The Animated Man (16 page)

While Disney was in New York, he was in no position to supervise Iwerks's animation closely, but an ongoing conflict between them festered even while they were a continent apart. Their continuing disagreement was over whether Iwerks would animate “straight ahead”—leaving to an assistant only details like the skeletons' ribs—or as Disney wanted him to, with what were called
extremes
and
inbetweens
, the latter provided by an assistant called an
inbetweener
.

When animators first began using inbetweeners in the 1920s, the idea was that they could increase their output by delegating the less important drawings
to less-experienced artists. The animators would draw the extremes, the key drawings that defined movement, while the inbetweener made the drawings needed to fill out the animation so it did not look jerky on the screen. That potential increase in productivity was an important consideration at a studio that relied so heavily on one animator, Iwerks, even though he already animated so rapidly. For Iwerks, though, the costs of the change were unacceptably great. His objections were summarized in notes from an interview with him around 1956: “Ub said he'd lose direction of action—he got better feeling of action [when] he animated straight ahead and left details to be filled in. Walt could never see this method.”
⁷

It was only when Iwerks's drawings were tightly synchronized with music that the dominant characteristics of his animation—smooth and regular and impersonal—became unmistakable virtues. What might have seemed merely mechanical was instead precise and pointed.
The Skeleton Dance
had no plot and few real gags, only simple and repetitive dances by skeletons with rubbery limbs, but so closely did the skeletons' actions mirror the music that they tracked not just the beat but the individual notes.

Disney said in 1956 that he had considerable difficulty getting
The Skeleton Dance
into theaters, citing one theater manager's complaint: “It's too gruesome.” He spoke of tracking down “a film salesman” in a pool hall and, through him, getting the cartoon seen by the manager of the prestigious Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. In early May, Disney let the Carthay Circle book
The Skeleton Dance
for what he called “an extended pre-release showing.” Disney wrote to Charles Giegerich of the Powers organization about the “unusual amount of attention” the cartoon was receiving during this run and urged him to “close a national release” for the
Silly Symphonies
“on the strength of this one subject, plus the reputation that we have created with the quality of our ‘Mickey Mouse' series.”
⁸
A second showing, in New York at the Roxy on Broadway, was equally successful. In August, Giegerich signed a contract with Columbia Pictures Corporation for thirteen
Silly Symphonies
.
⁹

Although the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons and the
Silly Symphonies
were supposed to differ in their emphasis on music, the two series quickly became alike in their reliance on tight synchronization. (In the summer of 1929, Disney said he had “decided upon a policy that from now on all the action [in the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons] will be set to a definite [rhythm] and we will have no more straight action to a mere musical background”—that is, the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons would be as thoroughly synchronized as the
Silly Symphonies
.)
¹⁰
None of the earliest Disney sound cartoons were overwhelmingly superior to competitors' cartoons except in their use of sound, but that made all the difference.
As other cartoon makers, ignorant of Disney's system, scrambled to add sound tracks, the results were invariably noisy and distracting. Disney's seamless synchronization was all the more impressive in contrast.

Disney knew from the beginning that he was in a strong position, and he was eager to exploit it. Writing to Roy and Iwerks from New York in February 1929, he was encouraged by the favorable response to
The Opry House
and by what he had heard about Charles Mintz's troubles (Universal was not renewing its contract with Mintz but was going to make the
Oswald
cartoons at a studio of its own instead). “Now is our chance to get a hold on the industry,” he wrote. He was buying sound equipment from Powers so he could set up his own recording studio in Los Angeles, and he was seriously thinking about making a series of live-action shorts—“dialogue comedies”—in addition to his cartoons.
¹¹
Those live-action comedies never happened, although the Disneys did set up a short-lived Disney Film Recording Company at 5360 Melrose Avenue after Walt returned to Los Angeles.

