The Animated Man (46 page)

After less than three years, the CP was out of business. Disney ordered the damaged
Lilly Belle
—“the cabin was all broken up and the safety valve busted off,” Broggie said—into storage. His interest in trains had not been extinguished, however. “His ideas always grew and grew,” Ollie Johnston said of Disney's mushrooming interest in trains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. “He used to say, ‘I've got to have a project all the time, something new to work on.' ”
⁶⁶

In the late 1940s, Disney's interest in trains was growing alongside his work on
Cinderella
, a less satisfying project. The meeting notes for that film—usually, but not always, stenographic transcripts—show him filling his usual
role, as a shrewd and decisive story editor, although that role was a little more ambiguous than usual. In a January 15, 1948, meeting, for example, Disney was responding to what was already up on the storyboards. The transcript shows him repeatedly identifying crucial story points and leading the way toward resolving problems satisfactorily. He seems to be going well beyond what was already on the storyboards, but it is impossible to be sure. (He also offered ideas that didn't wind up in the film, but they were not bad ideas, only superfluous.)

As the story moved toward animation, it became clear that
Cinderella
and Disney's role in it were both significantly different than anything that had come before. For one thing, Disney was using live action more extensively than ever to guide the animation of the human characters. Most of the film was shot in live action, on bare-bones sets, with actors playing the parts of Cinderella, her stepmother, the stepsisters, and other human characters. Disney had turned to live action as an aid to animation not only during work on
Snow White
but for
Pinocchio
, too, and for parts of
Fantasia
. In 1938, he had spoken of building a larger sound stage to shoot “more and more live action” for
Alice in Wonderland
and
Peter Pan
.
⁶⁷
But now live action seemed less like a useful tool and more like an indispensable crutch.

Said Frank Thomas, who animated Cinderella's cruel stepmother: “I sensed this lack of confidence, lack of knowing where he was going, what he wanted to do with the picture. So, he relied heavily on live action to set his staging, his timing, and the business. . . . [The live action] looked pretty silly, you know, with no backgrounds, but you could follow it and say, ‘Well, this is dragging, this is not.' . . . So, this helped him and it helped the story people immeasurably”
⁶⁸
—even though it hobbled the animators. As Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote: “Everyone's imagination as to how a scene might be staged was limited by the placement of the camera, for once a scene had been shot it was very hard to switch to a whole new point of view.”
⁶⁹

Disney was uneasy with the results. He said in a December 13, 1948, meeting, after he saw animation of Cinderella for the start of the film: “I think the boys on Cinderella have to watch, as they go along, to take more freedom—they're all good animators and don't have to literally follow those Photostats” blown up from the frames of live-action film.
⁷⁰

Marc Davis, who animated much of the Cinderella character, said that if the animator participated in shooting the live action for his scenes, “it really amounted to doing your first rough animation through the performer.”
⁷¹
That was exactly the purpose that the live action of Snow White had served, a dozen years earlier, but now the live action was more confining. “Cinderella was a real girl,” Frank Thomas said, “and the stepsisters and everybody who
worked with her, particularly the Prince and the stepmother, to my way of thinking had to be just as real as she was. You couldn't let up and have them half-cartoon.”
⁷²
There had been just such a gulf between Snow White—a “real girl”—and the dwarfs—who were considerably more than half cartoon—but Disney himself, in collaboration with animators like Bill Tytla, Fred Moore, and Ham Luske, had bridged it through a new kind of animation acting. In
Cinderella
, though, the “straight” characters, like Cinderella and her stepmother, rarely shared the screen with true cartoon characters that could pull them away from their live-action origins.

Instead, Disney cultivated a parallel conflict, between the stepmother's cat, Lucifer, and the mice that are Cinderella's friends, to match the conflict between Cinderella and her stepmother. The two essentially independent stories were expertly braided together, so that, for instance, the film's initial encounter between mice and cat nests snugly with the first humiliation of Cinderella by her stepmother and stepsisters. Gus the mouse has hidden from Lucifer under a teacup that Cinderella unwittingly delivers to the stepsisters, and they accuse her of a malicious trick.

There was only a hint of the cat-and-mouse conflict in a March 25, 1947, treatment, but it was emerging as an important element by the time of the January 15, 1948, meeting on
Cinderella
. Disney said that the story as it existed then “doesn't do justice to what we have. . . . We have to pull out a lot of gags that are just in as gags.”
⁷³
Shortly thereafter, he put Bill Peet—who was largely responsible for writing the animated segments in
Song of the South
—in charge of the cat-and-mouse segments.

It was as those segments took shape, on the storyboards and then in animation, principally by Ward Kimball, that Disney showed rare enthusiasm for what he was seeing. “Thing's looking awfully good,” he said during a February 28, 1949, meeting, after seeing John Lounsbery's animation showing the mice as they elude Lucifer while gathering beads and buttons for Cinderella's dress. (That episode appeared on the storyboards relatively late, added probably in anticipation of the animals' audience appeal.)
⁷⁴

Otherwise, Disney was more often reacting cautiously to what his people did than prodding them to realize ideas of his own. He wanted Cinderella's fairy godmother to be a “tall, regal” type, Frank Thomas said—in effect, a new version of the fairy in
Pinocchio
—instead of a small, plump woman: “Boy, he wasn't sure of that. He just wasn't sure to the very end. But when he saw [Milt Kahl's] animation on it he finally bought it.”
⁷⁵

There was a sort of casting by character on
Cinderella
, as with Thomas's animation of the stepmother and Johnston's animation of the stepsisters, but
the heavy reliance on live action reduced the importance of such casting. When a character like Cinderella herself was parceled out among two or more animators, reconciling the different versions was less a matter of achieving consistent acting than of smoothing out variations in drawing. Eric Larson said that his and Marc Davis's versions of Cinderella herself weren't the same because “the character models hadn't been set. Usually, those things never get set until hundreds of feet of animation have been done.”
⁷⁶
Assistant animators were responsible for ironing out such differences, once there was a final version of a character.

