by Neal Gabler
Walt was focused again, maybe for the first time since Fantasia. That August and September, as Seversky shuttled between the studio and various speaking engagements, sometimes snatching just a few hours before having to leave again, the staff raced to complete both the script and the storyboards. Walt kept emphasizing plausibility. “We have got to build it up so that the people are convinced—they are right with us on this,” he said at a story meeting. “If we get too fantastic, it is going to cause people to discount the whole thing.” In fact, it was Seversky, not Walt, who was more likely to insist on the entertainment value of the film rather than on its propaganda value, and when Walt objected to one point, Seversky snapped, “If we’re going to get stuck in the mud of today we may just as well wipe out the whole picture.”
Still, Walt saw aesthetic possibilities too. Though he called it a “bastard picture,” like The Reluctant Dragon, since it combined live scenes of Seversky lecturing with animation illustrating his points just as Dragon had combined Robert Benchley and animation, and since, as in Dragon, the animation itself was less refined than in the features, he spoke glowingly of how the animators could present the future. “[W]e can show torpedoes striking ships,” he said. “We can show huge cargo and bombing planes such as Seversky foresees.” He was especially excited by a projected final sequence that showed the enemy as an octopus and America as an eagle. “You bomb the heart of the octopus and we show the big thing as we hit it,” he gushed, “hammer on the vitals of the things, it knocks out the supplies and weakens every tentacle…while we’re hammering away at the tentacles, we’re still driving at the heart with our American air power.” As Walt saw it, this wasn’t going to be ordinary propaganda, any more than the features were ordinary cartoons. This was going to be great, earth-shaking propaganda. “The basic idea is big,” he wrote Perce Pearce, Dave Hand, and the film’s screenwriter, R. C. Sherriff, after hearing that audience interest was high. “It is the first time that Gallup has been able to report this on any picture he has surveyed,” and Walt urged that they try to rush the film out no later than December to take advantage of public anticipation.
Walt began shooting Seversky’s scenes in early October 1942. The filming had to take place at night because of the roar of planes taking off and landing nearby at the Lockheed plant during the day. Given the schedule, it was hectic. “I’ve scarcely been in my office for the last ten days,” Walt wrote producer Walter Wanger at the end of the month, “what with shooting live action on the de Seversky [film] along with everything else, I haven’t had a minute at my desk.” He was haggard-looking and worn too, often unshaven and bedraggled in his loose pants and open-collar shirts. But for all the time he devoted to his oversight of Victory, Walt was, as usual, not entirely satisfied. Watching the rushes, he complained that Seversky kept saying the same thing over and over again and that he was skipping information that the public needed to appreciate his theory. He also felt that they might be relying too heavily on what he called visual “stunts” and suggested that they turn “our thinking from tricks to guts.” And Walt worried that time was running out. As he told two visiting United Artists executives who had agreed to release the film when RKO declined, “There is a little too much optimism now,” with Americans thinking that the war might end in a year, when Seversky believed that it was likely to continue for another five.
If Walt felt he was saving the country from Nazism with Victory Through Air Power, he was also helping to save South America with his other films. All that spring and into the summer of 1942 the studio had been completing the package of shorts, now called Saludos, inspired by the South American trip of the previous year. “We had better whip it into shape now or else forget it,” Walt conceded after watching a reel of the film that May, though forgetting it was really not an option. He spent much of May and June polishing the film, then shipped it out in July so that Nelson Rockefeller and President Roosevelt could screen it. “Everybody in our office is most enthusiastic about SALUDOS,” Fran Alstock, now the director of the coordinator’s Motion Picture Division, wrote Walt after a July 29 preview. “It was shown last night to a number of the most important people in the Government,” and “its success far surpassed any of the pictures we have shown.” Rockefeller himself wrote Walt that the film “quite exceeds our highest expectations.” Already the studio was considering a sequel, featuring other South American countries.
