Working with Disney (8 page)

MD:
Well, again, that was different people working on them. This has always been a problem. It's always been a conflict amongst animators, too, and yet really, it's nobody's fault. It's just that no one person could control the animation in a whole film, because there's just too much to do. And certainly Walt Disney was the only man in the world who could put that many people together and have them turn out a feature film as consistent as it was and still have it work and be believable. He deserves full credit for putting that many different personalities together and having them not kill one another—you know, commit murder! Because there always were personality conflicts.

DP:
With a group of artists, I imagine it's difficult.

MD:
Well, strangely enough, the artists were sometimes less visibly temperamental than people in other areas. This always surprised me. Musicians were a little more apt to be upset than the artists, and so were a lot of other people in other areas, in a visible sense. Yet I think there was always the annoyance that you couldn't do the whole thing your way. The thing that always bothered you the most—particularly from the standpoint of being a key animator on a character—was that you didn't get to do the action. The action was generally done by somebody who had less talent and less ability, because it was less critical to the picture. Personality was the thing that your key animators had to do to make the picture
come off. But doing the action was oftentimes a lot more fun and you rarely got the opportunity. The one picture I did get the opportunity was on
101 Dalmatians.
I did all of Cruella, so I can take credit for the good things and the bad things as well. There's some animation that if I had a chance to do it over, I would, but that's always true. I remember one time Frank Thomas saying—and I think this is true—“When you get down to about the last three scenes of a film, you know then how you should have done it.”

DP:
When you say a “key animator,” I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean.

MD:
A directing animator. One animator generally would supervise the animation of a character. In other words, Milt Kahl would supervise two or three characters. Maybe he'd help a lot of other people on their stuff, too. But he was the number one man, and every critical scene with the character he was involved with, he would be doing. The personality was the thing. I know this was always a problem, because [Milt] would be annoyed if somebody did a thing and it wasn't well thought out, wasn't well conceived, or was poorly done. He wasn't about to forgive them. And this was a feeling I think we all had, that you still had to work with some guys who just never would reach that point where they really understood what the thing was all about. But still they could contribute a certain amount of footage. The guys you appreciated the most would come to you for help on the drawing or the conception of a scene, the staging of a scene, or something else. Really, the directing animator had more control over this than the film director, who in most instances really was not a director in the sense of a live-action picture but rather a man who was kind of holding the thing together from all the technical points of view: timing out the footage, dialogue, making out exposure sheets, and so on. Yet still the directing animator would go up and make his suggestions, which generally a director would go along with, because you were giving something more thought than he would have had the opportunity or the capability to do. In the early days, an awful lot of directors came out of animation—they were expendable as animators—but still they knew the business and so they became directors. I wouldn't
say this was 100 percent true—it wasn't—but in many cases, it was a man that Walt didn't quite know what to do with. And then there was also an ego factor that when a man became a director, he believed it.

DP:
I think Ben Sharpsteen would probably fit that classification.

MD:
Very much so.

DP:
He says that Walt could have kicked him out. Instead, he made him a director. Maybe Wilfred Jackson would feel the same.

MD:
Well, Wilfred was a very thorough man. He was so thorough he was kind of inclined to be a little pedantic. I know Walt kind of got bored with him in later years, so he always had Wilfred doing the opening of a picture and the ending of a picture for the simple reason that he knew it would work. He knew that Wilfred would introduce the characters, and they would work and so on. Then I think Wilfred reached a point where he became very annoyed with Walt. I was afraid at one time that he was going to have a nervous breakdown before he left. I'm not sure he didn't! Well, as I say, there are lots of personality things, and even when you talk about somebody, it doesn't mean that you don't admire them, because I admired Jackson tremendously.

DP:
He is a wonderful guy.

MD:
Terribly skilled person. But again, it's that overall personality thing, this many people having to work together. And when you first worked with Jackson, everything was spelled out, even to eye blinks. Then as he got to know you and he respected you, there was less of that. Then pretty soon, he realized that you could be pretty loose with what you did if you made it work and made it work better than what he had planned.

