The Animated Man Read online

  Zamora was, however, famously casual about his work, and he lasted at the Disney studio only about a year, from January 1931 until early in 1932. He was at one point a victim of Disney’s habit—familiar to his employees since the 1920s—of roaming through the studio after hours. Dave Hand, who described Disney’s nocturnal visits as “a little sneaky,” remembered when Disney—finding that Zamora had done no work on a scene—trapped him into bringing him a stack of blank paper with only a few drawings on top. Disney peeled off those drawings, revealing the blank paper beneath.68

  There was, in short, no smooth upward trajectory at the Disney studio, but more of a stuttering pace.

  Sometime in 1931, Disney said twenty-five years later, “I had a hell of a breakdown. I went all to pieces. . . . As we got going along I kept expecting more from the artists and when they let me down and things, I got worried. Just pound, pound, pound. Costs were going up and I was always way over what they figured the pictures would bring in. . . . I just got very irritable. I got to a point that I couldn’t talk on the telephone. I’d begin to cry.” He spoke again of weeping in a 1963 interview: “Things had gone wrong. I had trouble with a picture. I worried and worried. I had a nervous breakdown. I kept crying.”69

  Disney left with Lillian on a cross-country trip in October 1931 after he “finished a picture that I was so sick of. Oh gosh, I was so sick of it. So many things went wrong with it. And I went away ‘til that picture turned over”—completed its initial theatrical runs, presumably. On that trip, Disney said, “I was a new man. . . . I had the time of my life. It was actually the first time we had ever been away on anything like that since we were married.”

  When he returned, “I started going to the athletic club. I went down religiously two or three times a week. I started in with just general calisthenics. Then I tried wrestling, but I didn’t like it because I’d get down there in somebody’s crotch and sweaty old sweatshirt.” Disney moved on to boxing and then to golf and horseback riding. He showed up at the golf course at 5:30 in the morning, played five holes, then cut across the course to the eighteenth hole. “Eat breakfast fit for a harvest hand and then go up to the studio just full of pep,” he said. Starting in 1932, Disney played what Les Clark called “sandlot polo” with Clark, Norm Ferguson, Dick Lundy, Gunther Lessing, and Jack Cutting of the animation staff; they rode horses rented from a riding stable.70

  There is no way to know which cartoon Disney found so distracting, and it is not even clear how long he was gone on his restorative vacation—probably four to six weeks, but in any case not so long that his absence troubled the people who worked for him. None of his employees at the time ever cited his “breakdown” as a major event in the studio’s life. As closely as some of them observed their boss and tried to anticipate his wishes, his “breakdown” seems to have made no impression on them. Disney’s emphasis on his tears smacks of the self-dramatization—the obverse of “some of his ebullience”—that he sometimes lapsed into, but there is no reason to doubt that he was truly distressed.

  Roy was aware that something was wrong. He wrote to their parents on December 30, 1931, that “Walt is feeling much better than he was before his vacation, but is not back to his old self.” Roy wrote of a physical cause of Walt’s “trouble,” however—“some sort of parasitic growth in his intestines of a vegetable nature”—even though he added, “Things are going much better at the studio so it is much less of a nerve-wracking job for him than before.”71 Whatever the nature of that “parasitic growth,” it seems not have made any lasting impact on Walt’s health.

  There is little direct evidence of Disney’s thinking in the early 1930s—nothing much in the way of memoranda, transcripts, or letters that speak to his state of mind—but this was the time when his role in the studio changed decisively. His distress probably arose from that circumstance, and it may have been building for years, contributing to his repeated arguments with his closest associates.

  By 1931, Disney’s involvement even in story, the area where he concentrated his efforts after he surrendered the director’s duties to Iwerks and Gillett, had diminished with the hiring early that year of two full-time gag men, Ted Sears and Webb Smith. After so many years of animating and then directing—and, before that, years of other kinds of jobs that required working with his hands, and before that, years of manual labor, all the way back to his newspaper-delivery days—Disney now had to persuade himself of the legitimacy of purely mental work.

