The Animated Man (24 page)

Disney clearly admired Tytla, but “he and Tytla didn't fit together in the same way that he and Fred [Moore] did,” Ollie Johnston said. “Walt and Fred didn't seem to have any problem communicating with each other,” whereas Moore could be more difficult for others to understand. He talked in a sort of verbal shorthand that required a frame of reference to comprehend fully—and Disney obviously had it.
²⁹

Disney was now raising up animators to take the places that once would have been filled by older men who had worked at places like the Fleischer and Mintz studios. By 1935, the inbetween department had become a full-fledged training department, and, Don Graham said, “classes of a dozen or so new employees got six to eight weeks of instruction in drawing and animation,” the first two weeks of it entirely in Graham's life classes. They were also encouraged to attend the night classes.
³⁰

As the studio grew—by 1935 it had more than 250 employees—Walt Disney himself became a remote and even intimidating figure to some of his employees. Eric Larson, as a junior animator in the middle 1930s, typically saw Disney only in the sweatbox: “He'd go in the sweatbox, and he'd tear things apart, and he'd go out, in a matter of a half hour. . . . I had some demoralizing experiences with him right off the bat, when I started animating. For instance, in
On Ice
[which was being animated in the spring of 1935], Mickey and Minnie were skating and had these big smiles on their faces—they were happy—and I didn't take them off. Walt was sitting there next to me, watching this, and he turned to me and said, ‘Can't they ever shut their
damned mouths?' . . . I bet I hadn't even gotten to my room when somebody stopped me on the way and said, ‘I hear Walt wants you to shut Mickey and Minnie's mouths.' ”
³¹

Campbell Grant, who started as an inbetweener in 1934 after working in a federal arts project, recalled: “The whole philosophy at that time . . . was exemplified by Ben Sharpsteen, who once told me flat out, ‘Listen, you artists are a dime a dozen, and don't forget it.' He was pretty close to it; there were a lot of guys, and some damned fine artists, that were having a hard time.”
³²

With other jobs scarce, newer members of the staff had every incentive to try to find ways to catch Disney's attention. Thor Putnam, who joined the staff in 1934 and began working in layout the next year, remembered that one of the first things he learned was that “you always left a good drawing on your board” because Disney so often prowled the studio at night.
³³
In the story department, Homer Brightman said, the office politics were fierce, with real danger that good gags would be stolen. The only sure way to get credit, he said, was “to pull a terrific gag in front of Walt.”
³⁴
Joe Grant attracted Disney's eye with story sketches that incorporated color and were sometimes more finished than the norm. “Your whole focus was appealing to Walt to stimulate him,” he said. “And also to raise yourself in his esteem; after all, I was new.”
³⁵

In the middle 1930s, Disney's relationships with those employees who had known him since the studio was much smaller began to change irrevocably. It was not that their affection or regard for Disney diminished. Wilfred Jackson even speculated that Disney's cigarette cough was in part genuine and in part “consideration”: “I think he liked to let us know he was there. Anyway, there was that cough, and you'd always come to attention.”
³⁶
Grim Natwick recalled that when he came to the Disney studio in 1934, Disney “play[ed] handball with the guys, and even used to get out and play softball. . . . Walt was just like anybody else.”
³⁷
But Disney was becoming a celebrated man—he monopolized the Academy Awards for animated short subjects after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established that category in 1932—and his growing fame, along with his prosperity and his new baby, combined to make socializing with his employees increasingly what Dick Huemer called “an unnatural arrangement. . . . One by one everybody dropped out of the little coterie.”
³⁸
Disney did visit some of his employees' homes in later years (usually with a specific purpose in mind), and he occasionally recruited one of them as a traveling companion when Lillian was not available. But there was never any sense that he was “just like anybody else.”

Disney's separation from his employees coincided with his emergence as an artist, and the two developments were closely related.

