Mouse & Man

Mr. Leon Schlesinger, Mr. Max Fleischer et al, make most of the animated cartoons produced in the U. S. Of the man who makes the rest and the best, Mr. Schlesinger recently observed: ''We're businessmen. Walt Disney's an artist. With us, the idea with shorts is to hit 'em and run. With us, Disney is more of a Rembrandt."

Even artists say that Walter Elias Disney is an artist. Some go farther, say that he is a great one. Certainly his works are better known and more widely appreciated than those of any other artist in history. Three weeks ago, his Mickey Mouse created a minor government crisis in Yugoslavia. Last year, as "Miki-san," he was Japan's patron saint. In Russia the works of Disney are appreciated as "social satire," depicting the "capitalist world under the masks of mice and pigs." The late George V, it is said, would not go to a cinema performance unless it included a Disney film.

But Disney, the Artist, is nothing like as widely known as Mickey, the Mouse--or any of Mickey's score of charming fellow players in the Disney zoological stock company. In fact, when some art historian of the future sets out to chronicle the rise of the animated cartoon, the quest for original drawings by the man most responsible for it will be about as difficult as it is now to locate additional authentic Rembrandts. Walt Disney has not drawn his own pictures for nine years. To turn out the mass production issued nowadays under his name, he would have to have 650 hands. And 650 hands he has. With slim, 36-year-old Walt Disney as the guiding intelligence, his smooth-working cinema factory produces an average of twelve Mickey Mouse films and six Silly Symphonies every year. Were Disney to undertake the involved processes of drawing, coloring, photographing the 15,000 sketches that go into one of these shorts, the feat would approach Michelangelo's job on the Vatican ceiling. Released this week was the latest Disney venture, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the most ambitious animated cartoon ever attempted. It took Disney's many hands over three years to make.

Snow White, like Mickey Mouse, was a creature of necessity. After sound came whooping in, Disney needed a character to replace silent Oswald The Rabbit. From a night of heavy thinking in an upper berth in 1928, Mickey Mouse was born. When the bulging double-feature movement began three years ago to crowd out the Disney shorts, Disney resolved to enter the feature field himself.

Disney's Folly. Wary Hollywood, which scoffed at sound ten years ago, scoffed at the idea of a seven-reel animated cartoon. The Snow White project was referred to as Disney's Folly. Rivals said he had bought a sweepstakes ticket. Shrewd older Brother Roy Disney, the business brain trust of the Disney enterprises, surveyed Snow White's final bill of $1,600,000, observed: "We've bought the whole damned sweepstakes." In the Disney film, Snow White, the delicate stepdaughter of the Queen, is a dark-haired girl with a doll's oval beauty and a voice like a chime of bells. The Queen, envious of Snow White's beauty, hid her in the scullery. But though her work was grimy. Snow White was happy. She dreamed of a Prince who would some day come and take her away. Instead of a Prince, however, a fierce huntsman comes, sent by the Queen to take Snow White into the forest and kill her. So touching is her innocence, so terrible her scream of panic when she sees the sharp flame of the dagger, that the huntsman, rough as he is, cannot execute his mission; he sets Snow White free.

Nightmares limp round Snow White in the gloomy forest. From the bushes, thorns reach crooked hands to tear her; eyes glare from the shadows and bad whispers ride the wind. Snow White is sobbing helplessly when the glaring eyes draw nearer, become friendly. The docile creatures of the wood, wild--eyed because they are as frightened as Snow White, quickly make friends--bush-tailed squirrels and striped chipmunks, birds, horny turtles, and a big-eyed, bangtailed buck. Joyously they lead Snow White to a slovenly little hut they know of. When the dwarfs who own the hut return from their day's work in the diamond mine, they are alarmed to find their hovel spick-&-span.

The dwarfs are seven, and their names are chiseled on their beds: Doc, who often gets his words and ideas mixed. Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Bashful and Dopey, who did not know if he could talk because he never tried. Squatty and bearded, looking much alike except for Dopey who, being younger, has no beard, the seven dwarfs have timid hearts: they know Snow White is the Queen's step-daughter and will not keep her till she promises to make gooseberry pie. Snow White will not let them eat until they wash their hands.

Meanwhile the magic looking glass has told the Queen that Snow White still lives.

The Queen changes herself into a witch. Unlike the original Grimm Brothers' Queen, this one does not waste time trying to comb Snow White's hair with a poisoned comb or choke her by pulling her laces too tight. With white eyes leering from her hag's hood and a pimple on her nose, she pops up at the hut after the dwarfs have gone to work. Snow White forgets the dwarfs told her not to let anyone in. She takes a bite of the red, delicious-looking poisoned apple. The apple brings the sleeping death for which the only cure is love's first kiss.