Meanwhile, as he was attempting to save South America from the Nazis, Walt was also charged with saving that continent from disease, pollution, and malnutrition. Late that May, even before completing Saludos, he and seven of his artists had gone to Washington to discuss a series of health and educational films—with uninspiring titles including The Winged Scourge (about mosquitoes), Water: Friend or Enemy, and The Grain That Built a Hemisphere—as well as the four propaganda pictures, with the Coordinator’s Office, and to meet with Vice President Henry Wallace. Walt certainly understood the importance of these films both for South America and for the studio, but they were basically makework, used to keep the animators drawing and the studio running. In effect the studio, which had once existed to make films, now made films so that it could continue to exist. To Walt, who understood exactly what was happening, it was dispiriting.
While Victory seemed to satisfy his need for a major project commensurate with his ambitions, he was also looking for a property for an animated war film that might have commercial possibilities, since he was stymied from making his own entertainment features. He thought he might have found one that July when he received a story from a young Royal Air Force lieutenant named Roald Dahl. Dahl’s story concerned “gremlins,” fictional creatures who were blamed for the various little malfunctions that seemed to bedevil war pilots. Walt clearly liked the idea, especially after a brief national gremlin craze that fall, and he managed to deter other studios from making gremlin films of their own by saying that he was putting one into production. Walt eagerly commissioned a script, and Dahl visited the studio that November, but the project seemed as vexing as the gremlins themselves. Even before signing the contract, Roy complained that Dahl failed to give a logical reason or motive for the gremlins’ behavior. Perce Pearce thought that the only feasible approach would combine live action with animation, but that no matter what they tried, the gremlins were “very very heavy villains” for mucking up the planes and threatening the pilots. Ward Kimball said that one problem was that no one seemed to know what a gremlin should look like.
Dahl returned to the studio in April 1943 to develop the film, and Walt continued trying to hammer the story into shape, but his interest had begun to wane as he confronted the material’s problems. One artist accompanied Walt to a meeting of RAF fliers to discuss their encounters with the “gremlins,” but the fliers preferred to tell stories instead, and Walt left at midnight, frustrated, declaring that he wasn’t going to make the film. “Definitely, the GREMLINS will not be made as a feature because of the feeling on the Distributor’s part that the public has become tired of so many war films,” Walt wrote Dahl in December 1943, after what was now a year and a half of attempting to crack the story. He said he had tried to interest his crews in making it into a short but had had little success there either. “[I]f we ever hit upon an angle that seems right for production, we’ll get in touch with you.” He never did.
V
Even as the studio was almost totally devoted to war output, one commercial feature was still slowly making its way through production, a relic of a time that now seemed so long ago: Bambi. All through the strike and after America’s entrance into the war, thirty-five to forty employees continued to toil away, though even with another small infusion of $150,000 from the Bank of America, Walt had had to economize on the picture. Some scenes were cut, others were changed to place characters in silhouette where they wouldn’t have to be fully animated, camera movements were simplified, final cleanup tests were being sent directly for inking, and the inking was less precise. When Walt advised
Frank Thomas that there wouldn’t be any picture if they didn’t drastically cut costs and Thomas began tearing up, Walt bent over him and said, “Frank, I know it hurts you, but dammit, it’s got to go, that’s all there is to it.” To another director who lamented after Walt ordered cuts that they would be “losing something,” Walt said, “You’re telling me what you’d be losing. Here I am, sitting here, losing my shirt, and you’re telling me what you’d be losing.” In the end Walt had no choice but to cut scenes wholesale, slashing the film from 8,500 feet to 6,259 feet. “There was not much excitement or the usual thrill of completion during the last days of Bambi,” Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston would later confess, “but finally it was finished.”