  He was still trying to persuade himself, a quarter century later. “People don’t . . . attach any importance to the coordinating of all the talents that go into these things,” he complained in 1956. “The vital part I played is coordinating these talents. And encouraging these talents. . . . I have an organization over there of people who are really specialists. You can’t match them anywhere in the world for what they can do. But they all need to be pulled together.”

  For Disney to be a coordinator in 1931 was especially hard because he was not leading his men toward some goal that only he could see. He was leading them toward something that even he had only a vague conception of. His new role—and his difficulties in adjusting to it—were making more complex what been a basically simple personality. Like his father, he had always been an entrepreneur by nature, with an entrepreneur’s rather diffuse urge to dominate and control. Now he was on the verge of becoming an artist, too. With that change would come an impulse to control for increasingly distinct and ambitious purposes.

  Disney passed through his crisis as the studio itself was becoming a somewhat different place, one where more of the people who worked there were taking their work seriously—not just feeling delight in the occasional well-executed scene, but striving for consistency at a higher level. There was still plenty wrong with the Disney cartoons. However much Disney may have wanted to ban rubber-hose animation, it still turned up, in quantity, in the Mickey called Barnyard Olympics, released in April 1932. More than one Disney cartoon from early 1932 brims over with obvious, cost-cutting cycles. But the tide was turning the other way.

  “Everybody was enthused in those days,” Ed Love said. “We’d have meetings, and Walt would talk, and everybody would yak. I remember they’d talk about simple things like how do you go from putting stuff on twos to on ones. It was a big deal, and nobody could figure out what to do.”72 (The questions involved were when to use the same drawing for two successive exposures, or frames of film, as opposed to using a separate drawing for each frame, and how to manage the transition from one to the other.) Dick Marion (later known as Dick Hall), who worked as an inbetweener under the animator Jack King, was fired by Disney around the end of 1931 when it came out that he was looking for another job. “You had to be dedicated,” he said, “and that was not being dedicated. I shouldn’t have even thought about leaving.”73

  Around the beginning of 1932, in a step that speaks of Disney’s new confidence in his role as coordinator, he ordered his animators to start making their animation drawings as rough sketches, rather than finished drawings, and to make pencil tests of the roughs. Until then, pencil tests were shot only after the animation was in finished form, ready to be inked on cels. In Wilfred Jackson’s recollection, it was seeing some of Norm Ferguson’s very rough animation in pencil test—animation that “read” clearly despite the sketchiness of the drawing—that spurred Disney to order the change.74

  Kendall O’Connor, who as a Disney layout artist knew Ferguson a few years later, described him to Mark Langer as “a typical New Yorker, high pressure and very fast. I think he thought we were all too slow out here. . . . He twiddled his hair, a little forelock, with a finger all the time he talked to you. He was a very nervous chap.”75 That nervous energy probably found a readier outlet in rapid sketching than in finished drawings.

  “By encouraging Fergy to concentrate on the actions with rough drawings and assigning to him an excellent draftsman to clean up his animation drawings,” Jackson wrote, “Walt felt Fergy was able
to produce better quality as well as great quantity of outstanding animation. Walt felt, also, that it should work this same way for his other animators and let them know he expected them to do their animation in the same way, too.”76

  Ferguson was possibly not the first Disney animator whose work was cleaned up by others, Jackson said. But “I do recall Fergy’s use of a cleanup assistant being held up as the example of how he wanted all the other animators to work by Walt, when some of them were reluctant to adopt that method.”77 Before Disney’s edict, by the time he saw a scene in pencil test it was so far along the road toward ink and paint that his criticisms must have frequently been more relevant to the animator’s next assignment than to the scene at hand. But now he could use pencil tests of rough animation to get at his animators’ work before it was too late to make major changes. “Walt felt that if you roughed out an action,” Les Clark said, “you could see much faster whether it would turn out the way Walt wanted it to. If it didn’t, discard it, and make changes. You didn’t have to throw away a lot of cleaned-up work.”78

  By insisting that they draw their animation roughly, Disney was encouraging his animators to think in terms of movement, rather than individual drawings. “The hardest job,” he said in 1956, “was to get the guys to quit fooling around with these individual drawings and to think of the group of drawings in an action. They couldn’t resist when they had a drawing in front of them that they had to keep noodling.”