The creatures of the wood rush to the dwarfs. After an awful chase through gloomy mountain chasms the dwarfs force the Queen to the edge of a precipice and a thunderbolt tumbles her over. Snow White seems dead, but the dwarfs cannot bear to part from her. They let her sleep in a glass coffin. One day the Prince, wandering far and wide, hears of the girl who lies asleep in a glass box and when he sees her, kisses her. Snow White awakes and there is gaiety in the hut.

Few changes have been made in the Grimm story. The dwarfs have been developed until each has a character of his own--that of Dopey so unexpectedly heart-winning that Disney may use the mute, youngest dwarf in a series of his own. Wood creatures have been animated with the same type of clever personalities that birds and animals acquire in the Disney shorts. Songs, dialogue in verse, dialogue in prose and silent sequences with incidental sound and music have been worked into a harmonious pattern. Catchiest tune: Hi-Ho, as the dwarfs trudge home from work. Tunesmiths: Frank Churchill (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf) and Larry Morey. Technicolor is used with simpler and stronger effects than ever before in motion pictures, giving a vital, indelible reality to the fairyland locales.

Skeptical Hollywood, that had wondered whether a fairy story could have enough suspense to hold an audience through seven reels, and whether, even if the plot held up, an audience would care about the fate of characters who were just drawings, was convinced that Walt Disney had done it again. Snow White is as exciting as a Western, as funny as a haywire comedy. It combines the classic idiom of folklore drama with rollicking comic-strip humor. A combination of Hollywood, the Grimm Brothers, and the sad, searching fantasy of universal childhood, it is an authentic masterpiece, to be shown in theatres and beloved by new generations long after the current crop of Hollywood stars, writers and directors are sleeping where no Prince's kiss can wake them.

Process. Although it took a large part of the Disney staff three years to draw and photograph Snow White's 250,000 pictures, the process of making Snow White was exactly the same as used in making any recent Disney cartoon.

Few visitors get past the tiny reception office of the Disney studios. But if a privileged investigator could stay around for the six months it takes to complete a typical cartoon short, he would find it a highly efficient, if occasionally cockeyed, procedure. First step in the making of any Disney picture is the story conference, at which the Disney story staff gathers to sort out ideas that may have grown out of their half-dozen minds, or may have been plucked out of the studio gag library, a sort of omnibus of humor and situations from Aesop to Captain Billy's Whiz Bang. Before any script is written, it is discussed and pantomimed by the eager gagsters, who solemnly simulate Donald Duck squawking his rage when trapped under a theatre curtain, or frozen Pluto, slinking down an Alpine slope like a hunk of ice sliding off a tin roof.

Once approved in outline by the story staff (Disney is sometimes outvoted), the story is adapted into sequences, scenes, shots, and the main action illustrated by some of this staff with a series of rough sketches. A director is then assigned to conduct the picture through to its conclusion. He and subordinate music, art, sound-effects and dialogue directors, look over the sketches, decide on the timing. In a typical Disney cartoon, the action and sound move according to an intricate schedule in which the frames of the film are synchronized with the musical beat or sound effects.

While the music staff prepares the score, the dialogue director collects his cast of voices (Disney is always Mickey Mouse) and records the dialogue. The sound-effects department records a third track. In the recording room, sound engineers then synchronize the three sound tracks on one. Meanwhile background artists have been sketching out the scenes of the story, the limits in which the characters will eventually move according to the rhythm set for them.

The story is now ready for the animation. The 75 animators are the master builders of the Disney organization. Upon them depend the unfailingly familiar forms of Mickey, Donald, Pluto, et al. The senior animators sketch out the main movements of the characters in accordance with the set tempo, leave the intermediate steps to assistant animators, "in-betweeners," students from whose ranks the future animators will be chosen.

In the animation department are the strangest sights in the Disney plant. Animators leer and grimace into mirrors adjusted over their drawing boards, cocking one eye questioningly, darkly knitting brows, leaping up and down, squawking in experimental frenzy, and then calmly jotting down the effects with a few swift lines. There used to be a "zoo" at the Disney studios, and animators would study the antics of the animals in preparing their scenes. But for some years it has been recognized that the best cartoon effects are not to be got from animals acting like animals, but from animals acting like people. Mickey Mouse, of course, looked like a human from the start. He has the large soft eyes and pointed face of his creator. Occasionally another portrait creeps into the company. In character and appearance, Max Hare very much resembles clownish Heavyweight Max Baer.

