by Rees Quinn
Below the surface, Disney was impatient, overbearing, and volatile. According to Roy, “Walt puts up this mild front, but underneath it there’s drive, drive, drive.” The studio was his world. He created it, maintained it, and lived in it. While he encouraged ideas from his staff, he didn’t hesitate to tell them how to do something. Disney thought nothing of throwing away a drawing an animator had slaved over; if he couldn’t see the humor or value in it, it was worthless. With a near photographic memory, Disney could recall the smallest visual detail or gag that had been agreed to months before, and if it was missing or wrong, he would leap to his feet and demand to know what had happened. In staff meetings, he was quick to express his displeasure with any idea he didn’t like and the person who had offered it up, regardless if the employee was hired the day before or was one of his most trusted, longtime staff members. “I sometimes feel like a dirty heel,” he said once, admitting that he got his way by “pounding” on the people who worked for him.
In his utopian vision of the studio, Disney wanted to be its muse, not its overlord. But as the studio expanded, this role became impossible. Disney believed in giving employees bonuses and developed a rewards system that required him to keep track of what everyone was doing, but by 1936, he realized he needed a more objective way to grade employee performance. Disney implemented a complicated formula for grading animation and paying salaries based on the quality and the number of feet of film an animator was responsible for. The staff despised the new system, and Disney still stepped in from time to time to modify the formula on a case-by-case basis. But it increased productivity: The more work an animator churned out, the more he was paid.
The breakneck pace took a toll on Disney. Although the studio was focused on making animated features, it was still turning out a steady stream of short cartoons. Disney was often sick and needed frequent consultations with an assortment of physicians. Polo was his physical outlet and his sole form of recreation. But in 1935, he had collided with another rider, who was knocked to the ground and killed when Disney’s horse fell on him. Roy Disney gave up polo immediately; Walt quit three years later. He sold his ponies and drifted away from his polo friends. After that, Walt spent most of his leisure time with his family. “He really didn’t have time to make friends,” his wife Lillian said. “Walt had too much to do. He had to have a clear mind for work the next day.”
During a visit to 1939’s Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, Disney decided on a new hobby. It was a World’s Fair to celebrate the city’s dedication of the newly-built San Francisco-Oakland Bay and Golden Gate bridges. The exhibit that caught Disney’s eye was by Mrs. James Ward Thorne. It was a miniature world, with model homes decorated in American and European styles from different eras. Mrs. Thorne furnished it with dollhouse furniture and accessories – some collected during European travels and others she handmade herself. It reminded Disney of the Lionel train models he built with his nephew. Peering into the meticulously detailed rooms, he felt transported – to another time, a different dimension.
From then on, he was a collector. He was always on the lookout for some tiny bauble to add to his collection. He returned from trips to Europe with suitcases full of glass, wood, china, and metal trinkets. They filled his home. “My hobby is a lifesaver,” he wrote. “When I work with these small objects, I become so absorbed that the cares of the studio fade away . . . at least for a time.”
Race to the Box Office
In 1938, the Disney brothers went on a buying spree. They purchased the rights to a number of children’s stories, including Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan. Roy negotiated for these properties while Walt wrestled with Bambi and Pinocchio, two features which had gone into production simultaneously, but were progressing at different speeds. Disney originally planned to release Bambi as his second animated feature, but had difficulties with both the script and the animation. The biggest obstacle to Bambi’s progress, however, was Disney’s understanding of the story.
Bambi was based on the 1923 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by an Austrian writer who used the pen name Felix Salten. The story follows a buck roe deer from birth to old age, when he becomes the strongest and wisest deer in the woods. Salten intended the book for adult readers, and it is an often grim, even gory tale. Bambi is orphaned early on when his mother is killed by a hunter and is later shot. Badly wounded, Bambi recovers when an older buck shows him how to leave a confusing trail of blood in the forest so that he will not be found.
The book was an international bestseller. An English translation became a Book of the Month Club selection and sold more than a half million copies in the United States. A reviewer for The New York Times called Bambi, A Life in the Woods “tender” and “lucid,” and marveled at how the story “takes you out of yourself.”
