Creators (35 page)

Disney’s original company, the Laugh-O-Gram Corporation, made short animation films, animation plus photography films, and advertising shorts using cartoon figures. But though Disney owned his own movie camera, bought on credit, and borrowed cash, he was forced into bankruptcy. All he kept was the camera and a print of
Alice
to use as a sample. He was forced to disband his team and use his camera for freelance news photography, making Kansas City his base and selling his footage to Pathé, Selznick News, and Universal News, all based in Hollywood. He completed his plus fours outfit with the badge of the newsreel cameraman, a cap turned backward. He did private jobs, too—filming weddings and funerals at $10 or $15 each. He did not starve, but he often lived off canned beans. His contacts with the news studios persuaded him that he had to establish himself, and a new production company, in Hollywood. So he sold his camera and, with the proceeds, bought himself a ticket there, with $40 as his capital, traveling on the famous train
California Limited
, in July 1923.
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The early 1920s, full of hope and daring, were a classic period for American free enterprise, and for anyone interested in the arts—acting, writing, filming, design, costumes, sets, music. Hollywood was a rapidly expanding focus of innovation. But Disney had a very hard time getting work of any description in the movie industry, trudging from studio to studio and borrowing money just to eat. He went back to making animated cartoons, drawing a head, mouth, and eyes, then a body of single lines—“they looked like white matchsticks on a black background.” He also used his Alice sample to get a series going. He shot the live part against a white drop (the camera was hired at $5 a day), then drew the cartoons around her. He organized a group of local children, each paid 50 cents a day, to act skits around Alice, and he trained his great-uncle Robert’s Alsatian dog to be part of the fun. Each reel consisted of 900 feet of film of real children and the dog, and 300 feet of animated cartoon. Disney wrote the script (or improvised it); built the sets in the open
air—his “studio” was a small back room in a real estate office rented for $5 a month—made any props he needed; produced, directed, and filmed it himself; and then sat down to draw the animation. The first movie cost him $750 in all, and he sold it “east” (i.e., to a New York syndicate) for $1,500, his first real profit.

He had a contract for a dozen movies, and the first six he made entirely by himself. These he sent to Ub Iwerks in Kansas City, and then he brought Iwerks out to help with the animation. There is a curious similarity between his work with Iwerks and Picasso’s collaboration with Georges Braque in the invention of cubism nearly two decades earlier. So closely did Picasso and Braque share their ideas and techniques that a few years later it was sometimes impossible to tell which of them had produced a certain canvas, or if both of them had; neither painter could tell either. In some cases the mystery remains to this day. Equally, the precise roles of Walt and Ub in the early successful animations can no longer be determined with certainty. It is clear that the basic ideas came chiefly from Disney. But many of the most effective touches sprang out of the animation process itself, and here Iwerks was important. Disney also hired another draftsman, Tom Jackson. Disney did the initial outlines of the drawing himself, and his two assistants filled them in. Then, gradually, he gave his assistants entire scenes to do, but he insisted on a distinctive Disney style of drawing that became, and remains to this day, his hallmark. He made the maximum use of circles because they were easier to draw fast. Even so, each short movie took a month, “and was the hardest work I have ever done.”
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It is impossible to exaggerate the need for a producer like Disney to respond quickly to changes in public taste and to the need for novelty. Just as Picasso, in Paris, went from one phase to another, to cater to the insatiable appetite for ideas of the art world, so Disney had to adapt and change his cartooning. “The east” reported that audiences were tiring of Alice, and indeed of animation plus photography. They wanted a “new character.” Disney invented a rabbit called Oswald, who was all cartoon, with long ears, long feet, and a little knob of a tail. Live action and real people were eliminated, and Disney’s output remained
homogeneous for a long time.
Oswald
was a success, but Disney found that once his shorts acquired a reputation, other studios, bigger and with more capital, tried to raid his staff and steal his animators by offering them more money. He could frustrate this process by inventing a new character, rather as, nearly a hundred years before, Charles Dickens defeated pirates, before the age of copyright, by conceiving a new story and writing it fast.

