by Neal Gabler
Beyond economics, the sort of full-bodied personality animation that Walt Disney had pioneered and that others had imitated faced another threat: a new animation aesthetic. Animator John Hubley, who had worked at the Disney studio before the strike, remembered a Russian cartoon that architect Frank Lloyd Wright had brought to Burbank during a visit. “It was very modern,” Hubley said, “with flat backgrounds, highly stylized characters, modern music.” When Hubley and other like-minded animators left the studio after the strike and scattered to various companies, the modernist aesthetic stuck with them—an early salient in what Hubley, who went to Screen Gems, admitted was a “revolution” against the “characteristic Disney round and opaque forms.”
It wasn’t until the war that the political and aesthetic revolutionaries found an instrument to advance their cause. As David Hilberman, the onetime Disney gadfly, told it, he, another former Disney animator named Zack Schwartz, and a third animator named Stephen Bosustow formed an informal partnership, Industrial Film and Poster Service, to make cartoons and posters for industry and government. Eventually they landed a contract for a film sponsored by the United Auto Workers to promote Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944. By the end of the war—with encouragement from the business manager of the Cartoonists Guild, Bill Pomerance, the support of some former Disney strikers who had landed in positions of authority and could steer work to them, and several films underwritten by unions—the studio, renamed United Films and then United Productions of America (UPA), began to attract other former disaffected Disney animators.
It was a small shop, and it survived in its early days only because its employees were willing to forgo their salaries. But if it was hardscrabble, it was also infused with a vision every bit as powerful as the vision that had infused the old Disney studio. It was Zack Schwartz, according to animation historian Michael Barrier, who had the revelation that “our camera is closer to being a printing press, in the way we use it, than it is to being a motion picture camera.” What Schwartz meant is that animation should be the handmaiden not of film, as it was at the Disney studio, or of comic strips, but of design, and that it should be a product not of popular culture but of high art. (Of course Disney had had the same revelation, but the necessity of making money kept him from doing much about it, save his aborted flirtation with Dali.) As Hilberman explained the evolution of UPA, “It was simply that you had designers who had art training who were beginning to push out and feel their oats. People who knew who Picasso was and could recognize a Matisse across the room. And here they were at Disney, Warners, working on this really corny, cute stuff. They were ready. UPA was the first studio that was run by design people, and we were talking to an adult audience, to our peers.” “[O]ur approach was a painterly approach, or an artist’s approach,” said Jules Engel, another former Disney animator who had gone to UPA, “[the approach of someone] who was aware of the flat surface and knew what the hell that is all about.”
As enemies of Disney, both politically and aesthetically, UPA animators consciously forswore all the hallmarks of Disney animation: the realism, the depth, the sense of gravity and secondary effects, the sentimentality and emotional affect, even the animals that Disney typically featured. “They thought they [Disney cartoons] were dead,” animator Bill Melendez said of UPA’s sense of superiority and sophistication. “We had a very low opinion of Disney.” They disdained Warner Bros. cartoons too, dismissing slapstick, in the words of one former Warners writer who came to work for UPA, as “Warner Bros. humor.” When it came to technique, UPA animators were interested less in movement or the development of personality than in graphics, in how shapes played on a flat surface; their inspirations were the Bauhaus, Klee, Kandinsky, Dufy, and Léger. When it came to subject matter, they were masters of what one animation critic called the “wry grimace: self-mockery per se”; their inspirations here were New Yorker cartoons and other sources of what they considered mature, understated humor.
