by Neal Gabler
Walt, too, believed that Pigs had broken barriers. “It brought us honors and recognition all over the world and turned the attention of young artists and distinguished older artists to our medium as a worthwhile outlet for their talents,” he wrote, and many of them trekked to Hyperion to join the cause. More, it had a financial ripple effect on the entire studio; the following year, thanks largely to the attention given to Pigs, the studio’s net profit was estimated by Fortune at $600,000. But the cartoon’s real effect was on the status of animation generally and on the status of the Disney studio specifically. As Walt put it years later, “[T]he main thing about the ‘Three Little Pigs’ was a certain recognition from the industry and the public that these things could be more than just a mouse hopping around or something.” They could be art.
The difference between Three Little Pigs and most of the earlier Disney milestones was that it was not only an achievement in animation but also, like the song, a cultural achievement, which was certainly a source of its astounding popularity. Critics immediately acknowledged that it bored into the national consciousness, both reflecting and somehow ameliorating anxiety over the Depression. Walt, as usual, pleaded ignorance, saying that neither he nor his crew had had any message in mind when they made the film. In fact, after nearly four years of national economic turmoil, Walt was still amazingly cavalier about it, once even remarking to his staff that if it hadn’t been for the Depression, he wouldn’t have had any of his top animators. Even so, the Disneys were not entirely unafflicted. Flora and Elias in Portland were suffering; their tenants were unable to pay the rent, which was, in any case, half of what it had been before the crash; and when Roy suggested that his father “trade” the rent with a tenant for paint and brushes to refurbish the buildings they owned, Elias said that he had $100 in back rent due him. “Of course that ain’t much to any one having a ‘Mickey Mouse’ Studio or something similar,” he wrote his son Raymond snidely. “To us it means considerable.” Their hope, they said, rested with the election of the new president.
When Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated in March 1933 and declared a bank holiday that same week to help stem a possible run on financial institutions, Roy was shaken, frantic over how the studio would pay its staff with its assets frozen. He had gone down to the bank to remonstrate and was given a ten-dollar gold piece for each employee as a token on the account, but before the week was out gold had been declared illegal tender. Now Roy began “stewing,” to use his own word. Walt, who had no interest in politics and whose primary interest in money was in reinvesting it in his cartoons, was unsympathetic. “Quit worrying,” he shrugged. “People aren’t going to stop living just because the banks are closed. What the hell, we’ll use anything—make potatoes the medium of exchange—we’ll pay everybody in potatoes.”
As it happened, Pigs was released on May 27, a little more than two months after the inauguration and the bank holiday, and the timing couldn’t have been more fortunate. Wrung out by the Depression and bolstered by the new president, the nation seemed to convert the cartoon of two carefree but shortsighted pigs and their hardworking, far-sighted brother into a parable of suffering (the wolf as economic adversity) and triumph (the industrious little pig as the embodiment of President Roosevelt’s New Deal that promised the country relief), which was exactly how numerous political cartoons at the time framed it. Film historian Lewis Jacobs said that the film became “by force of circumstance and the time…a heartening call to the people of a troubled country.” A few observers even credited it not just with reflecting the Depression but with helping vanquish it. “No one will ever know to what extent it may be held responsible for pulling us out of the depression,” Harvard professor Robert D. Feild wrote a few years after its release, “but certainly the lyrical jeer at the Big Bad Wolf contributed not a little to the raising of people’s spirits and to their defiance of circumstance.” In his annual report Will Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, said that “historians of the future will not ignore the interesting and significant fact that the movies literally laughed the big bad wolf of depression out of the public mind through the protagonism of Three Little Pigs.” Whatever the cartoon’s impact on sagging morale, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” indisputably became the nation’s new anthem, its cheerful whoop hurled in the face of hard times.
Among the many effects on the Disneys of the success of Three Little Pigs was the further expansion of the studio, the staff of which by late 1933 numbered nearly two hundred. Walt said, not disapprovingly, that Hyperion was coming to resemble a “Ford factory,” with the difference that “our moving parts were more complex than cogs—human beings, each with his own temperament and values who must be weighted and fitted into his proper place.” Walt had always been as concerned with the process of making cartoons as with the cartoons themselves, and in comparing his studio to a factory production line, he was acknowledging the new pressure on him to streamline that process. For one thing, he was constantly being nagged by Roy, and now by George Morris as well, to find a way to economize so that the studio could turn a profit. For another, he was always seeking ways to optimize the talents of his staff, in the service not just of productivity but of quality. It was precisely because he didn’t want to sacrifice his status as the best cartoon maker that he was driven to find a better way to make cartoons, effectively trying to mass-produce excellence.
