by Neal Gabler
The decline in the quality of the shorts, however, was only symptomatic of a general decline in the quality of animation at the studio after the war had enforced its limits. With no features on which to apply the old animation techniques, the animators’ skills had withered. “[G]radually people forgot how things had been done,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would later write. Even Walt’s precious, once-innovative equipment, they said, “was all rusting on the back lot, and newcomers walking around the lot at noon wondered why anyone would keep junk like that around.” Eventually, it was scrapped in favor of newer machinery.
What was worse, the old animators had withered too. Between June 1945 and July 1946 fifty-three of them left the company for various reasons, and the studio continued the process, as one memo put it, “of weeding out marginal talent” and even a “higher standard of people should production reasons require this decision.” Several of the casualties had once been stars of the studio. Fred Moore had been the “Chopin” of animators, according to his onetime assistant, Frank Thomas. He could pour his “pure emotions” onto the paper, and everyone admired the appealing style of his drawings, which had been the standard for the Disney style. In the right mood he would cheerfully draw picture after picture, humming while he worked at his board. But Thomas also noted that Moore was wracked by “dissatisfaction” and “torment.” Ward Kimball said the boyish Moore, who was only thirty-four at war’s end, felt that his star was falling, and he would grouse endlessly about how the studio was “giving him a bad deal.” Always a heavy drinker, his growing discontent led to even longer binges, so much so that Kimball, his assistant, frequently had to finish his drawings.
If Moore thought he was losing favor, he wasn’t wrong. The new, more modern minimalist and seemingly more artistic aesthetic that Walt was pursuing with Dali and that he was encouraging as a way of keeping pace with a change in visual tastes and of regaining his own favor with critics was a long distance from Moore’s aesthetic. The younger, more academically trained animators like Frank Thomas (whom Walt personally welcomed at the studio gate when he returned from service on April 1, 1946), and Woolie Reitherman (whom Walt cornered for hours and convinced to return when Reitherman visited the studio after his service to pick up some belongings) were now the fair-haired boys because they wielded their pencils more nimbly and they were more au courant. Within this new aesthetic where line and technique mattered more than emotion, Moore’s work began, Kimball said, “to look crude.” Whatever it possessed in charm, it lacked in subtlety—or at least that was what the self-proclaimed progressive animators, who had a stake in Moore’s demise, seemed to think. Moore and Norm Ferguson, who had been a star even before Moore, “had not followed what the studio had progressed in,” Eric Larson recalled—a situation that Larson described as “tragic.” Ben Sharpsteen concurred, saying that they “lacked the ability to analyze animation and to grasp the finesse it required,” and Sharpsteen believed that Moore and Ferguson realized that they were falling behind, which was why they were both miserable. Though Ferguson hung on, despite Walt’s increasing dissatisfaction with his work, Moore, hopelessly lost in drink, was fired in August 1946. He had become, in Walt’s term, deadwood.
Moore wasn’t the only one who was losing his way in the postwar period. So was Walt Disney. As his plans met resistance that spring and as the studio faced yet another financial crisis, he had become “psychologically fragile,” in Frank Thomas’s estimation. He had begun to lose his footing and his confidence, and with Roy pressuring him to slash budgets and even to begin another round of layoffs, he had come to a terrible, almost crippling realization, one that seemed to sear him: even if he were to move ahead with his features, they would never be as good as the films he had made before the war—never as beautifully animated, never as deliberately plotted, never as painstakingly fussed over, never as fully the product of a near-religious commitment to greatness. The studio simply did not have the financial resources, the time, the talent, or perhaps most important of all, the sense of spiritual mission that it had previously had. The cult was over. It was even questionable whether the new, leaner, less realistic aesthetic lent itself to the sort of full-bodied dramatic greatness of the early features. And if the films could never be as good as they had been, was there really any point in making them—other than to keep the studio intact and running, just as Walt had been compelled to do during the war? He understood that where he had been an unpretentious artist before the war, then a salesman and goodwill ambassador during it, he was becoming an employer after it, which was why he began to talk now about selling the studio or leaving it. “We’re through with caviar,” he reluctantly conceded. “From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.”
