Walt Disney

by Neal Gabler

  Eric Larson was the son of Danish immigrants who had settled in Utah. Larson attended the University of Utah majoring in journalism until a prank—some fellow students broke into his office at the college humor magazine and one of them fell through a skylight and died—led him to find a job in Los Angeles at a firm that designed yearbooks. He stayed for six years, the last few as art director. When he got married in 1933 and needed to increase his income, he decided to write a radio script for station KHJ, which steered him to one of its former employees, Dick Creedon, for some tips on how to improve his radio play. Creedon, who was now working for Disney, suggested that Larson apply for work there since Walt was about to expand his staff for Snow White. Larson, then twenty-eight, reluctantly tried out as an animator and after two days was hired as an assistant.

  Ward Kimball, another in this group of recruits, had just turned twenty when he went to work at the Disney studio in April 1934. Where Reitherman and Larson were easygoing and agreeable, Kimball was an edgy iconoclast and looked the part with a round, manic putty-face, a high forehead, full cheeks, and an oversize grin. Kimball’s father had been an itinerant salesman who shuttled the family from one town to another—Kimball said that he attended twenty-two schools—before finally settling in California when Ward was a teenager. As a child he had been sent by his parents to live with his widowed grandmother in Minneapolis, where he first began drawing, and when the family relocated out west, he took art correspondence courses and attended the Santa Barbara School of the Arts. It was while he was working his way through school by playing in the Mickey Mouse Club band at the local theater that he saw Three Little Pigs, which “just knocked me out!” An instructor encouraged him to apply for a job at the studio, and Ward’s mother offered to drive him down from Santa Barbara for an interview. As Kimball told it, he arrived with his portfolio, which apparently no one else had ever done, and when he was asked to leave it, he said, truthfully, that he couldn’t afford the gas to drive back to pick it up. The receptionist slipped it to Walt, and Kimball started work the next week. By the time he ascended from assistant to animator, Kimball was known for breaking the rules. “He never did what was expected,” wrote fellow animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, which is why, according to Sharpsteen, Walt eventually “looked for an opportunity to use Kimball on something where he could be an individual and not have to conform to others.”

  The month after Kimball started work, Milt Kahl, then twenty-five and living in northern California, headed to the studio at the suggestion of Ham Luske, an old friend who was already one of Walt’s top animators. Kahl had had a rough childhood. After his father, a German immigrant, abandoned the family and his mother remarried, Kahl had disputes with his stepfather and was forced to quit school to earn money. Like Walt, he found an escape in art. At sixteen he began what would be a string of jobs working in the art departments of various newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area—it was at one of these that he met Luske—before drawing ads for a West Coast theater chain and then freelancing until Luske made his suggestion. Kahl was hired.

  Frank Thomas had taken up drawing as a child because he was lonely and friendless, and he pursued it through high school in Fresno, California, and later college, first at Fresno State College, where his father was president, and then at Stanford. Upon graduation Thomas, who was bespectacled and professorial, left for Los Angeles and enrolled at Chouinard. A Stanford friend and fellow artist named Jim Algar, who had also gone to Los Angeles, had come to Disney’s attention, and he suggested Thomas apply as well. Thomas passed a one-week tryout and began work in September 1934. Meanwhile another Stanford friend of Thomas’s named Ollie Johnston was serving as manager of the Stanford football team and visiting Los Angeles for the Rose Bowl when he decided to enroll at Chouinard himself. He was rooming with Thomas when Donald Graham invited him to try out at the studio. Three weeks later he was hired. A little more than a year later he replaced Thomas as Fred Moore’s assistant.

