Disney (6 page)

The Disney animation department moved at a frenetic pace. Dozens of artists worked on drawings that had to be matched up in multiple layers to create a single frame of film. Disney compared the operation to “a Ford factory,” only “our moving parts were more complex than cogs – human beings, each with his own temperament and values who must be weighted and fitted into his proper place.”

After early sketches of Snow White were dismissed by Disney as too cartoonish, a young dancer named
Marjorie Celeste Belcher
, aka “Margie Bell,” was hired to model for the character. Supervising animator Hamilton Luske, whose job it was to make Snow White more lifelike, directed her in several live-action sequences, which were filmed and studied.

For
Snow White
, Disney used a newly developed device called the
multiplane camera
, which looked down at several layers of animation cels stacked on top of one another from a fourteen-foot-high scaffold. The camera photographed each frame individually, so that the characters, the foreground, and the background appeared as a seamless image, achieving a sense of depth that hadn’t been seen in animation before. Exposing one frame at a time, it took on average two weeks to shoot 750 feet of film, which was the length of a typical Disney animated short. The camera cost $75,000 - an investment Disney never questioned. “It was always my ambition to own a swell camera,” Disney said, “and now, godammit, 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.”

Perhaps the most-pressing business was naming Disney’s seven dwarfs, which Walt felt was essential to giving them personalities that would endear them to audiences. This process took months, during which the list of candidates grew to include: Scrappy, Cranky, Dirty, Awful, Blabby, Silly, Daffy, Flabby, Jaunty, Biggo Ego, Chesty, Jumpy, Baldy, Hickey, Gabby, Shorty, Nifty, Wheezy, Sniffy, Burpy, Lazy, Puffy, Dizzy, Stuffy, and Tubby. Eventually, Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy, Happy, Sleepy, and Dopey made the cut.

Finding the right voice for Snow White presented another challenge. Disney auditioned about 150 girls for the role, including thirteen-year-old actress Deanna Durbin. The role eventually went to twenty-year-old
Adriana Caselotti
, daughter of vocal music coach Guido Caselotti, who was called in as a consultant. Adriana, overhearing a phone conversation between her father and a Disney casting director, got on the line and demonstrated her shrill girlish voice. Guido shouted for his daughter to get off the phone, but she had already made an impression on the casting director, who invited her to audition. Disney hired her on the spot.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
premiered at a star-studded event at the
Carthay Circle Theater
in Los Angeles on December 21, 1937. Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant were seen choking back tears as the dwarfs mourn the seemingly lifeless Snow White before putting her into her glass coffin. As the lights came up, the audience stood and roared its approval.

The film
opened three weeks later in New York and Miami to acclaim. At Radio City Music Hall in the first week alone,
Snow White
grossed $108,000, and tickets from scalpers on the street cost as much as $5. People left theaters humming
Snow White
’s songs, including the seven dwarfs’ workday theme song, “Heigh-Ho,” which became as infectious as “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” Audiences particularly fell in love with the boyish, big-eared Dopey, the only dwarf not sport a bushy beard.

This was good news for the Disney studio, which had ballooned to 650 employees in the push to finish the film. Walt later joked that Roy had been “brave” about financing the film - until the tab exceeded $1 million. The critics were again silenced, and Mickey Mouse got his tail back.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
was the highest-grossing motion picture of 1938. Disney earned another honorary Academy Award for its “innovation” and for having “charmed millions.” Child star
Shirley Temple
presented Disney with the golden statue - along with seven miniature ones celebrating the dwarfs. The Disney Brothers Studio expected to make $2 million that year.

Other honors followed. At the Forty-ninth Annual Tournament of Roses Parade that year, he was presented with a marble electric clock and received plaques from Radio Guide magazine “in appreciation of pleasure brought to radio listeners by Disney’s characters,” the National Broadcasting Company, and a collective of artists in Havana, Cuba.

Though he never completed high school – “I’m a very uneducated man, a graduate of the school of hard knocks,” he told the
New York Post
- suddenly Disney was being hailed as an intellectual. Colleges clamored to award him honorary degrees. He received an honorary Master of Science degree from the University of Southern California, and Master of Arts degrees from both Yale and Harvard universities and turned down another honorary degree from Boston University. “Get me right, boys. I’m grateful for these honorary degrees and the distinction they confer,” Disney said in an interview for
The American
, a William Randolph Hearst newspaper. “But I’ll always wish I’d had the chance to go through college in the regular way and earn a plain bachelor of arts like the thousands of kids nobody ever heard of.”