By the late 1940s, Disney's role in feature production had shrunk noticeably. He no longer dropped in every day or two for brief, unannounced visits between more formal meetings, while the director was preparing his part of a cartoon for animation. The directors were left to exercise their own judgment more on details.
⁷⁷
A director like Wilfred Jackson “would have noticed [Disney's] absence a lot more than [the animators] would,” Ollie Johnston said, “because he was probably in and out of Jackson's room two or three times a week, while we might see him once every three or four weeks.”
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Jackson, one of
Cinderella
's three directors, lamented the change. “Walt was a very inspiring person,” he said, “and it was much more exciting and a lot more fun to work on a picture where I was in direct contact with him every few days than it was when he would let us go further ahead . . . and only check up on us at less frequent intervals.”
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Jackson remarked on another change that was consistent with the greater reliance on live action: “
Cinderella
 . . . was the first cartoon I worked on in which the musician, Ollie Wallace, composed his music for all the sequences I directed after the animation was finished and okayed for inking, with the exception, of course, of the ‘musical sequences' ”—that is, the songs. This was a shift toward the way scores for live-action films were composed, without the careful synchronization of music and action that had characterized the Disney features until then—even though conspicuous “mickey-mousing,” as it was sometimes called, had all but disappeared by the time of the first Disney feature. For Jackson, the most musically involved of the directors, that change was occasion for regret: “It seemed to me that the time and effort I spent in pre-timing the action, working closely with the musician as he pre-composed the musical interpretation of it, was not only the very most delightful part of directing a cartoon, but also one of the most significant for [its] effectiveness.”
⁸⁰

Cinderella
lacks the lavish detail of
Pinocchio
, in particular, but it was through attention to detail that
Cinderella
most strongly echoed the earlier
features, in methods if not in results. The effects animator Edwin Parks recalled that the stepmother

had a cane, with a gold head on it, and there was a highlight that had to go down [the length of the gold head]. . . . We would have a conference about a thing like that. It would get into a quite detailed discussion, taking sometimes many hours, and tests, and color models—the whole works—on just whether this highlight should go from the top of the gold color down to where it ended, or maybe it should end just before it got to what would be a natural border. And those things always ended up that maybe it shouldn't quite touch. So then you had the problem of cutting this thing off so it wouldn't crawl back and forth [that is, so the bottom edge of the highlight wouldn't appear to move]. We might do it, and it might be shot in final, but then they'd find out there's too much crawling, and now we've got to go back and change them all and re-shoot the whole works—do it over in ink and paint. . . . We did it over [with the highlight still ending above the border], and it still crawled, and finally they just decided, well, why do it the hard way.
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Despite such occasional relapses into old ways,
Cinderella
still came in at a cost of $2.2 million—a full-length feature made for little more than the cost of each of the package features that preceded it. When the film opened in February 1950, it was greeted with a
Newsweek
cover and hailed almost universally as a return to form.
Cinderella
was Disney's greatest box-office success since
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, with gross rentals of almost eight million dollars. The film's heroine and her prince, her lovable friends, the story's adroit expansion of its fairy-tale source—all of this recalled
Snow White
in the most satisfying way. Only a few critics discerned the troubling void at the center of the film, a void left by Disney's own limited involvement and his compensating reliance on live action. John Mason Brown, in an extended review of
Cinderella
, saw in it the bottom of a long decline and dismissed Disney's “heroes and heroines” as “bloodless transparencies cursed with wafer faces.”
⁸²

It was not just trains that distracted Disney from
Cinderella
. On June 11, 1949, he and his wife and daughters left on a trip to England, Ireland, and France that would keep him away from his studio until August 29.
⁸³
(On that Monday, his first day back, he sweatboxed the
Cinderella
sequences Ham Luske had directed and ordered many minor changes, as well as a significant reworking of the very end of the film.)
⁸⁴
Disney himself flew back to London on October 13, when production of
Cinderella
was essentially finished. He was gone three weeks.

The immediate occasion for Disney's trips was the filming in England of his first wholly live-action film,
Treasure Island
. Making such a film was a
way for Disney to use British earnings that he could not convert into dollars under postwar currency restrictions. Such an option was not available to him where animated features were concerned, since as a practical matter he could make those features only in Burbank. (David Hand had set up a British animation studio a few years earlier for the J. Arthur Rank organization, but despite Hand's best efforts the results fell short of Disney standards in every respect. Rank closed the studio after two years.) RKO, which had blocked sterling of its own, shared the production costs of
Treasure Island
.

Filming began in July 1949 at Bristol harbor.
⁸⁵
Disney had hired an American director, Byron Haskin, another of the very ordinary, relatively inexpensive directors he was coming to rely on. Haskin's most valuable credential may have been his work in special effects on such 1930s swashbucklers as
Captain Blood
. The producer—Perce Pearce, from Disney's Burbank staff—was American, too, as was one of the stars, the boy Bobby Driscoll. The bulk of the cast was made up of veteran British character actors, most notably Robert Newton as Long John Silver. In the film, Newton makes an arresting John Silver, his face constantly in motion as if he were some sly animal. Haskin, in a book-length interview with Joe Adamson, complained that Newton's performances in rehearsal were more vivid, and that he throttled back during the actual filming, but if so, Newton knew what he was doing.
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