The Animated Man (25 page)

Toward the end of the year, Disney himself reduced his thoughts to paper in several long memoranda, extraordinarily detailed compared with anything of the kind he had written before.

Even though the memo titled “Production Notes—Shorts” is unsigned and undated, it clearly was written around the end of the year, and the “I” who speaks in it is unmistakably Disney. (Neither is there any indication to whom the memo is addressed, although its content suggests that it went to the directors and a few other members of the staff who worked closely with him.) Disney dismissed two of the more inventive cartoons of the preceding year:
Music Land
, a musical fantasy in which humanized musical instruments from the “Land of Symphony” war with their counterparts on the “Isle of Jazz,” and
Cock o'the Walk
, in which barnyard fowl, in astonishing numbers, parody the elaborate Busby Berkeley dance numbers in such live-action musicals as
Gold Diggers of 1935
.

“True,” Disney wrote of those cartoons, “a lot of people will like these pictures, but the vast public that we are appealing to will not like them as a whole. . . . They are not the type of picture that we want to make, because we are making . . . pictures to appeal to the masses.” The best cartoons, he said, as if laying out a credo for his feature, appealed both to specialized tastes and to “the masses.” Writing in terms that applied at least as much to his feature as to the shorts, he fastened on the importance of the animators to successful films: “An animator should not be allowed to start on a scene until he
has not only the mechanics and routine of the business, but the feeling and the idea behind the scene thoroughly in mind.” Animators' time in story meetings should be devoted “to finding out what possibilities the scene presents to the animator, stirring up his imagination, stirring up his vision, stimulating his thought regarding what can be done in the scene.”
⁵³

In a December 20, 1935, memorandum evaluating Bill Tytla's animation in
Cock o' the Walk
, he emphasized caricature, calling it “the thing we are striving for.” He offered this advice: “On any future stuff where we use human action, first, study it for the mechanics, then look at it from the angle of what these humans could do if they weren't held down by the limitations of the human body and gravity.” He expressed a strong preference for “doing things . . . which humans are unable to do.”
⁵⁴

Disney emphasized caricature again in a memo he wrote to Don Graham three days later, to lay the groundwork for more extensive training: “The first duty of the cartoon is not to picture or duplicate real action or things as they actually happen—but to give a caricature of life and action.”
⁵⁵

There was, in short, a lot of intensive self-examination by Disney and his people, “with the thought in mind,” as Disney said in his October 17 memo, “to prepare ourselves now for the future.” The question was, as work on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
began to pick up speed again, whether Walt Disney's stubbornly personal working methods were really compatible with the industrial apparatus he had assembled and would need now to make a feature.

As in previous years, the increase in employees' numbers did not bring a significant change in the number of releases; only eighteen Disney shorts came out in 1935, one more than the year before. New employees were further dividing work that was already being done, as with the animators who now specialized in “special effects” like rain and fire, or they were doing jobs that had not been done before, as with the sound-effects department that Disney set up in 1934. It started with two members and soon grew to five.

Inevitably, the studio was growing more bureaucratic as it grew larger, but Disney—like many an entrepreneur at the head of a rapidly growing small business—continued to regard the studio as an extension of himself. Wilfred Jackson explained how that worked: “When [Walt] got ideas, he visualized the whole thing, 100 percent. . . . He'd give you a little action, he'd describe something the Mouse should do, and you'd think you had the whole idea of what Mickey was supposed to do, and you'd show him the drawings, and he'd say, ‘No, Jack, we talked this all over, his tail shouldn't be back there, it should be up like this.' ”
⁵⁶

However problematical Disney's intensely personal approach to filmmaking may have been in some respects, it also contributed immensely to the success of his films, for reasons suggested by Douglas Churchill in his 1934 article. “When he talks of a picture or a plot,” Churchill wrote of Disney, “he becomes animated, intense; his mimicry leaps out; he moves about impersonating the characters, making grotesque faces to stress his point.”
⁵⁷
This was a side of Disney's involvement that his animators found particularly appealing, and particularly helpful. Said Ward Kimball, who witnessed such performances in later years: “When he took the parts of . . . any of the people in the pictures, valets, anything—he all of a sudden was a valet, just as good, we said, as Chaplin, for that moment, in the room, showing us how it ought to be done.”
⁵⁸

That side of Disney's involvement is also particularly hard to grasp now. The transcripts of story meetings rarely give any sense of how he might have been portraying a character. The closest thing to a window on Disney's performances is probably a radio program heard only on the West Coast, the
Hind's Hall of Fame
Christmas show of December 23, 1934.
⁵⁹
At the time, he was wrestling with the continuity for
Snow White
, but the radio show is a romp, with Disney pretending to banter with his cartoon characters (all represented by the people who gave them their voices on the screen, like Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, and Pinto Colvig, the voice of Goofy).

Disney read scripts on any number of radio shows in the 1930s, always stiffly, but on the
Hall of Fame
he seems for once to lose himself in a role, that of the boss of a gang of unruly cartoon characters. Disney's sparring with Donald Duck and the others is not really acting so much as it is playacting—enthusiastic and spontaneous make-believe. He is playing “Walt Disney,” of course, but with striking emotional openness, and it was surely that openness, more than any acting skills, that made his performances so valuable to the animators and writers who watched him. There may be awkwardness in Disney's radio playacting, but there is no hesitation or embarrassment. Though Dolores Voght, Disney's secretary for many years, was not thinking of such performances when she said, “There was nothing subtle about that man at all, believe me,”
⁶⁰
her words sum up their particular virtues.