When Harvard President
James B. Conant
wrote to Disney to offer the honorary degree, Disney humbly accepted, writing back, “We’re selling corn, and I like corn. I try to entertain, not educate: an important part of education is stimulating an interest in things.” He later submitted measurements for a cap and gown - “I am five-feet-ten-inches tall and usually take size forty in wearing apparel” – and at the Harvard ceremony, was filmed playfully blowing his tassel out of his eyes as it dangled from the mortarboard. His degree included the citation: “A magician who has created a modern dwelling for the Muses.”

Disney looked the part of a Hollywood mogul. He wore lounge coats, open-throated shirts, and expensive sweaters. He often twirled a lock of his dark brown hair around his finger as he spoke, and when discussing his projects, he became as animated as his beloved characters. But if the Disney studio had a special formula, Walt Disney had no idea what it was.

Disney had again redefined film. The richer, more-lifelike animation of
Snow White
was a sign of greater things to come from the Disney studio. But Disney was largely dismissive of the praise and plaudits his latest creation attracted. “We just try to make a good picture,” he said. “And then the professors come along and tell us what we do.”

After the success of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
in 1938, Walt and Roy bought their parents a house in Los Angeles. Elias and Flora Disney were enjoying a retirement near their sons. Flora’s health was worrisome following several small strokes, but everyone was happy to be together again.

The brothers hired a woman named Alma to keep house for their parents. One morning in November 1938, as Alma was in the kitchen fixing breakfast, she became dizzy. A faulty furnace had filled the house with carbon monoxide. When she ran upstairs to check on the elder Disney’s, Elias was unconscious and Flora was dead. Elias recovered, but he was never the same.

Walt and Roy worked stoically and didn’t talk to anyone about what had happened. Around the studio, no one was allowed to speak of Flora’s death. Decades later, Walt still got tears in his eyes whenever his mother was mentioned.

Not known for giving much consideration to family tragedy, theater owners pressed the Disneys for more animated features. Many wanted to see some sort of sequel to
Snow White
featuring the singing dwarfs Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Bashful, and Dopey. Disney, however, wanted to move on.

Snow White
had grossed $8 million at the box office. Disney, always expansion-minded, invested a portion of that revenue into a large, state-of-the art studio in
Burbank
. In order to pay for the entire facility, Disney turned to his bankers. They agreed to advance Disney the money on one condition: The main building should be easily adaptable to other uses, should the studio fail. Because the area needed a hospital, Disney had his animation building designed with wide central corridors, which would allow easy passage for wheelchairs and gurneys. The hallways included recesses which could accommodate nurse stations; for the time being, they held snack and soda machines.

Disney’s new studio featured lavish staff facilities, including a gym and a restaurant, and was surrounded by lush, park-like grounds. Disney had the principal streets surrounding the studio renamed Mickey Mouse Boulevard, Minnie Mouse Boulevard, Donald Duck Drive, Snow White Boulevard, and Dopey Drive.

The Disney staff, however, was most pleased by the air conditioning. In the old studio, the heat from the projector made room unbearably hot. Animators joked that even in the new building the screening room was still sometimes a sweatbox because of Disney’s notoriously short temper.

To his employees, Walt Disney sometimes seemed to be two different people. For the most part, he was a gracious, down-to-earth leader who spent little time in his modest office; he was more at home on the animation floor, looking at storyboards, working up gags, and watching footage in the screening room. Everyone called him Walt. He was known for his generosity and took an interest in his employees and seemed to know everyone’s spouse and children by name. Disney’s management style consisted of a single, overriding principle: Everything was a team effort. But, paradoxically, the layout of the new studio failed to foster that cooperative spirit. Production units were isolated from one another. A young woman was stationed at each to record the movements and motives of all who passed between them.

