The Animated Man (27 page)

As work on the film progressed, Disney became ever more absorbed in his characters and the story. Robert Stokes, one of the animators of the girl Snow White, spoke of observing him: “I can remember nights when I worked a little bit of overtime, say, and he'd come in and pull up a chair and we'd talk . . . until eleven o'clock, just his views on things. Animation, the character, the type of person this character was—he believed that this character was a live person, and he had a way of instilling that in you. . . . I'd hear him padding around in the various rooms, maybe run a Moviola or flip a few drawings and then go on to the next room.”
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Dick Huemer remembered Disney's “utter dedication” during work on
Snow White:
“He used to come on like a madman, hair hanging down, perspiring . . . Christ, he was involved.”
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Wilfred Jackson, who moved over from short subjects to direct part of
Snow White
in 1937, said: “There is more of Walt Disney himself in that particular picture than in any other picture he made after the very first Mickeys. There wasn't anything about that picture—any character, any background, any scene, anything in it—that Walt wasn't right in, right up to the hilt. . . . I mean literally that he had his finger in every detail of that picture, including each line of dialogue, the appearance of each character, the animation that was in each scene . . . nothing was okayed except eventually through his having seen it.”
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It was not just the animation of the dwarfs that caused headaches as production of
Snow White
spread beyond the small group that had worked on the film through much of 1936. On the shorts, a single layout man and a single background painter typically handled an entire film, assuring a consistency of treatment; but
Snow White
would, of necessity, be spread among dozens of artists. Here again it fell to Dave Hand to try to fit everyone into a single harness. As the layout artists for different sequences bumped against one another, it was all too easy to miss an opportunity to make what was on the screen seem more real. “There must have been at least fifty or sixty corners in the main room of the Dwarfs' house,” the layout artist Tom Codrick lamented, “because different units were working on the same room and had basic thoughts about what the room was like or the shape of it.”
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To further complicate matters, Disney planned to shoot parts of
Snow White
on the new multiplane camera, a gargantuan device his technicians had designed to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality. For those scenes, the cels, background paintings, and overlay paintings might be on as many as six different levels, with the backgrounds and overlays painted on sheets of glass mounted several inches apart. As the camera moved—trucking in and out or panning—different levels would come in and out of focus, as if they were being photographed by a live-action camera. Hand worried aloud that multiplane scenes might stack up late in production.
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Disney's attention to detail extended to such matters as well as to the characters. In a September 3, 1936, story meeting on Snow White's encounter with the animals in the woods, a stenographer recorded these comments, probably directed mostly at the layout artist Charles Philippi, one of the participants: “In the long shots, work in the larger animals in the foreground. Also work in shadows of leaves against the trees wherever possible. Work in mushrooms through this sequence—different colored mushrooms that you see in Europe.”
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A month later, talking about the dwarfs' march home from their mine, he said he wanted “different settings as they walk along—some trees that have
lost part of their bark and stand out white in spots—have them go through a bunch of pines and come out in an aspen grove—or birches . . . and spots where there are big rocks with moss on them of different colors—young and green and old, dark and dried.”
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Disney's conception of his film matured so remarkably over the two years of production that he was able to resist even the strong temptation to pump up the brief sequence in which the dwarfs mourn Snow White at her bedside. Almost a year after the film was finished, Dave Hand was still speculating about how, “had we been clever enough, and analyzed the situation more thoroughly, we could have obtained a stronger audience reaction.” Hand pointed to the pies that Snow White was making when the queen interrupted her and tempted her into eating the poisoned apple: “Might we not have used these uneaten pies as a touch in there to draw a little more of a tear from the audience? By a deep analysis of our situation, might we not convey the idea to the audience a little stronger, instead of this crude way of presenting Snow White dead and the dwarfs around her crying?”

Hand was speaking to a studio audience, and some of his auditors got into the spirit of things, suggesting that the sequence could have been made even more affecting if the soup and bed-building sequences had been left in the film: “It would have been a touching thing to have shown Snow White on that bed—the dwarfs wanted to build it for her, then got it ready only in time for her death.”
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That sort of overemphasis, so common in Hollywood live-action features, threatened to invade
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
throughout its production. Work on the film was less a search for such weak ideas—they were there from the start, as with the “tear-jerker” of a prayer that Disney himself initially thought that Doc should deliver—than a continuing struggle to keep them out. Disney not only had to work free of his own mistakes, but he also had to resist well-meant but potentially deadly suggestions from members of his staff. He had to exclude from his film anything that might amount to an expression of doubt that animated characters could ever command an audience's attention for the length of a feature film.

Disney's firmest expressions of confidence in his medium came during work on the grieving sequence, which was written and animated in the spring and summer of 1937, late in production of the film. He insisted, in effect, that the dwarfs could win the audience's sympathy without begging for it. “Each one should do a simple thing,” he said. “If you try to do too much with the scene you will run into trouble.” He wanted his audience to see his characters plain. When the layout artist Ken Anderson voiced concern that the
dwarfs “might look funny crying,” Disney replied, “I think you'll really feel for them. . . . You'll miss something if you don't show close-ups, I think.”
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Disney never expressed any second thoughts about the deliberate pacing and tight framing of that sequence, but he did regret that he had not slowed the pace a little at other points in the film, as when Snow White prays for the “little men.” “Before we finished
Snow White
,” he said in 1938, “I was talking to Charlie Chaplin about it, and he said, ‘Don't be afraid to let your audience wait for a few things in your picture—don't be afraid to let your tempo go slow here and there.' Well, I thought he did it too much, because I used to get itchy from watching his pictures. But it's the truth—they appreciate things more when you don't fire them too fast.”
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In his memo to Don Graham, Disney had used the phrase “a caricature of life” to describe what he wanted from animation, but he dwelled mostly on the caricaturing of physical action. It was in work on
Snow White
, and particularly in his shaping of the animation of the dwarfs, that Disney embraced a broader conception of such caricature, one that encompassed the mind as well as the body. Bill Tytla's animation of Grumpy was the purest expression of such caricature. Tytla drew extraordinarily well, and he preserved in his animation the sense of a consistent character while representing accurately a tremendous fluidity of thoughts and emotions. “It is the change of shape that shows the character is thinking,”
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Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written—a point made especially clear by the changes in Grumpy's face in Tytla's animation. Grumpy was still a cartoon character, with a cartoon character's exaggerated features, a big nose especially, but Tytla took advantage of those features by using them to make the tumult inside Grumpy's head wholly visible.