Disney was eager to get Bambi made while audiences were still excited about Snow White, but he couldn’t get comfortable with the story, which was more a collection of scenes than a narrative. He also struggled with how to make Bambi a sufficiently sensitive character and to find the balance between realism and fantasy in his story about a talking deer. Meanwhile, his animators were having trouble drawing deer. At one point, Disney resorted to keeping a live deer in small corral at the studio. Frustrated, Disney announced that their next feature would not be Bambi but Pinocchio.
Pinocchio is the story of a wooden puppet who longs to become “a real boy.” It was adapted from an 1883 Italian novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi. Made by a woodcarver named Geppetto, Pinocchio has a natural tendency for misadventure. His most famous characteristic is a nose that grows longer when he tells a lie.
Disney felt sure Pinocchio could move ahead more quickly than Bambi, but once the animation got underway, he again had reservations. Disney thought Pinocchio lacked charm and was too wooden and puppet-like. People liked the story, he said, but not the main character. Disney told his team to stop thinking of Pinocchio as a puppet drawn to look somewhat human and instead imagine the character as a human drawn to look somewhat like a puppet. Eventually, they got it right. As one of the animators later put it, “I made kind of a cute little boy out of him, and Walt loved it.”
Actors were filmed for a number of sequences in Pinocchio, and animators used stills as a reference for creating the scenes. This new technique heightened the realism of the action and became a standard process in the studio.
Much of the script had to be rewritten when Disney took a minor character in the book - a cricket – named him Jiminy and turned him into Pinocchio’s conscience. Disney turned to one of his “Nine Old Men” – his top animators - to design Jiminy Cricket. Ward Kimball, disgruntled that much of his work had been cut from the final version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had been ready to walk out before Disney approached him with Jiminy. Kimball preferred to animate exaggerated cartoon characters over realistic ones, and Disney proclaimed him a genius at it. He drew Jiminy Cricket with wide, oval eyes, and a smile that stretched from one end of his pale green face to the other, plumping his cheeks like a carefree child. His tattered top hat and tails, worn-out shoes, and a hook-handled umbrella that doubled as a walking cane suggested an old soul. Kimball described Jiminy as a little man with an egg head and no ears, and joked, “The only thing that makes him a cricket is because we call him one.”
The cricket was given his voice by a forty-three-year-old singer from Missouri named Cliff Edwards, whose nickname was “Ukulele Ike.”
On a star-lit night in Tuscany, Jiminy Cricket croons to the viewers the song that would become a Disney anthem, “When You Wish Upon A Star.” Jiminy has a tale to tell about a wish on a star that did come true, and it starts in the warm and welcoming workshop of the jovial, fatherly woodcarver Geppetto. Witness to a miracle, the cricket is our narrator and guide, as much as he is Pinocchio’s. This responsibility is given to him by a beautiful Blue Fairy, a wishing star who materializes to grant the lonely woodcarver’s wish that the puppet child he
has created could be a real boy. Breathing life into the wooden Pinocchio, she tells him that to be a real boy, he must prove himself to be brave, truthful and unselfish.
The world outside the workshop, though, is tawdry, and rife with terrible temptations, as Pinocchio soon discovers on his way to school. He crosses paths with slick-talking scoundrel Honest John Foulfellow the Fox, who swindles him with promises of fame and fortune. The Fox’s companion, Gideon, is a shabby alley cat whose only contribution to the conversation is a series of hiccups (provided by Bugs Bunny voice actor Mel Blanc). Against Jiminy’s advice, Pinocchio is sold to a menacing puppet master named Stromboli, who threatens to chop him into firewood if he won’t perform. Pinocchio is visited again by the Blue Fairy, who asks him why he allowed himself to be led astray. He concocts a lie which, along with his wooden nose, grows more and more elaborate. Insisting he has learned his lesson and will be a good boy from then on, Pinocchio is freed by the fairy, who warns she will not intervene again.
The boy puppet is soon sidetracked again, convinced by Honest John that he is sick and in need of a vacation to Pleasure Island. There, Pinocchio is befriended by a misbehaving boy named Lampwick, and with no rules or authority to stop them, they gamble, smoke, drink and vandalize the island. Jiminy Cricket discovers the island’s sinister purpose: the boys, in making jackasses of themselves, become donkeys to be sold into servitude in the salt mines and circuses. He warns Pinocchio and they escape, but not before the boy has grown donkey ears and a tail.
