The Animated Man (21 page)

Might try to stress the angle of the little pig who worked the hardest, received the reward, or some little moral that would teach a story. Someone might have some angles on how we could bring this moral out in a direct way without having to go into too much detail. This angle might be given some careful consideration, for things of this sort woven into a story give it depth and feeling. . . .

These little pigs will be dressed in clothes. They will also have household impliments
[sic]
, props, etc., to work with and not be kept in the natural state. They will be more like human characters.
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Only a few animators worked on the film, assigned carefully to characters, so that Norm Ferguson—the studio's pioneer in giving the semblance of life to animated characters—animated almost all of the Big Bad Wolf, whereas Dick Lundy and Fred Moore, an upcoming young animator, handled most of the pigs' scenes.

Moore was a small, compact man who survived in his colleagues' memories as something of a cartoon character himself. Although he was a superb athlete, “his proportions were cute . . . and it kind of tickled you to watch him move around imitating someone like Fred Astaire or Chaplin, or trying some fancy juggling act,” the animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written. “Even if the stuff dropped on the floor, Fred would always end up in a good pose—just like his drawings.”
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Early in work on the story, Albert Hurter had drawn the pigs as idealized versions of real young pigs, smooth and pink and round. Moore animated those characters with the pleasing elasticity that animators call
stretch and squash
. There was nothing loose or sloppy about this stretching and squashing—instead, Moore animated his characters from one pleasing shape to another. There was no sense that their true form had been compromised just to inject a little life into the animation. Instead, whatever shape they assumed at any given moment had the same pleasing roundness and solidity.

Norm Ferguson had shown animators how to suggest that a character was alive. Now Moore showed them how to enhance that illusion, almost to the point that it seemed that the character had a personality. His animation in
Three Little Pigs
—he handled the scenes at the start of the cartoon when the pigs introduce themselves—was charm itself.

The real genius of the cartoon, though, was that all its action took place within the musical framework that Disney described. In
Three Little Pigs
, the pigs' expressions, if not their movements, were still formulaic—they struck attitudes, rather than revealed emotions. There was no confusing them with any kind of real creature. It was music that filled the gap.
Three Little Pigs
was the first cartoon to plunge wholeheartedly into the sort of operetta style that had been germinating in the
Silly Symphonies
almost from the beginning of the United Artists release.
King Neptune
(1932), scored by Bert Lewis, opened with the title character singing about himself, and the operetta flavor was even stronger in
Father Noah's Ark
, whose characters introduced themselves through song within Leigh Harline's classically oriented score.

Frank Churchill, who wrote the score for
Three Little Pigs
, had nothing like Harline's musical education—Harline majored in music at the University of Utah—but he was a highly adaptable musician with a skill common
to musicians who worked in the silent-film era, the ability to improvise quickly to fit whatever was happening on the screen. Churchill was perfect as composer for
Three Little Pigs
because the cartoon's action required him to switch gears constantly. When the wolf pretends to give up his pursuit of the two foolish pigs, he goes into hiding to the accompaniment of what Ross Care has called “a charmingly bland ‘wolf-trot.' ” Later, the Practical Pig executes, in Care's words, “an imposing piano cadenza a la Rachmaninoff”—played on the sound track by Carl Stalling, Disney's original musician, who had returned to the studio briefly as a freelancer—“as the wolf literally blows himself blue in the face while vainly attempting to blow down the door of the brick house.”
¹⁰⁷
All of this takes place within a score dominated by “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” the song that Churchill wrote for the cartoon, but
Three Little Pigs
is so fragmented and musically demanding that the song is never heard in its entirety.

Since directors and musicians worked as teams in the early 1930s, assigning Churchill to
Three Little Pigs
meant assigning Burt Gillett to it, too. Gillett had been directing the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons, which by 1933 had become a series devoted mostly to comic adventures depicted in broad strokes. Even though Mickey Mouse and the other characters in those cartoons were little more than what Walt Disney later called “animated sticks,” it made a strange sort of sense for him to assign Gillett to a cartoon like
Three Little Pigs
, in which the characters themselves were the center of attention.

Gillett “was quite talkative, and a pretty good salesman,” Ben Sharpsteen said. “He'd act things out. It was pretty horrible, but that was what Walt wanted—it was stimulation.”
¹⁰⁸
Gillett was distinguished by his enthusiasm and energy and his small-boy liking for excitement, Wilfred Jackson said (Gillett chased fire trucks). He “visualized each thing with his whole body,” Jackson said, and this made him a “noisy neighbor” to have in the music room above Jackson's.
¹⁰⁹

Gillett did not bring to his direction anything like the care and precision that Jackson brought to the
Silly Symphonies
. Dick Huemer recalled forty years later that he was “just floored by the perfectionism” when he picked up his first assignment from Jackson, on a 1933
Silly Symphony
called
Lullaby Land
. “The fact that [Jackson] would hand me a scene, and all the [camera] fields would be marked, and the trucking [camera movements toward and away from the animation drawings] would be marked (I had never heard of cartoon trucking before), with a little red square indicating where the action would be in close-up. . . . This would be handed to me; and several action poses in that scene to boot.”
¹¹⁰
As Huemer said, “All I had to do was just
move [the characters] around”—and Jackson always conferred carefully with his animators about how they would do that, too. Gillett worked as a director much less precisely, exactly the right approach for the principal animators on
Three Little Pigs
(Moore and Ferguson rarely animated for Jackson). The important thing, with Gillett as director, was that animators who wished to bring more to the characters in
Three Little Pigs
could easily find room to do it, as Moore in particular did.