DP:
Was there one director that you liked to work with the best on the short subjects?

MD:
I don't know. I really got along pretty well with most of them. I didn't have any real problems with directors, I don't think, because I didn't permit myself to be in that position. Although I think at certain times, we all had kind of ups and downs with a certain director. Certain
directors were very loose and had not worked out things as well as they should have. In other words, we'd feel that they hadn't done their jobs. And then some might almost overdo it, like Jackson certainly did with younger people and newer people. As I say, this is just a matter of putting that many personalities together, especially in those days when we were doing those big features and there were so many in the animation department. I don't think I ever saw a film that Jackson was the director on that wasn't superb. And yet, always this conflict. Walt himself created a lot of his conflicts. As a matter of fact, Walt didn't like people working together who were too friendly, liked one another too much. He liked to put people together in conflict. He felt that he got a better job out of them. I never particularly agreed with him on that.

DP:
It would seem to cause a little more tension, anyway.

MD:
Yeah, and it's always that kind of upset. It was sometimes very annoying, especially in animation. Animation is something that demands such concentration and a dedication to hard work, because it certainly is hard work.

DP:
I imagine. I'm in awe of people who can do anything like that.

MD:
Well, number one, you had to be or should be a damn good artist. Number two is—and of course, a lot of these things are developed, too, when you move in with an organization like this, because you don't really know what talents you have in regards to that—to have a sense of entertainment, to have a sense of acting, to have a sense of comedy—all these things. Until you are put in a position to do something with it, you don't know whether you have it or not. And a lot never do. And some come up with surprising things. So it's a weird combination of talents.

DP:
Kind of an actor and an artist?

MD:
Actor, artist, and some sense of fun, some sense of humor, and knowing how to put this thing together for somebody else. You can take a good story and louse it up with bad staging and bad presentation. To be able to stage things clearly and make them work—this was the thing, of course, that Walt was the master of—taking and building a character.
There may be one big laugh at the end of this thing, but it came out of the development of the character and not because it was a mechanical gag in the sense of slapstick or something else. It was never the “Look, Ma, I'm dancing” type of humor. It was always a thing that built up through personality. I think if there is anything that's Disney, that's it as much as anything else.

DP:
Regarding
Sleeping Beauty,
you have said that you felt the backgrounds were too busy and kind of stage sets.

MD:
Yeah. That was again a conflict of personalities. This was Eyvind Earle, who does magnificent things, but he was so in love with his backgrounds that they didn't give you a good stage to stage business in because they were so busy. But Walt at that time was very intrigued with them. Also, this was the first time we had done a Cinemascope feature
[Lady and the Tramp
was actually the first Disney animated feature in Cinemascope], so he felt that this picture could be like moving illustrations. Well, we went ahead and animated a sequence, and it was pretty dull. This was Jackson. I animated on it. Walt came in. He felt with this big screen you could keep a scene on for a long time. But when he saw the sequence, he said, “For God's sake, don't you know there's such a thing as cutting? My God!” So then you began to realize you could cut in and around and you didn't pay any attention to this thing being wide. Our feeling was, when we first saw Cinemascope, that it was like looking through a mailbox slot, which was not true.

DP:
Do you think that the story of
Sleeping Beauty
also hurt it?

MD:
I think very much so. It was not one of our better efforts. It was terribly inconsistent. I never felt that the king sequence worked, although it was beautifully done by Milt. I never liked the backgrounds on it. I think his development of the characters was just great, but it was like all of a sudden having something happen in an aircraft hanger with three people. And it never came to life the way his animation should have. I blame this on direction, on background, and on the general staging of it. I felt personally that those characters were kind of inconsistent with the rest of the film, too. We had tried to create a very strong style for this,
which in some ways was good and in some ways, I think, was a mistake. We went a little overboard on it. And I was one as responsible for it as anybody else. Tom Oreb did some styling and they were just magnificent, beautiful drawings. And again, trying to get something that would go with Eyvind's style of backgrounds, which I think to a degree they do. Yet everybody wasn't able to design their characters and put them into that same thing. So you had some characters that were pretty round and roly-poly and others that were kind of severely designed—the girl, probably Maleficent, and a few others. The animals were very severely designed, and I think that was a mistake. And the girl was a mistake, too. I think we were not equipped to make that kind of a graphic change at that time.

