I recently bought a print of this photo online—it was published on page 178 of the original 1958 edition of Walt Disney: The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas—and it stirred up memories of what the great animator Eric Larson told Milt Gray and me when we interviewed him in his office at the Disney studio on October 27, 1976. Near the end of the interview, Eric gestured toward the wall where that framed photo was hanging. "That's Walt and me out here in the hall," Eric said. "This was toward the end of Sleeping Beauty. Walt's saying, 'I don't think we can continue, it's too expensive.' This was the general conception."
Sleeping Beauty was not only expensive but a box-office disappointment when it was released in 1959, and Disney feature animation was hanging by a thread until it was rescued by the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The much greater success of Mary Poppins, with its long "Jolly Holiday" combination sequence, revived Walt's own enthusiasm for animation in the last years of his life. There were other brushes with extinction in later years, most notably thanks to the box-office failure of The Black Cauldron. Now, modest efforts like last year's Winnie the Pooh aside, the hand-drawn Disney feature seems unlikely to survive the indifferent box-office performance of The Princess and the Frog, fifty years after the release of Sleeping Beauty.
Looking back over the Disney features made in those five decades, I have to wonder if hand-drawn animation, as an art form, and we as its audience, might not have been better off if Walt had followed through on his implicit threat to pull the plug. The industry certainly would have survived, thanks to Hanna-Barbera and the other TV-cartoon factories that were thriving in the late 1950s and the 1960s; and because their staffs were full of theatrical-cartoon veterans (and would be, for the next few decades) there would have been the continuing potential for new animated features that didn't have to compete with Disney's. New non-Disney features were of course made in the 1960s and 1970s, but always in the hulking shadow of the latest Disney features. Those Disney features defined for most people what animated features were or should be like, and since most of the Disney features were fatally deficient when measured against the best of Walt's own films, the effect was to drag down animation in general.
I've been thinking lately about the latter-day Disney features, and more specifically about why I've never been able to work up much interest in them. Grayson Ponti, proprietor of a blog called The 50 Most Influential Disney Animators, triggered that thought when he wrote to me recently:
I know you're not a fan of new-age Disney films, but I was curious if you thought the animators of the new age hold a candle to the old ones and the problems are more management-related, or if you think the animators aren't as good and the animation is substandard. Do you feel if the animators of the new age had Walt at their side that they could have done animation as good as that done by the old guys?
If you're not acquainted with Grayson's blog, there are a lot of things about it that make me want to say "wait a minute..." For one thing, I bridle at the very idea of such numerical rankings of creative people. His pages devoted to individual animators tend to be very long (and to seem even longer, since they're white type on black background), and they would have benefited greatly from the sort of ruthless editing that writing for the Web almost never gets. But Grayson's enthusiasm is contagious, and the scale of his blog is remarkable, considering that he is still a high school student. When I was his age, I was struggling to draw a comic strip for my high school newspaper that couldn't be dismissed as pathetically amateurish. I can't imagine attempting anything as ambitious as Grayson's blog.
The most questionable, but also the most intriguing, aspect of Grayson's blog can be found in its title: The 50 Most Influential Disney Animators. At the top of his list (and the judgments are his, not the product of any sort of poll) is Bill Tytla, followed in the top fifteen by Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Fred Moore, Ollie Johnston, Glen Keane, Milt Kahl, Norm Ferguson, Eric Larson, Mark Henn, Andreas Deja, John Lounsbery, Ham Luske, Woolie Reitherman, and Duncan Marjoribanks.
I suppose "influential" sounds a little more objective than "best." If I were required to compile a list of the best Disney animators, it might look very much like Grayson's list, at least down through the first eight or nine names. But if the test is whether an animator's example shaped other people's work in important ways, Grayson's list is more than a little odd. Surely the most influential Disney animator over time, for better or (more often) worse, has been Milt Kahl, followed by Frank and Ollie and Eric Larson, all of whom have made their influence felt for generations now, as examples and mentors and teachers. For the same reason, Marc Davis and Art Babbitt should be high up, too, in any ranking of the influential (they're Nos. 16 and 17 on Grayson's list).
But to get back to Grayson's question about what I think of the Disney animators of the "new age": Obviously, some of them are very talented people. Glen Keane comes first to mind, and he's justifiably high on Grayson's list. But there are many others who resist my admiration. For instance, when I've watched Beauty and the Beast in the last few years, I've always enjoyed Keane's Beast, but most of the supporting cast, humans and inanimate objects alike, puts me in mind of the Gold Key comic books of the 1960s and '70s. Weak drawing, clichéd movement. There's lots of sheer ugliness in many of the latter-day features.
Walt made his share of duds, too, and his best animators were always, and inevitably, a thin front line behind whom marched much larger ranks of animators of lesser abilities. Even so, my misgivings about, say, Fun and Fancy Free never discouraged me from pumping the people who worked on it for whatever they could tell me about how it was made. I've never felt any comparable interest in the more recent features, or in the people who made them. The poor writing of almost every recent Disney feature has been a formidable obstacle to animating well, but that shouldn't stand in the way of appreciating the animation when it is in fact done well, or to celebrating the people who've done it. And yet: sit me down with a tape recorder in front of someone who worked on Atlantis or Home on the Range, and my tongue would no doubt cleave to the roof of my mouth.
My misgivings are rooted now, as they always have been, in "sincerity." I've written about "sincerity" on this site a number of times, starting with my review of Treasure Planet in 2003. What I wrote then about the debasement of "sincerity" still seems valid to me. The early Disney emphasis on sincere characters gave way long ago to an unfortunate emphasis on the sincerity of the animators, and ultimately to a toxic mixture of hero worship and self-congratulation. I think it's very difficult for good animation to surface in such an environment, and just as difficult for animators to approach their work in the self-critical spirit that Walt encouraged and that the early Disney animators turned so much to their advantage, and to ours.
I remember years ago working my way through all the Disney features then available at the Library of Congress, starting with Saludos Amigos (this was long before any Disney features were available on videotape), and growing steadily more annoyed by the time I got to The Jungle Book, because more and more of what I saw on the Steenbeck monitor's screen seemed false. Much of what I saw was delightful, of course—I think immediately of the mice and the cat in Cinderella, of the March of the Cards in Alice, the "Willie" sequence in Make Mine Music, dinner at Tony's in Lady and the Tramp, Hook's seduction of Tinker Bell, and so on—but what came in between the delightful moments was increasingly problematic, until finally what I felt as falseness swallowed up most of The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book.
I think the falseness I saw was rooted, paradoxically, in that Disney shibboleth "sincerity." As Walt used the term, during work on the first great features, it was the characters who were to be sincere, that is, to seem to move of their own volition. Over the years, sincerity came to be valued less in the characters than in their animators (and, at one step removed, their directors), until now we are supposed to admire animation because its practitioners—assuming a high level of technical skill—are conspicuously earnest, in a way that many of the great early Disney animators were not. It's hard to imagine someone as gifted and irreverent as Ward Kimball, in particular, surviving for very long in the current environment (Kimball had a hard enough time surviving in the Disney of the late '50s and early '60s).
What this earnestness means in practice is that Disney-style animators have a powerful incentive not to venture beyond the obvious, because of the risk that what is not obvious will make them seem insincere. Couple that with the self-consciousness that is [Don] Bluth's legacy, so that characters seem real only in their awareness that they're performing for the camera in a ridiculous story, and you have the dreariness that I see in [the] opening minutes of The Princess and the Frog, in which utterly empty and unbelievable characters have been animated by people whose work fairly aches with sincerity. (How can we not admire what they've done, when we can see how much work has gone into it?)
If I were hired as a Disney consultant, I would first want to find out if the person who hired me was out of his or her mind...but then I'd lock the Animation Research Library and throw away the key. I'd tear down all those Xerox copies of great animation scenes that paper too many walls (no more cribbing from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad!). I'd tell everyone to forget they ever saw The Jungle Book.
I don't think there's the slightest chance of anything like that ever happening. That's one more reason I can't pretend to any interest in the latter-day Disney features, or to any real admiration for more than a few of the people who make them.
I have a growing queue of things I plan or hope to post about soon, but book writing and other obligations have thrown me far behind. So, as a placeholder, let me write a little about the visit Phyllis and I made to the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, earlier this month.
Crystal Bridges, as the serious museumgoers among you know by now, opened on November 11, after months of anticipation and lots of attention from mainstream media like The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CBS News. The museum is in Bentonville, in the Ozarks, because that's the home town of its founder, Alice Walton, the only daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Alice Walton is, thanks to her father, one of the nation's wealthiest people, and she has poured many millions of that wealth into building the museum and filling it with American paintings and sculpture.
You may recall that Alice Walton ruffled a lot of feathers a few years ago, when Crystal Bridges was still in its embryonic stage, by buying an Asher Durand painting called "Kindred Spirits" from the New York Public Library. In other cases, she attempted purchases that were thwarted by belated outbursts of civic pride, most notably in Philadelphia, where a splendid Thomas Eakins painting eluded her. Crystal Bridges has been dogged by snobbish resentment of its very presence in an out-of-the-way town like Bentonville, and by dark mutterings about Walmart's supposed mistreatment of its employees.
A lot of that carping seems to have died down now that Crystal Bridges is open. The museum is architecturally extraordinary if not entirely successful (most of the miscalculations can be corrected without major surgery, and probably will be), and the collection is very impressive, even if it weakens the closer you get to the present day (another shortcoming that will surely be corrected, since Crystal Bridges has hundreds of millions of dollars to work with). Admission is free, and the museum has attracted tens of thousands of visitors since it opened.
Contrary to what many people on the East Coast seem to think, the middle of the country is not a desert where museums and art are concerned Just a stone's throw from Bentonville, there's the justly famed Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Gilcrease in Tulsa. Cast your net wider, and you come up with first-class institutions like the Kimbell and Amon Carter museums in Fort Worth. Within a few years, I'm sure, the presence of Crystal Bridges in northwestern Arkansas will seem no stranger than the presence of great museums in those other cities.
Animation and comics connections in the museum's holdings are scant, alas. I noticed a Theodore Robinson oil of the Columbian Exposition at Chicago (where Walt Disney's father, Elias, was a carpenter), and a Jim Dine sculpture of a boy that bears a suspicious resemblance to the Disney version of Pinocchio. The gift shop offers a surprisingly large number of books about graphic novels. But easily the most cartoon-friendly item in the collection is Nick Cave's 2010 sculpture (or assemblage, whatever you want to call it) "Soundsuit." A view of the whole thing is at the right, and a detail below.
There are too many good websites now to do all of them justice in an item like this one, but I do want to call your attention to a new one that promises to be well worth multiple visits. This from Ginny Mahoney, Max Fleischer's granddaughter:
We've been working on
building a Fleischer Studios Virtual Museum... and we finally have it
online!!! Our first exhibit is OPEN. This first exhibit is about Christmas at Fleischer Studios, since
Christmas was a special holiday for them...a good time to show off
their drawing skills, get together, be crazy, and party! This was a
nutty group and this exhibit shows it. To visit the exhibit, go to our website, Fleischerstudios.com, click on the word "Museum" near the top of the page (under Fleischer
Studios), and this will take you to our museum site, where you can click to enter
our Christmas exhibit.
This is a preview; we plan to
have an official museum opening sometime in January.
To end a problematic year on a bit of an up note, here are three sketches of the Three Caballeros by Fred Moore. At the time I received color slides of these drawings from Ken Kearney, back in the 1970s, they were owned by Bob Carlson, a Disney animator of long standing and one of the industry's good guys. You can see another Moore drawing of the same vintage at Jenny Lerew's Blackwing Diaries blog.