Bambi, which had cost over $1.7 million even after the cuts, would need to return $2.5 million to break even, but the early signs were not encouraging. The studio had missed its target preview date in December 1941 because Walt decided to add lyrics to some of the songs, and when the film was finally previewed in Pomona the following February, a teenager shouted after Bambi’s mother’s death and Bambi’s calling out for her, “Here I am, Bambi!,” breaking the film’s spell. “The ride back to Burbank was even quieter than the ride out had been,” Thomas and Johnston wrote. It seemed a harbinger. The postponements had hurt the publicity campaign, and Walt’s plans to release the film as a roadshow attraction with Fantasound had to be dropped. A Gallup survey commissioned by the studio found that “ready-made viewership is low” and the “want-to-see” was the lowest of all the films on the survey’s index. Respondents said they “don’t like full-length cartoons,” that they considered them “childish” and that they expected it to be a “jungle picture.” The only hope, reported Gallup, was to sell the film as “tomorrow’s classic” and get testimonials from famous individuals. Meanwhile Roy wrote Walt that “BAMBI deals are coming in slowly,” in part because the market was crowded with pictures, in part because the recent Disney films had been disappointing, and in part because the Disneys’ distributor, RKO, had seemed to lose faith in them, though Roy still believed that the film would return its negative cost and might even turn a profit.
The whole project now seemed shrouded in gloom. That May, Frank Churchill, the frail, doleful, alcoholic composer who had written the scores for Snow White and Bambi, committed suicide with a shotgun. Always sorrowful and sensitive, he had no doubt been further depressed by Walt’s ongoing dissatisfaction with his work on Bambi. (Churchill had written a great score for the “musical circle of Hollywood,” Walt griped, but one that was monotonous and did not provide the excitement the movie needed.) Churchill’s last request was that “Love Is a Song,” which he had written for Bambi, be dedicated to his wife, Carolyn, who had been Walt’s personal secretary from June 1930 to January 1934, when she married Churchill. But even that was denied since the song had already gone to the publisher.
When it was finally released in August 1942, critics received Bambi almost as if it were an afterthought, which is what it had become, and the realism that Walt had striven so hard over so many years to achieve, the realism that had caused him so much grief, was seen not as an advance of the animation art but as a decline. “In his search for perfection, Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy,” The New York Times observed in what would become an increasingly common complaint against Disney. Critic Manny Farber, calling Bambi “entirely unpleasant,” agreed that by attempting to “ape the trumped up realism of flesh and blood movies, he [Disney] has given up fantasy, which was pretty much the magic element. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck lived in a beautiful escape land, where they flew through the air, swam under water, died a thousand deaths, and lived to see the end of each picture.” In Bambi the animals “behave just as Hollywood thinks we do,” which makes the film “old stuff and boring.” In short, critics found that in attempting to perfect the world on screen, Walt had tamed the rough, subversive energy of the earlier cartoons and forsaken the very reason to have animations in the first place—because they challenged the laws of reality—though what these critics seemed to miss was that Walt’s animated realism was every bit as much an exercise of control as his wilder and more “imaginative” animations, and that control was the objective.
The larger problem with Bambi may have been a cultural dissonance between the film and its audience. On the one hand, while citizens around the world professed to want escape from the gravity of war, they seemed to think that animation was now juvenile and inappropriate, which clearly accounted for some of the antipathy in the Gallup survey. Cartoons had boosted morale and provided diversion during the Depression, when spirits needed to be raised and when animations seemed a correlative for a plucky nation under duress and trying to fight back. War provided an altogether different and far more difficult trial—one for which the buoyancy of animation seemed insufficient. On the other hand, the realism and seriousness of Bambi were not the sort of qualities that audiences seemed to desire at a time when everyone lived within harsh reality and seriousness. Young Diane herself complained to her father that Bambi’s mother needn’t have died, and when Walt answered that he was only following the book, Diane protested that he had taken other liberties and that in any case he was Walt Disney and he could do anything he wanted. But Walt hadn’t wanted to lighten the drama. “Life is composed of lights and shadows,” he would later say, “and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows.” In taking that position in wartime, however, Walt Disney, who had once strummed the psychic chords of the entire world, was now out of tune.