It was bleak. Nineteen hundred and forty-six may have been the unhappiest of a skein of unhappy years at the studio, especially because the motion picture industry, thanks to returning troops and peacetime, was enjoying its best year ever. “Walt was a bear in those worrisome times,” animator and storyman Bill Peet would write, “always in a growling mood and hard to deal with.” And when he wasn’t growling, he was sighing—“prodigious” sighs, according to one employee. He was so uncertain that he increasingly surrendered his own judgment to the judgment of the Audience Research Institute (ARI), which now conducted audience surveys not only of completed movies or their rough animations, as Walt had done under his own auspices to test his own instincts in the mid-1930s, but of the story sessions themselves, so that even before a film proceeded to animation, it had to score with two focus groups—one made up of people recruited off the streets, the other of the creative personnel at the studio. (Walt made it a point never to preview with children because he always insisted that his films were not made for children.) Walt attended nearly all of these sessions, mostly held in the projection room down the hall from his office, and some films were subjected to as many as twenty separate evaluations. Walt, whose taste had once been the only gauge that mattered at the studio, invariably bowed to the audience. Indeed, as far as the shorts were concerned, he had decided that the ARI would be the sole determinant of quality.
While he waited on the features, hoping to advance them, he compromised once again. During the war, when Walt had despaired of making another feature, he had begun planning a series of musical shorts—mainly remnants from the proposed Fantasia sequel—that he was hoping to package in a forty-minute featurette, just to keep his animators limber and just to keep his own hand in real animation. “I had a strong conviction,” Walt would say, “that we needed to change our direction. The cartoon field was flexible enough. It forced me to make either a cartoon short seven or eight minutes long or a feature cartoon seventy to eighty minutes long. And I had a lot of ideas I thought would be good if I could fit them in between those two extremes.” But this was another of Walt’s rationalizations. The truth was that the shorts weren’t profitable, and he couldn’t make a feature. The best he could do was sew together these remainders, now ten of them, swelling the film to feature length. The segments included “Blue Bayou,” which was a reworking of the animation for “Clair de Lune” that he had cut from Fantasia; “Peter and the Wolf,” which Sergei Prokofiev had composed for Disney years earlier; “All the Cats Join In,” with jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman, which Walt had had in preparation since 1940; “Casey at the Bat,” narrated by comedian Jerry Colonna; and “The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met” featuring the voice of opera star Nelson Eddy. The total cost was set at a modest $395,000, though even then one executive wrote Walt that he should meet with the creative team to set the direction “in order to complete the PACKAGE as economically as possible.”
Walt didn’t fool himself about the quality of the film, which at Perce Pearce’s suggestion had been retitled Make Mine Music after being called Swing Street. The characters were far more stylized than the typical Disney figures, and Marc Davis felt that Walt “didn’t feel warmly towards those.” In addition, the lovely but prohibitively expensive blending that had provide
d a chiaroscuro effect in the early features was gone, and so was the round, soft tactile quality that had made those earlier images seem so warm and cute. In their place were a sharper line and a brighter, harder surface. And if Walt didn’t care for these new compilation packages, the animators didn’t care much for them either. “[W]e at the studio there kind of laughingly joked about them as Walt’s remnant sale!” Ben Sharpsteen recalled. The critics were no kinder. Even Bosley Crowther of The New York Times felt disappointment, calling the film an “experience in precipitate ups and downs” and scolding Disney for “adjusting his art to what he considers the lower taste of the mass audience” by using bathetic popular music in the film rather than the classical pieces of Fantasia. Writing in The Nation, James Agee, no fan of Disney now, thought it “tacky” and said the film “sickens” him, though probably not as much as it must have sickened Walt.