Disney also knew he needed more help, since Iwerks was the only experienced animator on his staff, backed up by several novices—Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, John Cannon. As he had in 1928, Disney talked with animators in New York about coming to work for him. (There was no place else Disney could have found experienced animators, apart from the few who had already left him to work for Mintz.) In March, after Disney and Stalling returned to Los Angeles, the Disney staff “heard that some
real
animators were going to be brought out from New York,” Jackson said. The first new hire was Ben Sharpsteen, a veteran of several New York studios, notably Max Fleischer's.

“He came in,” Jackson said, “and was given his place to work, and given a scene to do, and he spent the whole morning working on it. We were real curious to see what he had done, and so when lunchtime came, none of us wanted to go to lunch, we wanted to see what he'd done. And Ben was a new guy there, he didn't want to be the first guy to go to lunch. So we were all there working, twenty minutes after our lunch hour, before Ben finally said, ‘Hey, don't you guys ever go to lunch around here?' And we all pretended, ‘Oh, my goodness, yes, it's lunchtime.'

“And Ben went out, and so we all went over to Ben's desk to see what he had done. Ub took the drawings and flipped them, and we all stood respectfully back to see what Ub's opinion would be. After he flipped them, Ub said, ‘Huh! They look just like the clown' ”—that is, like the Fleischer cartoons. “Ben did draw Mickey with funny little eyes that were like the clown, and a kind of a pinched little nose, at first.”
¹²

When he was in New York, Disney had visited Pat Sullivan's
Felix the Cat
studio, which was, thanks to Sullivan's stubbornness, as committed to silence as Disney was to sound—and thus was the kind of studio that an animator with an eye on the future would try to escape. “I think he wanted to hire Otto [Messmer],” said Al Eugster, a young animator on the Sullivan staff—Messmer actually made the cartoons that appeared under Sullivan's name—“and he took Burt Gillett with him.”
¹³
Gillett, who had been animating for more than a decade, started work for Disney in April 1929 as the second New York animator to join the staff.

Roles began to change in response to the Disney cartoons' success. After the first few
Mickey Mouse
sound cartoons, Iwerks animated less, working instead with Disney and Stalling in the office called the “music room” because Stalling's piano was there (that term was later applied to a Disney director's room even after a musician no longer shared it). Iwerks's principal duty now was to make sketches that showed the growing staff of animators how to stage their scenes. “Walt still handed out the scenes to the animators for the most part,” Jackson said, “but I believe Ub occasionally did this for him at this time.”
¹⁴

Disney had always been the de facto director of his cartoons—no one used that exact title—but sound had strengthened him in that role by giving him more control over the timing of the animation. His animators had to adhere to the timing on the exposure sheets, which Disney and Stalling wrote as they planned the music. Now, though, Disney was actually pulling back. Burt Gillett “moved into Walt's music room to help prepare the shorts for animation very soon after he came out from New York,” Jackson said.
¹⁵

The division of responsibility between Gillett and Disney was indistinct, Ben Sharpsteen said: “There wasn't anything formal in the division there, and Walt wouldn't hesitate to criticize Gillett in front of one of us. . . . Nothing was sacred to anybody then.”
¹⁶
All the lines between jobs were fluid in the late 1920s, as Jackson explained: “Each animator drew his own layout [a drawing that showed the staging of a scene], working from Ub's little thumbnail sketch, each time he started to animate a scene—and the first animator, or inbetweener, who ran out of work as a cartoon was nearing completion was likely to be given the task of painting the backgrounds for the picture.”
¹⁷
As the staff filled out with experienced New York animators, the animators' responsibilities in particular came to be better defined. Carlos Manriquez, who had started in ink and paint, became the first full-time background painter, probably sometime in 1929.
¹⁸