  Another of these prize recruits, John Lounsbery, discovered drawing at the age of thirteen when his father died, then attended art school in Denver after working briefly on the railroad. He continued his studies at the Art Center in Los Angeles, where one of his instructors referred him to the Disney studio in the summer of 1935. He was joined there by the last of what would eventually become the band of master animators, Marc Davis. Davis was the son of a first-generation Jew of Russian extraction who traveled the country with a mindreading act before landing finally in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Like Ward Kimball, Davis attended nearly two dozen schools, which provided him with the kind of lonely, peripatetic childhood that seemed practically obligatory for animators who amused themselves with drawing. Moving to northern California, Davis drew theater posters and newspaper ads. It was a theater owner in Yuba City who suggested he work for Disney, and when his father died, Davis and his mother relocated to Los Angeles. He visited the Disney studio and was hired that December as an assistant. “Attended classes day and night,” he described his indoctrination into the Disney method, “and we worked a lot of overtime and we got meal tickets and we were delighted to be there.”

  Though they may have arrived at the studio haphazardly, many of them had been hired during a recruiting drive that Walt had launched in June 1934 to attract young animators for Snow White, despite the fact they had no idea the studio was embarking on such a project. “The qualification,” went a recruiting letter drafted by Ben Sharpsteen that was sent to art schools throughout the country, “is an ability to draw well, creatively, plus a certain amount of imagination that would be helpful in the study of dramatics, which animators must acquire.” Once the call went out, thousands responded—thirteen hundred from Chouinard alone by one account, and thirty thousand overall by the end of the decade.

  As popular as the studio had become, it wasn’t just the lure of Disney that beckoned them; it was the lure of any job at all. Years later Marc Davis would say, as Walt himself had, that “the Depression was the greatest thing that could ever have happened to Walt,” since there was no way he could have gotten this talent otherwise. Davis was probably right. “It looked like a real utopia in the height of the Depression,” John Lounsbery concurred. Of the thousands who responded to the ads or art school fliers by submitting samples or portfolios, roughly fifteen hundred were selected from an initial screening, and of these roughly seventy-five were given a one-week tryout at the studio. Of these, roughly twenty advanced to the next stage of training.

  Now began the real test. Walt was not hiring these men to animate—not yet—and certainly not to shoulder the main load. Indeed, according to one animator, it would take nearly ten years of apprenticeship for a trainee to move from in-between work to a classification as a master animator. He was hiring them to train for the herculean task that lay ahead of in-betweening and assisting on Snow White. Walt still griped that when he hired veteran animators, he had to put up with their “goddamn poor working habits from doing cheap pictures.” It was easier, he believed, to start from scratch with young art students and inculcate in them the Disney system. In effect, Walt was sending these men to a kind of artistic boot camp.

  It was intensive, but then Walt wanted Snow White to be perfect. The trainees spent all morning and then, after a lunch break, the rest of the afternoon in life classes taught by Don Graham—eight hours each day in all. After several weeks they were assigned to animators as in-betweeners at eighteen dollars per week. Even then, however, they would be excused to attend classes for a third or half a day, and beginning in February 1935, they were expected to attend an evening class every Wednesday night on the studio soundstage. Graham described his course as “[i]ntensive lectures on character construction, animation, layout, background, mechanics and direction [that] extended studio knowledge to the youngest neophyte.”

  But it wasn’t only the trainees who were now attending classes. By the fall, with the Snow White script being fine-tuned and the film nearing the animation stage, Walt
reinstituted mandatory classes for the entire studio art staff on Tuesday nights after having suspended them in the face of the heavy workload. Sessions alternated between action analysis and screenings of recent live-action films that, Walt announced, were “tied up in some way with the current stuff we are working on…with the thought in mind to prepare ourselves now for the future,” meaning Snow White. In addition, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston said, animators attended classes two or three times a week, where Graham would analyze small pieces of film, running them forward and backward repeatedly; his lectures were recorded, transcribed, mimeographed, and then distributed throughout the studio. When he wasn’t analyzing live action, Graham was analyzing the movements of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, not only to improve the animation of these characters but also to sharpen the animators’ skills for Snow White. “Put in simple terms,” Graham said, “it amounted to this: a drawing principle is a drawing principle. If it works in a Rubens, it must work in Donald Duck. If it works in the Duck it must work in SNOW WHITE.”

