The Animated Man (32 page)

It was increasingly important to the Disney studio that
Pinocchio
be a hit. The studio's income went skidding down after
Snow White:
from $4.346 million in the first nine months of 1938, to $3.844 million in the next twelve months, to $272,000 in the last three months of 1939—lower even at an annual rate than in the pre–
Snow White
years. The studio showed a loss in that quarter.
⁴⁴
In June 1938, Disney floated the idea of paying his employees a very large bonus from the profits of
Snow White
—as much as a million dollars, compared with around $120,000 that was actually paid that year in “salary adjustments”—but by the fall of 1939, he had spent the money
Snow White
had brought him.
⁴⁵
Money was still pouring out—into
Pinocchio
, into
Fantasia
, and into a new studio in Burbank that was nearing completion.

Sharpsteen said many years later that Disney's unease about
Pinocchio
, voiced so often during production, had grown into distinct misgivings by the time the film was previewed in January 1940. The endless touching up continued even then, as Milt Kahl redrew the scenes at the end of the film showing Pinocchio as a “real boy.” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston drew the inbetweens for Kahl's animation. “As I recall,” Thomas said, “we had less than a full day to complete our drawings and get them over to ink and paint.”
⁴⁶

In the meantime, as work continued on
Fantasia
, there was evident the same attention to detail, but from different motives, to burnish a jewel rather than rescue a mistake. Disney's commands “sometimes added hours to our work” in the inking and painting department, Marcellite Garner said, “as for instance in a scene from
Fantasia
, we did long sliding cels of mud bubbling up. Must have been hundreds on a cel, and we used about five different shades of colored ink, so close in hue that we could hardly tell them apart.”
⁴⁷

Fantasia
was the beneficiary—and the studio the victim—of a subtler form of extravagance. During work on the film, as the effects animator Cornett Wood said, “effects techniques were invented on the spot, scene by scene,” the “effects” being things like the bubbles (for “The Rite of Spring”). “Everything depended on the needs of the scene,” Wood said.
⁴⁸
Sometimes this constant improvisation extended beyond the effects animator's own desk—the camera department and perhaps other members of the staff would be enlisted in the search for a certain effect, which might not be achieved until several tests had been shot. Once the desired effect was on film, no one bothered to write down the steps needed to produce it, except as a sort of personal reference, distinct from anything the studio required.
⁴⁹
The prevailing attitude, the effects animator George Rowley said of this ad hoc process, was that “it's done and worked out all right, so that's that.”
⁵⁰

Disney's attention in the late 1930s was splintered among not just
Pinocchio, Fantasia
, and
Bambi
, but also other features in earlier stages of development. The work on those embryonic features was dominated by written material, to the exclusion of drawings.

Al Perkins's highly detailed, 161-page “analysis” of
Alice in Wonderland
, dated September 6, 1938, is a particularly striking example. Perkins explains in a note at the front that his “chapter-by-chapter and scene-by-scene breakdown . . . has been prepared for the benefit of those in the Studio who may be called upon to work on the feature based on the book. Each scene or episode of the book has been summarized, and some preliminary exploration
has been made into various ways in which the material might be treated. No attempt has been made to work out a story line, to find gags or amusing business, or to develop any of the many characters into real personalities.”
⁵¹

Stories were developed as continuities and even scripts before they were visualized as story sketches. In the case of
Alice
, no drawings of any kind went up until May 1939, about six months after story work started, and even then the artwork was blowups of the Tenniel illustrations.

Disney himself began to take part in meetings on
Alice
in December 1938, around the time that
Pinocchio
's most vexing story problems had been resolved. The meeting notes indicate that Disney did not read Lewis Carroll's book until March 1939, and they reflect a great deal of frustration, confusion, and ambivalence on his part. On September 20, 1939, at a showing of a Leica reel for
Alice
, he spoke like a man trapped inside a mechanism he had designed himself but had come to dislike: “I don't think the day will ever come when we can write our stories. Some of the best stuff comes after we get thoroughly acquainted with the characters.”
⁵²

Features had generated writing problems as great as the animation problems—and those problems were magnified the more remote Disney was from the story work. That was true of no feature more than
Bambi
. In June 1938, Disney spoke as if
Bambi
would be ready for release a year later.
⁵³
By the end of 1938, though, that timetable had slipped to the point that he was speaking of production taking another two years.
⁵⁴

From the start, the
Bambi
unit was at a distance from the rest of the Disney studio. It worked at first in the “annex,” a building across the street from the main studio that also housed the training department. In October 1938, a little more than a year after story work began, the unit moved to a building at 861 Seward Street, several miles away. That building had housed the Harman-Ising studio run by Walt Disney's old colleagues Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, who by then had given up independent production and were cartoon producers at MGM.

Disney himself, preoccupied with problems at the Hyperion Avenue plant, almost never visited the Seward Street operation. Since only he could make real decisions, work there proceeded at a snail's pace under the supervision of Perce Pearce, who had been a key writer of both
Snow White
and “Sorcerer's Apprentice.” The unit was staffed mainly with strong draftsmen who knew how to draw animals. Drawing classes were held just for the
Bambi
unit, first at Seward Street and then over a cafeteria on Vine Street. Rico Lebrun, a Chouinard instructor and renowned animal artist, presided over classes in animal drawing for a year and a half.
⁵⁵

During story work, Carl Fallberg recalled, “we'd go out on field trips and look for animals and background material. It was all very, very scientific. . . . I even bought a pair of skunks from Minnesota and kept them over at Seward Street for a while.” (There were live deer on the Hyperion Avenue premises for a year or so, too. The state of Maine sent them to Disney in the summer of 1938.)
⁵⁶

When Disney did make a rare visit, he “knew what he wanted generally,” said Fallberg, who had worked under Pearce on “Sorcerer's Apprentice” and accompanied him to Seward Street. “But sometimes he couldn't put it into words and he'd have to see something, so there was a period when we'd try something out and be groping ourselves, and hoping that would be it. That was particularly true on
Bambi
, of course. . . . We were all a little bit in awe of it . . . it was so different from everything that had been done before.”
⁵⁷

In August 1939, with work on
Pinocchio
winding down and the animation of
Fantasia
under way, Disney began tending to unfinished business. He put Dave Hand in charge of
Bambi
, with an unmistakable mandate to accelerate work on the story. At the end of the month, Disney attended his first
Bambi
story meeting in more than a year. He attended more meetings after that, and the detours that had multiplied under Perce Pearce were closed off.

