Walt Disney: A Career in Three Acts

Republished from The Valve, April 3, 2007.

We have recently been blessed with two comprehensive biographies of Walt Disney. Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination came out late last year while Michael Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney is scheduled for release later in April - though Amazon has already been shipping copies. The two books are very different in method, tone and achievement. Gabler's main text comes in at 633 pages while Barrier's has 325 pages; both books have extensive notes. Gabler had access to official Disney archives while Barrier did not - at least not this time around, however, he'd been in the archives on an earlier project, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. As the page count suggests, Gabler crams in more information - more about the company and business affairs, more about the general context, and more about Disney's ancestors. Barrier's book is more focused on Disney and, I believe, more empathetic to him - though Gabler has written that his method is to identify with his subject.

Despite these differences, both present a career in three acts: animation, Disneyland, and the Florida project. To be sure, Disney's studio has always been involved with cartoons and, during his life, Disney was always involved with those cartoons. But the nature of his involvement changed in quality and intensity, allowing other projects to attract his most passionate attention and activity.

Animation

Disney began learning the craft of animation in Kansas City in 1920, but left for Hollywood in 1923 with his business affairs in a shambles. There he hooked up with his older brother Roy and they formed the company that, in time, set the standard in animation. Initially Disney did everything - drew the pictures, painted the cels, and photographed them. As Walt Disney Productions became more successful, however, the Disney's hired others and by the mid 1920s Walt was no longer doing the animation himself. But he remained deeply involved in planning the cartoons, coming up with gags and story lines, and supervising every detail from start to finish.

Toward the end of the decade the novelty of cartoons had worn off and the business was getting tighter. In 1928 Disney had the idea of adding a fully synchronized sound to one of his cartoons, Steamboat Willie, the third Mickey Mouse cartoon. Other producers had been playing around with sound, but none had done so very effectively. With the help of a recent hire, Wilfred Jackson, who knew more about music than anyone else on staff, Disney was able to add a musical soundtrack to the film such that music and images were synchronized from beginning to end. Steamboat Willie was a smash hit; in consequence, Disney's business affairs began to turn around

 

In the wake of Disney's success other studios rushed into sound, but Disney had a head start and was able to maintain the advantage. In a few more years Disney was the first studio to use color. Along with these technical advances came artistic advances as well. Disney arranged for his animators to take drawing lessons; and, by insisting on perfection, forcing everyone to do things over and over, which inevitably meant learning how to achieve more effective results. One result that became particularly important was creating a sense of personality for his cartoon characters so that their actions would be experienced as coming from that personality. Each of the four characters in Three Little Pigs (1933) - three pigs and the wolf - had a visibly distinct personality. That, and a song, “Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?,” made the cartoon a hit.

The big one, of course, was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which premiered at the end of 1937, nine years after Steamboat Willie. Three years in the making, it was the most expensive film made to date and became the highest grossing film to date, though it was soon eclipsed by Gone with the Wind. As the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White changed people's perception of the medium. It was no longer about gags and laughs. Disney had shown that animation could sustain a substantial narrative that elicited deep identification with its characters.

Disney staffed up to produce more features and released Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi over the next five years. Dumbo made a profit, but the others did not. By that time, 1942, the nation had entered WWII and everyone's life changed.

All feature projects were put on hold and, while the production of shorts continued, for the duration of the war the Disney studio's main business was producing propaganda and training films for the US government. Never again was Walt Disney so intensely involved in cartoons as he had been through 1942. When the war was over he began developing new lines of entertainment business, nature films and live action films. Cartoon production continued, but Disney no longer invested them with the passion he had lavished on them in the two decades leading up to the war. Producing cartoons had become a mere job.

Disneyland

In the late 1940s Walt turned his attention to model railroads. Not only did he give them as gifts to himself, and his nieces and nephews, he also learned to construct them. He was already a respectable carpenter - skills he had learned from his father. Now he learned how to fabricate the metal parts necessary for a 1/8 scale railroad which was constructed in the yard at his new house. This railroad was his pride and joy; he loved operating the engine - which was a real steam engine, though not full-sized - and giving people rides on the train.

He also learned how to craft miniatures of various kinds and build to dioramas. At his direction the studio built three dioramas, though the more complicated they became, the less Disney himself worked on them. The studio exhibited some of these dioramas and there was some thought about fielding a traveling exhibit of Americana.