  As they edged closer to beginning the animation for Snow White—and given Walt’s reluctance to begin without being fully prepared, they were always edging—he intensified the training. Besides the night classes, the screenings, and the action-analysis sessions headed by Graham and Phil Dike, Walt enlisted the older animators to give instruction to the younger ones—“to discuss with them Timing [and] means of obtaining certain effects…[I]n this way I hope to stir up in this group of men an enthusiasm and a knowledge of how to achieve results that will advance them rapidly.” (Walt later wrote Graham; “Immediately following these talks, I have noticed a great change in animation.”) He asked Joe Grant, a young artist who had specialized in caricature, to teach a “Caricature Class” where animators wouldn’t just take instruction but would share ideas. He expanded courses to include other artists: Jean Charlot on composition, Rico Lebrun on drawing animals, and Faber Birren on theories of color. He invited guest lecturers to the studio, including notables like the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. He expanded his visual library so that animators wanting to see various animals or objects in motion could have films of them run in a sweatbox. He even had Graham take the animators on a monthly excursion to the zoo to observe the animals. “I am convinced that there is a scientific approach to this business,” Walt wrote Graham in a long memo that December, “and I think we shouldn’t give up until we have found out all we can about how to teach these young fellows the business.” “A creative structure was being built,” remembered I. Klein, who worked at the studio then, “an analytical, educational and artistically functional ‘belt line’ for producing animated cartoon films to compete with live action films and to go beyond the limitations of human actors.” Animator John Hubley put it more succinctly: The studio was “like a marvelous big Renaissance craft hall.”

  Nor was the instruction restricted to visuals. Walt believed that he could give the same scientific treatment to the narrative side, so in May 1935 he recruited Dr. Boris Morkovin, the chairman of the department of cinematography at the University of Southern California, to conduct classes anatomizing the gag and subjecting it to the sort of scrutiny to which Graham was subjecting action. As Morkovin put it, “Walt’s idea is that he has to prepare his young artists just as the U.S.C. football team is prepared.” Morkovin claimed to have classified over two hundred gags into thirty-one basic types, though all were united by one basic idea: “Shock is the soul of the gag…. We can see that when two unexpected things are brought into contrast they give a jolt to the spectators’ nerves and stimulate great hilarity.” As a result, he advised his charges, “You must train your imagination and get into your blood the ability to bring about unrelated and contrasted gags.” Taking his science one step further, he charted certain cartoons to examine the duration of their gags and to determine whether the gags were “properly proportioned,” whatever that meant.

  Walt, in his obsession with systematization, was so enamored of Morkovin that he even had him analyze story outlines as he was now having Graham review rough animation in the sweatbox, and Walt got his idea for distributing questionnaires at the studio after screenings when Morkovin began issuing bulletins critiquing animations, which, Walt felt, was “an ideal way to promote discussion among everyone.” But Walt’s enthusiasm for the professor was not widely shared. Most employees found Morkovin, gray hair lacquered back on his head and bespectacled, every bit as pompous as his name and thought his lectures bordered on the comical—a kind of parody of academic pretension. “[A]n hour a week under Ted Sears would have done more good than the four days’ juggling with constantly changing, half-developed, confusing classifications,” complained one employee after taking Morkovin’s course. For years, long after he had left the studio, Morkovin remained a joke—one of Walt’s few failed attempts at bringing rigor and enlightenment to his staff.

  The intention, however, was not just education; it was infatuation. As always, Walt wanted the studio employees to be besotted, as he was, with the notion of excellence. He wanted obsession, and with the encouragement of Graham’s classes, he got it. Following Walt, Graham had said that the “thinking animation character becomes a personality,” so Ward Kimball and another animator, Larry Clemmons, would go out to Ocean Park on hot summer Friday nights, munch Cracker Jacks and popcorn, and muse about passersby, “analyzing people: what made them tick, and going into the psychology of the persons,” as a way for Kimball and Clemmons to hone their animation talents. Frank Thomas, who was an accomplished piano player, said he would study the audience as he performed. “[Y]ou watch these [people] and you know that you’ve got a character for a picture.”

