The Animated Man (20 page)

The color version of
Flowers and Trees
—a fantasy in which two young trees are lovers menaced by a jealous stump—premiered on July 18, 1932, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, accompanying MGM's pretentious feature
Strange Interlude
. It was a huge success, and when Lichtman wrote to Roy a few days later he joined in the applause but worried aloud about whether the Disneys should be sinking their money into such expensive films in the
midst of a depression. Roy was clearly elated by the cartoon's reception, and he wrote in reply: “I realize that Walt and I do not run our business on a strictly ‘business basis,' but honestly we have more concern over re-intrenching
[sic]
ourselves during these difficult times by making our product as desirable to the exhibitor as we possibly can, feeling that if we can only ride out these present times we are really doing well in the final analysis. Then when better times do return, we will still be in the front and be able to take care of the old family sock.”
⁸⁶
Roy, as much as Walt, wanted to go into color, and he was working hard to justify such a move, to himself as well as Lichtman. By November 1932, there was no longer any doubt—it would be wrong, Roy wrote to Lichtman, to do other than make all the
Silly Symphonies
in Technicolor.
⁸⁷

At first, when the Disney studio began making color cartoons, colors were set more in the story department than by the directors or layout men, but in this area, as in most others, the decisions were really being made by Walt Disney. Wilfred Jackson was a director then. “By the time I would talk to [Emil] Flohri [the principal background painter] about the backgrounds, Walt had been there,” Jackson said. “Flohri was telling me what he was going to do in the way of coloring, I wasn't telling him.”
⁸⁸

In the early 1930s, Disney was still close to the people who worked for him, literally so in some cases. He lived just a few blocks from the Hyperion Avenue studio and across the street from Don Patterson—an assistant animator at the studio (and formerly an animator for Charles Mintz).
⁸⁹
But with the studio more prosperous thanks to the UA release, Disney was ready to move again.

In the spring and summer of 1932, Walt and Lillian Disney built their second new home, this one a twelve-room house described as “Norman-French” in style, at 4053 Woking Way in the Los Feliz Hills.
⁹⁰
Like the Lyric Avenue house, it was on a winding street not far from the studio, but the new neighborhood, north of Los Feliz Boulevard, was, like the house itself, considerably grander than its predecessor. Roy Disney marveled in 1968 at the audacity of the construction: “He hung this swimming pool up on the corner of this darn thing. It's a granite hill and we were taking bets to see if it would stand. It's thirty-five years and it's still there.”
⁹¹

(Even in 1964, Disney was a little defensive about just how grand the house was. “Everybody gets mad at the rich for owning these big places,” he told the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, “but they forget how many jobs it creates. It takes a lot of people to run a big estate. I built a house in Los Feliz during the Depression. Men used to line up there in the morning hoping
to get work. I found a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and had him paint my whole ceiling.”)
⁹²

By mid-1932, the enthusiastic, cheerleading voice in Disney's 1928 letters from New York was being heard in the story outlines for new cartoons that were distributed throughout the studio with a request for help with gags. The outlines typically begin with a summary of the story—running as long as four pages—that was probably dictated by a member of the story crew, followed by notes that sound like Disney himself, right down to the profanity, as in the outline for
Mickey's Mechanical Man
(“This could lead to a helluva lot of gags and a new type of Mickey”).
⁹³

In an outline distributed in July 1932, Disney scoffed at the doubters who said a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon called
Building a Building
could never be made: “Production has been started on it twice before, and it was side-tracked both times because it was thought to contain too much detail. I cannot agree with this. I believe it can be handled in a simplified manner and turn out to be very effective. . . . So let's go after it with a vengeance and make something very good out of it.”
⁹⁴
There was a disingenuous side to Disney's cheerleading—who else but Disney himself could have “side-tracked” a cartoon because “it was thought to contain too much detail”?—but his enthusiasm was genuine.

In his addenda, Disney always adopted a positive, can-do tone. In August 1932, he touted the possibilities of
Mickey's Good Deed
, a Christmas cartoon to be released at the end of 1932: “Here is a story that has everything necessary to make it a wow. A good plot—good atmosphere—personality—pathos—and plenty of opportunity for gags. There are seven major sequences to this story—each holds wonderful possibilities for good gags and bits of human action. I am expecting everyone to turn in at least one gag on each sequence.”
⁹⁵
(Disney was correct when he said that the story had a “plot.” It does have one in the strict Aristotelian sense, with beginning, middle, and end—one of the first Disney cartoons of that kind.)

In November 1932, at the end of the outline for a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon, a burlesque of costume dramas set in medieval England to be called
Ye Olden Days
, Disney dwelled at length on the musical and comic potential in the story, and on how different characters could be portrayed: “I see this story as a wonderful possibility for a burlesque on a comic opera . . . For a change I would like to see us make a Mickey built around good musical angles . . . This is our first costume Mickey—think of gag possibilities with the King in his royal robes—his funny looking attendants—the court jester and the court musicians with quaint ruffled costumes with balloon trunks, etc. . . . Possible chance for a Zasu Pitts type in Clarabelle Cow as the lady-in-waiting—she
could be the nervous type who doesn't know what to do to help yet is a very sympathetic type—when Minnie cries, she cries too, and when Minnie is in love, she feels it too . . . The King could be the type that is very blustery and excited over the least thing. I have in mind Mary Pick-ford's story
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall
 . . . Chance for some funny characters in the King's army. The soldiers could have guns of the blunderbuss type with forked stick to hold them up while they fire them—making noise like auto horns along with muffled explosions.”
⁹⁶

These distinctive notes vanish from the outlines starting early in 1933; the closing notes from then on have a more functional, workmanlike quality, less concerned than before with the feeling behind the gags. Disney, the ever more confident coordinator, was stepping back still further from a day-to-day role in work on the films.