The result was a mouse. Disney said that in Kansas City a mouse had lived in or on his desk and he had become fond of it and recognized its possibilities for affectionate animation. Disney said he sometimes caught mice in his wastepaper basket, where they fed on bits of candy wrappers, and that he put them in a cage on his desk so he could study their movements. He became especially fond of one specimen, and when he left Kansas City for Hollywood he carried this mouse into a field and released him. He had called the mouse Mortimer, so when he decided to feature a mouse series, he chose the name Mortimer Mouse. But his wife, Lilly (he had just married on the strength of the profits from
Alice
), objected: “Too sissy.” That was when Disney picked Mickey. The essence of Mickey Mouse was that he inspired affection, just as the mouse on Disney’s desk had “won my stony heart,” as he put it. Picasso had, in effect, turned the bodies and faces of his women and models into caricatures, cubist cartoon characters, animated (often enough) by contempt and even hatred. But Disney produced a mouse animated by admiration of its antics, and even by love. It is significant that Mickey Mouse, in the year of his greatest popularity, 1933, received over 800,000 fan letters, the largest ever recorded in show business, at any time in any century. (The next largest figure was the 730,000 letters Shirley Temple received in 1936.)
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But the mouse had first to inspire affection, just as Picasso had to inspire awe (and a sense of dread by his rejection of nature). Therein lay Disney’s genius: he could make people, especially children, love his creations. The process was not simple—it was in fact extremely complex, as was Picasso’s progress away from representation. The earliest Mickey was described as “functional. Not handsome. He had black dots for eyes, pencil legs, three fingers per hand, a string-bean body, and a jerky walk.” It
was pointed out, however, that Mickey was a kind of self-portrait (as were some of Picasso’s distorted heads in 1915–1925, and much later). The soulful eyes, when they emerged; the pointed face; the gift for pantomime were those of his creator. The earliest Mickey does not look lovable to our eyes, nearly a century later. His jerkiness was technical, rather than deliberate. With every month that passed, animation was becoming more complex, and Disney, to outpace his competitors, forced the pace. He used sixteen drawings to make Mickey move once. The team of animators had grades, with senior members drawing the key moves, following Disney’s own sketches, and juniors filling in. About 14,400 drawings went into a ten-minute cartoon short.

While Mickey was in his awkward infancy, backed by music provided, in the usual way, by the movie theaters, Warner Brothers released (1927) the integrated sound picture
The Jazz Singer
, starring Al Jolson. Disney had made three Mickey shorts, but he jumped for joy at the idea of talkies because he had always believed sound to be the true third dimension of movie cartooning. Disney had no sound equipment and proceeded on a do-it-yourself basis, which is a model of entrepreneurial improvisation. He got Jackson to play a harmonica; he bought nightclub noisemakers, cowbells, tin pans, and washboards for scrubbing noises. The problem, as Disney saw it, was tempo and mathematics. Sound film ran through the projector at the rate of twenty-four frames a second. If his sound tempo for a mouse movie was two beats each second, he had to beat every dozen frames. He introduced a metronome, then drew the noises on blank music sheets to produce a sound score. The cartoon animation and the sound effects could thus be devised to synchronize. But it was one thing to produce a sound score and quite another to record the score, mixing noises with orchestral accompaniment—and yet a third to integrate the sound into an animated film. New York, not Hollywood, was then the headquarters of the recording and music industries. In the rush to embrace talkies by all movie producers in 1927, not only was equipment in short supply, but the whole business was bedeviled by copyright restrictions imposed by big recorders such as RCA, who wanted $3,500 from Disney to sound-back his Mickey, and insisted on doing it their way
instead of his. He refused and devised his own method, often sidestepping copyright barriers by ingenious dodges. He hired an orchestra leader, Carl Edwards, and thirty players. They were packed into a tiny studio, and eventually were reduced to sixteen to save on wages.