Meanwhile, Geppetto, his cat Figaro and goldfish Cleo, distraught over the missing boy, had set out to sea to search for him, only to be swallowed by a giant whale named Monstro. Pinocchio, determined to rescue his family, follows them into the beast’s belly and devises an escape in which the smoke from a fire forces the whale to sneeze them out. They all wash up on a beach, but Pinocchio’s wooden body is lifeless until the Blue Fairy, deciding he has proven himself, brings him back as a real boy. Jiminy Cricket, as a reward for his service, is pinned with the solid gold badge of an official “conscience,” and outfitted in proper, new clothes.
More than Snow White, the villains of Disney’s Pinocchio are a fearsome bunch – from the satirical adult predators Honest John and Gideon to the terrifying Monstro. A morality tale teaching children the benefits of hard work and middle-class values, Pinocchio dramatically overstates the consequences of bad behavior.
Pinocchio opened in New York on February 7, 1940. Five months before the world premiere, Germany had invaded Poland, and World War II was on.
Still, Disney and his new distributor, RKO, had high hopes. The critics reinforced them with raves.
Frank Nugent of The New York Times declared Pinocchio superior to Snow White in every way but its score - a minor complaint. The film, Nugent said, was “the best thing Mr. Disney has done and therefore the best cartoon ever made.” The film’s real star, he wrote, was Jiminy Cricket. The cricket was smart and chirpy, the opposite of Dopey, the fan-favorite Snow White dwarf. Critics also praised the quality of animation.
Time magazine called it “in every respect except its score, (Disney’s) best. In craftsmanship and delicacy of drawing and coloring, in the articulation of its dozens of characters, in the greater variety and depth of its photographic effects, it tops the high standard Snow White set. The charm, humor and loving care with which it treats its inanimate characters puts it in a class by itself.”
But the good reviews turned out to be the only good news for Pinocchio, which failed to draw the sizeable audiences Snow White had. Disney lost money on his $2.6 million investment. Part of the problem was the timing of its release, which at the start of World War II kept it from reaching European markets. Despite the fact that Jiminy’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song, the mood at Disney was gloomy.
A New Mickey
In the mid-1930s, Disney decided Mickey Mouse was getting stale. Mickey was a blank slate - a character without character. The studio was working more personality into its cartoons, and the fact that Mickey had no real personality made it harder to come up with material for him. Mickey Mouse, the character and the franchise, needed a fresh start. Disney’s solution was to cast Mickey in a Silly Symphony musical dream sequence called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on a 1797 poem by Johann Wolfang von Goethe, and set to music composed by Paul Dukas. The story is simple but transfixing. An old sorcerer retires for the day, leaving his apprentice to clean up the workshop. The apprentice employs magic he doesn’t fully command to get a broom to do his work, and chaos ensues as the apprentice is unable to control the supernatural forces he lets loose.
Disney looked around for a conductor to record the music for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and found one in a chance meeting at Chasen’s restaurant in Hollywood in 1937. Leopold Stokowski, the renowned leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was so enthusiastic about the project he offered to do the job gratis.
With the music in place, Disney wanted to make Mickey more appealing. He turned to Fred Moore, who had imbued the Three Little Pigs with such life and charm. Moore gave Mickey a softer, plumper body and a fuller, more expressive face. The change was subtle but dramatic. Mickey became less rodent-like and more child-like. He was cute.
Work on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice commenced in late 1937. Disney told his team to think more artistically, and to stay away from slapstick. The gags, he instructed, should be more graceful and subtle. Disney was bowled over in January 1938, when Stokowski arrived in Los Angeles with eighty-five musicians to record the score. Stokowski also had an idea to expand the project. He proposed making The Sorcerer’s Apprentice only one segment of a full-length feature film, with other pieces of music matched to animated sequences illustrating each musical mood. Although Disney was heavily extended with Pinocchio and Bambi, he jumped at the idea. Their working title for the new project was The Concert Feature.