“Nobody took offense at the slightest criticism,” Huemer told Joe Adamson. “We asked for it, we'd go to Walt and say, ‘Walt, in the last picture, I wasn't satisfied with something. What was wrong?' And he would try to tell you. . . . We had that interest in our product. It was a like a crusade to do the best, and it never seemed good enough.”
³⁹
Such traffic was to be in one direction, of course. Disney was not interested in revisiting even his most recent failures. Early in March 1935, the veteran animator Johnny Cannon sent him two typewritten pages on how
The Golden Touch
might have been improved—a gratuitous exercise, to say the least, but Disney responded graciously:

Some of the thoughts expressed sound very good and might have helped considerably to pep up the picture. However, at this stage it is too late. I know the picture is not good, but it is impossible to make any radical changes in it at this time. It is unfortunate that we missed on
MIDAS
as I felt that it had possibilities of being a very good cartoon. About the best thing we can do at this stage is to profit by our mistakes in the making of future pictures.
⁴⁰

Not only was “the best” to be as Disney defined it, but by 1935 he was articulating what “the best” meant to him as he never had before, at least on the record. If in the early 1930s the cartoons had advanced mainly thanks to the trading of ideas among the animators themselves—exchanges that took place in an environment that Disney created, of course—he had now more than caught up. Disney was always a man who wanted to be in charge, even in someone else's home. “You tried to be the host—it was your house, and your food—and he made it impossible for you to be the host,” said Kenneth Anderson, a highly versatile artist and trained architect who joined the staff in 1934. Instead, Disney took over and dictated how things should be done.
⁴¹
For him not to be taking the lead was, from his point of view, simply an unnatural situation.

On June 1, 1935, Disney sent memoranda to thirteen of his animators, criticizing their work individually. There is a tremendous gap between Disney's cheerleading of three years earlier and the cool, direct language he addressed to his troops in these memos. This paragraph preceded each memo: “The following suggestions are offered in the sense of constructive criticism only. In our apparent avoidence
[sic]
of your good points and stress on your weaknesses, we have not lost sight of any of your virtues. But praise accomplishes nothing but a feeling to a small extent of self-confidence. It is just as likely to be a dangerous factor and be of more harm than good to you. Therefore, take these in the sense in which they are offered, as constructive criticism and let's try to benefit by them.”

There was not a memo for every animator—Ham Luske apparently did not get one—but of those who did, no one escaped unscathed. Dick Huemer was losing interest in his animation after the first pencil test. Dick Lundy was not drawing well enough. Bill Tytla and Grim Natwick were guilty of a lack of system. To Bob Wickersham he addressed these comments:

It has been observed that you lack an understanding of the proper portrayal of gags. The development of showmanship is a valuable thing and plays a great part in one's analytical ability. Your sense of timing is limited and needs to be developed. Likewise, your resourcefulness in handling a personality has need of improvement. There is an approaching danger of a laxity in the general systematic handling of your work. Be sure to watch for every opportunity of making your drawings foolproof, from the assistant's and inbetween's standpoint. Don't lose sight of the fact that confusion at any point in a scene's progress, be it on your board or the assistant's or the inkers, makes for loss of time and an increase in animation cost.
⁴²

The memo for Art Babbitt was unique in that Disney's comments were addressed mainly not to his animation, but to the way he conducted himself: “It is up to the animators to maintain the morale of the plant by setting the examples for the younger men. In your own case, it has been observed that you have set bad examples many times by maintaining social relations during business hours, that, though of a dignified nature, have a tendency to create a non-professional makeup in younger and less experienced men. I believe we can count on your cooperation in this respect if only [i]n appreciation of the recent evidence of our faith in your ability.”
⁴³

When Disney wrote those memos, he was preparing to leave on a trip to Europe with Roy, Lillian, and Edna. He was not fleeing the studio in doubt and despair, as he had in 1931. There was a medical aspect to the trip—Roy said many years later that “Walt was having treatment for what the doctors said was a defective thyroid,” and Roy thought that getting away from the studio would be better for his brother than the injections he was receiving—and there was a business side, too, since Walt would accept an award from the League of Nations in Paris. But otherwise it was to be a true vacation, a tenth wedding anniversary trip for both couples, with visits to a half dozen countries. It was the first time either Walt or Roy had been to Europe since just after the war, and neither of their wives had ever been.

