The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Read Free Book Online Page B

Walt on May 6. “Settlement going to work out good and future very bright.” 47
    At this point, Walt Disney may not have been ready to take full advantage of his improved situation. In the early 1930s, he could be strikingly conservative when he spoke for publication about cartoons. In a statement for
Film Daily
in April 1930, he was cautious about both color and the wide screen: “After all, in a cartoon comedy it is laughs and personality that count. Color alone will not sustain public interest.” 48 About a year later,
American Magazine
quoted him as saying that it was a “mistake” to think “that American audiences always want brand-new gags—surprises and cute turns. We have found out that they want most to laugh. They easily forget the original turns, but if a picture has given them a good laugh, whether by old gags or new, they always remember it.” 49
    Disney remembered all the gags in his silent cartoons, or so it seems, because gags from
Alice
comedies like
Alice’s Fishy Story, Alice’s Orphan
, and
Alice’s Brown Derby
can be identified in cartoons made years later—reworked and improved, to be sure, but still the same gags. “The best gag men are those with the best memories,” David Hand said in 1946, two years after he left the Disney studio. “Disney has the most marvelous memory—like an elephant he never forgets, and he remembers all the awful animation you ever did.” 50
    Disney’s model for the “laughs and personality” he sought was not any new talkie star, but the greatest star of the silents, Charlie Chaplin. In 1931, Disney cited Chaplin as a principal source for Mickey Mouse: “We thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin . . . a little fellow trying to do the best he could.” 51
    In the first few months of 1930, after Iwerks’s departure, the Disney staff continued to gather at night once a week or so—in Walt’s office, or in theadjacent music room—to talk about gag ideas. No one on the staff devoted full time to writing. No one had devoted full time to writing for Disney’s silent cartoons, either, but in their last year or two—if the surviving examples are a fair measure—he had still been able to fill at least some of those cartoons with comic business that was dense and complex. When Disney was making his early sound cartoons, though, the greatest challenge they posed was essentially technical—sound and images had to fit together in a pleasing way.
    Iwerks had met that challenge adroitly, after hitting his stride with
Skeleton Dance
, and that is why so many of the early Disney sound cartoons seem more his creations than Disney’s own. Iwerks’s kind of animation, ticking away with mechanical precision, could not have been better suited to the demands of early sound cartoons. By 1930, though, Disney and other members of his staff had absorbed the basics of making cartoons with sound, and the loss of Iwerks’s expertise could actually be seen as a blessing. The Disney cartoons could now recoup some of their pre–
Steamboat Willie
vitality, but with sound as a fillip.
    How to do that was the problem. Disney in the early 1930s was not some visionary leader, trying to inculcate in his followers what he had already grasped himself, but was instead groping toward some better kind of cartoon alongside his animators. He was notoriously inarticulate. “In the real early days,” Ben Sharpsteen said, “Walt didn’t seem to have the command of ways of expressing himself for the benefit of the animator, and I would say that most of the progress was made among the animators themselves, in pinpointing faults.” 52 Les Clark remembered a Disney who “talked a lot and sometimes you didn’t understand what he wanted. . . . Maybe he didn’t, either, until he saw something