Working with Disney (9 page)

DP:
The Great Depression was a help.

MD:
Well, for him it was. For us, it was a time of great tension and tremendous strain. When you arrived, you had a tryout in an art class for a couple of weeks and then you learned how to inbetween, which was one way you could kind of earn your keep a little bit. Then if you could do that, you had demonstrated the ability to draw. Walt wanted to have people highly trained, so he brought in people to teach story, to talk about art, to talk about anything that he felt would make better films.

DP:
I think I read somewhere that you looked out the window one day and you saw Albert Einstein walking through the studio.

MD:
There were many of them. He just happened to be one who caused you to do a double take. But there was such an interest, so many people! It's hard for you to realize now, but of course, we didn't have television, and we didn't have too many picture magazines. Practically every magazine at that time—and these were the sophisticated ones like
Vanity Fair
—ran articles about this young genius, Walt Disney, and a picture of him as a very thin young man holding maybe a drawing or a doll or something else. What he had done somehow hit so strongly with the
public in a time when if ever people needed a laugh or some relief, that was it. And you had radio and motion pictures. Motion pictures were very cheap to go to at the time; generally, they gave away prizes, like groceries and dishes. When Mickey Mouse appeared originally or when Pluto went howling across the screen, that just by itself was a riotous laugh. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are still doing that type of humor, and an awful lot of the cartoons that are being made for television are not that solid and not that funny. I think Walt recognized that there had to be more than that. When he finally did the
Three Little Pigs,
that thing just hit the country like wildfire. You have no idea the impact that that picture had and the impact that song, “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” had because everybody had the wolf at their door. I am sure he could not have had any conception of how that thing would hit. It made
Snow White
and everything else possible in its own way. That picture was made before I came there. I was living in Sacramento at the time. My father—I don't know how he happened to have dropped in and seen it—took me to see the
Three Little Pigs
at, I think, the old Alhambra Theater. That's all we saw. He was so intrigued with this picture, and I must say I was, too, but I still didn't think of it as a place for me to work. Then later, I was up in Marysville. My father had died, and I worked up there for a while. I did some work for a local theater over in Yuba City.

DP:
What kind of work were you doing?

MD:
Oh, I did posters, signs, advertising mastheads, and some things for a local newspaper. I also worked in a print shop. Somehow I managed to survive. I had had some sign experience previously in San Francisco after I ran out of money going to art school there.

DP:
Did you grow up in San Francisco?

MD:
No, I've grown up everywhere. I went to twenty-two different schools before I got through high school, so I had traveled a great deal. I think that a lot of that experience has a lot to do with my own creative background. I saw enough of life before I ever got to the studio that I wasn't out of one grammar school, out of one high school, out of one art school, and here I am ready to approach the world.

But getting back to Marysville, the man who owned the theater called me up and said, “Gee, there's a wonderful cartoon by Walt Disney over here and I think you ought to see it. You know, it's the kind of thing you might like to work in,” or something like that. The cartoon was
Who Killed Cock Robin?
[1935]. And I must say I was just enormously impressed. I saw it three or four times. It struck me in a more personal way than the
Three Little Pigs,
and I began to think that I might like to work at Disney's. Around that time, I decided to come down to Los Angeles. I didn't think only of Disney. I wrote a letter to Disney, and I received a reply. I don't know how they made the mistake, but it began, “Dear Miss Davis, Sorry, at the present time we are not hiring women artists.” I wish I'd kept the letter! I was sore and I dumped it in the trash and forgot all about Disney. Then I came down here and I thought I'd like to get into some form of motion picture artwork. I had a few contacts. But everybody was telling me, “Gee, Walt Disney is hiring. Why don't you go out there?” So finally I did, and I've been there practically ever since. As I say, once you got hooked, it was like a drug. The marvelous young guys there were from all over the country, and a lot of them were from all over the world. It was a terribly exciting time. It's awfully hard to describe because they were all young, all full of hell, all anxious to do something. None of them could understand what the hell we were doing, you know. And it took a long time. Now the animation has been done, and you can say, “Well, you do it this way and that way.” The thing was that you just didn't really know what this thing was about; but the excitement was that every day, somebody did something that hadn't been done before. This was the excitement. This was the thing that excited Walt, and he began to see things materialize. And he was always asking for more. Once you learned how to do something very well, you were never asked to do that again. You were asked to do something else. This was a tremendous challenge that only a man like him would ask for. He was a man who visually, I guess you could say, to the public had to be the most conservative man in the world, but he was anything but conservative. He was a gambler, but he also believed in himself and he believed in what he wanted to do. It took a few years for him to gel in his mind what he wanted to do. And then sometimes he would go along and
let us do some of the silly things that we wanted to do. Generally, they turned out pretty bad!

DP:
I imagine that part of the excitement of that period would have come from having the opportunity to work closely with Walt.

MD:
In the early days—the Hyperion days—I never had that much contact with Walt personally. He worked through his directors and key animators. He was moving like a bomb through the studio. I don't know how many people were there when I came in. I came in on December 2, 1935, and there were quite a few guys who were ahead of me: Ken Anderson, I guess, was there a year ahead; Milt Kahl was probably there a year ahead; Frank Thomas, Ollie [Johnston] and Eric Larson, maybe ahead of them; Woolie [Wolfgang Reitherman]; and of course, Les Clark, who was way ahead of any of us. So it took a long time for you to get any attention from Walt.

DP:
What were your first impressions of him?

MD:
We were all pretty much in awe of him, because after all, you could open up magazines and here were articles about this man. Also the fact that he could hire and fire you. You could never fully understand this man. I saw one Walt, somebody else saw another Walt. I'm sure Ben Sharpsteen had one, and Milt Kahl had another one. I think we—Milt and myself—were probably a little closer to the same Walt.