Below the surface, Disney was impatient, overbearing, and volatile. According to Roy, “Walt puts up this mild front, but underneath it there’s drive, drive, drive.” The studio was his world. He created it, maintained it, and lived in it. While he encouraged ideas from his staff, he didn’t hesitate to tell them how to do something. Disney thought nothing of throwing away a drawing an animator had slaved over; if he couldn’t see the humor or value in it, it was worthless. With a near photographic memory, Disney could recall the smallest visual detail or gag that had been agreed to months before, and if it was missing or wrong, he would leap to his feet and demand to know what had happened. In staff meetings, he was quick to express his displeasure with any idea he didn’t like and the person who had offered it up, regardless if the employee was hired the day before or was one of his most trusted, longtime staff members. “I sometimes feel like a dirty heel,” he said once, admitting that he got his way by “pounding” on the people who worked for him.

In his utopian vision of the studio, Disney wanted to be its muse, not its overlord. But as the studio expanded, this role became impossible. Disney believed in giving employees bonuses and developed a rewards system that required him to keep track of what everyone was doing, but by 1936, he realized he needed a more objective way to grade employee performance. Disney implemented a complicated formula for grading animation and paying salaries based on the quality and the number of feet of film an animator was responsible for. The staff despised the new system, and Disney still stepped in from time to time to modify the formula on a case-by-case basis. But it increased productivity: The more work an animator churned out, the more he was paid.

The breakneck pace took a toll on Disney. Although the studio was focused on making animated features, it was still turning out a steady stream of short cartoons. Disney was often sick and needed frequent consultations with an assortment of physicians. Polo was his physical outlet and his sole form of recreation. But in 1935, he had collided with another rider, who was knocked to the ground and killed when Disney’s horse fell on him. Roy Disney gave up polo immediately; Walt quit three years later. He sold his ponies and drifted away from his polo friends. After that, Walt spent most of his leisure time with his family. “He really didn’t have time to make friends,” his wife Lillian said. “Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day.”

During a visit to 1939’s Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, Disney decided on a new hobby. It was a World’s Fair to celebrate the city’s dedication of the newly-built San Francisco-Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges. The exhibit that caught Disney’s eye was by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. It was a miniature world, with model homes decorated in American and European styles from different eras. Mrs. Thorne furnished it with dollhouse furniture and accessories – some collected during European travels and others she handmade herself. It reminded Disney of the Lionel train models he built with his nephew. Peering into the meticulously detailed rooms, he felt transported – to another time, a different dimension.

From then on, he was a collector. He was always on the lookout for some tiny bauble to add to his collection. He returned from trips to Europe with suitcases full of glass, wood, china, and metal trinkets. They filled his home. “My hobby is a lifesaver,” he wrote. “When I work with these small objects, I become so absorbed that the cares of the studio fade away . . . at least for a time.”

In 1938, the Disney brothers went on a buying spree. They purchased the rights to a number of children’s stories, including
Winnie the Pooh
and
Peter Pan
. Roy negotiated for these properties while Walt wrestled with
Bambi
and
Pinocchio
, two features which had gone into production simultaneously, but were progressing at different speeds. Disney originally planned to release
Bambi
as his second animated feature, but had difficulties with both the script and the animation. The biggest obstacle to
Bambi
’s progress, however, was Disney’s understanding of the story.

Bambi
was based on the 1923 book
Bambi, A Life in the Woods
by an Austrian writer who used the pen name
Felix Salten
. The story follows a buck
roe deer
from birth to old age, when he becomes the strongest and wisest deer in the woods. Salten intended the book for adult readers, and it is an often grim, even gory tale. Bambi is orphaned early on when his mother is killed by a hunter and is later shot. Badly wounded, Bambi recovers when an older buck shows him how to leave a confusing trail of blood in the forest so that he will not be found.

The book was an international bestseller. An English translation became a Book of the Month Club selection and sold more than a half million copies in the United States. A reviewer for
The
New York Times
called
Bambi, A Life in the Woods
“tender” and “lucid,” and marveled at how the story “takes you out of yourself.”

Disney was eager to get
Bambi
made while audiences were still excited about
Snow White
, but he couldn’t get comfortable with the story, which was more a collection of scenes than a narrative. He also struggled with how to make Bambi a sufficiently sensitive character and to find the balance between realism and fantasy in his story about a talking deer. Meanwhile, his animators were having trouble drawing deer. At one point, Disney resorted to keeping a live deer in small corral at the studio. Frustrated, Disney announced that their next feature would not be
Bambi
but
Pinocchio.