Skipping ahead twenty-six years from yesterday's post of a 1933 Disney Christmas greeting, here's the cover of a 1959 Warner Bros. comic book. Odd how slick and "modern" this drawing seems by comparison with the Disney, even though it's from fifty-two years in the past, exactly twice as long as the chronological gap separating it from the Disney drawing; and, of course, the comic-book cover lacks the Depression-era gruesomeness of that very dead wolf on the floor. But what's really odd is how gigantic Bugs is, compared with the other characters. The idea, I suppose, was that Bugs had to be drawn that big, to emphasize that it was his funnybook. Bugs Bunny's Merry Christmas was, besides, the first ten-cent Bugs Bunny Christmas comic book, a demotion after nine years of twenty-five-cent "giants," so maybe it seemed to need an extra push. But it still makes one blink.
Back on June 6, 1969, Milt Gray and I recorded the first of our many interviews with Bob Clampett, the great Warner Bros. cartoon director, at his studio on Seward Street. Bob and I exchanged many letters in the months that followed, as I transcribed the interview and then prepared it for publication, with Bob providing lots of illustrations and other feedback, as well as a steady stream of newspaper clippings on various subjects. The interview was published in the fall of 1970 in Funnyworld No. 12, the first printed issue, after eleven I produced by mimeograph. You can read the interview here, at this link.
In April 1970, when our correspondence about the interview was accelerating, Bob sent me a Los Angeles road map heavily marked with the locations of historic animation sites, as well as what might be called historic Clampett sites—sites that were important in Bob's life if not necessarily animation related. Thanks to Mark Evanier and his scanner, you can see the relevant portions of that map by clicking on the excerpt above, the map cover at the left, or this link. This is a big file, and it may take a while to load and then come into perfect focus on your computer. [The link through the map excerpt isn't working, although it's working fine on the archive page. I have no idea what's wrong.]
The Clampett interview stirred up anger, frustration, and resentment among some of his old colleagues, most notably Chuck Jones, and I think the map offers a clue as to why that happened. Bob's memories of his animation and television career were extraordinarily detailed and for the most part unquestionably accurate, as you might expect from someone who was as passionately involved in his work as Bob typically was. The problem was that Bob took for granted the importance of his own role in the events he was describing. Often he was just as important as he thought he was, but not always, and the result could be an account of events that was firmly anchored in fact but somewhat misleading in its totality. The map is thus a detailed and accurate guide to the Hollywood animation landscape in the 1930s-1940s, but it is also Clampett-centric—not a problem here, since the map was not intended for publication but only to help me as I edited the interview, but that same Clampett-centrism could cause problems in print.
Bob was a little off when he marked the location of the MGM cartoon studio—it was, as you know if you've read my recent posts about that studio's geography, at the corner of Overland Avenue and the now-vanished Montana Avenue—but I can't think of any other mistakes he made. I carried the map with me on trips to Los Angeles for many years, using it as a guide as I visited the locations of the old cartoon studios. I finally retired it only when I'd finally fnished writing Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.
I've only just received Setting the Scene: The Art and Evolution of Animation Layout by Fraser McLean, published by Chronicle Books with a list price of $60 (but available for much less online), and I've barely had time to page through it, much less read it with any care. I can say with assurance, though, that it's an extraordinarily beautiful book, full of fascinating photos and reproductions of original art, and it seems to have been laid out, appropriately, in a way that maximizes the impact of those illustrations. It is easily the most attractive animation book to come into my hands in many years. What I've seen of the illustrations and the little I've read so far in the text reflects care and an attention to detail that is lamentably rare in nonfiction books of any kind, much less a book in a field dominated by what amount to glossy press releases.
I'm looking forward to reading Setting the Scene in the weeks ahead, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about it when I've given it the full attention it obviously deserves. In the meantime, if you're looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for that animation person in your life, here's the answer.
A couple of follow-ons to my long November 27 review of a bundle of new comic-strip and comic-book reprint volumes...
* I said of Fantagraphics' new Pogo book: "The book is a triumph." But I should have said that the book is a triumph not just for Walt Kelly, and for Fantagraphics, but for its editors, Kim Thompson and Carolyn Kelly (Walt's daughter). Especially since I singled out for criticism, by name, the editors of another Fantagraphics book. I've made the necessary correction in my review.
* In my comments on Fantagraphics' first Carl Barks reprint volume, Donald Duck "Lost in the Andes," I regarded skeptically Donald Ault's introduction, in which he writes about how Barks's stories
fundamentally altered millions of people's lives during their formative years and afterwards[,] infusing them with a love for reading, pointing them in the direction their lives should take, defining the codes of morality and excellence by which they led their lives (even inspiring them to enter specific occupations).
I found it difficult to believe that Barks had so vast and positive influence, for all that he was tremendously admirable as a person as well as a comic-book creator, but I set aside "the question of just how effective Barks was at instilling in his most ardent fans—some of the big-gun collectors of his duck paintings, say—those 'codes of morality and excellence.'"
A few days after my review appeared, I received the following anonymous message from someone who could probably be described as a person whose life was "fundamentally altered" by his encounter with Barks's work. I'm not sure what provoked his message; maybe my "Lost in the Andes" review, but more likely my 2001 essay "Thoughts on Carl Barks's Hundredth Birthday," in which I was highly critical of Barks's paintings of the Donald Duck family. In any case, the message came from someone whose email address led to a web page offering Barks paintings for sale for close to a million dollars each.
Your either ignorant about art or your just stupid not to recognize Carl barks painting as the best art of our times. The proof is that you never owned a Carl barks painting .. which I'm sure you could of bought one for a few hundred dollars. Which a collection just sold at heritage for 4 million .. and a single painting brought 265k. Your ignorance has cost you thousands or perhaps millions. You should keep your opinion to your self as its shows everyone what a complete idiot you are judging carls paintings as rubbish and trash.
As my correspondent's message indicates, people who are enthusiastic about Barks's work are not necessarily inspired to emulate his scrupulous use of the English language, or, for that matter, any of the other admirable things about him. I suppose you could try to draw a line between belligerent fans of the paintings, like my correspondent, and those of us who care about the stories, but has anyone ever come to feel genuine enthusiasm for the paintings—setting aside purely monetary motives—without reading and loving the stories first? How could they?
The value of Barks's best work surely must exist independent of whatever therapeutic effects it is supposed to have had on its readers, such effects being so often invisible or nonexistent.
And that brings to mind another question: Does anyone know of a real artist, or art critic, or scholar in the fine arts, who thinks Barks's duck paintings are any good, much less "the best art of our times"? Someone who's not on Steve Geppi's payroll, I mean. I can't think of any. Not that that's conclusive—Barks's duck stories don't have nearly as many admirers in high places as they deserve—but it's at least a fact to weigh in the balance against my correspondent's illiterate resentment.
The Barks paintings I've reproduced here are merely examples that I think resist being classified as good art, much less as some of "the best art of our times." And, for the record, I do own Barks paintings, two of them, a landscape that I bought in 1971 and a portrait of Scrooge that Carl and Garé Barks gave to me and Phyllis in 1973, as a wedding present. They're not for sale.
Walt Disney was born 110 years ago today, on December 5, 1901, and I've wanted to post something about him a little different from the usual tributes. So I thought about his October 1957 visit with Salvador Dali, at Dali's home in Spain, and I thought, more specifically, about Walt's haircut on that day. It seems not to have provoked much comment, but if you examine the photo above, and the other photos from that visit that are floating around the web, you'll notice that Walt's haircut is...well, different from his usual careful grooming. It is what Walt himself called a "butch haircut"—maybe it would qualify as a flattop?—and he told the Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper, in a piece published on November 5, 1957, that he'd adopted it for a seven-week trip to Europe as a sort of disguise.
"I got by with my butch haircut and registered under William Edward Jones, so nobody bothered me," he said. "Only in England was I spotted. But we didn't go to Paris or Rome, we traveled thru [that's the Chicago Tribune's spelling] Belgium, south Germany, Austria into Italy, into part of the Mediterranean, and Spain, where we visited Salvadore [sic] Dali who lives in a tiny fishing village near Barcelona. ... He has the answer to living: spends six months there and the rest in New York."
Hopper was, by the way, not a "gossip columnist" of the Walter Winchell sort, but rather an earnest apologist for the Hollywood studios. She was a Disney fan and wrote about Walt often. Her papers at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills reflect the reporting she and her staff put into her longer pieces, especially, including some on Walt. Hopper wasn't an objective reporter, by any means, but she seems to have gotten her facts right most of the time.
On that 1957 trip, Walt and his wife Lillian sailed September 5 for Southampton, England, on the S.S. United States. They spent a week in London before moving on to Brussels, and then (presumably by car the entire time) Bonn, Heidelberg, and Munich in Germany; Bolzano, Venice, Milan, and Portofino, in Italy; and Juan-Les-Pins, Avignon, and Carcassonne in southern France. These were mostly one- or two-night stops. The Disneys' grand tour ended in Spain: Cadaqués (near Dali's home at the village of Port Lligat), Barcelona, Zaragosa, Madrid (an uncharacteristic four nights), Bailon, Granada, and the port of Algeciras, before sailing for home October 19 on the S.S. Constitution, which arrived in New York on October 25. The visit with Dali apparently took place on October 6 or 7. It sounds like an exhausting itinerary—in my own travel experience, nothing is worse than pulling up stakes every day and heading for someplace new—but, of course, Walt and Lilly had lots of help along the way.
Walt may have found the trip a bit too much, though. He told Hedda Hopper: "I'm not a good tourist—there's too much of everything."
As you know if you've read my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, MGM broke with Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising in 1937, when it ended its distribution deal with the independent Harman-Ising studio and built its own up-to-date studio—staffed in large part by defectors from Harman-Ising—across Overland Avenue from the main MGM lot. The new studio's Captain and the Kids cartoons were not well received, and after a year MGM had to eat humble pie and ask Hugh and Rudy to join the cartoon studio's staff and produce cartoons like those they'd been making as independents. It was a rather awkward situation, as exemplified by the caricature above, which shows Heck Allen, on the left, and Joe Barbera, on the right, clinging to Rudy Ising; both Allen and Barbera were members of Rudy's story crew when he became an MGM producer, and the message from the drawing (by Bob Allen, Heck's brother and an MGM animator and director) is that they were predictably anxious to secure the new producer's patronage.
MGM erected its cartoon studio at Overland and Montana Avenues in Culver City, but as you know if you've read the comments on my earlier posting, Montana Avenue no longer exists. (There's a Montana Avenue in nearby Santa Monica, but it's a completely different street.) David Nethery did some probing on the internet and came up with information that permits a more accurate siting of the studio than that simple street address. David has pointed me to this authoritative site about the MGM lots. As he says, "The Main Lot, Lot 1, is the present- day 'triangle' piece of property bordered on three sides by Washington, Overland, and Culver. That's where Sony Pictures is now." The website mentions other MGM lots on surrounding property, including this one:
Across Overland Avenue to the west from Lot 1 was Lot 2.This 37-acre parcel was purchased specifically for studio expansion and some of the first films to use it were King Vidor's "The Big Parade" (1925) and "Quality Street" (1927). Many of the standing sets
from the early backlot built on the west end of Lot 1 were moved here to form "Waterfront Street." The prison set from "The Big House" (1930) was built here, as was "New England Street," a curved street of well maintained, middle class homes used extensively throughout the "Andy Hardy" series. The swimming pool, stables and mansion from "The Young Philadelphians" (1940), the exterior
Chinese set from "Green Dolphin Street" (1947) and the "Verona Square" set from "Romeo and Juliet" (1936) where among the many others built here.
The Animation Department where cartoon characters "Tom and Jerry," "Droopy," and "Barney the Bear" were drawn and filmed was located in a streamlined building on the northeast corner of Lot 2.
So, was that building actually on the MGM lot, as it says here, or not, as I was told by people who worked there? The answer almost certainly is, both. The MGM cartoon studio was on MGM's property, on Lot 2, but anyone visiting there entered not through the lot itself, but through a door at the corner of Overland and Montana. The cartoon studio's situation was evidently analogous to that of the Walter Lantz studio at Universal: that studio was on the Universal lot, but the entrance was on Lankershim Boulevard, as Roger Armstrong has explained in an essay I've posted on this site.