DP:
I think that it is a better picture than the initial criticism of it. It doesn't seem to have the sympathy or the heart that
Snow White
has, though.

MD:
No.

DP:
But that is built into the basic story, I guess.

MD:
Again, it was the basic story. There wasn't that much you could do about it, really. The story was such a simple one. Walt found such a great angle on
Snow White
and the warmth of the characters, and I guess maybe the naïveté of the times, too, had something to do with it. I think we were a little too sophisticated by the time we got to this one to develop characters and personalities that would interweave the way Walt had done it on
Snow White.

DP:
I think that's a masterpiece.

MD:
Well, it is. It's one of the greatest pieces of storytelling. I think it's the best that Disney ever did, and I think it's one of the best of all time, too.

DP:
I really think it's as great as
Gone with the Wind.

MD:
I agree with you. And yet it has crude animation by comparison with some of our later films. But everything worked. It worked from the
standpoint of personality and scene by scene. Of course, that musical score by Frank Churchill, and Larry Morey's lyrics (and others, I know, contributed to them)—just absolutely magnificent.

DP:
When I see that picture, I think of what I've read and what people have told me about working at Disney's in the 1930s. It seems like the excitement from that period is in that film. I can feel it in
Snow White.

MD:
I started there at about the time that they were starting that picture. Walking to the studio from where I was in the annex across the street and then hearing some of this music being run just on the movieola—clickety-clack—I thought, “My God! What a privilege! I am listening to music that nobody on the outside has ever heard before.” I was quite captivated by the music, but I think at the time that I had no realization how great it was. Certain musicals like
South Pacific
I don't think have a bad song in them. I think the same of
Snow White.
There was not a bad song in it. Every one was memorable. So anyway, this was one of the startling things in going to work there, hearing the music and then seeing some of the first animation. I ended up working as an assistant animator on the girl. They let each of us animate a scene when the picture was almost finished. This was meant as kind of a bonus. I can't even tell you which one I animated now!

DP:
On another occasion, you talked about the changes between 1928 and 1935 and how much Disney had grown.

MD:
Well, that was Walt. It couldn't be anybody else but him. Nobody really, I think at that time, had any comprehension of the fact that he was attempting to do a full-length cartoon. Everybody thought he was insane, just like they thought he was insane when he was going to do an amusement park. Only it wasn't an amusement park; it turned out to be something else. Even with all of the imitations, nobody else really understood what he had down there, nor was anybody else equipped with the staff that he had to fulfill it. That was again to his credit—the fact that he knew he had to get in better artists and he had to educate them to do what he wanted done. This is where Walt deserves such enormous credit, and he probably was making absolutely nothing. We were making
very little, too, at the same time, so it was kind of a group gamble in a way, although he was the one who was gambling. We were, as young artists, just lucky to be able to make a living in the art field. Even though we were paid what sounds like pennies today, at that time the economy was so different that you could get by. And a lot were not getting by until they got that job. A lot, including myself, didn't know particularly what this was all about. Still, Walt Disney was hiring artists. Then when you got in, you kind of took to it like a strange drug, and it became a competitive thing to see whether you were capable of competing. There were so many talented young people at the time, and there were good ones who were let go and some bad ones, I think, who were kept on. There had to be thousands who went through there, and Walt was very lucky that he was building the studio at that particular time. He couldn't start from scratch now the way he did then, because the economy just wouldn't permit it.