Thus began another revolution. Just as he had been reinventing animation and attempting to perfect it through new techniques, Walt now began reinventing and attempting to perfect the system under which animations were produced. This put him in the unusual position of trying to reenchant a modern world that had been disenchanted partly through excessive rationalism by devising a system of production that would itself be more rational. Even if Walt had wanted it to, the studio clearly could no longer operate as a kind of giant fraternity where roles were ill defined and everyone pitched in on everything. Already before Pigs Walt had instituted his story department with Sears and Smith, which by late 1932 was segregated from the animators, and throughout 1932 and 1933 he had further divided the animators themselves into key animators, who drew the major poses or extremes, in-betweeners, who drew the action in between the extremes, and assistants, who cleaned up all the animation drawings and readied them to be inked and painted on the cels—a division that had the added bonus of allowing younger animators to learn from more experienced ones. Now new roles emerged, as well as even greater specialization, to make production less haphazard.
The process always began with the story. In the early days the stories usually originated with Walt, who would relate them to his animators to help him “gag” them during brainstorming sessions. When in the late 1920s Walt began assigning cartoons to directors to execute—either Iwerks or Jackson, and after Iwerks left, Burt Gillett—he would have them draw up rough sketches of the continuity, which Walt examined and approved or improved. “[T]he picture Walt was after was in his head, not on pieces of paper,” Wilfred Jackson said. Though the hatching of the story remained the least formalized stage of the cartoon, that informality gradually changed thanks to the activities of the new story department. Walt might still present a situation to his crew on which they were to ruminate, or after the studio expanded, he might distribute a mimeographed outline of a new animation to solicit gags from the entire staff, which would then be bandied about at large gag meetings on the soundstage.* (By 1934 he was requesting that these gags be drawn rather than written: “This would be an ideal way to present your story because it then shows the visualized possibilities, rather than a lot of words, explaining things that…turn out to be impossible to put over in action.”) But in the early 1930s Walt also created a new position, that of the sketch artist, who worked with the storymen and produced the storyboards. After a gag meeting the storyman and sketch artist would meet with a director to develop the continuity. When the storyman and sketch artist felt ready, they would d
rag the giant storyboards to one of the music rooms for a presentation to Walt. That part never changed, no matter how much the studio expanded: Walt was always the final authority, the one whom everyone had to please.
Standing in front of the boards, with an audience of the director, possibly the animators assigned to the short, and Walt, who invariably sat in the middle, the storyman would narrate the events and read the dialogue under the drawings. This was not just an informational session. The storyman had to “sell” his project to Walt. Being a good storyman meant not only devising a plot and gags but convincing Walt of their value. “The best story guys could act up a storm, laugh uproariously at their favorite gags, and outshout everyone, while using a wooden pointer to emphasize the main elements,” recalled director Jack Kinney. One storyman, Roy Williams, would get so carried away with his pointer that he would smash it right through the board.
During these sessions Walt usually sat impassively, unless he saw something that inspired him, and then he would leap to his feet and be off in a creative convulsion, spinning new ideas, one after another, sometimes even shooting down his own contribution and adducing another and then another and another. When he wasn’t inspired, one attendee remembered, “one eyebrow would go up and he would start to cough or thump his hand on the arm of his chair”—the raised eyebrow, the cough, and the drumming fingers, especially loud since Walt’s fingertips were calcified from his chain-smoking, three telltale gestures that could strike fear into the heart of any storyman. At the end of the presentation Walt, “like a Roman Emperor at the gladiator combat arena,” as one staff member described him, would typically sit in silence, and after this dramatic pause, during which the storyman and sketch artist would be quaking, begin his analysis, leading to a revision, to an abandonment, or to the coveted go-ahead. Even then, however, the story process was not quite finished. By the mid-1930s Walt was subjecting the storyboards to questionnaires in which studio staff were asked what they liked and didn’t like and inviting suggestions, for which Walt offered prizes as he did for gags.
At first the storymen were basically interchangeable, but they soon began to develop specialties. One might be good at story structure, another at character development, a third at recycling old gags, and a fourth at finding visual possibilities, and Walt would “cast” them, like actors, depending on what a particular animation seemed to need most. By now Walt had added another specialization to the story process, the gagman, whose job was to take the continuity and further “gag it up.” Sometimes this would take place in gag sessions with the storyman and director. Other times Walt would roam the studio with several gagmen in tow, visiting music rooms to add gags under his supervision. But even the gags were being routinized. At roughly the same time the gagman appeared, the studio was negotiating with UA publicist Hal Horne for his extensive gag file, and by decade’s end the studio had a row of filing cabinets with 1.5 million jokes grouped under 124 classifications.
In the very early days, once the story had been developed and gagged, Walt would then supervise the animation, functioning essentially as both producer and director. By the late 1920s, under the pressure of two full programs of animations—the Mickey Mouse cartoons and the Silly Symphonies—he had surrendered the director’s role. The director was a coordinator, synthesizing the story with the animation, the background layout, and the sound track. It was the director who finalized the “grays,” the gray sheets of paper on which were listed all the dialogue and sounds, then drew up the bar sheets that listed the sounds and the images frame by frame and side by side. He also was responsible for recording the sound, assigning scenes to animators, preparing the pencil tests to be reviewed by Walt, overseeing the inking and painting of his film, editing it and assembling it, and perhaps most of all, conveying Walt’s instructions to everyone on the project so that Walt’s vision was realized—an unenviable task, since Walt was often inexact in expressing what he wanted and then usually berated a director for not being able to read his mind. As Ben Sharpsteen put it, “Walt was the antagonist. He would take no excuses for a poor picture and he was prone to blame the director for a picture’s weaknesses.” Iwerks and Jaxon (Wilfred Jackson) were the first directors after Walt relinquished those reins. Later, when Walt was forced to divide the work into units to speed production, he assigned Jaxon, Gillett, and Sharpsteen to head them, and when Gillett was lured away by Van Beuren after the success of Pigs, an animator named Dave Hand, who had joined the studio two days after Iwerks left, assumed control of a unit.