In digging through my files of photos from MGM, I've found two early photos that show the studio entrance. In the first photo, Fred Quimby, Hugh Harman, and Rudy Ising greet a visiting group of some kind at the front door, marked "M-G-M Cartoon Studio." That's Overland Avenue at the left. The photo was taken sometime between 1938 and 1941, when Harman left MGM.
The next photo may have been taken in August 1941, when Rudy Ising had just married Cynthia Westlake, a young actress to whom he was married for the rest of his life, and was leaving on his honeymoon. (Rudy had been married at least once before, to an actress named Maxine Jennings, but that marriage lasted only a few years.) I can't account for the other women in the station wagon, though. The photo was taken looking across Overland Avenue, with Montana Avenue—like Overland a public street—on the right.
And what of the structures visible behind the cartoon studio's building, in this photo and in Ed Benedict's 1953 photo? Presumably they're frameworks for sets or something of the sort, on Lot 2, but I can't be sure. [A January 13, 2012, update: Thanks to Dan Briney, I can now be sure that those are indeed frameworks for sets. You can go directly to his comment by clicking on this link.]
And as for what the location of the MGM cartoon studio looks like now—here's a screen shot, courtesy of David Nethery:
David elaborates:
Attached find what Google Maps Street View shows in present day Culver City on Overland Avenue at the corner of Overland and Palm Court Way. (Palm Court Way is just a bit south of Oregon Avenue, which you mentioned is on the Bob Clampett map , near where the now nonexistent Montana Avenue was.) If the camera turned to the left in this Google Maps screen grab you would see the entrance to Sony Pictures on what is left of the original MGM Studio lot.The same spire from Veterans Memorial Park is in view in both the Google Maps screen grab and the original Ed Benedict photo of the MGM Cartoon Studio. Of course there is no way to duplicate the exact same perspective or position that Ed Benedict was in when he took the photo, but I think this is more or less the location. So the location of the MGM Cartoon Studios building is now occupied by one of the many condos/apartments put up when Kirk Kerkorian sold off large chunks of the MGM lot.
Here's the entrance to Sony Pictures:
And speaking of the Clampett map (which I described in the comments on my original post about the MGM studio): Mark Evanier has generously offered to scan it on his scanner, which can accomodate much larger documents than mine, and I hope to post it here soon.
I've been submerged for the last few weeks in a pile of new books reprinting classic comic books and comic strips, by such creators as Walt Kelly, Carl Barks, Floyd Gottfredson, and (odd man out) Alex Toth. I've emerged with a very long review, which you'll find at this link.
The review being as long as it is, and the internet being what it is, I'm sure almost no one will read this piece, but it certainly was challenging and stimulating to write. A quick summary, for those who can't take the time even to click the link: Buy the new Pogo book without delay, and save your pennies for the final volume of Segar's Popeye, promised in January. As for everything else—well, you'll just have to read my review.
That's Tex Avery at his desk in the MGM cartoon department on that date, in one of a set of color slides of the MGM staff taken by Avery's layout artist, Ed Benedict. I've posted all of the slides, which Ed permitted me to copy for publication back when I was writing Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, on an Essay page. That page is one of a series of such pages devoted to groups of photos taken on the same day, sometimes minutes or seconds apart. You can find other Day in the Life pages, whose subjects range from Walt Disney in Kansas City in 1922 to Walt Kelly in New York in 1955, under the Essays tab in the right-hand column, and you can go straight to the MGM page by clicking on this link.
Another relic from my unpublished book on the Warner Bros. cartoons. I can't find my note of who owned this poster back in 1978, when I had it photographed for the book, but I think it was Tom Bertino.
Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal's theater critic, wrote last week about the first volume of Gunther Schuller's autobiography, Schuller being the highly distinguished composer, author, and performer who, as Teachout noted, "is the only musician in the world who can claim to have played with Maria Callas, Miles Davis, Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra, Igor Stravinsky and Arturo Toscanini." Teachout continued:
I was especially interested in what Mr. Schuller had to say about "Fantasia," Walt Disney's 1940 animated feature film about classical music, which he saw for the first time when he was 14: "That film masterpiece truly changed my life, particularly its Stravinsky 'Rite of Spring' sequence, which, as far as I can remember, was the first time I heard that remarkable music. It completely bowled me over. I knew then and there that I had to be a composer."
Needless to say, snobs of all kinds have long taken a dim view of "Fantasia," with its dancing mushrooms and cavorting hippos. Not so Mr. Schuller: "I hope [Stravinsky] appreciated that hundreds—perhaps thousands—of musicians were turned onto 'The Rite of Spring' (and by implication lots of other modern music) through 'Fantasia,' musicians who might otherwise never have heard the work, or at least not until many years later."
I'm with Mr. Schuller. Hollywood used to do a lot to introduce youthful moviegoers to the joys of classical music. I first encountered Rossini, for instance, in Chuck Jones's "Rabbit of Seville," which made brilliantly apposite use of the "Barber of Seville" overture as background music for one of the looniest of all Looney Tunes cartoons. I can still close my eyes and see Bugs Bunny whacking away at Elmer Fudd's lather-covered face with a straight razor ("There, you're nice and clean / Although your face / Looks like it might have gone / Through a ma-chine").
Back in the days of middlebrow culture, the movies weren't the only way for children to get a taste of the classics. I initially made the acquaintance of such literary gems as "Macbeth" and "Moby-Dick" in comic-book form, courtesy of the unjustly mocked Classics Illustrated series ("Featuring Stories by the World's Greatest Authors"). A few years later I graduated to Reader's Digest's Best Loved Books for Young Readers, whose first volume contained condensed versions of "The Call of the Wild," "David Copperfield," "Madame Curie" and "Treasure Island."
The key to grasping the effectiveness of these unpretentious little objets d'art is that they yoke the familiar with the unfamiliar, in the process implicitly suggesting that it's no big deal to move from the one to the other. Bugs Bunny is funny, and so is a Rossini crescendo. "Macbeth" may be a poetic masterpiece, but it's also a blood-drenched ghost story. And as Howard Dietz reminds us in "That's Entertainment," all art, be it great or crude, aspires at bottom to do the same thing, which is to thrill us: "It might be a fight like you see on the screen / A swain getting slain for the love of a queen / Some great Shakespearean scene / Where a ghost and a prince meet, and everyone ends in mincemeat."
So how do you get young people to appreciate high art? The indispensable, irreplaceable first step is to expose them to it, and to do so in a way that doesn't lead them to assume that they're not going to have any fun. Do that and there's no telling what will happen next. One day in 1940 a 14-year-old kid from New York City went to the neighborhood movie house to see a Disney cartoon. A couple of decades later, he composed "Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee" and wrote "Early Jazz." If the gatekeepers of American culture don't find equally effective new ways to introduce today's teenagers to Stravinsky, Rossini and Shakespeare, the next Gunther Schuller may not be so lucky—and neither will we.
Cheering words, but I was left wondering how many other young people really were stirred by Fantasia to embrace classical music. It seems strange to say, since I saw Fantasia multiple times as a kid, but I don't think that film had anything to do with my decision last Saturday afternoon to pay $22 to see a high-definition telecast in a movie theater of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Wagner's Siegfried. Classical music wasn't a part of my family's life (we owned few records of any kind), and musical resources were generally scarce in Little Rock fifty years ago, so if after seeing Fantasia I had been on fire to hear more Stravinsky and Beethoven, I probably would have been out of luck.
If I can credit any person with my love for classical music, it's not Walt Disney but my freshman roommate at Northwestern, a flautist from North Dakota. We didn't get along at all (which was almost entirely my fault), but I remember hearing his LPs of Schubert's "Trout" Quintet and a couple of Haydn quartets as we both studied, and I remember gradually realizing how much I enjoyed the music. By the end of my sophomore year, I had joined a couple of classical record clubs and actually owned two sets of the Beethoven symphonies (Toscanini's and Bruno Walter's).
So, I'm happy for Gunther Schuller that Walt Disney opened the doors to a life in music for him. But as for me, I owe my love of classical music to that flautist, Kenneth Malvey.
And Speaking of Fantasia...
Bill Benzon, who has co-authored essays on that film with me on this site, has been writing about it on his own blog, working his way through each section of the film and describing what's really happening on the screen—including, most recently, the soundtrack segment. Only the "Pastoral Symphony" is left. Stimulating reading, as always.
Geoff Blum has called my attention to an interview in the San Francisco Chronicle with Trevor Allen, who played Pluto and the Mad Hatter at Disneyland back in the '90s and has converted his experiences into a one-man show called Working for the Mouse. You can find several clips from the show on YouTube. The Chronicle's interviewer asked Allen if he was "anti-Disney," and he replied:
When I was working 12-hour days plus a four-hour parade rehearsal, I loved it. There was a sense of being part of the magic and a sense of esprit de corps. I appreciate there are children who love Mickey Mouse and people who love the Disney thing. I don't mean to diminish any of that, but Disney has perfected the commodification of imagination and hope and wishful thinking. I do take that to task in my show. If you really love Disney, you don't want to go backstage. Once you've seen how the trick is done, you can never go back.
That's true, I think, not just of the Disney parks but of Disney in general—with this qualification, that Disney lovers are more than happy to go backstage if what they find there is an iteration of an orthodox account of the backstage activities involved, whether they're the mechanics of the park's shows or the history of the Disney company. Walt himself took his TV audience "backstage" many times in the '50s and '60s, showing how his cartoons and the Disneyland rides were made, but that audience was of course seeing exactly, and only, what Walt wanted them to see; and the true Disney lover didn't want to see anything else.
Disney is now a much larger (and colder) company than in Walt's day, and even more determined to control how it is perceived. If you're reluctant to embrace the orthodox version of whatever Disney wants you to believe, it doesn't matter how favorable your independent assessment turns out to be, it will be judged fatally deficient by those people, both Disney employees and Disney lovers, who feel threatened by the most tentative departures from orthodoxy. Disney is hardly unique in its desire for such control, but it does seem to work exceptionally hard at it.
Which is probably why the Chronicle's reporter asked Allen—whose show is from all appearances very mild in its depiction of Disney—if he worried "about the corporate behemoth stomping on the show." He replied: "When you write from what you know, it gives you a sense of fearlessness that speaks truth to power. They can't argue with what I experienced under the fur in the Magic Kingdom. My life experience is not something they can say is copyrighted."
The interesting thing about your Don Christensen photo [July 27] is the table behind him. It shows that Christensen is animating. According to Dave Hand, the Disney animators had a table with a lightbox AND a second table where they could have their jumble of preliminaries, colour crayons, reference material and what not. That way the "operation area" on the lightbox was uncluttered. A simple turn of the chair made contact.
And also:
Dave Hand told about training new people in the thirties. "We sorted them out according to their varied talents—some went into background. The animation talents went through a 9 months schedule. Later we cut this to 3 months. Then we discovered that if we put a promising neophyte in with an animator of the same type of talents, he would be animating in no time." Could one of these have been Dick Lundy?
Lundy began animating in 1930 after just a few months as an assistant to Norm Ferguson, so—could be!
This independent animated feature by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger was in and out of my local art theater too quickly last year for me to see it, but I finally caught up with it on DVD a few days ago. The timing seemed right. After Phyllis and I returned from Europe in late September, we house- and dog-sat for two weeks for former neighbors in our old home town, Alexandria, Virginia. The dog in question was the estimable Louie, a sweet-tempered dachshund. So we were exceptionally dog-conscious when we saw My Dog Tulip.
I haven't owned a dog since I was ten years old, and I have never wanted one, not only because I enjoy cats' company more but also because a dog imposes a rigid rhythm on your life that a cat doesn't. No matter what, you've got to walk the damn dog. And the reason you've got to walk him, of course, is so that he can empty his bladder and his bowels. The title character in My Dog Tulip does a lot of both. Some fastidious people have been put off by the film's emphasis on urination and defecation and their rhyming cousin, fornication, but Louie would find such daintiness misplaced. When we took him out, usually four times a day, he instantly became a hound, absorbed in smells and devoting intense deliberation to the choice of just where he should write his own urinary signature. To suppress so important a part of his life would surely be insulting to him, if he had the capacity to feel such an insult.