To make the recording, Disney’s method was as follows. Sound required 90 feet of film a minute. Individual pictures were projected on a screen at the rate of twenty-four a second. The musical tempo was two beats a second, giving a beat every twelve frames. All this, including sound effects—bells, gongs, etc.—had to be marked on the score. The film was marked with India ink every twelve frames. When it was projected in the recording studio, the mark made a white flash on the screen, becoming a visual substitute for the ticking of the metronome and keeping the music director (or sound effects chief) on the beat. It took a great deal of effort, time, and rerecording to get the system working smoothly; and by the time the composite print was made, with fully synchronized sound, the Disney brothers had run out of cash and had even had to sell their father’s car.
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This first sound movie using the mouse was called
Steamboat Willie
and shown early in 1928. It was a huge success, not only because of Disney’s technical triumph of synchronized animation, but because of the ingenuity of what Disney got the mouse to do in producing noises. Therein lay his extraordinary gift, the imagination to enter into the head of a half-mouse, half-man, and devise weird and hilarious things to do as the mouse steered a boat down the river.
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The possibilities opened up were limitless, a new kind of anthropomorphized animal art that would have fascinated Dürer. The cartoon movie came of age with this enchanting little picture. Like Dürer, who effectively invented the art of illustrated printed books, Disney had invented the sound cartoon, a combination of imaginative drawing, scripting, and engineering science. It was, and remains, a wonderful example of creativity—the birth of a new art form. Disney could now borrow money from the banks, and he quickly delivered a series, the importance attached to the sound track being reflected in the name,
Silly Symphonies
. The first,
The Skeleton Dance
, was backed by Grieg’s
The Hall of the Mountain King
, Saint-Saën’s
Danse Macabre
, and bone-rattling. This worked too
with audiences. But the clamor was for “more mice.” By the end of the decade Mickey Mouse was the best-known figure in movies. Mickey’s voice was originally done by Disney himself, then became a standard sound track. Other characters devised by Disney soon appeared: Minnie Mouse, Figaro the Kitten, Chip the Chipmunk, Pluto the Pup, Goofy the Dog, and Donald Duck. The way in which Disney devised the infuriated animation of Donald to synchronize with irascible quacking noises was another triumph of imagination. This was the first time in the history of art that drawing had been not merely animated but vocalized. Disney’s stress on the importance of sound and song in animated drawing was finally vindicated by his cartoon
The Three Little Pigs
, made in 1932. The movie originally got a cool reception from distributors because, they claimed, it had only four characters: three pigs and their enemy, the wolf. It was said, “Walt is cutting down on characters to save money.” The movie was saved when Disney decided that it needed a theme song, and it was produced by the entire studio. An animation scriptwriter, Ted Wears, wrote a series of couplets with the chorus “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?” and a young studio musician, Frank Churchill, who had never composed before, devised the marvelous tune. The result turned out to be one of the greatest song hits of the twentieth century, and a catchphrase that resonated throughout the world. This song not only launched the pigs in their film life but gave Disney’s animated image of them a global life long after the cartoon itself faded.
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The year 1932, perhaps the worst year of the Depression, also saw Disney release for exhibition his first cartoon in color,
Flowers and Trees
. This underlined his emphasis on the study of nature for inspiration in depicting movement in cartoons. Though Disney and his animators stylized their subjects—such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, with their strongly individual features and characteristic movements—the studio regarded nature as the one and only true source of Disney art. Animators, led by Disney himself, constantly watched movies of animals, and live animals were brought into the studio for study. It was Disney’s view that nature was a richer source of humor than the human imagination. What he and his team supplied was anthropomorphism. In 1934 Webb Smith devised and Norm Ferguson animated a
sequence in which Pluto the puppy dog tries to shake off a strip of flypaper. This superb little movie had an enormous influence on the cartoon trade. It delighted audiences because the dog remains a dog while being endowed with human resources—obstinate determination and fury.
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Disney could only anthropomorphize successfully if he kept his animal movements highly realistic, and set them against plausible backgrounds. He regarded color as a godsend, almost as crucial as sound, because it enormously increased realism. He experimented widely with color systems before he adopted Technicolor, and signed an exclusive contract with its manufacturer to use the three-strip system needed to produce the full chromatic range.
Flowers and Trees
was not only an eye-opener, displaying the huge leap that color made possible in the depiction of nature. It also set completely new standards for future realistic backgrounds for animated characters.
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Disney was now moving toward cartoon fires, waves, winds, and storms, as well as anthropomorphized trees, flowers, and man-made objects.