Disney had been interested in making an animated film that revolved around music rather than narrative since adapting the Danse Macabre for 1929’s Skeleton Dance. He also needed to recoup the skyrocketing cost of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Standard Disney shorts were generally produced in two weeks; production on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was expected to take the better part of a year and cost more than $150,000. The Concert Feature made more sense, but it would be expensive. Stokowski’s original offer to conduct the score for the short for free had been amended to give him a percentage of the profits. The new contract gave him $125,000 to record the score for The Concert Feature and to appear in live-action sequences as himself.
Disney and Stokowski called composer Deems Taylor, who flew in from Manhattan, and rounded up Disney’s sound engineer Bill Garrity, and together they selected symphonies from Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Schubert. Contemporary composers Paul Hindemith, Serge Prokofiev and William Grant Still joined the production. As Disney’s $3-million Burbank, Calif., studio buzzed with the activity of its 1,200 artists, animators and engineers, Stokowski went to the Philadelphia Academy of Music, where he would conduct his own Philadelphia Orchestra for the other segments.
Disney obsessed with making the sound as realistic as possible, collaborated with RCA to develop a system using multiple soundtracks and speakers to the left, right, and center of the theater. Disney called it Fantasound. Garity invented the system for recording each section of the orchestra on a separate track, and splicing it so that in final production, it surrounded the audience. To make it work, Stokowski and Garity recorded 430,000 feet of sound track, which was cut and braided down to 11,953 feet. The equipment cost Disney and RCA $85,000; the total cost of the recordings exceeding $200,000. But it was a smart investment: The engineers had done for sound what Technicolor had done for visuals.
Next, it was up to Disney’s animators to match action to the music. Many who had never attended a classical concert in their lives found themselves whistling and humming to Bach and Beethoven as the compositions were repeated as ma
ny as 700 times. Disney insisted on a refinement and realism to surpass the typical Mickey cartoon. He wanted audiences to be startled, rather than amused.
For Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde “Rite of Spring,” a cataclysmic scene depicting the formation of the earth and the appearance of life on the planet through the time of dinosaurs was imagined. Disney animators studied comets and nebulae at Los Angeles’s Mount Wilson Observatory, and spent hours at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, where the curriculum included prehistoric beasts, protozoic life, and the properties of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. One zealous Disney animator was arrested by suspicious police who observed him lying on his back on an L.A. sidewalk during a lightning storm to study the flashes. The team consulted experts like paleontologist Barnum Brown, famous for discovering the first documented remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex in 1902. Animators analyzed the movements of iguanas and an alligator roaming the Disney lot while Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring thundered so blaringly that this group had to be quarantined so as not to disturb the others.
Fantasia, as film was eventually called, comprised eight animated musical sequences interspersed with back-lit live-action scenes of Stokowski and his orchestra. Deems Taylor, the grinning, balding live-action master of ceremonies, introduced the program, calling it “an entirely new form of entertainment.”
Fantasia opens with the orchestra playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” to swirling patterns, lines, shadows and cloud formations that react to the beat and tempo of the music. Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” ballet danced by flowers, fairies, fish, falling leaves, and a small, slant-eyed mushroom named Hop Low who can’t keep up with his larger counterparts. Next, Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” features the rejuvenated Mickey Mouse. Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” is followed by an intermission, and then the orchestra to play Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” at a festival to honor the god of wine, Bacchus. The party, attended by cherubs, cupids, centaurs, and scantily-clad centaurettes, is interrupted by an enraged Zeus, who scatters the crowd of mythological creatures by hurling lightning bolts at them. Amilcare Ponchielli‘s “Dance of the Hours” is a colorful comic ballet with dancing hippos, elephants, and alligators. Susan, the principal hippo ballerina, and Ali Gator, premiere dancer of the ostrich ballet, literally tear up the dance hall. The scene for Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s “Spooky Night on Bald Mountain” snakes through a graveyard inhabited by ghosts and ghouls on flying brooms. Disney’s animators collaborated with Danish fairy-tale illustrator Kay Nielsen on this segment, a stand-out among Fantasia’s best acts.
