The Animated Man (30 page)

Left to right:
Rudolph Ising, Roy Disney, George Winkler, Margie Gay (“Alice”), and Walt Disney on the outdoor set where live action was shot for the
Alice
comedies, circa 1925. Courtesy C. G. Maxwell.

Walt and Lillian Disney outside the Disney Brothers Studio on Kingswell Avenue around the time of their marriage in 1925. Courtesy Rudolph Ising.

Disney holds a movie magazine's award for best short subject of 1933, won by
Three Little Pigs
. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

Disney played polo at the desert resort of Palm Springs in the 1930s. Courtesy Palm Springs Historical Society.

Lillian and Walt Disney disembark in New York from the Italian liner
Rex
on August 1, 1935, returning from their triumphant tour of Europe. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

Disney and child star Shirley Temple admire the special Academy Award—with seven statuettes representing the Seven Dwarfs—he received in 1939 for
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. Cliff Wesselmann Collection, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills. Courtesy Gregory Paul Williams.

Lillian and Walt Disney arrive for the premiere of
Fantasia
at the Broadway Theatre in New York on November 13, 1940. The theater was known as the Colony when
Steamboat Willie
premiered there twelve years earlier. Courtesy University of Southern California, on behalf of the USC Specialized Libraries and Archival Collections.

The picket line at the Disney studio in 1941 often reflected the artistic ingenuity of the striking employees. Art Babbitt is standing at left. Courtesy Art Babbitt.

Lillian and Walt Disney, on the
Queen Elizabeth
's sun deck, arrive in a rainy England in the fall of 1946. It was their first visit to Europe since the end of World War II. Quigley Photographic Collection, Walt Disney File, Georgetown University Library, Special Collections Division, Washington, D.C.

Disney testifies before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in October 1947. He condemned what he called the Communist role in the 1941 strike at his studio. AP Photo.

The Disneys—Lillian, Walt, Diane, and Sharon—return to Los Angeles from England on August 28, 1949. AP Photo.

By developing such animators, Disney had solved the worrisome question of how to assign them. Thomas, Johnston, and Kahl ultimately wound up animating many scenes apiece with Pinocchio, and there are no significant differences in how their work looks on the screen. That uniformity was owing not just to the animators' skills but also to the character himself. In his concern that Pinocchio be “warm,” Disney had made him bland and passive, robbing him of anything that made him interesting. The same fretting over warmth and “cuteness” transformed another character, Pinocchio's “conscience,” Jiminy Cricket, from a caricatured insect into a miniature man. “They call him a cricket, so he's a cricket,” said Ward Kimball, who as another of the rising young animators struggled with the design for the character. “He's small, so I guess he can't be anything else.”
²²

Even as he surrendered himself to the search for “cuteness,” Disney acknowledged the value in leaving even a relatively minor character with the same director and animator who handled him in earlier sequences. “That keeps the coachman's personality the same,” he said in a December 8, 1938,
Pinocchio
meeting.
²³
But by then such considerations were shrinking rapidly in importance.

While Disney was struggling with
Pinocchio
and to a lesser extent with
Bambi
, plans for another feature were taking shape in his mind. The new feature was the outgrowth of his decision in 1937 to make a musically more ambitious short than any he had made before—a sort of super
Silly Symphony
based on Paul Dukas's symphonic poem
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
, with Mickey Mouse in the title role.

Dukas's music told a story, one that had itself originated in another medium; Disney's greatest challenge was thus to come up with images that were more than superfluous. That challenge must have seemed manageable for a cartoon studio that had already provided a striking visual complement to Rossini's
William Tell
overture in
The Band Concert
, a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon released almost three years earlier.