Working with Disney (7 page)

DP:
Did you work on the character of Pinocchio?

OJ:
Yes.

DP:
I noticed that in Leonard Maltin's
The Disney Films,
he lists you as a character designer for that particular film.

OJ:
Frank and I started on the thing together and designed the character. We were using a speeded-up voice. Walt, I guess, or the story
guys picked the voice of Ted Sears. But Walt didn't like the voice, so he junked that, and we went on to a short [subject] and then came back on it again later. At that time, he decided to use a kid's voice [Dickie Jones]—more appeal. I think at first he was thinking of a puppet that wasn't any particular age. Maybe he would have a different voice when the puppet came to life. There were all types of things that I enjoyed in
Pinocchio
—the fantasy particularly. There were tender moments in it, like with the Blue Fairy and her relationship with the cricket, which I thought was great. Then there was the more grim type of fantasy, where these boys were sold on Pleasure Island and what happened to them when they started turning into donkeys, which I thought was a real exciting way to use the fantasy. I mean, where else can you do that but in an animated cartoon? And to get inside the belly of a whale. The whole thing—gee, I thought it was beautifully conceived. A lot of people call it the finest picture we've made. There was an awful lot of money spent on it. You look at Pinocchio's costume and all the little detail down the side of the pants—gee, you can't believe all that stuff. But there are characters that I enjoyed working on more.

DP:
Do you have one character that you liked the best?

OJ:
Gee, I always liked what I was working on. But looking back, I enjoyed doing Mr. Smee [in
Peter Pan].
I enjoyed doing the dogs on
101 Dalmatians.
I enjoyed working on Bambi and Thumper. I enjoyed being part of
Fantasia,
though there wasn't any what you'd really call personality-type animation, which is what I really like.

DP:
Did you work on “The Pastoral?”

OJ:
Yeah. I guess I loved working on Baloo and Mowgli in
The Jungle Book.
I loved working on the geese and Uncle Waldo in
The Aristocats.
And I loved Prince John and Sir Hiss [in
Robin Hood].
I guess that was probably the richest character relationship I ever had. I enjoyed the albatross and the cat and the mice and the girl [in
The Rescuers].
The girl not as much, but I still enjoyed it, because I felt we were doing something on that picture that would draw the audience into it and you had to have the girl to do that. The mice—you couldn't make them sympathetic, although I think they were entertaining.

DP:
When you have a voice like Terry Thomas for Sir Hiss and Peter Ustinov for Prince John, do you naturally gear the character towards that voice when it's a recognizable voice?

OJ:
You're influenced greatly. A lot of people said that the longer I drew Prince John, the more he began to look like Ustinov.

DP:
Did you watch movies of him?

OJ:
No. I watched him when he came over here and recorded. I watched him at lunch. I watched Terry Thomas, but you don't really approach it too much that way. We got certain little gestures out of Bob Newhart [for Bernard]. He's always moving his hands around when he's fumbling through a word, but mostly you use the voice. If the voice is a good one, it will make you see pictures in your mind of how this thing ought to be acted. It really doesn't have all that much to do with how that guy acts when he's performing in a role himself. He gives you a mental picture of how that ought to be acted, and more important almost than that is he gives you a personality along with story conception that his voice fits into. But you, of course, alter your story conception to a certain degree when you get a voice that deviates a little. You go with it. You don't fight it. We built a little different relationship than had originally been planned. Originally, Sir Hiss was to be a little more like Kaa in
The Jungle Book,
a little more of a villain. But it seemed more entertaining if he was submissive to Prince John. His whole existence depended on how he could butter the guy up.

DP:
Has the Xerox system altered the way you animate?

OJ:
It's more altered the way we clean up the animator's drawing, the way the assistant does.

DP:
Does it detract or make any difference as far as the finished product?

OJ:
Well, some people have complained because they thought it didn't have the refinement that the ink line has. However, I think it has more vitality, because it's the actual drawing—it isn't a tracing of the drawing, so it's got more life. With the development of different colors, we're arriving at ways to use it where we can get almost the same thing we had with the ink [line].

DP:
In
The Rescuers,
the scene where the albatross is trying to fly and drops off the edge of the roof really amazes me.

OJ:
We had a really tricky pan there. When he goes off the roof, first you see him disappearing from you. But then you have a scene where he's pulling out of the dive. I don't know how much you know about our pan backgrounds, but when you're diving, you've got to have a pan that's going the opposite way from your dive. Well, then, if you shift in that same scene to a horizontal move, then you've got to switch it to a horizontal pan instead of a vertical pan. That was tricky, but we worked it out and gave a good effect, because it made you feel like there were a lot of Gs [g-forces] there as he pulled out. If you'd have had to cut right at that time, you would have lost that.