Pinocchio
is the story of a wooden puppet who longs to become “a real boy.” It was adapted from an 1883 Italian novel,
The Adventures of Pinocchio
, by
Carlo Collodi
. Made by a woodcarver named Geppetto, Pinocchio has a natural tendency for misadventure. His most famous characteristic is a nose that grows longer when he tells a lie.

Disney felt sure
Pinocchio
could move ahead more quickly than
Bambi
, but once the animation got underway, he again had reservations. Disney thought Pinocchio lacked charm and was too wooden and puppet-like. People liked the story, he said, but not the main character. Disney told his team to stop thinking of Pinocchio as a puppet drawn to look somewhat human and instead imagine the character as a human drawn to look somewhat like a puppet. Eventually, they got it right. As one of the animators later put it, “I made kind of a cute little boy out of him, and Walt loved it.”

Actors were filmed for a number of sequences in
Pinocchio
, and animators used stills as a reference for creating the scenes. This new technique heightened the realism of the action and became a standard process in the studio.

Much of the script had to be rewritten when Disney took a minor character in the book - a cricket – named him
Jiminy
and turned him into
Pinocchio’s conscience. Disney turned to one of his
“
Nine Old Men”
– his top animators - to design Jiminy Cricket.
Ward Kimball
, disgruntled that much of his work had been cut from the final version of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
had been ready to walk out before Disney approached him with Jiminy. Kimball preferred to animate exaggerated cartoon characters over realistic ones, and Disney proclaimed him a genius at it. He drew Jiminy Cricket with wide, oval eyes, and a smile that stretched from one end of his pale green face to the other, plumping his cheeks like a carefree child. His tattered top hat and tails, worn-out shoes, and a hook-handled umbrella that doubled as a walking cane suggested an old soul. Kimball described Jiminy as a little man with an egg head and no ears, and joked, “The only thing that makes him a cricket is because we call him one.”

The cricket was given his voice by a forty-three-year-old singer from Missouri named
Cliff Edwards
, whose nickname was “Ukulele Ike.”

On a star-lit night in Tuscany, Jiminy Cricket croons to the viewers the song that would become a Disney anthem, “When You Wish Upon A Star.” Jiminy has a tale to tell about a wish on a star that did come true, and it starts in the warm and welcoming workshop of the jovial, fatherly woodcarver Geppetto. Witness to a miracle, the cricket is our narrator and guide, as much as he is Pinocchio’s. This responsibility is given to him by a beautiful Blue Fairy, a wishing star who materializes to grant the lonely woodcarver’s wish that the puppet child he has created could be a real boy. Breathing life into the wooden Pinocchio, she tells him that to be a real boy, he must prove himself to be brave, truthful and unselfish.

The world outside the workshop, though, is tawdry, and rife with terrible temptations, as Pinocchio soon discovers on his way to school. He crosses paths with slick-talking scoundrel Honest John Foulfellow the Fox, who swindles him with promises of fame and fortune. The Fox’s companion, Gideon, is a shabby alley cat whose only contribution to the conversation is a series of hiccups (provided by Bugs Bunny voice actor
Mel Blanc
). Against Jiminy’s advice, Pinocchio is sold to a menacing puppet master named Stromboli, who threatens to chop him into firewood if he won’t perform. Pinocchio is visited again by the Blue Fairy, who asks him why he allowed himself to be led astray. He concocts a lie which, along with his wooden nose, grows more and more elaborate. Insisting he has learned his lesson and will be a good boy from then on, Pinocchio is freed by the fairy, who warns she will not intervene again.

The boy puppet is soon sidetracked again, convinced by Honest John that he is sick and in need of a vacation to Pleasure Island. There, Pinocchio is befriended by a misbehaving boy named Lampwick, and with no rules or authority to stop them, they gamble, smoke, drink and vandalize the island. Jiminy Cricket discovers the island’s sinister purpose: the boys, in making jackasses of themselves, become donkeys to be sold into servitude in the salt mines and circuses. He warns Pinocchio and they escape, but not before the boy has grown donkey ears and a tail.