When an animator and his assistants complete a scene, a test camera photographs the sketches on a film strip. Running this back and forth in a small two-way projector known as a moviola, the animator spots "bugs and bobbles," jerkiness or missteps in the animation. Not until a set of drawings is approved by Walt and the director does it go to the inking and "painting department, where over 150 nimble-fingered girls trace the sketches on 12 1/2-by-15-in. celluloid transparencies, called "cels," paint in the designated coloring from a store of 1,500 colors and shadings. All Disney cartoons have been done in color since February 1935.

The animation cels are assembled, together with backgrounds and other eels of intermediate background, and taken to the camera. In Snow White, the $75,000 multiplane camera is the one chiefly used--it is much like any other movie camera, except that its action can be governed to expose one frame of film and then stop. Regular cinema cameras run at the rate of anywhere from eight to 64 frames per second. What makes the Disney camera unique is its towering, 14-ft. framework. The camera peers vertically down from the top of this iron structure through several levels, set below it like the grooved shelves in a baker's pie-wagon. On the lower levels, various elements of back ground drawn in relative perspective may be superimposed, one over the other, imparting an illusion of depth in the finished print. Above these backgrounds the animation cels are grouped. In this process an average 750-foot Disney short takes two weeks to be photographed. After that it is taken to the Technicolor plant for processing, and made ready for final re lease.

Disney, Inc. "It was always my ambition to own a swell camera," says Walt Disney, "and now, godammit, I got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operate it, and remembering how I used to have to make 'em out of baling wire." The baling wire period in Walt Disney's life lasted from 1901 to 1930. In 1901 Walt was born in Chicago. His father, Elias, was a contractor, who now lives quietly with Walt's mother in Oregon and hears from his famous son about twice a year. The family moved to a farm near Marceline, Mo. in time for Walt to start school there. The first art work he got paid for was a series of impressions of the town barber shop. The pay: free haircuts.

Back in Chicago at 16 he studied cartooning in night courses at the Academy of Fine Arts. Walt drifted to Kansas after the War. He sketched cows and plows for farm journals, then set up for himself as a commercial artist. In 1920 he was working for a film slide company, and his ani mated cartoon career was launched with a series based on Kansas City topicalities. The film cost him 30-c- a foot, sold to three theatres. The average Mickey Mouse or Silly Symphony costs somewhere between $50 and $75 a foot; Snow White, over $200. Walt and a group of local cartoonists organized a $15,000 corporation in 1922, after spending six months making their first feature, Little Red Riding Hood. A New York distributor was found and out came Jack the Giant Killer, Town Musicians of Bremen, Goldilocks and three others, among them Alice in Cartoonland, which was a sort of embryonic Snow White. But the distributor collapsed. So did Walt's corporation. In return for movies of their children, Kansas City mothers paid him enough money to get him to Hollywood, where there were the twin attractions of a booming film industry and a Brother Roy with a steady job.

Walt arrived in Hollywood in 1923 with a print of Alice and $40. Brother Roy had $250 in the bank. They became partners, got a $500 loan from an uncle, set up a studio in a garage. On the strength of Alice, they got an order from M. J. Winkler, a small Manhattan producer and distributor, for a cartoon series. Oswald The Rabbit was the central character. This Disney series lasted two years. Then, when Mr. Winkler could not agree to stepping up Oswald's production costs, Walt Disney abandoned both of them.

The breakup with Winkler occurred in New York. Day or so later, riding back to Hollywood, Walt Disney conceived Mickey Mouse during the celebrated sleepless night in the upper berth. Mickey's first adventure found no takers. The second. Plane Crazy, was shelved, but the third, Steamboat Willie (the first with sound), was a great success in Manhattan in 1928. Plane Crazy was brought up to date, released shortly before the parent of the Silly Symphonies, Skeleton Dance, and Mickey was off to fame, if not immediate fortune. Disney, aware of the complications of distributing the pictures himself, entrusted them to an independent distributor. When a batch of 21 delivered by January 1930 netted him only $1,000 profit, he turned to Columbia Pictures. Two years and 69 releases later he shifted to United Artists, where his products were the only short subjects distributed.