At the same time - the late 1940s - Disney began thinking about creating a “Mickey Mouse Park” on sixteen acres of land near the studio. The original purpose was to have a place where studio employees and visitors could park their children. But, as Disney thought about the park, and investigated amusement parks here and there, his aspirations became ever more elaborate, and ever different from standard amusement parks of the Coney Island type.

In time these two lines of activity coalesced into a plan to create a large theme park to be called Disneyland. Late in 1952 Disney formed a new corporation, WED Enterprises, which became the planning organ for this new park. It was housed on studio property and some of its original employees came from the studio, while others were new hires. This is where Disney's passion found its next, and last, institutional home.

The major problem he faced, however, was financing the park. His conception had grown to the point where his own resources were not sufficient to purchase the land, much less construct the attractions. At this point his entrepreneurial imagination - and his brother's as well - went to work. The solution they came up with was that the studio would provide part of the financing and a television network would provide the rest. They had been thinking about getting into television, in part as a way to promote their films. In March of 1954 Disney signed a contract with ABC, the smallest of the networks (and now owned by Disney). Disney would provide a hour of programming per week (for seven years) and ABC would provide part of the financing for Disneyland. The television show debuted in late October of 1954 and the (unfinished) park opened in July 1955. Both were immediately successful.

Animated Acting

We all know that Marlon Brando was a Method actor, and that The Method has roots in the work of the Russian director, Stanislavski. You know who else was a devotee of The Method? Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the three little pigs, the whole Disney stable of characters. That's what Donald Crafton argues in Shadow of a Mouse: Performance, Belief, and World-Making. See, for example, this passage about the Disney animators and Donald Graham, who taught a long-standing course on action analysis at the Disney's studio (p. 48):

The animators and Graham were pursuing a Stanislavskian ideal of embodiment, trying to inject human thought, motion and emotion into their formerly figurative hieroglyphs, but the result was more complicated than they intended. They constructed lifelike movements and gave their characters the illusion of sentience, free will, and human frailty without the visible strings to the animators or their techniques. Inadvertently, though, they introduced ambiguity and increased the likelihood of unintentional meanings. [Quoted from Adam Weaver Animation HERE]

Here's the publisher's blurb:

Animation variously entertains, enchants, and offends, yet there have been no convincing explanations of how these films do so. Shadow of a Mouse proposes performance as the common touchstone for understanding the principles underlying the construction, execution, and reception of cartoons. Donald Crafton's interdisciplinary methods draw on film and theater studies, art history, aesthetics, cultural studies, and performance studies to outline a personal view of animated cinema that illuminates its systems of belief and world making. He wryly asks: Are animated characters actors and stars, just like humans? Why do their performances seem live and present, despite our knowing that they are drawings? Why is animation obsessed with distressing the body? Why were California regional artists and Stanislavsky so influential on Disney? Why are the histories of animation and popular theater performance inseparable? How was pictorial space constructed to accommodate embodied acting? Do cartoon performances stimulate positive or negative behaviors in audiences? Why is there so much extreme eating? And why are seemingly insignificant shadows vitally important?

I've not yet read the book, but it's plausible on the face of it. Henry Jenkins has a four-part interview with Crafton which goes through the argument without all the (I'm sure) fascinating detail: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

Happy Birthday, Mike!

It's not often that one gets to work with a genuine pioneer, even if only in a small way. I'm talking of animation historian, Michael Barrier, who turned 70 yesterday, 16 June 2010. I feel honored for his generous correspondence over the past several years and for the fact he has published some of my thoughts at his website.

From Amid Amidi's tribute at Cartoon Brew:

Barrier began interviewing animation artists in the late-1960s, and by the 1980s, he (along with his Los Angeles-based research partner Milt Gray) had recorded the most comprehensive collection of interviews with artists from the Golden Age of theatrical animation. To put his work into perspective, when he started chronicling the lives of these artists, few film critics took animation seriously, and even fewer regarded the classic Hollywood cartoons as a field worthy of study. In the face of such indifference, Michael had the audacity to not only interview the famous directors but hundreds of little known artists who contributed to the success of Hollywood theatrical cartoons ranging from animators and layout artists to cameramen and composers.

The spade work Barrier's done will serve us for generations. It's a real contribution to the study of cartoons and animation and, through that, to the crafts themselves. Without a sure knowledge of the past, we cannot advance with confidence into the future.