For all its antagonism toward Disney—Art Babbitt had gone to work for UPA—and for all its artistic self-consciousness, UPA was also very much the product of its own stringent economies. “The big change,” said Faith Hubley, John’s wife and an animator in her own right, speaking of the difference between UPA and Disney, “was that we figured out how to make films in a very small space. It’s as simple as that—personal films—that required half a dozen people.” UPA animations had less movement than Disney’s, less detail, less refinement. “I am a bit of a slob,” Hubley added, “and I like a free-flowing line and texture…. That was our contribution…to liberate animation from itself, and to go to watercolors and to paint pastels.” Expediency became style. The result was a series of popular cartoons featuring a myopic old man named Mr. Magoo and then a breakthrough, Gerald McBoing Boing, based on a phonograph record by Theodore Geisel, known professionally as Dr. Seuss, about a young boy who can speak no words, only sound effects, and who suffers as a result until he is rescued by the manager of a radio station who can use Gerald’s talents. Time predicted that Gerald’s “boing!” “may prove as resounding as the first peep out of Mickey Mouse.”
McBoing Boing did become a milestone. Not only did it win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject of 1950, an award that Disney routinely won in the 1930s; it drew the sort of critical hosannas that had once been reserved for Disney animation. With McBoing Boing and Magoo, realism was officially passé. Minimalism was in. So was the arch attitude of the UPA cartoons. A critic, writing in 1953 and comparing Disney’s Peter Pan to UPA’s Mr. Magoo, noted that a “new cult is forming; a new word is perhaps already being minted, Magooism, describing benevolent nearsightedness.” He concluded that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had lost their popularity because they were creations of the 1930s, a time when audiences enjoyed their anarchism, while Magoo had become popular in the postwar period, when people understood the awful results of irresponsibility. “Mr. Magoo represents for us the man who would be responsible and serious in a world that seems insane,” the critic observed; “he is a creation of the 1950s, the age of anxiety; his situation reflects our own.” Of course, there was a much simpler explanation for UPA’s critical favor: its animations seemed more adult than Disney’s, more highbrow.
Though Walt’s own animation style had been changing—and been minimalized—since the great animations of the late 1930s and early 1940s, he wasn’t fond of UPA. “There isn’t enough money in the world to make me go back and try to make cartoons the way they’re making them now,” he told Pete Martin. But despite that disparagement, he did try. “We had a lot of product coming where we had to bring it in for a low budget,” Ward Kimball recalled. “He realized we had to cut corners and he didn’t expect the full animation quality that he was getting on the features.” Kimball had been assigned a short describing the history of musical instruments titled Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and began animating while Walt was on one of his European trips. He decided to use a more modernist style. “[E]verybody said you’ll never get this by Walt—you guys are crazy…straight lines, things like that, unheard of—backgrounds that were tippled and things glued on—you’ll never get away with it,” Kimball said. His associates felt that Kimball was imitating UPA and that he had betrayed the studio. Kimball confessed that he had been emboldened only because Walt was gone, but when Walt returned, he said he liked it, and the short won an Academy Award. Still, for all Kimball’s protestations that he had devised a new visual approach very different from UPA’s, he had clearly been working under UPA’s influence. “In style a clean steal from the Bosustow [UPA] cartoons,” Time reported, but added approvingly, “Toot takes Disney in one jump from the nursery to the intellectual cocktail party.”
The intellectual cocktail party, however, was not Walt Disney’s métier, and he did not succumb without a fight. While UPA was producing Magoos, the studio put Lady and the Tramp the story of an effete female dog who finds herself in the company of mongrels, into production. The project had been in d
evelopment since 1937, when Walt bought the story from his friend Ward Greene, the head of the King Features Syndicate, which distributed Walt’s comic strips. It had gone through a series of scripts: Joe Grant and Dick Huemer introduced two calculating Siamese cats, Ted Sears introduced a dog pound, and Greene himself apparently introduced a romance—though Grant and Huemer objected to the idea of two dogs falling in love as “distasteful” and “utterly contrary to nature.” (It was Walt who had scratched out the name “mutt” in the script and inserted “Tramp.”) Like everything else at the time, the film was a casualty of the war—Walt confided to Greene that “I should confine my efforts to things that have more of a plus value”—but by 1952 Roy was encouraging Walt to put it back into production rather than make another anthology film, provided they could keep the cost down to not more than double the price per foot of a short and provided they released it in smaller first-run theaters where it could play for weeks. The film missed its original target date, in part because it was being animated in the widescreen Cinemascope process, which took so much more time than standard-format animations that it doubled the cost of the backgrounds. Animators had to work six-day weeks down the stretch, and the film’s budget escalated to just under $3 million. But when it was released, it was another Disney success and a temporary rebuff to the UPA style.