The four years with United Artists was the period of Disney's great artistic, technical and material expansion. He got into color (first with Flowers and Trees), opened up an amazing and delightful field of story possibilities when he cunningly amplified and filmed the nursery legend of the Three Little Pigs. Materially the Disney firm also waxed notably. In 1934 a Mickey Mouse cost about $27,500. The plant was worth $150,000 and 200 people worked there. It now costs about $50,000 to make a Disney one-reeler and 650 people are kept busy on the $800,000 Disney lot in east Hollywood. From film rentals, Mickey Mouse toys and comic strips, the Disneys will gross considerably more than $2,000,000 this year. But the Bank of America, Hollywood's perennial banker, has a note for $1,000,000 loaned for Snow White, which, to become a Disney asset, must gross at least $2,500,000.

All these money matters are in the hands of Brother Roy. Just how good a businessman Roy has turned into is not yet known. The Disneys have never pocketed their profits. The responsibility for that, however, would seem to rest with Brother Walt, who insists on spending more and more each year for a bigger and better staff, more elaborate technical apparatus to polish and refine his product. Like Rembrandt Harmens van Rijn, he is interested in the profits of his pictures largely because they bring him money to buy better materials to make better pictures.

But Brother Roy has the reputation of being a hard bargainer. Last year when United Artists insisted on future television rights to Disney products. Roy went to RKO Radio, drove a bargain that was almost too good to be true. RKO underwrites production costs; takes less than 30% of the gross. To the Disney studio, this set-up means guaranteed independence of bankers, more freedom for Walt in his pioneering ventures. His next full-length feature will be Pinocchio, replacing the scheduled Bambi. Meanwhile he expects to carry on with his regular quota of shorts.

Walt Disney wears the Hollywood uniform: lounge coats, open-throated shirts, fancy sweaters. His thick, dark brown hair, which dips to a widow's peak slightly less emphatic than Robert Taylor's, has a long top lock which Disney wraps around his finger while he talks. At a loss for words, he often resorts to pantomime. He works until six or seven o'clock every night, in busy times works round the clock. He drives his Packard roadster home to dinner, plays with his baby daughters, Diane Marie and Sharon Mae, and goes to bed. Hollywood hotspots seldom see him. Weekends he plays poor but occasionally inspired polo at the Riviera Country Club, where he has a one-goal rating. That he has any rating at all he attributes to the fact that he pays a pretty big club bill.

He and his wife and his brother and his brother's wife own the business--the nepotist corporate structure which is another Hollywood characteristic. But neither the corporate structure, nor Mr. Disney's indefatigability, nor the 75 animators, nor the $75,000 camera, nor the $800,000 plant, nor the $2,000,000 gross explain the great Quality X in Walt Disney, Inc., the thing which in the past decade has sent thousands of feet of wonderful little animals and fairybook people dancing out into the world--people and animals whose appeal is so profound and so pervasive that they are loved by literally everybody everywhere.

Other animated cartoons have heroes as bold as the Prince, as resourceful as Mickey or the sensible little pig. Other animated cartoons present portents cataclysmic as the Wolf's house-flattening puffing, physical violence as severe as the heroic bartering Donald Duck undergoes in Modern Inventions. But whereas Popeye's inevitable fight at the finale is almost inevitably cruel, grotesque and ugly, the worst beating ever handed out in a Disney film--the "pacifying" the big wolf gets in Three Little Wolves--somehow manages to be as charming, as delightfully inventive, as it is deserved.

Perhaps no one is less analytical, or cares less, about Walt Disney's Quality X than Walt Disney himself. He was actually puzzled when pundits discovered social significance in Three Little Pigs. "It was just another story to us," he says, "and we were in there gagging it just like any other picture. After we heard all the shouting, we sat back and tried to analyze what made it good. Then we tried consciously to put some social meaning into The Golden Touch. It ended with King Midas surrounded by his gold, hollering for a hamburger. It was a tremendous flop."

Nevertheless, when no less a savant than Aldous Huxley went to Hollywood, he tried to find out just what made Walt Disney do the kind of work he does. Mr. Disney was not much help. "Hell, Doc," he said, knitting his eloquent brows, "I don't know. We just try to make a good picture. And then the professors come along and tell us what we do."

Not long ago an interviewer spoke of Snow White as a cartoon, and reported that Mr. Disney retorted: "It's no more a cartoon than a painting by Whistler is a cartoon." The remark, if made, sounds pompous, out of character. The Rembrandt conception fits better--the conception of an artist, single of purpose, utterly unselfconscious, superlatively good at and satisfied in his work, a thoroughgoing professional, just gagging it up and letting the professors tell him what he's done.

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