  And they studied not only people and movement but the behavior of inanimate objects. “It came to a [point] where bricks would be thrown through a plate glass window,” recalled Eric Larson, “to see what the action looks like. And we would shoot it in slow motion.” To understand ripples, the animators would drop rocks into water, but Josh Meador in the effects department wasn’t satisfied, so he experimented with different-sized rocks and different liquids to appreciate better the effect of density. They even slammed doors to observe the reaction when the wood hit the jambs. Ham Luske would take off his tie while sailing to Catalina Island and dangle it just to see how the wind took it, or he would imitate a golfing partner’s putt to demonstrate “anticipation.” “Ham was studying animation all the time,” said Eric Larson, “it was his whole life.” But it was everyone’s life at Disney to absorb for the greater good of animation. “We saw every ballet, we saw every film,” remembered Marc Davis. “If a film was good we would go and see it five times…. Anything that might produce growth, that might be stimulating—the cutting of scenes, the staging, how a group of scenes was put together. Everybody was studying constantly.” And calling it a “perfect time of many things coming together in one orbit,” he added, “Walt was that lodestone.”

  Now they seemed to be ready. By late November 1935, two and a half years after Walt had first performed Snow White, he had set a schedule, basically starting with the comic scenes, moving to the frightening scenes, and ending with the sad scenes, apparently hoping that his staff’s sophistication would grow as the project proceeded, and he began to assign the animation. Ham Luske would be the “first to start” and was clearly singled out as the primary animator. In mid-December, Walt instructed Luske to begin with Snow White’s discovery of the dwarfs’ cottage, then move progressively on to the dwarfs’ discovery of Snow White asleep in their bedroom, the washing and soup-eating sequences, Snow White sending the dwarfs off to the mine, Snow White encountering the peddler woman and eating the apple, and finally Snow White in the woods meeting the birds. “It is possible that with the experience Ham will gain by the work he is now doing, plus his native ingenuity and ability,” Walt wrote Paul Hopkins of the studio personnel department, “he will be enabled to handle all of the Snow White action, with the exception of the sequence when the dwarfs entertain her at night,
which I intend Les Clark to handle.”

  As Joe Grant saw it, Walt was “casting” the animators the way a casting director for a live-action feature would have selected actors. “If he gave Grumpy to Tytla—Tytla was a grumpy character; whoever did Happy was a happy character. Walt figured it all out for himself.” Bumptious-looking Fred Moore, who had drawn the little pigs and was working at the time on the pigs in a sequel called Three Little Wolves, was to join Luske animating the dwarfs’ discovery of Snow White through the soup-eating sequence and in addition drawing the dwarfs starting out for the mine, meeting in the woods, and beginning work on a bed, a gift for Snow White. Effervescent Dick Lundy was to draw the dwarfs entertaining Snow White. Stern Bill Tytla, still in the hospital at the time recovering from his polo injury, was to draw the dwarfs in the mine, the dwarfs marching home, the dwarfs discovering a light in their house, and the dwarfs exploring the house. Johnny Roberts was to draw the dwarfs making the bed through the scene where the Queen leaps to her death. Master psychologist Norm Ferguson, the Pluto expert, was to draw the Queen’s transformation into the peddler woman, the making of the poisoned apple, the Queen’s visit to the Prince in the dungeon where she has imprisoned him (a scene that Walt would soon excise), and the Queen starting off for the dwarfs’ cottage. He was also to draw most of the Queen’s scenes up to her death. Les Clark would draw Snow White herself during the entertainment sequence. And Art Babbitt, who was charged with designing the Queen, would draw all the objects, liegemen, and animals with which the Queen came into contact, including her Magic Mirror, her huntsman, and her raven, feeling her out until he was able to finalize her look. Similarly, even after the animation had started, Grim Natwick, the old Betty Boop specialist, was to continue working with Luske and Clark on finding the right design for Snow White. (Natwick later said that he was allowed “two months of experimental animation before they ever asked me to animate one scene in the picture.”) At the same time Walt assigned Frank Churchill, his in-house composer, to write the music, and he divided the story department into six units, each with a separate scene or set of scenes that they were to continue to revise and refine in conjunction with the animators.