Grumpy was the dwarf who at once most strongly resisted Snow White but also cared most for her. Tytla conveyed that mix of emotions with extraordinary vividness, so that, for example, when he sticks his tongue out, Grumpy is not so much hostile to Snow White as indignant and resentful that he cares about her. Tytla was, in effect, a “method actor” in animation. He owned Richard Boleslavsky's
Acting: The First Six Lessons
, the 1933 book that introduced to many Americans the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky's ideas about acting, and he pursued Stanislavsky's goal of an emotional identification with his character—something that simply had not existed in animation before.

It was through such animation that Disney reconciled his impulse to make a comic film—one organized around gags, as his shorts had been—with the serious nature of the story itself. The dwarfs were, in their appearance and
their actions, unmistakably comic characters, and
Snow White
itself had a clear comic structure, in a way that the original story did not. (In the film, Snow White's return to life is truly the happy ending, whereas the Grimms' story saves for the last the queen's gruesome death, the penalty she pays for trying to cling to youth and beauty.) But the film was also as serious, in its way, as a comic opera by Mozart, because the best animation of the dwarfs was so emotionally rich, the range of their emotions so persuasively broad. They were funny and endearing little men, not little men who did funny things.

Snow White
was important to the studio, Don Graham said while work on the film was still under way, because it knocked down ideas about what could and could not be done in animation. Difficulties lay not in “the limitations of animation,” he said, “but the inability of the animator to handle it or to understand the problem.”
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It was in Tytla's animation—which Graham admired tremendously—that animation's horizons opened widest, but others among the Disney animators were not far behind.

In the closing weeks of 1937, no one had time to consider the implications of what Tytla had done in his animation, and of what Disney had done in the entire film. Years later, Disney lamented
Snow White
's rough edges. “We were really not ready,” he said in 1956. “We needed another two or three years to do what we wanted to do on
Snow White.”
Some shortcomings, like the weak rotoscoped animation of the prince, were beyond remedy, for lack of time, money, and adequate skills, but Disney could correct another mistake. In November, just weeks before the film's scheduled premiere, he cut two minutes from Moore's sequence—the first one he animated—in which the dwarfs confront Snow White in their bedroom. Perce Pearce, a writer and then a director of part of
Snow White
, suggested in 1939 that Disney paid a price for relying heavily on written scripts in the early work on
Snow White
, when the bedroom sequence was written. Because it is difficult to describe pantomime action adequately, but easy to get the same point across through dialogue, “you just naturally go after it [by] over-writing dialogue,” Pearce said.
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The deleted minutes were heavy with dialogue made superfluous by Moore's animation of the rest of the sequence.

In inking and painting, particularly, the pressure in the final weeks was intense, as some of the women who worked there remembered many years later. Toward the end of work on
Snow White
, Les Clark's sister Marceil said, “it was almost as if you were in a trance, all the time, like an automaton, getting the stuff out.”
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In the drive to finish the film on time, Mary Eastman said, “the girls almost got a little hysterical over it. It was this great community effort, and we were the ones who were putting it through—for Walt,
who had such charisma. . . . The girls had a worshipful attitude toward him.”
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Said Margaret Smith: “We'd go in at seven and work until ten three days, and until five on the other two days. We worked all day Saturdays, and sometimes we'd work Sundays.”
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At the peak of work on
Snow White
, Dodie Monahan said, the inkers and painters were working “from seven in the morning until eleven at night. . . . I never heard anybody complaining; it was kind of a thrill to work there at that time, on the first feature.”
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Women were restricted to such work as a matter of studio policy, as a 1938 handbook for potential employees made clear: “All inking and painting of celluloids, and all tracing done in the Studio, is performed exclusively by a large staff of girls known as Inkers and Painters. This work, exacting in character, calls for great skill in the handling of pen and brush. This is the only department in the Disney Studio open to women artists.”
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The boundaries were not as rigid as that statement might suggest—Dorothy Ann Blank received screen credit as one of
Snow White
's writers, for example—but the assumption was widespread that women were suited only for “exacting” work, and not for animation.

Snow White
's negative cost (the total cost before any release prints were made) grew ultimately to almost $1.5 million, just a little less than the Disney's studio's total revenues in 1937, the year the film was completed.
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Disney liked to talk as if he were flirting with disaster in the last months
Snow White
was in production. “Roy has the greatest confidence in me, in our medium and in our future,” he wrote in 1940, “but he is a business man and doesn't like to live dangerously twelve months out of the year.”
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Despite the scale of the borrowing required to finish the film, there was probably never any serious risk that the money would run out. When Roy Disney arranged for a Bank of America executive to see an incomplete version of
Snow White
on September 11, 1937, he told Walt the previous day: “The bank matter is all set.” The banker was going to see the film with an executive from RKO Radio Pictures, Disney's new distributor, “purely for a little support of their own opinions and judgment,” Roy told his brother.
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