DP:
Do you feel that a zenith has been reached in Disney films, from the shorts through the features? Do you feel that there is one film that is the best? Some people see the shorts of the 1930s as having the most vitality. Others see
Snow White
as the zenith. I was just wondering, as an animator, if you felt that “Gee, we've never quite equaled that particular film?”

OJ:
Well, I don't think we've ever equaled
Fantasia.
It's hard for me to say any one single one, because I think
Pinocchio,
having the fantasy and imagination that it has as a picture with a story, is hard to compare with one like
Fantasia,
where there is a different approach. But
Fantasia
was such a giant step in an entirely new direction and really so entertaining in its own way, that I almost have to say that is to me the peak, though I personally didn't enjoy working on it nearly as much as I have the ones with a story. But I'm flabbergasted when I look at it. And the music, the way Walt conceived it with the stereophonic sound. I could say that I can see why there is a cult of people that really are just crazy about the picture.

DP:
It is amazing. Even people who are critical of it have to admit a certain admiration for the effort. I think most critics feel at worst it is uneven.

OJ:
I'd agree with that. How it ever got made, really? I remember Walt back in the late 1940s; I was up in his office with some friends of mine that had the railroad hobby that he knew. We got to talking about
Fantasia,
and Walt was saying, “God, we could never make another one like that.” You don't have the staff any more, and you couldn't afford to make it.

DP:
After you started here, has all of your work been on feature films?

OJ:
No. I worked on
The Brave Little Tailor
[1938] and
The Pointer
[1939] and
The Practical Pig
[1939], and I think I worked on a Donald Duck picture. [He also worked on
Mickey's Surprise Party
(1939).] I worked some on
Song of the South
and
Peter and the Wolf
[1955],
Susie, the Little Blue Coupe
[1952] and “Little Toot” [from the feature
Melody Time
(1948)]. I worked in very few shorts, really. The last time I did a Mickey was for
The Mickey Mouse Club
show. I did a couple of the openings and closings.

DP:
As Walt's interest moved away from shorts to the features, several people have written that Warner Bros. and Tex Avery and MGM and others started passing his shorts in popularity. Did you feel that way?

OJ:
I think if Walt's interest had stayed on shorts, he would have surpassed anything anybody else would have done with his personality-type of animation. He'd done all that. Gee, he'd been doing them since in the 1920s. Look at the Aracuan bird
[The Three Caballeros]
and some of those things that we've done. He pops all over the place and you get three of him at once. Walt made the big jump from gags to personality stuff. That was it. He spent himself on the features.

DP:
Did you like Bugs Bunny or other characters from Warner Bros. or other studios? Tex Avery?

OJ:
Yeah, I used to get a kick out of them. I enjoyed the Tom and Jerrys and Woody Woodpecker or any of those. I still like to see them occasionally, but it's just not the kind that I would have picked out to do for myself. I like broad action, but I like it with a little more sincerity, I guess you'd say. I thought Harman-Ising was doing some interesting stuff for a while. They were somewhat like our Silly Symphonies. Some of the things they did had kind of a charm to them. And some of the early Bugs Bunnys I thought were good, and then it seemed like they kind of repeated themselves.

DP:
How was Cruella De Vil different from other Disney villains?

MD:
I think she was a combination of things, an attempt to do a villainess that would be fun rather than a villainess that would just be terrifying. You know, there were a lot of complaints about the witch in
Snow White
—and really with no qualifications, I thought. Then I did Maleficent, and she was just an evil character and had little or no personality, because all she did was make speeches. You have to have some kind of human contact with people. I think this is the beauty of Cruella, which I can't take responsibility for. This is Bill Peet's writing, putting together the story content. But making it work was a delight.

DP:
I think she is probably the best part of the film—her bustling in, her whole movement. She has her own energy source.

MD:
Christopher Finch spoke very well of that in
The Art of Walt Disney,
which pleased me, because I'd never have thought of the description that he wrote: half death-head mask and at the same time, a highly sophisticated fashion model type. [“Her face is a blend of death mask and fashion plate, perfectly expressing her character, which is at the same time evil and laughable.”] But the angularity of the woman came quite honestly, probably because that was part of the way she was done. Also, she was reminiscent of several different people that I knew. I tried to get this—how would you say?—erratic thing in movement and personality and a thing that could flip from one side to the other.

DP:
It is interesting, because even with the angular cheekbones and everything else, after initially seeing her, you accept her as a real character.

MD:
She probably was a little inconsistent in drawing style with the other characters and a little more highly caricatured. I think this is one of the most difficult things in a cartoon, to keep a unity of all the characters when you have many different people, with different outlooks on drawing and styling and everything, putting characters together in one picture. It's very difficult.

DP:
Someone wrote about the variations in the character design in
Cinderella.
The sisters were almost caricatures, while some of the other characters were more realistic.