The Disneys arrived in London on June 12, on the boat train from Plymouth, and the Associated Press reported that “a throng that included many children” greeted them so enthusiastically that “police had to intervene to
protect them from the crush.”
⁴⁴
In the weeks afterward, they saw England, Scotland, France, Switzerland, Holland, and Italy, driving much of the time. “Walt was quite a tourist,” Roy said. “One of the things at Strasbourg—the mechanical clock up there [in the cathedral]. . . . Walt was intrigued with that clock in Strasbourg and made sketches of it and went to quite a bit of effort to try to get up in the tower to try to see how it worked. He wasn't successful in that. But things like that intrigued him very much.”

On July 20, the Disneys traveled from Venice to Rome, where they had audiences with Premier Benito Mussolini and the pope.
⁴⁵
Roy spoke of Mussolini's office in terms that all but cry out for cartoon treatment: “You know, he had a real big office—real big. He was back in the corner. We had to walk across that. The fellow that was taking us in had the squeaky Italian shoes that you may have heard. So, down there, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak all the way to Mussolini. He was sitting there and he has the spotlight on you and he sits in the relative shadow. You sat in the chair and you were right under a spotlight. But he was most pleasant, most cordial.”
⁴⁶

On August 1, after six weeks in Europe, the Disneys arrived back in New York on the Italian liner
Rex
.
⁴⁷
Four days later, they disembarked at the Santa Fe station in Pasadena, where, the
Los Angeles Examiner
reported, Walt was “immediately rushed by autograph seekers.”
⁴⁸

Disney's absence from the studio did not mean that cartoons were released without his involvement. The production records indicate that the cartoons released during and just after his trip were far along in work before he left, so he could have seen and approved the rough animation, at least. As for the cartoons in production, when he returned, Bill Tytla wrote, “some of the pictures took a beating—some parts had to be done over,” but Tytla himself managed “to get by with very little changes.”
⁴⁹

Disney had been reassured by the success in Europe of programs made up of five or six of his shorts—their success boded well for
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, and Disney's enthusiasm for the picture had been rekindled after a long dormant period. In an interview with Louella Parsons just after his return, he spoke in terms highly similar to those he had used with Douglas Churchill the year before. He expected to devote fifteen months to the production of
Snow White
—he was still thinking of having it ready for release at Christmas 1936, in other words—and to spend more on it “than we have ever spent on any four of our other pictures.”
⁵⁰

On the evening of October 8, 1935, Don Graham held the first of a series of classes in “action analysis.” The idea, Disney said in an October 17 memo, was to study the movements of the human body, and to hear at times from
animators who would describe “any advancement or improvement that they have been able to make in the handling of their animation.”
⁵¹
Observation of the real world, of how people and things actually looked and moved, had been a priority at the Disney studio since Graham's classes began in 1932, but now, with the feature in prospect, such study would become more intense.

As the animation changed, one casualty was the flicker marks around a character's head that Disney himself used to add. Such marks, Ham Luske wrote in 1935, “should no longer be used.”
⁵²

In the run-up to the feature, Disney's key people were committing their thoughts to paper in a way that was new. In August, Ted Sears wrote a memo on “Disney Characters at Their Best” (“Mickey is most amusing when in a serious predicament trying to accomplish some purpose under difficulties or against time”), and at the end of the year Ferguson, Babbitt, and other animators described how they animated the characters Sears had discussed from a story point of view. Disney intended that such memoranda would guide those members of the staff left behind on the shorts when he put what he considered his best animators to work on the feature.