By 1934, the Disney cartoons were relying increasingly on dialogue recorded before the animation began—an aid to more realistic acting, because now the animator could be stimulated by what he heard in the character's voice. Disney himself had recorded Mickey's falsetto dialogue for years (after a long struggle in the first year or two to come up with a suitable voice), and he was joined in voice recordings by Marcellite Garner, a member of the
ink and paint staff who provided Minnie Mouse's voice. In recording sessions, Garner said, Disney “would go through a whole situation and act out all the characters and explain the mood, 'til I really felt the part. Burt Gillett did the same if it wasn't necessary for Walt to be there. However, no one else could just simply become all the characters as Walt did.”
⁶¹

In November 1935, Disney still intended to direct
Snow White
himself, but it is not clear just how much of the nuts-and-bolts work of a director he expected to do. A piece under his name that was published while
Snow White
was in production said that a cartoon director was “primarily an expert technician, versed in the mechanics of picture-making,” and Disney looked upon much of the director's work as “pretty routine,” Ben Sharpsteen said.
⁶²
But Disney clearly thought that the studio could absorb work on
Snow White
without serious disruption. As of late 1935, he intended, as he wrote in his memorandum titled “Production Notes—Shorts,” that “short subject directors and crews [that is, their layout artists and assistant directors] will remain practically as they are” during work on
Snow White
.
⁶³

In a November 25, 1935, memorandum, Disney listed how he expected to assign about a dozen of his animators to
Snow White
. He envisioned spreading the characters among the animators, so that Fred Moore, Bill Tytla, Bill Roberts, and Dick Lundy would all be animating the dwarfs. Likewise, although Ham Luske was to be in charge of Snow White herself, Disney planned to have Les Clark animating the girl, too, with Grim Natwick and another animator, Eddie Strickland, acting “in a way as assistants to Ham, handling [action] scenes under his direction, with Ham concentrating on personality entirely. I feel sure that both Natwick and Strickland will gain a great deal of knowledge by working this way with Ham.”
⁶⁴

In other words, Disney planned to cast his animators in only the most general terms, departing from a pattern he had already established in his short subjects. From the start of the United Artists release, Disney had encouraged more sustained and thoughtful work by his animators, giving many of them sequences lasting a minute or so on the screen. With
Three Little Pigs
he had gone a step further, casting his animators not just by sequence but by character. He had continued casting them in that fashion on many of the cartoons that followed, the
Silly Symphonies
especially.

In
Broken Toys
, whose animation was completed just a few weeks before Disney wrote his November 25 memo, the animators were cast very thoroughly by character, to the point that most scenes have only one character in them. A girl doll was wholly Natwick's, just as other characters belonged to Bill Tytla, Art Babbitt, and Dick Huemer. The doll was convincingly feminine
in both drawing and animation, like other characters Natwick had animated, and she could only have reinforced Disney's intention to assign Natwick to Snow White herself.

Other cartoons had been cast by character almost as thoroughly, and animators often shared scenes. But
Snow White
was going to be a much longer film, with many more characters, and Disney most likely shrugged off the idea of casting by character as hopelessly impractical, the sort of thing that might drag out production months longer. The alternative—smoothing out inconsistencies in the different animators' handling of the same character—must have seemed like the easier road to take.

Disney was, however, pitting his new film not against other short cartoons but against live-action features, with casts made up of real people. To hold an audience's attention, his characters' screen presence would have to be comparable to that of the live actors who would be their true competition. In a short cartoon, color and music and cleverness could easily outweigh minor differences in the way a character looked and moved after being drawn by several different animators. In a feature there was a much greater danger that such a character would seem superficial or even incoherent, a mere mannequin defined mostly by voice and design.

Even when he cast by character in the shorts, thereby making his animators the equivalents of live actors, Disney was not entirely successful. His most individual characters were always a little generalized compared with real people. The more naked a cartoon's plot, the more it magnified this shortcoming. A “story cartoon” like
Elmer Elephant
, with simple characters and simple plot, and music subordinate to both, was unmistakably juvenile, in a way that an intricate miniature operetta like
Three Little Pigs
was not, even though
Pigs
was based on a children's story. Disney's limited success with casting by character may have persuaded him that he had little to lose by taking a different approach.

The dwarfs in particular demanded a level of complexity that no earlier Disney characters had approached, and by 1935 they still existed mostly as vague story sketches. Audiences had to be able to tell them apart easily—they had to look alike, and yet different, but some elements of their appearance, like their clothes and beards, did not lend themselves to sharp differentiation. The vital task that Disney presented to Fred Moore and Bill Tytla at the beginning of 1936 was to make distinct everything about each dwarf that could be made distinct—eyes, noses, mouths, posture, waistlines. (The idea at first was to differentiate them even further by clothing them in what the color stylist Maurice Noble called “strong, simple colors.”)
⁶⁵

For Snow White herself, Disney had an even more striking answer to the question of how to preserve consistency across the work of several animators. All of Snow White's scenes were to be photographed in live action first, and the animation would then be based on tracings of the frame blowups. Disney evidently had something like this procedure in mind from early in work on
Snow White
. A memorandum titled “Routine Procedure on Feature Production”—undated, but written in the fall of 1934—assigned to the writer Harold Helvenston responsibility for “stage settings, sets, props, costumes,” and said that he “will be responsible for the setting of the stages, the production of all props and sets, and will see that the work on the stage progresses with a minimum time load.”
⁶⁶

This was probably Disney's response to the inadequacies of the character animation he saw in
The Goddess of Spring
. Why struggle with the animation of the girl, he may have reasoned, when a solution (already used extensively by Disney's rival cartoon producer Max Fleischer) was close at hand? The dwarfs and not the girl were to be at the center of the film, in any case.