthetic niceties, he claimed he had designed it primarily for function. “Give me the plans, functions, intelligently laid out,” he had ordered Crowhurst, “then I don’t care what you do after that so long as you do not destroy those functions.” But for Walt function was generously defined, which meant that aesthetics were very much taken into consideration. He wanted there to be a sense of comfort, even exhilaration, so that the employees would work from joy rather than obligation. To avoid monotony and provide a change of pace, he directed that the wings and floors be painted different colors, bright bold colors, which was something that designer Kem Weber had never done previously. To alleviate any sense of a somber industrial plant, he approved different shades of brick, incorporating a California palette with desert beige offsetting the red. Hyperion had often been described by reporters as having the ambience of a college campus; Walt determined that the new studio should have the appearance of a campus as well. Nothing soared at the Burbank studio. Everything was built low and horizontal, embracing rather than imposing. The pathways were broad, the lawns green and planted with oaks, the air still and quiet and filled with the fragrance of freshly mown grass. There were even quail, doves, rabbits, and the occasional deer, and one could often see Walt underneath one of the trees watching them. It was Walt’s very own Marceline.
Yet it was imposing in its own way. “[I]t wasn’t until you got to the new Studio on 50 acres of land that you realized what a big plant it was,” Bill Cottrell would say. The estimated cost was just under $2 million, with nearly half of that slotted for the Animation Building, which was, at 152,000 square feet, over three times as large as the Animation Building at Hyperion. Ink and Paint was also three times as large as the sheds at Hyperion, and the soundstage nearly five times as large as those at the old studio. All told, Burbank was four times larger than Hyperion.
> But it wasn’t just a matter of size. Where Hyperion had been attractive but ramshackle, Burbank was clean and efficient, just as the new production process was intended to be. The Animation Building had three floors and eight long wings jutting from a corridor to form two side-by-side H-shapes. The idea was that production would flow smoothly downward from the third floor, where Walt had his office in wing H next to the story department and where the films were initiated; to the second floor, where the directors and layout men divided the feature stories into sequences, devised the staging of the scenes, and eventually screened the roughs in the sweatboxes located there; to the first floor, where some two to three hundred animators were separated into groups under head animators in each wing to do the actual drawings; to the basement, where the test camera was housed and the roughs were shot. Each wing contained a unit—three devoted to features and one to shorts.