So, I liked the film for its portrayal of a dog that seems almost too real—more real, perhaps, than the film's version of J. R. Ackerley (the real Tulip's owner and the author of the book on which the film is based), although Christopher Plummer's voice-over provides all the life the character needs. There is much more to like about this modestly scaled, low-key film, which looks hand-drawn even though it was created entirely on the computer, but it's the connection with reality that most firmly separates it from the fancy schlock that dominates theater screens.
It is taking me longer than I expected to get back on track after five weeks away, but that's where my new store of color scans comes in especially handy. The drawing above, by Joe Grant, is a wonderful caricature of Dick Huemer, Disney animator, director, and writer, and Joe's co-author of the screen version of Dumbo, among other treasures.
I think I have plugged every volume of Didier Ghez's invaluable Disney interview anthologies as they've appeared, and I'm happy to do so again. Here's Didier himself:
The book is available on Amazon and on Xlibris. It is a staggering 629-page long and I admit that I am really proud of its contents.
Foreword: John Canemaker
Didier Ghez: Ruthie Tompson
Christopher Finch & Linda Rosenkrantz: Walt Pfeiffer
John Culhane: Shirley Temple
John Culhane: I. Klein
Peter Hansen: Basil Reynolds
Christopher Finch & Linda Rosenkrantz: Eric Larson
John Culhane: John Hubley
Robin Allan: Jules Engel
Darrell Van Citters: Ed Love
Darrell Van Citters: Mike Lah
JB Kaufman: Frank Thomas
Dave Smith: Carl Nater
John Culhane: John Hench
John Canemaker: Ward Kimball
Dave Smith: Ward Kimball
Didier Ghez: Frank Armitage
Robin Allan: Ray Aragon
Didier Ghez: Ray Aragon
Gord Wilson: Jacques Rupp
David Tietyen: George Bruns
John Canemaker: Dale Oliver
John Canemaker: Iwao Takamoto
John Canemaker: Richard Williams
Charles Solomon: Brad Bird
Alberto Becattini: Don R. Christensen
Jim Korkis: Tom Nabbe
Dave Smith: Roger Broggie
Didier Ghez: David Snyder
Didier Ghez: Carl Bongirno
John Culhane: Daniel MacManus
John Culhane: Ted Kierscey
John Canemaker: Glen Keane
Didier Ghez: Joe Hale
Jérémie Noyer: Mark Henn
Christian Ziebarth: Andreas Deja and Mark Henn
Didier Ghez: Ed Catmull
As always—and inevitably—the interviews are a mixed bag, but Didier's own interviews in this volume are especially good. The interviews are not all with people who actually knew Walt Disney, but for the most part the inclusion of the likes of Ed Catmull and Glen Keane is self-justifying, once you've read the interviews. Anyone who claims a serious interest in Walt Disney and the history of his studio should not hesitate to buy this and every other volume of Walt's People.
Back in the 1980s, when I had a contract with Warner Books for my never-to-be-published art book on the Warner Bros. cartoons, I spent a lot of my own money having 4 x 5 and 8 x 10 color transparencies shot of hundreds of pieces of artwork for the cartoons, as well as related items like licensed merchandise. I still have most of those transparencies, and I've wanted to post some of them here, to add color to my mostly gray pages. I was unable to scan them with my all-in-one machine, though, so they have languished in my files. Recently I found (through Groupon) a company called ScanDigital, which offered to scan such transparencies for a reasonable price. I received the first batch of scans in September, just before I left on my long trip, and I'm very happy with the results. I'll be posting those scans in the weeks ahead.
The first such scan is above, a sampling of Dell's Warner-character comic books from the 1940s and early 1950s; I'd planned for it to be a two-page spread in the Warner art book. You can see a larger version, closer to the size it would have been in the book, by clicking on the scan or on this link.
Some of the scans to come will have more artistic/historical interest, but I'm particularly fond of this one. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Comics and its offspring never soared to the comic-book heights of Carl Barks's best stories, but this former child reader found them consistently entertaining. Once past the early years, the comic books usually looked good, thanks to talented cartoonists like Carl Buettner, Roger Armstrong, Ralph Heimdahl, and Tom McKimson, and the writing, especially in the 1940s, when Chase Craig was responsible for much of it, was always at least serviceable. You can read a representative Porky Pig story by clicking on this link.
All of the comic books shown in this photo were, and are, part of my own collection. Like many other people, I talked myself into dismantling my comic-book collection in my teens, only to plunge into reconstructing it (and adding to it) a few years later, in the mid- to late 1960s. By that time, happily, it was much easier to find old comic books, at prices that were, by today's standards, shockingly low. I paid fifteen dollars for my copy of Looney Tunes No. 1, from 1941 (the same price I paid for Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, Carl Barks's first), and that price was, for many years, the most I'd ever paid for a comic book.
Much more recently, I bought (for more than fifteen dollars, I regret to say) the only Warner comic book from the 1940s that I was missing when the photo was taken, the first issue of Bugs Bunny, Large Feature No. 8, from 1942. I'd actually owned a coverless copy of that issue, but I gave it, along with my extra copies of many other Dell comics, to Roger Armstrong, after we began corresponding in 1967. Roger reciprocated with his detailed—and highly accurate, as I've since been able to confirm—memories of how that comic book and other Dell comics came to be.
Pulling the transparencies for scanning was a melancholy exercise in some respects. I was reminded, of course, of how much uncompensated time and money I put into the Warner book—my advance on royalties covered only a small part of my out-of-pocket expenses—but especially of how wonderful that book could have been. I was also reminded of another unrealized project that was in some ways even sadder.
While I was seeking out Warner artwork to be copied, I ran across a lot of artwork for other studios' cartoons, the Harman-Ising MGM cartoons in particular. Much of that MGM artwork was extraordinarily attractive, and I couldn't resist having a lot of it photographed. I put together an elaborate presentation for an art book on the MGM cartoons, which I hoped would be a followup to the Warner book, and I sent that presentation, which was filled with one-of-a-kind transparencies, to an art-book house (not Abrams) whose co-owner professed herself eager to see it. A few months later, when I'd heard nothing, I wrote to ask what was going on. The answer, ultimately, was that the publisher had moved to new offices in the interim, and during the move someone had thrown my presentation and its several thousand dollars' worth of transparencies into the trash.
I was reimbursed for the transparencies, eventually, and the money actually came in handy—the demise of the Warner book had left me as close to bankruptcy as I've ever come—but I could have found the money in some other way, and there was no way I could replace the transparencies. But at least I have a lot of transparencies left (including some of MGM artwork). I'm looking forward to sharing them with you in the months ahead.
While surfing the net, trying to find any photos I could for my sister, I came across your amazing interview with my brother-in-law, Corny Cole, who recently passed on (as you know). I'm writing because you probably also know that he lost his life's work in a fire a few years back. Would you be willing to pass the word for us, that we are desperately looking for any photos or art people may have of his? We would pay to recover any originals and would cheerfully pay for any costs incurred in copying and shipping securely any copies people would be willing to make. I'm asking you, because I hoped you might get the word out better than I could, knowing more of the world he occupied than I do. I'm asking on behalf of the family, especially his wife, is is just kind of lost without him.
People talk about his art, but no one knows that he had a love, how very much in love they were, how utterly devoted to each other they were, that my sister dropped her life to spend every single minute she could with him when he was sick, refused to send him to hospice, fed him, cleaned him, sat and read to him, and that he died in her arms last August. They met when she was a model in one of his classes and she misses him so much—so any help you could give me in trying to rebuild his work for her (even just photos she may not have seen of him would be such a balm), I would appreciate it more than you know.
If you can be of help, please let me know, at the email address at the top of the right-hand column, and I'll forward your message to Elizabeth.
I've heard from Andrew Mayer, son of Helen Aberson Mayer, the co-author of the book on which Walt Disney's Dumbo was based; he wrote in response to my essay called "The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book." I've revised that essay a number of times, but rather than do that again, I've posted Andy's comments on a separate feedback page, with links to and from the original essay.
If you haven't read that essay yet, you should, especially now that Dumbo has been reissued on Blu-ray. I haven't seen the Blu-ray yet, but Disney's other Blu-ray editions of the features have been outstanding, and I expect nothing less from the new Dumbo. If you read my essay and Andy Mayer's letter in tandem with a viewing of the Dumbo Blu-ray, I think you'll have a new appreciation of that wonderful film's strange and fascinating history.
Phyllis and I returned last weekend from a five-week trip divided about equally between Europe (Berlin, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna) and our old home town of Alexandria,Virginia. I photographed the mysterious figure above at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (I have no idea what was going on), but otherwise didn't do anything with animation/comics connections in Europe. As usual when I'm in Alexandria, though, I spent a lot of time across the Potomac in Washington, at the Library of Congress. Some fruits of my research there will turn up here in the coming months, although my immediate concern is with all the email and paper mail that piled up while I was gone, including such books as the second volume in Fantagraphics' landmark reprinting of Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comic strip and Craig Yoe's collection of Carl Barks's Barney Bear and Benny Burro stories for Our Gang Comics. I expect to resume real posts later this week.
Oskar Lebeck's name is not one that many of today's superhero-sotted comic-book fans would recognize, but he was for me one of the greatest comic-book editors, if not the greatest. Not the noisiest, not the one who left his fingerprints all over everything that his company published, but the editor who best recognized and nurtured outstanding talent.
Lebeck, a native of Germany, was throughout the 1940s the New York-based editor for many of the comic books produced by Western Printing & Lithographing Company and published under the Dell label. Walt Kelly created Pogo on Lebeck's watch, in addition to turning out sweet and funny fairy tales, uproarious slapstick, exciting adventures, and what is surely the best comic-book adaptation of a Disney feature, the Four Color Comic version of Pinocchio, the comic book that asks but for very good reasons does not answer the immortal question, what the hell is the gleet? (You can look it up.) Lebeck assigned John Stanley, his neighbor in the Hudson Valley, to Little Lulu, an assignment that Stanley thought was fortuitous but turned out to be inspired. And there were many others, including Morris Gollub, Dan Noonan, and George Kerr, among the cartoonists, and Gaylord DuBois, the highly productive writer whose stories have held up very well over the years.
When I read the work of one of those people, and then read a story from a comic book that another company published around the same time, the effect is almost always the same: the non-Dell story is hackwork (even if it is well-illustrated hackwork), and the Dell story is much better than that—and often much better.
I've been exploring the careers of Lebeck and his gifted colleagues for my next book, on comic books, and in the course of my research I've acquired a small collection of Lebeck photos, some of them with John Stanley. You can see a selection of them, with my comments, at this link.
And Speaking of Stanley...
Dan Noonan, who knew John Stanley when they were drawing comic books for Western Printing, said of Stanley that he “used to send ideas to The New Yorker, and Jim Geraghty, who was the cartoon director there, was so impressed with Stanley he wanted to give him a contract. Stanley wouldn’t have any of it; he didn’t want to be tied. Although I can’t think of any nicer way to be tied down than under a contract with The New Yorker.” Stanley’s ideas were “very sophisticated gag ideas, all of them,” Noonan said.
But: only one of Stanley's cartoons was ever published in The New Yorker, in 1947, but his gag ideas could of course have been bought to be illustrated by other cartoonists. The New Yorker's archives are housed at the New York Public Library, as are Jim Geraghty's files. I ran out of time before I could look at those archives on my last visit to New York, but the library's very helpful staff did some checking for me, and they came up dry—no Stanley correspondence in the Geraghty files, no evidence of him elsewhere. That's not conclusive, since the librarians inevitably couldn't make as thorough a search as I could, but still, I'm puzzled. Was Stanley exaggerating, or is there some other explanation? If anyone out there knows anything, I'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, I'm planning to visit the NYPL the next time I'm in Manhattan.
I enjoy reading your website and referencing your book. In general, I feel that you are a keen observer and that you are generally correct in your criticisms of films and art work. I feel that sometimes you focus too heavily on details and thus “miss out” on the enjoyment of the overall film. That is possibly only a perception of mine, but the more I read your work the more convinced of your “lack of innocence” in watching and enjoying a film I become.