The planning and construction of a new Disney studio in Burbank had been another demand on Disney's time (as well as the profits from
Snow White
). The
Bambi
group was the among the first to move to the Burbank studio, late in 1939, before the buildings were finished.
⁵⁸
Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl began experimental animation of the deer around the same time. Clair Weeks recalled that the
Bambi
story crew—heavily influenced by the realistic sketches drawn by Bernard Garbutt, perhaps the strongest draftsman working on the film—felt some resentment when the animators took over. “I felt, well, now these guys are going to make cartoony figures out of all this research and all this drawing that we have been putting into the story,” he said. “They're going to lose this.”
⁵⁹

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote years later as if the
Bambi
animators had done just that: “The more an animator goes toward caricaturing the animal, the more he seems to be capturing the essence of that animal, and the more he is creating possibilities of acting. . . . If we had drawn real deer in
Bambi
there would have been so little acting potential that no one would have believed the deer really existed as characters. But because we drew what people imagine a deer looks like, with a personality to match, the audience accepted our drawings as being completely real.”
⁶⁰

The deer in
Bambi
—as designed by Milt Kahl—were, however, not “cartoony”
at all. Neither is there anything about them that suggests “caricature” in the normal sense. Kahl did not exaggerate characteristics of real deer. Instead, he departed from the real mainly by giving the deer eyes and mouths that could be manipulated more freely. Crucially, he drew the fawn Bambi and other young animals—rabbits, skunk—in a way that maximized their cuteness, their resemblance to human children, by giving them large heads and wide eyes. Such designs would presumably enhance the characters' immediate appeal to the audience.

Bambi
's deer wound up neither real nor unreal but stranded somewhere in between, and thus perfectly suited for a highly sentimental version of Salten's story, one in which death enters an idyllic forest only by way of hunters' guns. The Kahl-designed deer were also made to order for a kind of animation that departed fundamentally from the animation in
Snow White
but was a natural outgrowth of the way Disney had been building his studio. Kahl initiated the change by proposing at a
Bambi
meeting on September 9, 1939, that the animators be cast by sequence—becoming in effect sub-directors when
Bambi
went into animation.
⁶¹

Kahl was one of the four animators whom Disney had already tabbed as his key animators on
Bambi
—the others were Frank Thomas, Eric Larson, and Fred Moore, all of whom were winding up assignments on
Pinocchio
(Moore animated the character Lampwick near the end of work on that film). In making his suggestion Kahl was motivated largely by boredom—as one of the principal animators of Pinocchio, he had gotten tired of the character. That was hardly surprising, since the puppet had been reduced to a neuter before animation began, thanks in part to Kahl himself.

Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in their book on Disney animation, single out a
Bambi
sequence on a frozen pond as one of the first to benefit from giving a supervising animator control over a sequence. That sequence echoed much earlier Disney animation, as Walt Disney himself recognized. In a 1939 story meeting he said of the
Bambi
sequence, “It is the same situation” as in a 1935
Mickey Mouse
cartoon,
On Ice
, when the dog Pluto struggled to right himself on ice skates.
⁶²
Norm Ferguson animated Pluto, who was alone on the screen. In the feature, though, there were two characters, the fawn Bambi and the young rabbit Thumper, on the ice. The feature sequence had “a character relationship with strong beginnings in the story department,” Thomas and Johnston wrote, adding: “Developing this relationship . . . only could have been done by one person [Frank Thomas] handling both characters and completely controlling every single bit of action, timing, and cutting.”
⁶³

Other films are persuasive evidence that control could be divided among a director and two or more animators with entirely satisfactory results, but younger animators like Thomas and Kahl could hardly be blamed for seeking more control for themselves. Walt Disney had cultivated these talented and highly flexible artists, but now he was spread so thin that he could not work with them as he had worked with his animators on
Snow White
.

More than that, he was recoiling from character animation's difficulties and seeking refuge in cinematic embellishments of many kinds. At a February 3, 1940, meeting on
Bambi
, Disney complained of “too literal” a handling of color in that film. He wanted something more subjective, color that strengthened a mood rather than copying nature.
⁶⁴
In an April 19 meeting he talked about “road-showing”
Bambi
, presenting it in a limited number of performances each day and with the same sort of elaborate sound system he also envisioned for
Fantasia
.
⁶⁵

As in work on
Pinocchio
, the appetite for perfection seemed to know no limits in work on
Bambi
. “There was one scene in
Bambi
that I shot fourteen tests of,” the effects animator Cornett Wood said. “They wanted Bambi to be scared, and he looks up, and it's starting to rain, with the thunder and everything, and he doesn't know what that is. He looks up, and there's this rain coming down at him. They wanted a shot [looking] up like that, of the rain coming down. Fourteen times we did it. That's the way they worked in the effects department, they really tried. I always had the feeling they tried too hard.”
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