DP:
What is the Walt that you saw? How would you characterize him?

MD:
Well, it's hard to say. I really “met” Walt after
Snow White
was over. I worked on a couple of shorts as an assistant animator, and then I moved over to the
Bambi
unit, which was located across the street from the studio. Then we moved up to Hollywood to a place on Seward Street. We developed the story of
Bambi
there. I worked there primarily as a story sketch man. Walt didn't come over there very often. Finally the lease ran out at Seward Street about three months before the main studio opened up in Burbank, and they moved us out there. We were the first group to move into the studio. We moved into the 3-B wing. Then Walt began to see the drawings I had done, and apparently he was quite delighted with
them. He decided that I had to be an animator. He put me in with Milt and Frank, and he said, “Teach him how to animate. I want to see his drawings on the screen.”

DP:
That was a nice step up!

MD:
Yes, that was a nice step up. So at about this time, Walt knew me and I began to know him. Walt had a lot of respect for me as an artist and for being knowledgeable about art, so I had some rapport in that area. As years went on, I had great contact with him in many, many areas. In later years, I had very close contact. But to have gotten his attention in the days when there had to be twenty-five or thirty guys coming in per week and maybe twenty-four of them leaving! He was not in a position to come over and say, “Oh, you're a nice-looking group” or something like that. That was a thing that he had set up an organization for—both good and bad. There was a guy at the head of it who was not a very bright man.

DP:
George Drake?

MD:
Yes. Not the most lovable character in the world, nor knowledgeable either. He was a rather nervous, ambitious guy, and I think he made a lot of mistakes. He made a lot of enemies for the studio, and he wasn't that well liked either. But still, within the limits of his personality, I guess you could say that he meant all right. But he did a lot of harm. He also was Ben Sharpsteen's brother-in-law. [He was actually a distant relative of Ben Sharpsteen.] That was one thing that hinged on a little bit of nepotism!

DP:
He interested me, because Ben never talked about him.

MD:
I think he was a great embarrassment to Ben as time went on. Don Graham, on the other hand, was just a marvelous man. He handled the study of art and the teaching of drawing. He gave a critical analysis of what he saw in the Disney films. He was a very warm man; so I think for somebody like myself who was terribly interested in art, Don Graham had more to do with my staying. Had it just been George, I think you'd have said, “I just can't tolerate this even though I need it desperately.”
I think a lot would have gone—and of course, a lot did. A lot came through who were as talented as anybody who remained with Disney, and they still went off into other areas and they excelled. It wasn't for everybody. It took a particular kind of temperament, and it took being so fascinated with something that you just wanted to be a part of it. You wanted to excel at it, so you had to be ambitious.

DP:
Also, I guess, to be able to work in a team situation.

MD:
Yeah. That's something, too, because a lot of people are creative loners, and I must say that in some regards, I think I am too, thinking-wise. Still, the nature of this business was that it was only as good as the worst guy on a picture. If there was resentment amongst the top people, it was when somebody did not do a good job. When somebody did a good job and Walt complimented them or we saw it ourselves, God, you were delighted and you were thrilled for them. It was like being on a baseball team, and if a guy hits a home run, even if you don't like him, you love him at that moment because you win the game. This was invariably true. If Walt said, “Gee, so-and-so did a great thing,” he probably wouldn't tell the person directly, but everybody else would say, “Hey, Walt said you did so-and-so. Gee. I'd sure love to see it! God, that's great!” and so on. This was a very high compliment, because Walt found it very difficult to compliment people directly to their face. He would say, “Yeah. Yeah, I like it.” Well, bells rang and everything else. You felt good for a week. If there is a change in the organization from Walt's time to now, it's this: There is nobody there who could make me feel as good by saying, “I like that” as Walt.

DP:
Nobody carries the weight.

MD:
Yeah, they don't carry the weight. But there was something about that that you knew he meant what he said. You also knew that he was highly qualified.

DP:
Did you work on the Ichabod part of
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad?

MD:
No, I didn't work on that. I worked on an awful lot of them. I worked on
Song of the South, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty,
and
Peter Pan.
I
did the original Tinker Bell in
Peter Pan
and the first animation that was done on her. And I worked on the Mr. Toad film
[The Wind in the Willows,
later part of
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad].
We worked on Mr. Toad during the strike. It was kind of a miserable time to be working on something of that sort, because there were so many things on your mind. It was the first thing that I did, after
Bambi,
where I was fully on my own as an animator. I did some good things and some bad things on it, I guess. Let's see what other pictures I worked on. I worked on
Alice [in Wonderland].

DP:
One list also included
So Dear to My Heart.

MD:
Yeah. I worked on story on
So Dear to My Heart.
Ken Anderson and I did the little stories that were in the scrapbook, but I did not animate on it. I worked on story on
Victory through Air Power,
and they neglected to give me a screen credit on it. I was sore as hell. I got an apology from Walt on it, because I did visually create an awful lot that was in the film.

DP:
With the Disney Studio emphasizing personality animation and some of the other studios, like Warner Bros., going off in a different direction, did you ever feel that shorts coming from other studios surpassed the Disney shorts, or was it more like “We are doing one thing and they are doing something else”?

MD:
More that, I think. I think we admired some of the early UPA cartoons very much, because we liked the freshness that they had. We mistakenly got hooked on some of that. It was inconsistent with our own capabilities or Walt's point of view. He did permit us to do a few kinds of avant-garde things and they were generally pretty bad.