I do feel, however, that if my perception is true I am beginning to understand your perspective. I was watching the Chip n’ Dale cartoon Two Chips and a Miss recently (a favorite of mine from childhood) and I found myself enjoying it much less than I did when I was a child watching the Disney Channel.
After some reflection, I came to realize that I enjoyed the cartoon less because I know much more about animation now after study/ research/ reading than I once did. I now see the Clarice “showgirl” sequence as a pale imitation of Red Hot Riding Hood and the dueling music section that followed as “Freleng-esque” (and not as good, in my opinion, as some of the better Merry Melodies in developing music based gags). I find myself having a tougher time enjoying the films as entertainment now that I have a broader scope of knowledge.
This is a very long way of asking if you find your joy in animation diminishing as your knowledge grows… I appreciate hearing your response.
I don't think my pleasure in animation has been diminished by my decades of study of cartoons of all kinds. Two friends and I watched the new Blu-ray of The Incredibles the other day, and I enjoyed that film at least as much as I enjoyed it the first, second, and third times I saw it (and I enjoyed it a lot, as my review shows). I constantly find myself surprised and delighted by cartoons I thought I already knew well. I remember watching all the earliest color Mickey Mouse cartoons in chronological order a couple of years ago, for the benefit of a friend's grandson (who promptly got bored and went wandering off to make loud noises), and marveling at how good those cartoons were, and at how miraculous it was that one wonderful cartoon succeeded another, with no significant lapses in quality. Blu-ray can lift a veil even from cartoons that I've seen multiple times in a theater. Watching the beautifully restored Blu-ray of Fantasia, with a decent sound system, I fully understood for the first time just how strong an impact that film could have made on its first viewers, back in 1940. Knowing a great deal about how Fantasia was made, and having known dozens of the people who worked on it, didn't diminish my pleasure in the least, but, if anything, added to it.
But what Kevin is saying, I suspect, is that such pleasure, however great it may be, is hopelessly compromised by what he calls a "lack of innocence"—a lack to which I cheerfully plead guilty, although if I were totally innocence-free I would be working harder to suppress other people's awareness of my many eccentric habits: watching cartoons, reading comic books, riding the bus downtown to the library, walking as many places as possible, and so on. There are a lot of fans, of whom Kevin may or may not be one, who think that the only valid response to a cartoon is the response they felt when they first watched it as a child. I think these tend to be the same people whose dietary habits are locked into those of a ten-year-old, so that they resist eating anything but hamburgers, hot dogs, milkshakes, and the like. No sushi for them! And let's not even talk about rabid sports fans, than whom there's no one more infantile, or people who listen only to the pop music they heard as teenagers, or...
I can certainly remember my "innocent" responses to various cartoons and other kinds of films. One of my most vivid memories is of seeing my first Three Stooges short, I think on the same bill with Disney's Make Mine Music (which didn't make nearly as strong an impression). I was six or seven, and sitting in the balcony. When I saw the Stooges short, I was in heaven: I had no idea that such fabulous movies existed. Why, the Stooges did everything to one another than I never dared do to my little brother! I don't remember the title of that Stooges short, but I do remember seeing other Stooges shorts soon after that, and regarding them with the same sort of rapt admiration. I've seen many Stooges shorts in the years since I became an adult, and I still feel a limited affection for them, but on the rare occasions when I've watched two or three in a row, I've gotten very tired of them, very quickly. Does that mean I suffer from a "lack of innocence"? Or does it means my taste has improved with age and broader knowledge? Both, I'm sure.
A loss of innocence, in Kevin's sense, is inevitable, and trying to sustain such innocence through artificial means (as by savaging people who refuse to swoon over whatever happened to be the object of one's childhood enthusiasm) can yield only sickly results. You can confirm that by visiting any number of animation-related websites. There's always the risk, if you accept that loss of innocence, that you'll eventually decide that animation is not the most important thing in your life, and that greater rewards can be found elsewhere. But surely that's a risk anyone who claims to be a grownup should be willing to take.
For the record, I think Kevin's current opinion of Two Chips and a Miss is correct. A clunker, for the reasons he cites, among many others.
From famed Danish animator Børge Ring, a memory of his first meeting with David Hand, who directed Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi for Walt Disney:
It was my very first meeting with the great man. Dave had agreed to meet Bjørn Jensen and me at his studio in England. We were European novices who knew cutting tables but had never seen an exposure sheet or a movieola with pegbars. Dave had written us beforehand saying that if we would read The Art of Walt Disney—the old 1942 one [by Robert D. Feild]—ahead of the consultation it would save him a lot of time.We knew this book by heart. Its pioneering author tried to convey a lot of information, some of which he himself had half understood, and the reading tattooed a few misunderstandings and left a pile of very down-to-earth questions that we hungered to hear the answers to.
I asked: "Mr. Hand: How is it with ones and twos??
Dave began: "Fast takes should always be on ones. "
I interrupted with confusion. "Yes, but Mr. Hand, in The Country Cousin the mouse jumps high up out of his pants, and he does it on twos." (We had a 16 mm black and white print.)
"Is his take vertical or horizontal ?"
'"Vertical."
"Well, vertical movements are more patient with twos than horizontal ones."
A number of like exchanges followed. Dave tired of the disorder of it all and he summed up: "Here is the rule: go ahead and animate on twos and see how far it will take you."
We pleaded with him to tell us how to obtain the Magic Feather. He got impatient and after awhile he condensed: "Look, this is what it is about. Take a situation of a man who is waiting for the bus to arrive. He has been shopping and has just one package too many. If you can animate that situation so that an audience howls with laughter, then you are an animator."
This answer crushed me and I grieved: "But what can we do to become good at it?"
Dave leaned back in his chair and asked: "Have you got a camera that shoots one frame at a time?
"Yes."
"Have you got an old projector that will run the film?"
"Yes."
"Well, that's what we had. Go ahead and you're in business. But mind you, it is not enough to be just animators. You go up to someone and say, 'Look, we can animate, we can animate.' He'll say, 'Sure you can and so what?'"
The consultation exhilarated and sobered me, and for ever after I have turned every stone on my way, looking for things that give progress.
The last time I visited Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, almost three years ago, I was startled to see the glass case in the photo above. It holds what might appear to be an effigy of Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963. Not so; it's the Pope himself, whose corpse, I've read, was found to be so "remarkably fresh" when his tomb was opened a few years ago as part of the canonization process that the Vatican decided to put it on display.
For some reason, I couldn't get that glass case out of my mind as I read a news release a friend forwarded to me yesterday, about a new attraction at a famous Las Vegas casino. Here's part of it:
The legacy and creativity of Chuck Jones, one of animation’s pioneering director-producers, will be brought to life with the opening of The Chuck Jones Experience, an interactive exhibit at Circus Circus Las Vegas designed to “Educate, Inspire & Entertain” people of all ages. The attraction will celebrate its grand opening in mid-October with a press conference featuring some of animation’s brightest stars.
A four-time Academy Award-recipient, Jones created some of today’s most beloved and enduring animated characters including Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner and Pepé le Pew among many others. In 1999, with the establishment of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, Chuck Jones envisioned a time when people of all ages could explore their creativity…when all ideas would be welcome, when inspiration would be nurtured without prejudice, and creativity would blossom and grow. The Chuck Jones Experience, utilizing the art, writings and films of Jones, will nurture that spirit of creativity in an environment that is playful, lively, inspirational and educational. The project is being developed by Jones’ grandson, Craig Kausen, Jones’ daughter, Linda Jones Clough, and a group of Chuck Jones fans who have believed in and supported its creation for years. “My grandfather said that if you provide the right materials and an environment of love, creative magic will come out of young people,” said Kausen. “TheChuck Jones Experience will provide kids, and animation fans of all ages, with an extraordinary place to not only learn about the art of animation, but to discover the creativity and magic that’s inside us all. We are thrilled to kick off Chuck’s Centennial year with the opening of this exciting new venture.”
The Chuck Jones Experience is a nearly 10,000 square-foot destination. At its entrance is the
1,000 square-foot glass-enclosed Chuck Jones Center for Creativity class room where creative art projects will be encouraged and guided by teachers from the field of animation and the arts. Heading inside, your first stop is the Chuck Jones Theatre, designed to simulate a 1930s-style movie theater. There, you’ll meet Chuck Jones via a short film, introduced by one of his characters, the Connecticut Cat.
Moving on, you’ll walk down a virtual street surrounded by many of Jones’ most memorable characters and a timeline of his extraordinary life. Next, you’ll arrive at a re-creation of Jones’ studio, where you’ll see how he worked, and discover what inspired him to create his beloved characters. From there, you‘ll enter the “How Do You Measure Up?” room where 3-D characters are on display. You’ll learn more about how characters are developed and experience some of the original key drawings Jones drew during the creation of these characters.
Continuing along, you can view some of Jones’ fine art work from various periods in his life and see classic photos of him, his fellow animators and his family. This leads into “Animation Alley,” a multimedia wall where animation pieces are on display from the permanent collection of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity and from other animation studios and collections.
Finally, you’ll arrive at the Acme Workshop, where you can create your own sound effects and voiceovers for a Chuck Jones cartoon at the Chuck Jones Experience Foley Stage. You can commemorate your experience forever at the Chuck Jones Experience Gift Shop with a variety of creative gifts and souvenirs.
So, one of animation's greatest directors is to be enshrined—not literally like Pope John, thank heaven, but close enough—amid slot machines and roulette tables. I trust that those "creative gifts and souvenirs" will include a selection of votive candles.
I remember thinking not long ago that it would be fun to post as a series my interviews with Corny Cole, Willie Ito, Dick Thompson, and other people who worked in the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros. in the 1950s and early 1960s. Those interviews read together give a reasonably full picture of one of the most important short-cartoon units. (In the Chuck Jones layout drawing above, think Daffy=Corny Cole, Porky=Willie Ito.) Maybe I'll still do that. But since Corny Cole died just a few days ago—and his interview is one I could put into publishable shape in a relatively short time—it seems appropriate to post it now. You can read it by clicking on this link.
Disney comic books and comic strips have been reprinted recently in two important new books edited by David Gerstein: the first volumes in a Fantagraphics series devoted to Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse and a Boom! Studios series reprinting very early issues of Walt Disney's Comics & Stories. I write about those books, and a lavish Danish set of Carl Barks's duck stories, in a review at this link.
And speaking of Disney comic strips, here's an odd one that I ran across while paging through old issues of Printer's Ink magazine. It was one a series of comic-strip ads for Puck Comic Weekly, the Hearst Sunday comics section, and it appeared in the May 18, 1939, issue of Printer's Ink. I can't even guess who drew this strip (which has been distorted by the tight binding of the bound magazines). No one at the Disney studio, I'd guess, since no one working at the Hyperion studio then could have confused Goofy with Horace Horsecollar.
In my July 16 item, titled "Mystery Men," I speculated about where the photo in that item was taken, at the old Disney studio on Hyperion Avenue or at the new Burbank studio. David Lesjak, to whom I recently provided scans of a number of photos for his forthcoming book on the Hyperion studio, has pointed out the resemblances between the July 16 photo and one of the scans, this one of Don Christensen, then a very young member of the Disney staff, at an animation desk very similar to the one in the July 16 photo. Don lent me that photo for copying many years ago, and my notation on the back, which reflects what Don told me, identifies it as having been taken at Hyperion. Case closed.
And while I'm at it, here's another Hyperion photo that originated with Don Christensen; thanks to Gunnar Andreassen for reminding me of it. Don thought it was taken in 1938 during story work on Pinocchio, but it must have been taken a year or so later, since that's an unpainted maquette of Bacchus that Joe Sabo is holding. Probably an almost-exact date could be determined if we knew the start and end dates for all of these people. These are the people in the photo, left to right: front row, Don Christensen, David Rose, Joe Rinaldi, Ernie Terrazas; second row, Joe Sabo, Tony Rivera, Bill Peet; Third row, Phil Eastman, Gordon Legg, Otto Englander (head of this story crew); back row, Walt Scott, Herb Ryman, Webb Smith, Ed Penner (who evidently didn't notice the "no smoking" sign).
