The Animated Man (57 page)

As it happened, television's imperatives forced him to scale back his shows with animation, old or new, and rely more heavily on live action instead. In the 1957–58 season, NBC scheduled a star-heavy western called
Wagon Train
on Wednesday nights against
Disneyland
, whose ratings suffered. Such westerns were the most popular shows on TV, and Disney loaded his schedule with westerns in the 1958–59 season because, he said, “I had to,” at the insistence of ABC and a sponsor. His preoccupation with “control” did not inoculate him from such pressures, certainly not when his ratings were affected.

The Disneys' relations with ABC soured early in 1959, when, Roy Disney wrote, “ABC insisted on terms and conditions for the Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro shows which were totally unacceptable to us,” then refused to let Disney take the shows to other networks.
¹⁰⁹
(For his part, ABC's Leonard Goldenson dismissed the Disneys as “terrible business partners” because they preferred to reinvest Disneyland's profits.)
¹¹⁰

Consumed by his roles as proprietor of an amusement park and overseer of a studio churning out mediocre live-action movies, Walt Disney had surrendered his role as artist. There is sometimes the sense, in the recollections of people who worked with him on his best films and were still on his staff in the 1950s, that their presence could be an annoying reminder of what he had left behind.

“When he got off on the park,” Ward Kimball said, “there was no stopping him; you couldn't get him in to look at something. He'd just say, ‘Go ahead and do it.' ” Kimball himself benefited from Disney's inattention when he made several
Tomorrowland
shows about space travel for
Disneyland
. Kimball's shows were inventive and mostly serious in their approach to the subject, but they departed sharply from the mid-1950s Disney norm in their knowing use of modern design and their occasionally flippant tone.

Kimball was aware of how unusual—and how hazardous—his situation was: “This was a risk you never ran before; you never dared go ahead on your own, without the OK. What could you do? He was interested in something else.”
¹¹¹

*
Another example was a weekly
Zorro
show—that unrealized project of Disney's private company—which began running on ABC in the fall of 1957.

In the 1960s, Walt Disney drove himself to work from Holmby Hills to Burbank, first in a Ford Thunderbird and then, from 1964 on, in a Mercedes-Benz 230 SL. His normal route took him right onto Carolwood Drive from his driveway, then left onto Sunset Boulevard, east toward Beverly Hills. He turned left onto Beverly Drive, soon bearing right at a V onto Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. From Coldwater he turned right onto the Ventura Freeway, recently completed across the San Fernando Valley, and headed east toward the Buena Vista Street exit in Burbank.
¹

He usually arrived at his studio by 8:30
A.M.
and parked in a double slot under a parking shed that he shared with Roy (Walt's slot was on the left, where it was easier for him to get in and out of his car). “I don't think I ever got down ahead of Walt,” Roy Disney said. “Walt's car was always in the stall next to mine and he was there when I came in the morning, and his car was there when I left at night. He was a bear for work.”
²

The Disney brothers presided over a studio that had undergone a dramatic transformation in the previous decade. As Walt Disney remarked in 1961, “in the last ten years we've gone into three big businesses—the [live-action] feature field, the amusement park field,
*
and TV. If it were just animated cartoons, it'd be a cinch.”
³

Sleeping Beauty
's poor box-office returns had proved, of course, that cartoons
were anything but a cinch. For fiscal 1960, Walt Disney Productions showed a loss of $1,342,037, after a $6 million write-down of inventories. Gross income, which had shot up since the opening of Disneyland, fell to around $46.4 million from $58.4 million the previous year. Film revenue fell by more than $7 million, largely a reflection of
Sleeping Beauty
's performance, and television revenue by $4.6 million, thanks to ABC's cancellation of
Zorro
and
Mickey Mouse Club
. Only Disneyland's revenue was up.
⁴