It was in such sensitive casting of director and animators, and in his understanding of how music could shore up half-grown character animation, that Walt Disney now made his ability as a coordinator felt, first in the studio and then beyond. “The main thing” about
Three Little Pigs
, Disney said in 1956, “was a certain recognition from the industry and the public that these things could be more than just a mouse hopping around.”

In terms of that broader recognition,
Three Little Pigs
was indeed a breakthrough, especially where the public was concerned. It played for only a week (May 25–31, 1933) at Radio City Music Hall in New York, but as it spread to neighborhood theaters it aroused more and more enthusiasm. No short cartoon had ever been so popular;
Three Little Pigs
ran for weeks at some theaters, through one change of feature after another. “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” was the first hit song to come from a cartoon.

The timing of the cartoon, and especially the song, made a difference—
Three Little Pigs
was released in the depths of the Great Depression, and its song could be heard as an echo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address, with the Big Bad Wolf a bogeyman no more to be feared than “fear itself.” But other cartoons were just as cheerful, and scoffed at the Depression much more directly, without stimulating anything like the same response. It was, Disney said in 1941, because he and his animators were beginning “to put real feeling and charm in our characterization” that
Three Little Pigs
was so successful.

“Feeling” was the key word. There was nothing like real feeling in
Three Little Pigs
, but it was the first Disney cartoon that fully employed many of the elements—lifelike movement, rounded forms that seemed to move in three dimensions, characters whose appearance was realistic enough to invite a suspension of disbelief—that would be most useful if a cartoon were ever to make an emotional connection with its audience. And this, it was increasingly clear, was where Disney wanted his cartoons to go.

If in the 1920s Hugh Harman was most concerned with cartoon acting, Disney was now seizing on its possibilities. Her husband acted out scenes, Lillian Disney said, “always—to the sky, the birds, to anything. He was always
making gestures—talking. . . . Laughing and acting out something he was working on. He was always doing that.”
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It was hard to translate this interest in “feeling” into animation that embodied it, especially when human characters were involved. When animation of
The Pied Piper
began under Wilfred Jackson's direction in May 1933, just as
Three Little Pigs
was entering theaters, the key scenes of Hamelin's mayor and the piper himself went to two young animators, Hamilton Luske and Art Babbitt. More than any other animators on the Disney staff, they could bring to the animation of human figures not just a reasonably high level of draftsmanship, but also an intense, analytical interest in how the human body actually moved.

Their scenes should have been a big step forward from Norm Ferguson's animation of the Big Bad Wolf or Fred Moore's scenes with the pigs. Neither Ferguson nor Moore had studied real movement as Luske and Babbitt had. Yet there is nothing so deadly in an actor's performance as the sense of performing consciously actions that ordinary people perform without thinking about them, and this sense pervades Babbitt's and Luske's animation. However lifelike a character's individual movements might be, those movements could not in themselves make the character lifelike. In fact, the reverse was true: isolated by analytical animation, even the most carefully observed movements would seem shallow and counterfeit.

Norm Ferguson's and Fred Moore's animation had much more vitality but also lacked the particularity of real people. Thus the challenge before them and all the other Disney animators was one that artists working with more respectable materials had met and mastered many times before, going back to the Greek artists of the classic period. What those artists valued most, E. H. Gombrich has written, was that “the new-found freedom to represent the human body in any position or movement could be used to reflect the inner life of the figures represented. . . . This is what the great philosopher Socrates, who had himself been trained as a sculptor, urged artists to do. They should represent the ‘workings of the soul' by accurately observing the way ‘feelings affect the body in action.' ”
¹¹²
Disney and the best of his animators, working in their own humble medium, were struggling to bring just such an emotional dimension to animation that represented the mechanics of movement with increasing accuracy. Theirs was not an easy task, considering animation's history of triviality and crude formulas.

In April 1933, shortly before the release of
Three Little Pigs
, Paul Fennell animated a scene for
Mickey's Mechanical Man
, a cartoon in which the robot of the title boxes a gorilla. “I had a test of Minnie, pounding the mat,” Fennell
said, and he showed it to Disney in the sweatbox next door to Wilfred Jackson's music room. “Walt looked at it, and ran it again, and he said, ‘You know what's wrong with this? You don't know anything about psychology. You ought to go home and read a book on psychology. It's feeling. You've got to really be Minnie, you've got to be pulling for Mickey to beat that big lunkhead. You've got to hit that mat hard, you've got to stretch.' I got a good bawling out, but I didn't understand him. Later on, I knew what he was trying to tell me. We learned it: feeling.”
¹¹³

By 1933, Disney had caught up with his best animators, and his ambitions for the medium were surging ahead of theirs. Now there were fewer and fewer occasions when the churlish Disney of the 1920s, the Disney who had driven away Hugh Harman and Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling, showed his face. The Disney in charge was once again the enthusiastic, ambitious Disney who had set up his own cartoon studio when he was just twenty years old—but armed now with more than a decade of experience making cartoons and, most important, with an artist's excitement about the possibilities he saw in his medium.

It was this combination, his powerful entrepreneurial drive combined with his new artist's sensibility, that made Disney so inspiring a figure to many of the people who worked for him in the middle 1930s. “Somehow,” Wilfred Jackson said, “Walt always made it seem to me that the most important thing in the world was to help him make a picture look the way he wanted it to look. It was a lot of fun to feel I was doing the most important thing in the world, every day.”
¹¹⁴

*
Iwerks began the 1930s releasing his
Flip the Frog
cartoons through MGM, the biggest and most powerful major studio, but then saw his fortunes decline. He rejoined the Disney staff in 1940—as an employee, not a partner. He specialized in solving difficult technical problems.