I've spared myself the time (and expense, not to mention the mental distress) of seeing any CGI movies in recent months, so it's a little surprising to me that I haven't been able to squeeze out more time for this website; blame it on my next book. Writing about old comic books has been much more alluring than writing about contemporary animation. My plan has been to plug part of the content gap by posting some of the many photos I've accumulated in work on my other books, but even that plan is not without pitfalls.
Take the photo above. When I interviewed the Disney animator Jerry Hathcock in 1986, he lent me that photo so that I could make a copy negative. That's obviously Jack Hannah—animator, story man who teamed with Carl Barks, and finally director of Donald Duck shorts—at the left; Jerry told me that two of the other three men were Nicholas George and Ted Bonnicksen, but he wasn't sure which was which, and neither am I.
My first thought was that this photo, with its crowding and informality, was surely taken at the Hyperion studio, but then I looked at Jerry's interview again, and I realized that he said he didn't start work at Disney until February 1940, months after the move from Hyperion to Burbank got under way. I neglected to ask him at which Disney plant he started, but most likely it was at Burbank (he was inbetweening in Norm Ferguson's unit). So, is that where the photo was taken? Does that furniture look like Burbank furniture? Who took the photo, anyway? It's presumably not a publicity shot, not with those feet on the desk and no identifying number; or is it? And what's Jack Hannah doing there? By 1940 he was a story man, not an animator.
All questions I should have asked; or maybe I did ask them, but Jerry understandably couldn't answer them after a lapse of almost fifty years. More research is thus in order, when I can bring myself to do it.
I enjoyed re-reading the Hathcock interview. Like the Fred Kopietz interview I posted recently, and like the John Freeman interview I've been working on, it has a real-life flavor. There's a sense that this is what working life was like for many talented people in the animation business when Jerry was active in it, from the 1930s through the 1970s. Not a Fantasyland, for sure, however rewarding the work was in many respects.
I got highly favorable feedback about the Kopietz interview from people who took the time to read it, but as best I can tell, from Google Analytics and otherwise, there were very few such people. I suspect that it's precisely the real-life flavor of the Kopietz interview that has led many animation fans—including, and perhaps especially, fans who work in the business—to shun it, in favor of romances about the glorious heroes of the Golden Age and their successors in today's studios. I get almost no web traffic, for the interviews or otherwise, that originates in the big animation studios, and on the rare occasions when I cross paths with someone who works at such places, electronically or in person, their hostility is palpable. All of which suggests to me, I'm afraid, that I must be doing at least a few things exactly right.
Let me qualify the preceding paragraph. I did hear a few months ago from a Recognizable Name at Pixar, who wanted me to send him a copy of a document, one more than a hundred pages long, that I'd cited in an essay. There was not a hint of reciprocity, and he was most anxious that I not mention here that he'd condescended to write to me. The clear implication, as far as I was concerned, was that as a simple peasant—I mean fan—I should be humbly grateful for the attention from someone so illustrious and should expect nothing in return. With as much politeness as I could muster, I told him to shove it.
I finally saw The Illusionist, on Blu-ray. I was looking forward to it, because I very much enjoyed Sylvain Chomet's previous feature, The Triplets of Belleville. The Illusionist is in many respects a lovely film; I haven't been to Scotland since 1999, but the backgrounds of Edinburgh and the Hebrides in the 1950s instantly evoked that country for me. I was, however, ultimately disappointed in the film as a whole.
Chomet based The Illusionist on a Jacques Tati script for an unmade film that would have starred Tati as Tatischeff (Tati's real name), the stage magician of the title and a version of the ungainly character Tati played in such live-action features as M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle. It had been years since I'd seen a Tati movie, but by happy chance Turner Classic Movies showed M. Hulot's Holiday a few days after I'd watched the animated version of the Tati character.
M. Hulot's Holiday was for me on this viewing like a feature-length short cartoon, one that had to stand or fall on the strength of its individual gags. Although it had its bright moments—I smile at the thought of the deflated tire that becomes a funeral wreath—there weren't nearly enough. Neither could I warm up to the Tati character, whose accoutrements—the ridiculous little car, the omnipresent pipe—finally seemed like placeholders for more ingratiating attributes.
Tati became for me an oppressive presence in his own film, and I felt very much the same about the animated version of the character in The Illusionist. But there's an even larger problem. Even more than Tati's live-action features, The Illusionist is essentially a pantomime film, but it lacks the precise exaggeration of expression that could compensate for the absence of dialogue. All the characters, especially Tatischeff and Alice, the young girl who tags along with him from the Hebrides to Edinburgh, are finally too opaque, and simply not very interesting. There's a failure not of execution, but of conception. I still look forward to Chomet's next film.
For a more sympathetic response to The Illusionist, let me refer you to the entry for that film in Andrew Osmond's stimulating new book 100 Animated Feature Films, which I've recommended previously. Andrew has made me aware of a controversy centered on The Illusionist, a controversy that seems all the stranger because the film was so conspicuously unsuccessful at the box office. Let me quote Andrew:
Anyone who writes about The Illusionist, especially online, is subject to getting blitzed by...well, let's say passionate activists who argue that the flm does a grave injustice to Jacques Tati's illegitimate daughter. You may know the story already. If not, the case is presented in (very) great detail on Roger Ebert's website in a letter from Tati's grandson. There is also a rejoinder from the producer of The Illusionist.
My own feeling was that the case is very inconclusive, and I left out any mention of it when I wrote up the film [in 100 Animated Feature Films]. (It was the last entry I wrote.) Later, however, I got impatient with some of the "activists" who take the side of Tati's grandson (in extremely dogmatic terms), and I made the mistake of arguing with them on the Cartoon Brew forum. The surreal result—which almost made the argument worthwhile!—was I was accused of being a malign mouthpiece for the British Film Institute, trying to suppress criticism of The Illusionist! Ah, the joys of the net...
On a happier note, I can recommend wholeheartedly a recent live-action film, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, whose caricatural evocations of 1920s Paris are so clever and subtle as to make even Brad Bird's Ratatouille seem a shade heavy-handed. I can't remember when I last sat through a film with a smile on my face the whole time—that is,until some moron's cell phone went off, about an hour into Midnight, and rang incessantly for close to a minute. At least I didn't notice any teenagers texting, as was true when I saw The King's Speech. Even such "adult" films aren't refuges from adolescent boors, unfortunately. When I encounter moaning and groaning about the decline of moviegoing as a communal theatrical experience—there was whimpering of that kind in the New York Times recently—I think about such disagreeable episodes, and more often than not I say to myself, "I'll wait until it's out on Blu-ray."
I've been signed up for a long time with an amazon.com program that gives me a (very) small slice of the income when orders are placed through links on this site. I've never reaped much money from the program, usually just enough to cover my internet service provider's annual fee, but that little bit has been most welcome. Now amazon.com is cutting loose many of its "associates," so as to have no physical presence in states like mine, which are attempting to collect sales taxes from online retailers. As of July 24 I'll no longer benefit from orders through links to amazon.com web pages. So, if you've contemplated ordering something from amazon through a link on this site, now is the time to do it.
Since circumstances are conspiring to make it difficult for me to post much these days, it seems like a good time to make use of some of the many photos I've accumulated. To start, here's a photo of the Disney inking department circa 1931. It comes from Marcellite Garner, the original voice of Minnie Mouse, via Bob Clampett, who sent me a copy in 1973. Marcellite's identifications: at the desks against the rear wall, Dot Smith, Margaret Walters, unidentified, and, standing, Hazel Sewell, Lillian Disney's sister and the head of the department. The other three women are, from left, Doris de Trémaudan (who was, according to Don Peri's new book Working with Disney, married briefly to Gilles "Frenchy" de Trémaudan, an early Disney animator), Marcellite Garner, and Margie Norton. Bob Clampett identified the Mickey Mouse doll at the left as one of those he made himself for his aunt, Charlotte Clark, when she was producing such dolls for Disney. Garner wrote about this photo in a 1971 letter to Clampett:
The picture of the inking department was taken after the new addition was built on the Hyperion studio. It is the front part, and was about 1931. When I started working there the end of 1929 or first of 1930 [Garner's official start date was February 17, 1930] the studio was just a small square building with a partial partition running through the middle of it. This divided the animators from the inkers (the things that used to go on over and under the partition!). It was really a fun place to work and so relaxed...so different from what it became in later years. When the addition was put on the partition was removed and that whole [original] building became the Inking and Painting Dept. One night when I was working late we heard a terrible squealing...looked down where the noise was coming from and I had caught a poor little mouse by the tail under my inking board, everyone called it my cousin!
I've accumulated a variety of items related to earlier posts, some of them dating back to the earliest days of the site, in 2003. Obviously, they'd get lost if I just appended them to the original posts, so here they are.
* THE LOGIC POLICE: It has been a while since I added anything to my Feedback page devoted to Pixar, DreamWorks, and the other CGI studios (which is now just about all animation studios), but Brendan Loundz has broken that lull with a blast that he titled in his message's subject line "Logic Police." You can read his highly skeptical comments about my reviews, and my response, by clicking on this link.
* WALT AT ZERMATT: Back in 2004, I posted a page based on my visit to Zermatt, a lovely Swiss village that Walt Disney visited several times. Zermatt inspired the Matterhorn ride at Disneyland (Zermatt sits at the base of the Matterhorn) and was the setting for one of Walt's best live-action films, Third Man on the Mountain. Curiously, I couldn't find any traces of Walt at Zermatt, but Michael Loeb, a German visitor to this site, has written to tell me that a 1959 photo of Walt at Zermatt is now displayed at the Matterhorn museum there. You can go to Michael's blog post about Walt and Zermatt (in German), and see the photo, at this link.
* ANDREW OSMOND'S 100 ANIMATED FEATURE FILMS: I mentioned this British Film Institute "screen guide" last January, before it was published in the United States, and it seems appropriate to say something more about it now that it's available stateside and especially now that I've spent some time with it. This is not a book you should read from cover to cover. You should instead dip into it and move from one entry to another as the mood strikes you. The hundred animated films are listed alphabetically, and Osmond doesn't present them as the "hundred best" or anything of the sort. His book is, he says in his introduction, "a skewed and partial appreciation of the medium."
As I've dipped into the book, sampling a few two- or three-page entries at a time, I've been reminded of books by film critics like Pauline Kael, whose Kiss Kiss Bang Bang devotes a large part of its pages to brief considerations of dozens of live-action features. Kael's book doesn't pretend to be comprehensive, and Osmond's doesn't, either. In both cases, the films chosen are there because the author had something to say about them. Such seriousness isn't a guarantee that the author's response will be of great interest in itself, of course, only that what we read will be more than dutiful, but so far I've found Osmond's critiques much more often illuminating than superfluous. Roughly half the book's entries are devoted to non-American features, and those entries benefit especially from Osmond's catholic taste and broad sympathies.
*AND SPEAKING OF ANDREW OSMOND: He wrote to share a curious discovery:
I recently turned up a comics curio that I thought might interest you. Here are some images from Japanese comic adaptations of Disney's Pinocchio and Bambi.
What makes the comics especially notable is that they were drawn by Osamu Tezuka (1928-89), Japan's so-called "God of Manga," whose influence on Japan's comics and cartoons is incalcuable. Tezuka was a huge fan of Disney (and also the Fleischer brothers), which influenced the cartoonish style of his strips. He created an estimated 170,000 comic pages in his lifetime, albeit with teams of assistants; his best-known creations are Astro Boy (Mighty Atom in Japan) and Kimba the White Lion (Jungle Emperor). The latter is at the centre of an unending fan argument about whether it influenced Disney's Lion King. I'm not sure when these Disney strips were drawn, although Wikipedia claims they were early Tezuka strips, so perhaps from the '50s.