In one respect, the opening of the Disneyland park—and its almost immediate success—had been a great boon to the people working on Disney's feature cartoons. “It took the pressure off,” Ollie Johnston said. “It was a big relief, because before Disneyland we'd always wonder if we would make another film, and that can be a tough way to have to live.” But the TV show and the park not only diverted Walt Disney himself from
Sleeping Beauty
, they also took away talented people who would otherwise have been available for the feature. Said Rolly Crump, who was an assistant animator in the late 1950s when he was recruited to work at WED: “One guy in particular used to refer to WED as ‘cannibal island' because of the way it would eat up studio employees.”
⁵

During work on
Sleeping Beauty
, Frank Thomas said, “Walt was not supporting us. And you couldn't figure out what he didn't like. Why he said the things he did. And we didn't feel it was personal condemnation, it was more that there was something in the way he saw the picture that he couldn't get over to us. Now, this happened many times. . . . Fergy [Norm Ferguson] said, when [I] first came here, ‘Don't do what Walt says, do what Walt means.' And I said, ‘How are you supposed to know?' And he said, ‘Well, you'll find out in a hurry.' ”
⁶

That worrisome lack of specificity is not something that turns up in the memories of people whose time then was devoted to Disneyland. For that matter, Disney's critiques in the middle to late 1930s were always clear enough in their intent. It was all a matter of where his interest was keenest at the time. He was vaguer the further he got from that center—but since his control did not slacken even as his interest did, he generated problems for his animators in particular.
Sleeping Beauty
is full of lapses of a kind that Disney would not have tolerated twenty years earlier. In one scene, to cite a small example, Prince Phillip picks up his father, King Hubert, and swings him through the air in a circle, effortlessly. Live action was no aid here—as Frank Thomas said, “Who's strong enough to pick up a man who weighs 250 pounds and dance with him?”
⁷
The scene had to be convincing on other terms, but it is not; instead, the king becomes, temporarily, a sort of human beach ball.

“We were on that for five years,” Ollie Johnston said of
Sleeping Beauty
, “and that was all because we couldn't get Walt to come into any of the meetings. You'd eventually get him, but you couldn't move anything.”
⁸
But if there was one thing worse than Walt Disney's not paying enough attention to his animated features, it was his paying too much of the wrong kind of attention. Disney damaged the film most not by neglecting it but by insisting that it adhere to a certain kind of design. That design was set by the background painter Eyvind Earle, whose early sketches showed that he wanted the film to echo medieval tapestries and miniatures in its general feeling (one sketch was modeled on a unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval galleries in upper Manhattan, another on a page from the book of hours of the duc de Berry).

Sleeping Beauty
resembled
Snow White
in its general shape, and in some particulars it recalled ideas that Disney had considered for
Snow White
and then rejected. The early story outlines for
Snow White
placed great emphasis on the prince (“Doug Fairbanks type”) and his highly intelligent horse (“Like Tom Mix's Horse Tony”); they were to be “great pals.”
⁹
The prince and his horse in
Sleeping Beauty
matched those descriptions precisely. As with
Cinderella
ten years earlier, Disney sought a safe haven, in effect, by remaking
Snow White
. But Disney's intention to make yet another version of
Snow White
could not be reconciled with his embrace of Earle's background paintings.

Those paintings have, at their strongest, a hallucinatory clarity, but they have no emotional content—they never reflect or reinforce the emotions the characters are supposed to be feeling. The practical problem the backgrounds posed for the animators, Frank Thomas wrote more than thirty years later, was that “we had to find designs that enabled us to get some kind of life in the characters, but still recognize that they would have to ‘work' against the busy detail of the backgrounds and hold their own graphically regardless of the choices Eyvind made for the colors on the costumes.”
¹⁰

Earle was a particularly striking specimen of the kind of artist who has a splendid technique but nothing much to say. Such artists are highly useful to someone who does have something to say but must rely on others' skills. By the late 1950s, the Disney studio employed many accomplished artists of the same general kind. Under other circumstances, Disney might have found some way to bend Earle's designs to broader purposes; but what recommended Earle's work to him now was simply its forwardness.