There was another reason for the delay on Lady, besides the troubles with Cinemascope. Walt had decided to take the animators off the film for a hiatus because he felt that they were becoming too involved with the detail and had lost sight of the characters. He reassigned them to Sleeping Beauty for six months, then put them back on Lady, where, he said, they “tackled the project with new enthusiasm and whizzed right along to the finish.” Even so, Lady, despite its long gestation and despite the fact that it turned out well, was essentially more make-work. Sleeping Beauty was something else. It was intended to be a magnum opus—“our most ambitious cartoon feature, to date,” Walt wrote author Dodie Smith, whose book 101 Dalmatians he had purchased for another animation. Sleeping Beauty was to be a grand last hurrah designed to demonstrate conclusively the superiority of the Disney style, and in so doing, it would also constitute a major assault on everything UPA represented.
As Walt would tell it, he gave his animators only one instruction for the film: “Make them [the characters] as real as possible, near flesh-and-blood.” To achieve this, he said, the studio “used living models more carefully than ever before.” In truth, however, Walt seemed to have little interest in the vaunted Disney realism or even, for that matter, in the vaunted Disney story sense. Though he had entrusted the project to Wilfred Jackson, and though Jackson and veteran storyman Ted Sears had reworked the entire script after Walt declared himself dissatisfied with their first attempt, Walt was much more focused on the visual design of the film than on its story. He had hired the painter Eyvind Earle in 1951 as a background artist (he did one hundred backgrounds for Peter Pan), and Earle had impressed Walt enough that Walt asked him to provide inspirational art for Sleeping Beauty.
“When I first saw his stuff, I almost fainted,” sketch artist Vance Gerry said. Earle had filled every wall of his room from floor to ceiling with detailed paintings heavily influenced by Dürer, Van Eyck, and Brueghel, but with a modernist twist in that the images were more abstract and less realistic and three-dimensional than typical Disney work. The layout artists and animators were both impressed and depressed by Earle’s paintings—impressed by the quality of the work, depressed that they would have to work within a style that many of them regarded as too cold, too flat, and too modernist for a fairy tale. “I had to fight myself to make myself draw that way,” Ken Anderson said. But Walt was insistent, claiming that in the past the inspirational art he commissioned had always been homogenized by the animators. This time he wanted Earle’s distinct vision on the screen. He told Eric Larson, whose unit was the first to work on the film, that the picture was to be a “moving illustration, the ultimate in animation.” He added that he didn’t care how long it took.
It took a long time—longer in terms of steady, uninterrupted work than any Disney animation since Snow White. It was started in 1951, was revised in 1953, and was finally ready for Walt to see at an “overall story board discussion” early in 1955. Milt Kahl blamed Walt for the delays. “He wouldn’t have story meetings,” Kahl said. “He wouldn’t get the damn thing moving.” Kahl finally surmised that Walt cared about everything but this picture. Meanwhile the release date slipped from Christmas 1955 to Christmas 1957 to Christmas 1958. In addition to Walt’s inattention, one problem was that he just didn’t have the staff to do this kind of animation anymore, especially since television was tying up three animation units. Even after promoting fifteen assistants to animators, the studio had to bring in a group of trainees for the first time since the 1930s. Another problem was that the process of working within Earle’s style was slow and onerous—so slow that the cleanup staff was moving half as quickly as it had on Lady and the Tramp. By January 1957, after over five years of work, 2,500 feet had been animated with 3,775 feet yet to go.