My thought, looking at Tezuka's drawings, is that Tezuka's adaptations of the Disney films seem to have had a lot more vitality than many of the American versions in the Dell comics of the '50s.
* DUSTIN GRELLA: I wrote on April 29 about Dustin Grella and his film Prayers for Peace, and encouraged visitors to this site to vote for that film for the Next Great Filmmaker Award. Dustin wrote a few days ago:
Good news! I found out this weekend that Prayers for Peace won the Next Great Filmmaker Award. There is no way the film could have won without the support of family and friends. Thank you!!!
This summer my plan is to do five new micro-animations per week and have my 100th video finished by mid-August. That means I'm going to need fifty new messages, so if you haven't left one yet, now's the time. If you have left one, then now is the time to leave another! Seriously the more messages the better. I've used Thatcher Keats and Lotte Meijer three times each already, but it's because they were leaving messages almost every day! The project is only as good as the messages I receive.
To see the 20 most recent animations go to Animation Hotline and to watch the entire archive go to vimeo.
* ART BABBITT: If you share my taste for animation history, and especially for the history of the Disney studio in its golden age of the '30s and early '40s, you'll certainly want to read Jake Friedman's essay on Art Babbitt as student and teacher of animation on the Animation World Network site. This is not a comprehensive biographical essay—Friedman says nothing about large parts of Babbitt's life and work—and I can't help but feel a little leery of some of the details, which may or may not be correct but also may not mean much. (Don Graham smoked a lot? Maybe so, but who didn't, seventy-five years ago?) And then there's my oft-repeated skepticism about the hazards involved in spotlighting individuals who worked in a highly collaborative medium. Still: Friedman writes well, he avoids mistakes (although, as David Nethery points out in a comment, it's ridiculous, even if not strictly inaccurate, to identify Les Novros as "an ex-Disney in-betweener"), and as "the authorized biographer of Art Babbitt" he presumably will be in a position to tell us much more about Babbitt than anyone else. If, as I hope, his biography materializes as a book, I will certainly buy it.
In the meantime, if you haven't read my 1986 interview with Babbit, which I posted in 2003, you'll find it at this link.
[A June 23, 2011, update: * HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS: I occasionally get long and thoughtful responses to my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, and you can read the most recent such, from Nicholas Pozega, by clicking on this link.]
The staff of the Universal cartoon studio, June 18, 1932 (Manuel Moreno's wedding day, which is why he's not in the picture). From left, Fred Kopietz, George Cannata, George Grandpre, Walter Lantz, Cal Howard, Don Williams, Les Kline, Ray Abrams, Gene Metillie, Tex Avery, Cecil Surry, Charles "Tex" Hastings, Sid Sutherland, Leo Salkin, and Bill Weber. Courtesy of Cal Howard, whose identifications I've adopted.The one that puzzles me is Gene Metillie, an odd name if Cal's spelling is accurate, and one I can't locate otherwise. It seems likely the name was French and the true spelling was something like "Jean Metilly," but I can't verify that spelling, either.
Interviews: Fred Kopietz
You can read my interview with Fred Kopietz, whose animation career (at Iwerks, Universal, and Disney, among other places) spanned the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, by clicking on this link.
Timothy J. Susanin's book Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928, arrived in the mail this week. Published by the University Press of Mississippi, it lists for $35 in hardcover (no softcover yet), but you can order it from amazon.com for only $23.10, a bargain price for such a handsome and well-filled book. There's also a Kindle edition for $19.25.
I've written about this book before, and I can do no better now than quote the blurb I contributed for the dust jacket (where I share space with such Disney-history eminences as Didier Ghez, J. B. Kaufman, Leonard Maltin, and Dave Smith):
Walt Disney was a man in movement, someone whose exceptional energy and curiosity permitted him to create great animated features and the extraordinary Disneyland park. Tim Susanin gives us our closest look yet at Walt when he was just starting to become that great visionary of the middle of the twentieth century. Susanin's book is a chronicle of Walt Disney in the 1920s, when he was just starting up Hollywood's ladder--whose lowest rungs happened to be in Kansas City. We meet many of Walt's friends and colleagues, too, people who have been little more than names in earlier biographies and studio histories but whose stories are told here in unprecedented detail. This book does a superb job of tracking the restless young Walt Disney through the decade of triumphs and trials that preceded the great turning point in his life: the creation of Mickey Mouse.
I was in touch with Tim constantly as he worked on Walt Before Mickey, and I gladly shared with him many of the notes I made and the documents I copied during my many visits to the Disney Archives in the 1990s, as well as the transcripts of some of my interviews. Tim has made excellent use not just of that material but also of much more that he found through an assiduous mining of resources of other kinds, especially online. The result is a book that takes us through Walt's life in the twenties in extraordinary and highly accurate detail. I learned a great deal about Walt, about his growth as a person, an artist, and a businessman, as Tim and I exchanged ideas and sources, and you will, too, when you read his book. And if you care at all about Walt and his works, you'll have a very good time.
There's another new Disney-related book that I can recommend without qualification, even though I haven't read it yet. It's Working with Disney: Interviews with Animators, Producers, and Artists, by Don Peri; it's available through amazon.com in softcover for $15.86. This is Don's second book of such interviews (both published by University Press of Mississippi); the first was Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Animators. Don is an excellent interviewer, and his new book includes sixteen interviews, some with familiar names (Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Marc Davis), others with people who turn up much less often in print (Lance Nolley, Lou Debney, Gilles "Frenchy: de Trémaudan). I'm looking forward to spending a few hours with all of them.
While I was in Florida earlier this month, I worked on my 1989 interview with John Freeman, Milt Kahl's assistant in the late '40s and early '50s. Converting the original transcript from an obsolete word-processing program to MS Word turned out to be relatively easy, but when I compared the original with the version that John revised, I found that he had made far more changes than I remembered. John is no longer with us—he died last year—and it's tempting to publish the very colorful unrevised version, but I don't think that would be fair to his memory. So it'll be a while before I can get that transcript into publishable shape. In the meantime, I'll try to find some other transcripts that don't require so much massaging to be publishable.
Speaking of interviews: I've realized that when Lynn Karp talks in that interview about having to move to New York to continue working on the Dell comic books for Western Printing , he was most likely mixing up his publishers. I think that what he had in mind was what happened when Jim Davis's "shop" on the West Coast stopped producing stories for Ben Sangor's ACG line (Ha Ha, Giggle), sometime in the late 1940s. As best I can tell, the cartoonists involved had the choice of moving to New York to work directly for Sangor and his editor, Richard Hughes, or finding some other source of income. This was when California-based ACG stalwarts like Jack Bradbury began contributing to the Dell titles, whereas Karp moved to New York and apparently worked for both ACG and Western while he was there, as well as Pines. He was presumably right about the move, but almost certainly wrong about which publisher instigated it.
Bill Blackbeard, the great collector who almost singlehandedly saved the early American comic strip from oblivion, died last March 10 at a California nursing home, a few weeks short of his eighty-fifth birthday. Sadly and a little strangely, no one in the comics community seems to have been aware of his death until well into April, when Bob Beerbohm learned of it and began spreading the word. Of the tributes published online, two of the best are by R. C. Harvey and Jeet Heer.
I pulled the files of my correspondence with Bill after I learned of his death, and I've been reliving my long acquaintance with him. My earliest letter from Bill came in October 1968, although we had corresponded before that through CAPA-alpha (the "comics amateur press association"). When I made my first trip to California in June 1969, I stayed for a few days with Bill and his wife, Barbara, at their home in San Francisco. They lived then at 2077 Golden Gate Avenue, a few blocks west of the Civic Center and a few blocks north of Haight-Ashbury. Not the most serene neighborhood, as I recall, especially since San Francisco was still wallowing in the backwash of the Summer of Love. Bill moved his home and his collection west to a large house at 2850 Ulloa Street, in the Sunset District, a year or two later.
I never saw the inside of the Ulloa house. After agreeing on a time with Bill by phone—this must have been in November 1973—Phyllis and I took the bus out to the Sunset District, only to find no one home. We hung around for an hour or so before giving up and heading back to our hotel, having wasted about three hours total. I left a note for Bill at the house but never heard a word of apology or explanation. Our correspondence just picked up as if nothing had happened. I learned later that the same thing had happened to Bill's (and my) editor at Oxford Unversity Press, Sheldon Meyer. I have no idea what Bill was thinking.
Bill was often described as a "scholar" or "historian," but he wasn't either of those things, not in any significant way. He once told me that he wasn't interested in pursuing the actual authorship of the strips—that is, in identifying the "ghosts" responsible for many of them—and he wrote in a letter that he didn't care to interview surviving cartoonists. (When I was about to interview Winsor McCay's assistant John Fitzimmons in 1976, and I asked Bill if he had any questions for Fitzsimmons, he devoted two long paragraphs to expressing skepticism about such interviews—before coming up with a half dozen good questions.) I remember reading a draft for the introductory chapter of his never-finished comic-strip history for Oxford; in it, he did not so much celebrate the virtues of the strips he loved as berate long-dead critics for their failure to be as perceptive and admiring as he was. I was dismayed by the draft's hectoring tone.
It was no surprise to me that Bill never finished the Oxford book, and there's no reason to regret that he didn't. His important work was not in writing but in collecting, and he did that superbly. Like all great collectors, he was intensely focused, first, on building his collection, and second, on finding the resources that would permit him to collect. I can only imagine what a splendid institution he might have created if he had been lucky enough to inherit or marry wealth. His "San Francisco Academy of Comic Art" was no more than the shadow of such an institution. It was a dodge, a respectable front Bill created so that the libraries that were microfilming and then, idiotically, destroying their irreplaceable bound newspaper volumes would give them to him instead. I was a willing party to that benign deception, as one of the Academy's "directors."
Bill stayed with me a couple of times in the '70s when he was in Washington, scooping up newspapers that the Library of Congress was foolishly discarding; he would have stayed more often, but Phyllis refused to hear of it. He was, alas, the kind of guest who tries to ingratiate himself with his hostess by telling her how expertly she cut apart the sections of his breakfast grapefruit. Poor Bill made it all too obvious that he regarded Phyllis and me less as friends than as a convenience.
Besides putting him up, I also supported his collecting in a very modest way by paying him for reviews he wrote for Funnyworld—not much, but my audience was one he wanted to reach, and fifty dollars for a review wasn't quite a pittance thirty years ago.
I jumped ship from Funnyworld just before it sank in the early '80s, and my correspondence with Bill petered out soon after that. (Funnyworld's proprietors at the time, Mark Lilien and Pam Clement, tried to donate the magazine to Bill's Academy, but he was justifiably suspicious of their motives, and nothing came of their offer.) I wrote to Bill twice in 1989 but received no reply. We were never in touch again. My usefulness to his collecting had ended, and with that our twenty-year acquaintance.
I think Bill's powerful instincts as a collector failed him in one instance. Bill and Martin Williams co-edited the enormously successful Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics (1978), which was made up of comic strips taken from Bill's collection. Martin told me that he wanted the book to be dominated by long runs from a relatively few outstanding comic strips, to show the medium at its best; Bill, a collector eager to display his rarities, wanted the book to offer examples of lots of obscure and forgotten strips—I remember Martin's mentioning one by Dr. Seuss—and the disagreements evidently became severe. I think Martin had much the better of the argument, and the book as published reflects his preferences more than Bill's; naturally enough, since it was Martin who actually worked for the Smithsonian Institution. Bill finally got the kind of book he wanted when Kitchen Sink published The Comic Strip Century as a two-volume boxed set in 1995; Bill co-edited that set with Dale Crain. It is exactly the kind of unfortunate hodgepodge that Martin resisted making of the Smithsonian book.
Because his collaboration with Bill had become so unpleasant, Martin turned to me as his co-editor for A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics (1982). I don't know that Bill resented my participation—I don't find any traces of resentment in our correspondence—but he surely would have liked to receive more royalties from the Smithsonian. When he volunteered to lend comic books to be photographed for the new book, I told him of several that we needed. He never responded, and I wound up borrowing the comics from other collectors.
