The Great Era Of Walt Disney

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A retrospective shows the magic of master animation

"When distorting the body retain the normal volumn [sic] in all parts."

"Ears elongate in violent action." "Feathers on head are usually ruffled only for anger or 'takes.'"

In these penciled instructions to guide animators as they drew Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, one can read the history of a popular art form as it attained its first--and perhaps only--golden age.

The time was the 1930s and early 1940s. The place was the Walt Disney Studio. Members of the young team that drew Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Goofy and the rest of its barnyard denizens were early students of what is now referred to as body language. They understood that, on the screen, action is character, that in the exaggerated twitch of one of their little anthropomorph's bottoms, the stretch of his back or the lift of his ever-scampering feet they could, with fine comic efficiency, show the state of his emotions. The history of animation from the Mouse's introduction in 1928's Steamboat Willie to the apotheosis of the high Disney style in such features as Snow White and Pinocchio, Dumbo and Bambi, roughly a decade later, can be seen as a process in which movement became subtler and more complex, with a parallel growth in the expressive range of the studio's "stars." The animators learned to incorporate tragedy (the panic of a lost boy in Pinocchio, the death of Bambi's mother) in what the public persisted in calling "cartoons."

The evidence of this disciplined rush to perfection of technique and technology can be seen at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art in "Disney Animations and Animators." Preliminary character and background sketches, animators' roughs of entire sequences, eels (the finished ink and paint drawings that the camera photographed), even film loops in which roughs and completed films are juxtaposed--all are there. The show provides a singular insight into the painstaking work of the talented artists who competed to realize Disney's dreams.

A few critics have argued that what the burst of creativity achieved was instant decadence. They see in the primitive purity of Ub Iwerks, Disney's first great collaborator and the man who designed the immortal Mouse, a whirlwind comic force, simple and unsentimental, that for high, mean spirits was never matched. It is true that in Iwerks' rubbery stick figures and bare backgrounds there was an elemental anarchy that is still delightful. But one has only to look at Norm Ferguson's roughs for Playful Pluto, in which he caused his pup to be caught in flypaper for an entire reel of helpless hilarity to see what three-dimensional plasticity could do to enhance the range and delicacy of animated humor. When the whole Disney gang got going on something like The Band Concert or Mickey's Service Station, the allegro pace of comedy bits could be staggering. That these shorts appeared just seven years after Mickey's debut gives some indication of the tempo of inventiveness at the studio.

What is perhaps most valuable about the exhibit is the care with which Curators John G. Hanhardt and Greg Ford have sorted out the individual contributions of the animators. All of them could outdraw the founder, who hung up his pencil early to assume the role of a demanding, inspiring editor. Though Walt tended to get the credit for everything that came out of the studio, its style was really the creation of many artists, each one honing a speciality. Ward Kimball, Les Clark and Frank Thomas were particularly adept at complicated fast-moving action sequences, while Art Babbitt concentrated on large, slow, furry creatures like Goofy and the Big Bad Wolf. Grim Natwick, who created Betty Boop for another studio, was the early specialist in femininity. Eric Larson's skill with cute round little animals contrasted nicely with John Lounsbery's sleek menace--Cruella in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Alex Alligator in Fantasia. That film, of course, was the great test of the studio's range and included such marvelous, unprecedented imagery as Wolfgang Reitherman's massed battling dinosaurs and the dark demonism of Vladimir Tytla's work on the Night on Bald Mountain sequence.

And who can forget Preston Blair's little masterpiece, the hippopotamuses in their tutus doing the "Dance of the Hours."

With The Fox and the Hound, a new generation of animators has shown that they can strip away the adorable encrustations of three or four decades, but it is unlikely that a conclave of talent like the old one will again be assembled. Certainly it is regrettable that a bitter labor dispute in 1941 and the necessities of war work brought an end to the questing spirit of the Disney Studio in its glorious morning. But under the shrewd eye of its founder, it defined the possibilities of a unique art form--and, in the process, created some of the cinema's best moments. --By Richard Schickel

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