That work was becoming steadily more organized. Disney told Bob Thomas that Webb Smith devised what came to be called the
storyboard
, almost by accident: “We would sit in his office in the morning and think up gags. . . . After lunch I'd drop in Webb's office and he'd have the sequence sketched out on sheets of paper. They'd be scattered all over the room, on desks, on the floor, every place. It got too tough to follow them; we decided to pin all the sketches on the wall in sequence. That was the first storyboard.”
⁹⁷

It probably did not happen quite that quickly and neatly. If, as seems likely, the first real storyboard was put up for a 1932 Technicolor
Silly Symphony
called
Babes in the Woods
, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel,” other cartoons came after it without the help of fully developed storyboards. Wilfred Jackson remembered that the storyboard for the
Silly Symphony
called
Father Noah's Ark
(1933) “was just a grouping of sketches here and there on the board with each group depicting a gag or a short continuity of business for an incident.”
⁹⁸
It may have taken a year or two before the idea of telling a complete story through sketches pinned to a large piece of corkboard really took hold. But even in embryonic form, the storyboard's efficiency must have appealed to Walt Disney himself, at a time when the pressures on his time were multiplying, along with the budgets of his cartoons and the size of his staff.

Art Babbitt, a former animator at Paul Terry's new Terrytoons studio in New York, was one of the many new members of the staff; he was hired in July 1932. The Friday-night classes at Chouinard had ended by then. As reflected in Jack Zander's anecdote, many of the Disney animators had been reluctant to attend such classes, but by the summer of 1932, with the cartoons changing rapidly and drawing skills in greater demand, interest in formal art instruction was quickening. When Babbitt organized classes of his
own and hired a model, growing numbers of his colleagues turned up each week for three weeks.

Disney noticed that Babbitt was succeeding where he had not. At Disney's instigation, Babbitt moved the classes to the studio, where Disney picked up the tab. Babbitt said in 1973 that Disney “was quite upset. As he put it, it wouldn't be very nice if the newspapers ever came out with the story that a group of Disney artists were drawing naked women in a private house. . . . He thought it would look a lot better if these art classes were held on the sound stage.”
⁹⁹
Disney did not have to be persuaded of the value of such classes, of course. In November 1932, he hired a Chouinard instructor, Donald W. Graham, to teach life classes at the studio two nights a week.
¹⁰⁰

Phil Dike, who taught painting at Chouinard for four years before joining Graham at Disney's, said of his colleague that “he had a practical sense of what made things work, from his engineering background”—Graham had originally studied to be an engineer—“and also intuitively.”
¹⁰¹
William Hurtz, who studied under Graham at Chouinard in the mid-1930s, said that Graham “was concerned with space, volume, movement—kind of a structural approach to drawing.”
¹⁰²
That approach was highly appropriate for animated characters of the kind that were emerging in the Disney films.

As the Disney animators learned from innovations like Ferguson's moving holds how they could produce more lifelike animation, the life classes forced them to look outward, to consider the life to which some of their animation now bore resemblance. From their earliest days, the Disney cartoons' characters had been flat and simple formula characters, most often animals whose faces were, like Mickey Mouse's, white masks on black bodies. By 1932, though, Disney's animators were drawing characters that looked more realistic (very generally speaking) and could move convincingly in what seemed to be three-dimensional space.

Once a formula has been established, it exerts a powerful gravitational pull on artists who have used it. Resisting it, and observing life directly with the idea of reproducing it more accurately, is hard work, as the Disney animators found. The effects on their drawings were sometimes awkward at first. “I'd go to this art class,” Dick Lundy said, “and then I'd come back, and I would try to put bones in Mickey, and he wasn't built that way.”
¹⁰³

Mickey Mouse was immutably a formula character, but human characters were troublesome, too. In assessing the plausibility of characters on the screen, audiences make increasingly rigorous judgments the more closely those characters resemble themselves. Working with animal characters, animators could improve their skills without exposing their weaknesses to withering
scrutiny. It was in their animation of the animals in
Silly Symphonies
like
Birds in the Spring
and
Father Noah's Ark
, both released early in 1933, that the Disney animators showed most clearly just how rapidly their skills were improving.

By early that year, the Disney cartoons had changed so rapidly, in so many ways, that the timing was perfect for a cartoon that in its seven minutes summed up how far they had come—and how far they might go. Disney made just such a cartoon,
Three Little Pigs
, which was released in May 1933.

“I was told,” Walt Disney later wrote, “that some exhibitors and even United Artists considered the
Pigs
a ‘cheater' because it had only four characters in it.”
¹⁰⁴
Father Noah's Ark
, by contrast, was overflowing with animals of all kinds, as well as human characters. But the small cast of
Three Little Pigs
was exactly what Disney needed at this point. He had been making cartoons, like
Santa's Workshop
(1932), that were as intricate and detailed as elaborate mechanical toys or department-store windows at Christmas. Their characters were more realistically drawn than earlier cartoon characters, but they were not much more than moving parts. In
Three Little Pigs
, Disney was making a cartoon where the audience's attention would be squarely on the characters.

In his addendum to the outline for
Three Little Pigs
that circulated in the studio in December 1932, Disney talked at length about how to make those characters appealing:

These little pig characters look as if they would work up very cute and we should be able to develop quite a bit of personality in them. Use cute little voices that could work into harmony and chorus effects when they talk together and everything that they would say or do in the first part of the story, while they are building their houses, could be in rhythmical manner. Anything that they would say would be handled either in singing or rhyme. The old wolf could be the fourth in a quartette, the bass voice, growling snarling type. When he fools the little pigs, he raises his voice, into a high falsetto. All the wolf dialogue would also carry either in rhyme or song. . . .