Nevertheless, given its cost, Make Mine Music did reasonably well at the box office, which encouraged the studio to produce more compilation films, though Walt’s sudden enthusiasm for bundling new shorts and repackaging old ones was also an indication of the studio’s creative bankruptcy. Another “remnant sale,” Fun and Fancy Free was already in production at the time when Make Mine Music was released in the early spring of 1946. It incorporated two stories, one about Bongo, a circus bear who finds himself back in the wild where he has to use his wiles, introduced by Jiminy Cricket, and Mickey and the Beanstalk, narrated by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, one of the very few people with whom Walt socialized. Both stories had been kicking around the studio for years—Mickey and the Beanstalk since at least 1940, when Walt was vainly searching for ways to revive his mouse by starring him in a series of fairy tales. At the time Bill Cottrell and another storyman with the improbable name of T. Hee (actually Thornton Hee) had presented the story to Walt and, as Hee later told it, Walt “burst out laughing, tears running down the side of his face,” and called in others to hear the presentation. But when Cottrell and Hee asked how soon it would be put into production, Walt said it wouldn’t. As much as he liked it, Walt told them that “you murdered my characters” and “destroyed what I’ve been working years to build up.” The audience had certain expectations of Mickey Mouse, and this wasn’t what they expected.
The film had, in any case, been suspended by the strike and the war, but even before the war the studio was in such desperate need of cheap and simple material—Walt wanted the film to be made with the shorts crews and with the efficiencies of the shorts—that he had overcome his misgivings about Mickey as Jack. It was yet another example of how much Mickey had ceased to be Mickey—of how much he had been deracinated over the years until he was essentially just another actor. Another example of Mickey’s demise was Walt himself. Almost from the beginning Walt had been Mickey’s voice, even through a throat operation and a tonsillectomy back in the early 1930s—a sign of his devotion to his creation. But during the production of Mickey and the Beanstalk a sound effects man named Jimmy Macdonald, who had worked at the studio since 1935, got a call to come to Walt’s office. As Macdonald told it, Walt said that the animators were pressuring him for Mickey’s dialogue, and he just didn’t have the time. (Macdonald also suspected that Walt was getting too hoarse to voice the falsetto Mickey, possibly from his chain-smoking filterless Camels.) He asked if Macdonald might give it a try. Macdonald, a beefy, blunt-featured man for whom Mickey’s high-pitched voice was incongruous, recorded a track, Walt another for comparison. Walt listened and approved, and as Macdonald later recounted, “right then we switched over to using my voice for Mickey, right in the middle of Mickey and the Beanstalk.” Macdonald would provide Mickey’s voice for the next thirty-eight years, but the casualness with which the transition was effected was telling. It testified to Walt’s growing estrangement from Mickey and perhaps from the animations generally.
With these movies, Walt’s artistic reputation among critics and intellectuals, long sinking, reached its nadir. Most found the films coarse, overly commercial, and utterly charmless. (One exception was Sergei Eisenstein, who thought Make Mine Music “absolutely ingenious” and was especially struck by the “Willie the Whale” section, which he compared to Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum.) The deeply felt if occasionally overwrought emotion of the early features had given way to what many critics regarded as cheap sentimentality and kitsch in Make Mine Music and Fun and Fancy Free, as if the films had been created by committee for money, which they were. The critic Richard Schickel believed that it was when Disney began disavowing claims to art and emphasizing his common man persona after the war that the intellectuals began disavowing him, but the process had in fact started with Fantasia, when Walt’s artistic aspirations had been highest. For those who thought that Fantasia had exposed Walt’s cultural obtuseness, the compilation films only confirmed it. “Suppose you visit a friend,” wrote one former admirer in the left-wing Theatre Arts in June 1946. “You know that he has a warm heart and is kind to animals, that his sense of humor is infectious, his professional skill beyond compare. But when you enter his house you find to your dismay that his walls are festooned with second-rate art” and “his furniture is carelessly assembled with little regard for harmony or any other concern except to fill space.” This wouldn’t cause you to hate the man, the critic said; it would only cause you to “admit with regret that his taste was deplorable.” Walt Disney was now that man.