Of the artists with strong personalities still left on the staff, the most important was probably the writer Bill Peet, who was skillful not only at constructing narratives but at drawing cartoon characters as well. Although Disney
allowed himself one burst of enthusiasm for his storyboards, Peet recalled, “after a few months Walt lost touch with the project and also seemed to resent spending time to discuss
Sleeping Beauty
. . . . He kicked me downstairs to work on TV commercials.” Eyvind Earle remembered Peet's storyboards as “extraordinarily funny, wonderful stuff,” all of it thrown out by Disney, “without a trace of it left. Because Walt was too busy; and in story, Walt wanted to have a part of it or he wouldn't accept it. It had nothing to do with whether it was good or not.”
¹¹

Harry Tytle recorded what he said was the “only . . . mention [in his diary] of Walt not
meticulously
working on the product that he was doing”: a
Sleeping Beauty
meeting at 10
A.M.
on August 22, 1957, “showing the whole picture.” This meeting took place just before Disney left on his long driving vacation in Europe. Tytle wrote that Disney “seems to be tired, has so much on his mind; he didn't give this the treatment he would have in years past, where he'd go in for a couple of days and fine-tooth comb the whole picture. . . . He hit more from a broad aspect than from small specifics, like he used to.”
¹²

Disney complained constantly about the cost of his cartoon features. The problem was, as Tytle said, that where the features were concerned, “Walt alone could determine how much to spend and where to spend it.” Disney's complaints were in fact directed at himself. Anyone who took his complaints seriously and tried to act on them risked being handed his head. “Sooner or later,” Tytle wrote, “the suggestions you would make for simplification or cost savings were going to interfere with Walt's efforts in building a cartoon feature, and you'd be switched, in Walt's eyes, from the role of lovable Jiminy Cricket to an evil Stromboli. The cost-savings approach would only work if it was
your
picture being produced and
Walt
was calling for changes. The reverse was a no-win deal.”
¹³

In other words,
Sleeping Beauty
was doomed from the start. It was a hapless relic from what now seemed like a very distant period in the Disney studio's history.

Disney read
Sleeping Beauty
's failure not as owing to his own distracted role in its production but as evidence that animation should play an even smaller role in the company. He had been gradually turning away from animation since World War II; now he did so decisively. He reduced the animation staff sharply, dismissing studio veterans with twenty or thirty years of service.

It was, ironically, around this time that the members of Disney's animation board began to acquire a modest celebrity.
¹⁴
By 1950, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston have written, “the board had settled down to a permanent group
of nine supervising animators”—the “nine old men,” as Disney called them, a joking reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt's denigration of the Supreme Court in the 1930s. The nine were, in addition to Thomas and Johnston, Les Clark, Woolie Reitherman, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, John Lounsbery, and Marc Davis.
¹⁵
By late in the decade, most of the “nine old men” had moved on to direction or Disneyland or other projects at the studio (and they were all well into middle age), but they remained the ultimate authorities where animation was concerned. Their continuing preeminence was a sign of animation's diminished status: there were no longer any younger men rising in the ranks who could be considered likely successors to some of the nine.

Not that membership in the “nine old men” was any sort of guarantee. Around 1960, Marc Davis recalled, “Ken Anderson, myself, and a couple of others worked on some cartoon stories, and I don't think we could have sold anything, no matter how good. We put together a story on Chanticleer, and when we had a meeting, the answer was no! The excuse was that you can't make a personality out of a chicken.” Disney's dismissal of “Chanticleer” was actually not that abrupt. In the August 24, 1960, meeting that Davis was probably remembering, Disney remarked that the problem with making a rooster a leading character was that “[you] don't feel like picking a rooster up and petting it.” Disney took “Chanticleer” seriously as a feature possibility—the August 24 meeting followed other “Chanticleer” meetings in 1960—but the eventual outcome was as Davis said.
¹⁶