With the lukewarm critical reception to Bambi, the only source of effective publicity for the film was an attack from another quarter. Raymond J. Brown, the editor of Outdoor Life, had seen the film in preview and lauded it to Walt as an “artistic triumph and your greatest achievement.” But Brown had quibbles too. Certain sequences, he thought, might be offensive to sportsmen and conservationists, and he suggested that Walt add a prologue stating that the film was a fantasy and not a depiction of reality. Whether Walt smelled a publicity coup or was actually offended himself, he responded the same day that it was too late to add a prologue and that in any case (obviously speaking disingenuously) he never saw the film as reflecting negatively on hunters: “[A]ll I ever saw in it was an entertainment that would appeal to everyone.”
Brown, taking the bait and intensifying his criticism, wrote an editorial condemning the movie as the “worst insult ever offered to American sportsmen and conservationists,” and Walt, at the behest of Howard Kemp, a sports columnist for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, countered that his audience would think he rated them “morons” if he had added a prologue advising them the film was fantasy when it was clearly not real. The exchange then triggered a heated debate in newspapers across the country about whether Bambi had unfairly tarnished hunters. Roy thought it inadvisable to get Walt embroiled in this sort of controversy, but publicist Vern Caldwell wrote Walt that the attacks were “getting results.” “The problem is to keep this thing alive & at the same time not allow Disney to be placed in a compromising position,” Caldwell said, and he recruited newsmen Bob Considine, Grantland Rice, and Paul Gallico to defend Walt as “being falsely accused by either a fanatic…or a shrewd exploitation man.”
Whatever burst the picture might have received from the publicity, however, was short-lived. Roy fought to have the Radio City Music Hall, where Snow White had played for weeks, keep Bambi for merely a third week, but he admitted to George Morris that “our friends in the Music Hall seem determined to slide us out at the end of two weeks.” By the end of its run Morris calculated that the studio had lost roughly $200,000 on it. Desperate as Walt was to see a profit so that he could put another feature into production, he didn’t seem surprised. “Living with BAMBI, as we did, for five years, we lost all sense of perspective,” he wrote columnist Jimmy Starr, who had praised the film, “but your wire and editorial comment raises o
ur hopes that we have achieved what we aimed for when we first decided to make it.” Then he added remorsefully, “One thing we learned from this experience[,] and that is we’ll never again spend so much time on another subject.”
It was a painful admission. Walt Disney had lived to spend time on his features, lived to create a fully realized universe that testified to his power and provided his escape. But Bambi was a reminder of how much everything had changed since the strike and the advent of war. The war had imposed a kind of grimness on Burbank. At Roy’s urging the studio had been classified as a strategic defense industry, and every employee was now fingerprinted and given a bright orange identification badge. At the same time, even though Walt personally visited draft boards to insist that his animation was a vital service for the war effort (he even dug out his old Veterans of Foreign Wars badge to show up a “billboard patriot” on one board who expressed skepticism about the value of the studio’s work), 173 employees, including Woolie Reitherman and Frank Thomas, had left the studio for the armed forces—almost 28 percent of the staff. Soldiers patrolled the lot, protecting a top-secret bombsight that was stationed there, and one naval officer who supervised the production of The Rules of the Nautical Road commandeered the bedroom off Walt’s office to live in, washing his clothes there in a bucket. Animators even fired small rockets off the Animation Building roof to see the patterns of the explosions so that they could better draw them. Adding to the military presence was the fact that Lockheed was renting space on the lot. And then there was the wartime economizing. Employees carpooled to save gasoline, as did Walt. Upset with the new militarization of the studio, Carl Barks, an animator who would later become the main force behind the Donald Duck comic books, left. “You were just going to be locked in there for the duration,” he said, “and I just didn’t think I wanted to be locked into that place for the duration.”