  Some among the New York animators, especially, showed a taste for essentially mechanical solutions to animation’s problems. Dave Hand, when animating something like a flock of birds in Flowers and Trees (1932), “would chart it out,” Dick Lundy said, so that the birds moved not in flowing, slightly irregular movements that would suggest real life, but in robotic patterns instead.79 It was probably in Jack King’s work that those old ways of animating collided most conspicuously with the new ways that Disney was cultivating.

  Chuck Couch, one of the young Californians who began populating the Disney studio’s lower ranks in the early 1930s, was King’s assistant, and he remembered King as “a meticulous draftsman; he didn’t rough stuff out very much. He’d always make very clean drawings.”80 When King joined the staff in 1929, such “clean drawings” were highly valued because the inkers had so little difficulty tracing them onto cels. Dick Lundy, who was also hired in 1929, remembered that one reason he got his job was that “they liked my line. I had a hard line, which was great for inking.”81 King’s drawings, though, were not simply clean, but rigid. King traced one coin for Mickey Mouse’s head and another for his belly—small coins for long shots, larger coins for closer shots—and, as Wilfred Jackson said, “that made a real stiff little character.”82 Les Clark saw Ben Sharpsteen, too, use coins to draw Mickey’s head.83 Such expedients weighed against moving the animation in the direction Disney wanted, and the animators who indulged in them felt his wrath whenever he learned what they were doing.

  Since the construction of the 1931 additions to the studio, Disney had been watching pencil tests in a small windowless room that quickly came to be called the sweatbox. Before that, Disney had looked at pencil tests on a Moviola. According to Wilfred Jackson, Disney switched from Moviolas to the sweatbox in part for his own convenience—so he would not have to “respond to requests all through the day,” from one animator after another, to look at tests on the Moviolas—but in large part so that the animators could keep in touch with what their colleagues at the rapidly growing studio were doing. Once the sweatbox had been set up, Ben Sharpsteen said, “Walt devoted considerable time to sitting in” on pencil tests “with most of the animators concerned on the picture.” Here again was the newly confident artist, or coordinator, at work, enlisting his animators in sustained scrutiny of their colleagues’ work as well as their own.

  The negotiations with Powers had left the Disneys cool to their new distributor, Columbia, and they wasted no time in signing with United Artists (UA) less than eight months later, in December 1930. That agreement was a striking advance over the Columbia deal, since it provided for an advance on each cartoon of fifteen thousand dollars. It took a year and half for the Disneys to work off their obligations to Columbia, however, and the first cartoons under the new agreement with UA did not appear until mid-1932. Early that year, the Disneys and UA began gingerly to explore the idea of making one or more of the Silly Symphonies in Technicolor. The idea originated with Walt Disney, but it was Roy Disney who exchanged letters with Al Lichtman, UA’s vice president and general manager for distribution, at its New York headquarters. Moving to Technicolor was not to be undertaken lightly; earlier color films had neither looked good nor been accepted by audiences, and the additional cost for prints (twelve thousand dollars for two hundred prints, Lichtman said) would be substantial. Success might even be a bigger headache than failure, Lichtman suggested: if the exhibitors wanted color in all future Silly Symphonies, “could we get enough additional money [from the exhibitors] to pay for the extra cost of colored prints?”84

  The Technicolor company itself was behind him, Walt Disney said in 1956, because “they were not quite far enough along with the color process to go into heavy production with any big live-action theatrical feature. A cartoon was ideal for their experimentation.” The cartoon Disney had in mind for Technicolor treatment was called Flowers and Trees. He had completed it in black and white by early June 1932, when Lichtman told Roy that it was “one of the nicest Symphonies I have ever seen,” so nice that UA was going to release it as its first Silly Symphony.85 Roy asked him to hold off until the color version was completed—a version no doubt made with the same inked cels, but with the black-and-white paint washed off their backs.

  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.