This work had proceeded while Walt was focusing on Disneyland, and when he finally turned his attention to Sleeping Beauty, he was not pleased. The budget of the film had soared to the point, Harry Tytle said, where Walt was questioning whether the studio could afford to do any more features. To keep costs down, one animator recalled, a quota system was instituted. “[Y]ou had to do eight girls a day, thirty-two medium sized birds a day, twenty-two squirrels a day,” he said. “That’s how they got through it.” But Walt’s interest in making this the great animation was already flagging. After a screening of finished footage in August 1957, Tytle noted “a noticeable, marked difference” in Walt from the old days. “He seems to be tired, has so much on his mind; didn’t give this the treatment he would have in years past, where he’d go in for a couple of days and fine tooth comb the whole picture.” His comments were general rather than specific. Dick Huemer agreed that Walt couldn’t seem to get engaged with the film and that he blamed the animators for concentrating on the visuals to the detriment of the story, Walt’s traditional interest, apparently not realizing that this had been his injunction to them. Bill Peet compared him to a “ringmaster directing a twenty ring circus”: “Walt the bear was the one who came to our story conferences, and he usually came with a scowl and left with a growl.”
For their part, the animators worked as devoutly as they had worked on all the great animations. One animator said that they were so cautious in drawing Aurora, the sleeping beauty, that the staff was cleaning up only one drawing a day, which translated into one second of screen time per month. “They measured the width of the line, the density of the line, the taper of the line,” he said. “’Cause we thought we were making the Lord’s Prayer for sure.” Frank Thomas worked so hard and under such pressure that he developed a red blotch on his face and had to visit the doctor each week to have it attended to. Wilfred Jackson, the supervising director, suffered a heart attack during the production. He was replaced by Eric Larson, who called the assignment his “downfall.” Larson was eventually replaced by Gerry Geronomi.
But for all the years of development, all the hard work, all the innovations, all the money spent (roughly $6 million, easily making it the most expensive animated feature to that time), all the hopes that had been placed upon it, and all the predictions of success for it (“Will be a bonanza at the box office,” one respondent crowed at a screening of the rough cut), Sleeping Beauty was a failure when it was finally released late in January 1959, both aesthetically and financially. Earle’s design had been visually stunning, but the wary animators had been right: it lacked warmth and charm. Then there were the story issues. Sharpsteen thought the problem was that the film concentrated too heavily on the three fairies who abet Sleeping Beauty. “[I]t got monotonous in the picture,” he said. Dick Huemer said the problem was Walt’s lack of involvement, but Walt had been no more involved on most of th
e recent features, and they had turned out better. In truth, the real problem may have been that the film sagged under the weight of its own ambitions—the ambitions Walt had imposed upon it. Walt seemed to know it. After screening the film shortly before its completion, he charged out of the projection room, approached Milt Kahl and Marc Davis on the steps of the Animation Building, and upbraided them for, Kahl said, “how heavy the animation was and how rotten the picture.” In the end Buena Vista, Disney’s distribution arm, lost $900,000 that year due largely to the film.
By this time the studio’s aesthetic nemesis, UPA, which had been one of the targets of Sleeping Beauty, had begun to shatter. As early as April 1952 Columbia, which distributed UPA’s cartoons, had demanded that the company secure loyalty oaths from its employees vowing that they were not members of the Communist Party. Most agreed. But the whole idea of taking oaths undermined the studio and its camaraderie. Eventually John Hubley, one of UPA’s most imaginative animators, left. When its contract with Columbia expired in 1953, UPA renewed, but the distributor insisted that the studio make only Magoos. At the same time the company was being harassed by a union because, UPA animator Bill Melendez felt, Walt had negotiated a contract with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and then sicced them on his rival. Bosustow eventually sold out, and UPA survived but only as a shell of itself—no longer the spearhead of modernist animation.