II
He was no longer the king of animation, only one among a group of pretenders to the throne. The intellectuals and critics who had fawned over him in the 1930s and anointed him one of America’s greatest artists now preferred his competitors. For years everyone else, remarked one animator at a rival studio, was in a “pack of greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.” Everyone had imitated him. Mickey Mouse had spawned a host of other mice, dogs, cats, pigs, a frog, even a black boy named Bosko who resembled Mickey—all trying to claim Mickey’s crown. The Silly Symphonies had spawned Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies, Harman-Ising’s Happy Harmonies, Iwerks’s Comicolor Classics, the Fleischers’ Color Classics, and Charles Mintz’s Color Rhapsodies. And even Snow White had spawned the Fleischer brothers’ feature-length animations Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town as well as Walter Lantz’s prospective Ali Baba, which was scotched almost as soon as it was announced because Universal did not have the money for it. For years rival animation studios had poached Disney artists, as Van Beuren had lured Burt Gillett and Pat Powers had lured Ub Iwerks, hoping to capture the Disney magic. But the result was always the same. One might imitate Disney, but one couldn’t match him. As Paul Terry admitted: “Disney is the Tiffany of this business, and we’re the Woolworth’s.”
One reason for this success was money. Disney was spending roughly $40,000 per short while Warner Bros., MGM, and Paramount were spending half that. Another reason was Disney’s initial monopoly on the three-color Technicolor process that made his cartoons look so much better than anyone else’s. But a much greater reason was the old disparity between the talent at the Disney studio and the talent everywhere else and, what had helped draw that talent, between the commitment at the Disney studio and the commitment everywhere else. If animation was a sacred obligation to Walt Disney, a way to reimagine the world, for the others it had always been just a product. “Making cartoons is like delivering milk” was how one of Paul Terry’s animators described Terry’s philosophy. “People expect the bottles at the door every morning. If you miss a morning, people get upset. I see to it that we don’t miss a morning and nobody gets upset.” Similarly Dick Huemer said of Charles Mintz, “He didn’t care. He wasn’t really interested much in the pictures. He was just a promoter, he bankrolled it.” Mintz once gathered his staff, showed them a Fleischer cartoon about two romancing swans, and then ordered his animators to make a cartoon like it with no more than two characters. At all the studios save Disney the cartoons were still thrown into production. Walter Lantz at Universal didn’t even ha
ve a story department, just a bulletin board on which a story idea would be pinned. Indeed, the only studio that harbored dreams of matching Disney, that of Max and Dave Fleischer, was hopelessly out of its depth when it tried, and by the early 1940s it had been forced to sell its operation to Paramount after having decamped to Florida and having borrowed heavily from that company to make its features.
But after all the Disney studio’s years of unchallenged preeminence, the war created opportunities for its competitors, not only because Disney’s own animation was stagnating under the press of government business but because many of the rival animators, some of them refugees from Disney, felt increasingly emboldened to attack the Disney style. As director Frank Tashlin, who left Disney for Screen Gems just before the strike, would later put it, “We showed those Disney guys that animated cartoons don’t have to look like a fucking kid’s book.”
At MGM the head of the shorts department, Fred Quimby—a man known for his impeccably tailored double-breasted suits, his Brahmin accent, and the whiff of talc—spent his day reading the Hollywood trade papers, getting a shave at the studio barbershop, taking lunch, returning to the office for a nap, and then driving home at three o’clock—a routine that one of his animators called “as inevitable as death and taxes.” But while Quimby idled, his directors used their comparative freedom to cut loose. Two of them, Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, teamed to create a warring cat and mouse who in early 1940 were named Tom and Jerry and at the end of the war were starring in a series of cartoons that veered wildly between sentimentality and ever-increasing violence of a sort that Disney wouldn’t have tolerated for fear of offending his audience. (Usurping Disney, who had had a virtual lock on the Oscar in the 1930s, Hanna and Barbera won four consecutive Academy Awards for Best Animated Short, from 1943 through 1946.) Another director, Tex Avery, who had defected to MGM in 1942 after years at Warner Bros. and a brief tenure at Paramount, specialized in self-referential cartoons with a zany, unrestrained energy, the most famous of which—starting with a contemporary 1943 version of “Little Red Riding Hood” titled Red Hot Riding Hood—featured an oversexed wolf of the sort, again, that would have been far too suggestive for Walt Disney.