Now Walt interpolated two more positions into the process, which again seemed to contribute to quality at the expense of efficiency. He hired artist Albert Hurter, who had worked at the Barré studio in New York and whose style inclined to European illustration, to provide what were called “inspirational drawings”—drawings that were intended to create an atmosphere or suggest a look that would both guide and inspire the men entrusted with actually animating the cartoon. It was a luxury that other animation studios obviously could not afford. “Albert Hurter had a big room and a big desk and did exactly what he pleased,” Grim Natwick remembered. “Walt would say, ‘Well, we’re going to make an animal picture, it’ll be located so and so. See if you can think of funny little positions.’ And Albert would play around with it.”
At roughly the same time Walt also broadened the responsibilities of the background artists, who were themselves early specialists, into laying out the entire cartoon visually prior to its being animated. Hence the name layout artist. As animation historian John Culhane put it, “[T]he director ‘saw’ the story in time and the layout artist saw it in space.” The latter worked closely with the director to devise not only the backgrounds, as in the past, but the characters and the staging of the scenes, even indicating camera angles and edits, so that the animators, who had previously worked primarily from the sketch artist’s drawings, now had a clear directive to follow.
After the director and the layout artist had settled on their approach, the director would assign the animation, a procedure called the “handout,” and the key animators would then draw the main poses. Walt’s division of labor into head animators, in-betweeners, and assistants may have been partly a concession to economy, and it did conserve the key animators’ time for the important things while relegating less important tasks to the less experienced animators, especially since each cartoon required anywhere from six thousand to seven thousand drawings, with the bonus that having assistants clean up the animation imposed a consistency between the work of one key animator and another. But another, less mercenary motive also lay behind Walt’s thinking, one that meshed with the animation techniques he was encouraging. Walt believed that by confining the chief animators to drawing extremes, he could get looser, more active, more powerful animation than if they had to concern themselves with drawing more cleanly for ink and paint. By the early 1930s Walt was insisting that his best animators draw roughly and that the assistants in cleaning up a drawing then actually “[m]ake it stronger than it has been drawn,” in Eric Larson’s words, so that the process produced bold, striking work. (Thomas and Johnston said that this redrawing helped account for the beauty of the animation at the time.) Some had a difficult time adjusting. One animator, Jack King, so resisted Walt’s injunction that he had his assistants rough up his clean drawings until Walt caught him and exploded.
Once the key animators got their handouts, they proceeded to draw poses. (Eventually they began making “pose tests” in which the poses were photographed so that the animators could see how the poses registered on the screen.) The rough animation led to the pencil tests, after which animators would revise their drawings, and then to the sweatbox sessions with Walt, which were the animators’ equivalent of the storyboard sessions and just as grueling. “A sweatbox session could determine a man’s fate in the organization; a good session could lead to fame and fortune, a bad one to the other side of the main gate,” wrote Jack Kinney, who would work as both an animator and
a director. “Consequently, as the session progressed, the air became hot, then steamy, and even gamy as a result of all the perspiration, carbon monoxide, and shattered hopes floating about in the gloom.” That didn’t change even when the sweatbox was relocated from its alcove under the stairwell to an air-conditioned projection room. After these sessions changes were made, a Leica reel was shot, and finally a rough reel was assembled of the cartoon not yet cleaned up or inked and painted.
Now came yet another quality control. Walt would screen the rough tests for each animation at noon on the soundstage for the staff and pass out questionnaires for comments, just as he had during the storyboard review. He would also record the audience reaction on acetate disks so he could hear precisely what worked and what didn’t. Only then, after changes had been made in accordance with the response, would the animation be cleaned up, inked, painted, and photographed by a camera in which compressed air held the cels while the operator pressed a button to activate the shutter. And then, after the film had been processed, the cartoon would be previewed at a nearby theater, usually on an evening when there was a full house. Animators were expected to attend and engage in a postmortem with Walt either in the lobby or on the sidewalk outside the theater—yet another terrifying ordeal if the audience hadn’t been enthusiastic. One embarrassed director slunk out to avoid Walt and raced to the parking lot, only to find him there fuming. “Even though he was blocking traffic in the parking lot,” Sharpsteen recalled, “Walt stood there and let him know how unhappy he was with the picture!”
The entire process, from a cartoon’s inception to its preview, could take as little as three months, which was in fact the typical interval, or as long as two years, but time never mattered to Walt except as an annoyance. The only thing that mattered to him was that he had done everything in his power to make the cartoon as excellent as it could be.