The writing of the cartoons continued much as before. Sharpsteen remembered night meetings “for each new story concept. That's how Walt would get going on a new picture. He'd let us know what he had in mind,
and the possibilities he saw in it. We were privileged to sit there and make sketches of ideas as they came to us. Otherwise, we'd turn in something at a later date.”
¹⁹
Dick Lundy, who joined the staff as an assistant in July 1929, remembered that Disney called such meetings “a ‘round table.' We had it in the director's room when we were small, but later on . . . they would have it in the sound stage, and the whole group would get a synopsis of . . . a story idea. ‘Now, what gags can you think of?' ”
²⁰
As in the
Oswald
period, some gags came perhaps too easily. “In the early days,” Wilfred Jackson said, “we always figured that we had three laughs that were free, and we had to work for the other ones. One was the drop-seat gag, two the thundermug [chamber pot] under the bed, and three the outhouse.”
²¹

The Plowboy
, from June 1929, is filled with just that sort of cheerful farmyard ribaldry. A cow's udder is animated with great plasticity as Mickey milks it, and two of the cow's teeth move up and down like window shades to let out a stream of tobacco juice. The cow literally licks Mickey's eye shut—twice. The first time, he squirts milk from the cow's own udder in its face; the second time, he pulls the cow's tongue out to great length and wraps it around its muzzle. There's an undercurrent of lasciviousness, too. When Minnie calls to Mickey and his horse, both wave back—then the horse hitches up his chest and starts to swagger over, until Mickey orders him back. When Minnie is singing, wordlessly, she puckers, her eyes closed, and Mickey, drooling with desire, seizes the opportunity to kiss her (she smashes him over the head with a bucket). The cow laughs at Mickey—a trombone provides the laughter—he gives the cow the razzberry, and she stalks away, first flipping her udder at him in disdain.

The Plowboy
ran afoul of a few censors, as did a couple of other 1929 cartoons. Disney expressed mystification that “anyone could take offense at any of the ‘stuff' contained in our pictures; especially how anyone could be offended at anything pertaining to the milking of a cow.”
²²
Coarse, exuberant comedy of that kind was just what could be expected from a studio whose staff was made up largely of young men, most of whom, like Disney himself, had almost no formal art training, and limited formal education of any kind. Like so many schoolboys, the Disney animators ate their sack lunches behind the stage where Disney had filmed the live action for the
Alice
comedies. They also played horseshoes there—“Ub was the best,” Jackson recalled.
²³

Some of Disney's animators had fallen in love with the medium when they were children, seeing what must have been some of the earliest series cartoons, like those of J. R. Bray. Jackson remembered growing up in Glendale, California:

We lived near the [trolley] tracks . . . and the conductors would tear all the transfers off, and they'd have a little stub left, about, oh, three quarters of an inch thick and half an inch wide, with a rivet through the middle, or a staple. But the ends you could flip, and so you could make any kind of a little drawing there, and make it move. So I used to walk up and down the car tracks, finding the stubs where they'd thrown them, and make my animation on those.
²⁴

In the expansive atmosphere created by the Disney cartoons' success and the growth of the staff, some of Disney's young animators tinkered with ways to improve their work—for example, by shooting some of their pencil animation on film to see if it was turning out the way they hoped. The animators made such
pencil tests
of “isolated actions within a scene when the animator came up against some new problem and wanted to see how effectively—or otherwise—he was handling it before going ahead,” Jackson said.
²⁵
In addition, Dick Lundy said, the animators tested cycles; it was particularly important to catch any mistakes in cycle animation, because the same mistake would be seen on the screen over and over again.
²⁶
Walt Disney neither encouraged nor discouraged such tests. “We were allowed to use short ends of film that weren't long enough to shoot a scene with . . . if we wanted to come back at night and develop them ourselves,” Jackson said.
²⁷

By the late summer of 1929, both Iwerks and Gillett were performing all the functions of directors, Iwerks for the
Silly Symphonies
and Gillett for the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons. Disney called them “story men” because they were responsible for their cartoons' stories, although that was the area where Disney himself continued to be most heavily involved. The two directors now made the layout drawings that showed the animators how to stage their scenes, and they worked with Stalling to prepare the bar sheets and exposure sheets.
²⁸