Bill edited many other books reprinting comic strips from his collection, some of them, like Fantagraphics' "Krazy & Ignatz" series, models of their kind. In 1997, with the Ulloa house in serious need of repair and his landlord unresponsive, Bill sold the collection to Ohio State University and moved to Santa Cruz. The collection was by then so comprehensive—seventy-five tons of paper!—that six moving vans were needed to transport it to Columbus. In the years since, even as Bill's own involvement waned, the collection has been an indispensable resource for other excellent reprint series, like Fantagraphics' complete Popeye by E.C. Segar and Drawn & Quarterly's "Walt and Skeezix" reprints of Gasoline Alley. Interest in classic comic strips will inevitably wax and wane, but thanks to Bill Blackbeard, the comic strips themselves will be available when posterity decides they deserve a fresh look.
The San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection at OSU—which really, if justice were done, would be called The Bill Blackbeard Collection—is the kind of monument only a few benefactors of great museums have left behind. Anyone who cares about comic art must be forever grateful to Bill that we have it.
I very much admire Dustin Grella's short animated film of that title, about his 21-year-old brother's death in the Iraq war. You can see the film, and help the filmmaker receive a cash award, by clicking on this link. Dustin Grella explains:
I've been nominated for the Next Great Filmmaker Award for Prayers for Peace in an online film festival with four other films. The grand prize is $5000. So basically, I have a 20% chance at $5000. It's hosted by Berkshire Film Festival and sponsored by Berkshire Bank, and just for voting you are entered into a drawing to win an iPad2, $1000 cash, or a BluRay player. It sounds pretty insane but I read the contract and they are perfectly legitimate, they just love film and want to support filmmakers. It's only one vote per person, so when you get the chance, follow the link and vote for Prayers for Peace. If I win I'm planning on using the money to help get my current project, the Animation Hotline, off the ground. Thanks for your support. And send this to other people who know me and you might think would want to vote.
I've voted for Dustin for the award, and I hope you'll follow my example.
I'll be away for the next week or so, so I won't be posting—not that I've been posting a great deal lately, anyway. I've been devoting most of my attention to my next book, on comic books. I've been thinking about this site, though, and, in particular, reviewing my list of interviews to get some idea of which ones might be most easily transferred to a page here. Happily, I've found quite a few. All of my early interviews exist as typescripts that must be scanned to be publishable, usually with extensive corrections, even though not nearly as many as once was the case. I transcribed the later interviews on a PC, starting around 1988, but in an obsolete word-processing program whose output also demands considerable tweaking. The editing required with transcripts of both kinds is not difficult, just boring, but I'm finding ways to cut down on the time with each new transcript. So look for a steady flow of interviews here, with John Freeman, Milt Kahl's assistant in the 1940s, probably next, as a natural followup to the Kahl interview I posted a few weeks ago.
Otherwise, I'm planning to write a piece about Bill Blackbeard, the famed comics collector who died in March. I first met Bill more than forty years ago, when I stayed at his home on my first visit to San Francisco, and my perspective on his life and work differs somewhat from that of many other people, to judge from the tributes I've read. I also have in my queue some historical pieces that I expect will be a lot of fun to write.
I doubt that I'll be writing many reviews, of new animated features especially. I'm not seeing many of those, and the ones I've seen haven't stirred me to hasten to the keyboard. I finally got around to watching The Secret of Kells on Blu-ray the other day, and I was disappointed to find that it is, contrary to what I'd been led to expect, a shallow children's film. As best I can tell, from the occasional feature I see and the others whose commercials tell me more than enough, we're passing through a period when art direction is all, whether expressed in Kells' fancy graphics or the hyper-realistic dust and grime of Rango. In the CGI features, the star voices (and the endless dialogue) carry the entire weight of characterization in stories of the most formulaic kind. And it all works, for critics and audiences and many fans. Just not for me.
Back in 2006, when my biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney was about six months away from publication, I filled one of the last gaps in my research by visiting the Hermosa neighborhood in Chicago. Walt Disney was born and spent his first four and a half years there, until his father Elias moved the family to Marceline, Missouri. I'd saved Chicago for last because it seemed obvious that the places where Walt lived later—Marceline, Kansas City, Los Angeles—were much more significant in his life.
I was delighted, though, to see not just the Disney family home on Tripp Street but also, a couple of blocks away, Saint Paul Congregational Church, which Elias was instrumental in building in 1900, the year before Walt was born. (The church's records—which have survived even though the church itself no longer exists—show that Walt was born on December 5, 1901, and subsequently baptized at Saint Paul, effectively debunking the crackpot "birther" claims that he was born in Spain.)
Hermosa was by 2006 heavily Hispanic, and the church itself home to a Hispanic Baptist congregation, but it still looked very much as it must have looked a hundred years earlier. I posted some photos and a brief report on my visit, at this link; one of those photos, of the church's cornerstone, is below right.
I was pleasantly surprised last month, when I was rooting around in the Chicago Tribune's online archive for articles about Walt's 1957 visit to the Chicago suburb of Evanston, to find a couple of 1900 articles about the groundbreaking for Saint Paul. One from May 19 announced the groundbreaking, the other from May 20 reported on it with three drawings, two of which I've reproduced here. One shows the church's pastor, Walter R. Parr—for whom Walter Elias Disney was named—turning a shovel full of earth at the ceremony, which began at 6 p.m.; the other shows Parr behind a plow being pulled by members of the congregation, including Elias Disney.
Elias is mentioned in both articles, which is how I found them. Elias, a contractor, was one of the five members of the church's building committee; according to the Tribune's reporter, he didn't care for being hitched to the plow.
You can read both articles by clicking on these links, for the May 19, 1900, article and the May 20, 1900, article. I especially like the opening of the May 20 article, with its references to the "green prairie" and the "virgin soil" of what was then a neighborhood on the western fringe of Chicago. You would be hard pressed to find any remnants of the prairie in today's Hermosa.
My 1990 interview with Karp, a Disney animator (Fantasia, Pinocchio) and later a mainstay of the "funny animal" comic books, is at this link. [An April 17, 2011, update: Thanks to Didier Ghez for pointing out that I failed to mention the interview date in my introduction to the Karp transcript; the interview took place on September 25, 1990.]
My old friend and frequent collaborator Milt Gray has added some full animation of his character Viagri Ampleten to his comic-strip website about that character, and "pneumatic" is the word of the day. You can admire Viagri, and Milt's skill as an animator, when you click on this link.
More information has turned up about Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, the co-authors of what I've called "The Mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book," and I've seized the opportunity not just to incorporate that information in my piece with that title but also to rework it in other respects, and especially to make clearer what should have been clear in the first place (thanks, Jeremiah). The revised piece is more readable and interesting now, I think, and it's probably as complete a story of Dumbo's origins as you're likely to read until that distant date when Disney's "main files" disgorge contractual details that are now hidden. If, like me, you find Dumbo a source of endless pleasure, one of those rare animated features that seems richer every time you watch it, you will probably enjoy this piece, even if you've read the earlier versions. You can go to it by clicking on this link.
[An update: I accidentally posted the revised Roll-A-Book piece without incorporating some of my planned changes, but I've now added them.]
In March 2010, as you almost certainly won't recall, I mentioned that my old friend John Benson had sent me a copy of André Martin's chart called "Family Tree of the Origin and Golden Age of the American Cartoon Film 1906-1941" that was published in connection with the 1967 World Retrospective of Animation Cinema at Montréal. I didn't even think about trying to scan that huge sheet of paper—three feet tall and four feet wide!—and post it here, but now Michael Sporn has gone and done exactly that: scanning it in sections that at least one visitor to his blog has reassembled into a replica of the original sheet. Simply amazing.
The Family Tree scans are just the tip of the Spornberg, though. Recently (with the invaluable aid of Bill Peckmann) Michael has been putting up scans of the lovely illustrations from Bill Peet's children's books, as well as scans of Milt Kahl's wonderful animation of the llama for Saludos Amigos, animation that makes all the more poignant Kahl's complaints in the interview I've posted here about being restricted to "straight" characters in the later Disney features. Someone who restricted his animation-blog visits to Michael's "Splog" would still enjoy a very healthy diet of nourishing posts.
I've noticed that when Cartoon Brew posts links to items like two I've just mentioned—my Kahl interview, Michael's Family Tree scans—the comments typically pour into Cartoon Brew at a greater rate than they do to the originating site. Substantive comments, too, like David Gerstein's and Charlie Judkins's skeptical remarks about the Family Tree, in addition to the usual ignorant braying. Is that good, bad, or neither? I don't know, but it does seem a little odd.
Roger Armstrong's reminiscences of the Walter Lantz studio in the 1940s have stimulated some enjoyable posts elsewhere. Bill Benzon has subjected one of the best Lantz cartoons of that period (one of the best Lantz cartoons, period), The Greatest Man in Siam, to his usual painstaking analysis on his New Savanna blog, with lots of frame grabs, one of which I've appropriated. You can go to the first of his three posts at this link.
Michael Sporn has written about his two encounters with Walter Lantz, and his post put me in mind of my own single meeting with Walter. I interviewed him in 1971, in the company of my wife and the animator James Tim Walker, who arranged the interview for me. I liked Walter, as most people did, but the interview ultimately proved of little value. Walter by then had been interviewed too many times, and had told the same questionable stories too many times. (Walter spoke of contributing a bit of animation to each of his cartoons, as late as 1950, but when I mentioned that to Dick Lundy, one of the Lantz directors in the 1940s, a couple of years later, Lundy scornfully rejected Walter's claim: "He never even touched a pencil.")
As friendly as Walter was to me, he seemed to be especially taken with Phyllis. He was a small man, a little over five feet, and she is a small woman (5-foot-1); probably he enjoyed meeting an attractive young woman whom he could look straight in the eye.
Thanks to Chris Sobieniak for sending me a scan of this Ed Solomon gag drawing of Roger Armstrong and some of his colleagues at the Lantz studio; that's Solomon himself at the lower right. Roger mentions such gag drawings in his reminiscences of the Lantz studio, which I posted earlier this month.
The last few days, I've had a decision to make. Should I write a review of Rango, a review that would brand me, yet again, as a choleric, senescent grump? Or should I prepare for publication Roger Armstrong's memories of working at the Lantz studio in 1944-45, which he sent to me on a cassette more than thirty-five years ago—vivid memories of a happier time and a happier place than anything in today's animation world? Not even a close call. You can reminisce with Roger by going to the Essay page at this link.
Evanston, Illinois, is the anchor of what's known as the North Shore, the string of wealthy towns on Lake Michigan just above Chicago. It's the home of Northwestern University, where I went to college for four years, a half century ago. Evanston was in those days a smug and stodgy place, not just dry but so dry it was the home of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. College students who could persuade a skeptical bartender that they were twenty-one had to flee to Howard Street, on Chicago's northern edge, to slake their thirst; or they could risk drinking cheap wine in the attic of their fraternity house, in the hope that the enforcers from the interfraternity council wouldn't come prowling around before the wine was all consumed.
Evanston's representative in Congress then was Marguerite Stitt Church, whom you can see above shaking hands with Walt Disney on July 4, 1957. Mrs. Church, who has always looked to me as if she were posing for one of Helen Hokinson's cartoons in The New Yorker (and voted the same way), was of course a Republican, as was Walt.
Walt got to Evanston a little over a year before I did, in order to ride in a convertible in the thirty-sixth annual parade of the North Evanston Fourth of July Association. When it was announced in May 1957 that Walt would take part in the parade, the Chicago Tribune reported that Fess Parker and Jimmie Dodd would take part, too, along with a half dozen Mouseketeers. "The Disney theme will be carried in parade floats, and fireworks displays will depict Fantasyland, Frontierland, Tomorrowland, and Adventureland, all features of Disneyland, Cal. The twilight show and fireworks display will be held in Dyche stadium [Northwestern's football stadium]. Costumes of 14 popular Disney characters such as Donald Duck and Minnie Mouse will be shipped to Evanston from Hollywood to be worn during the day by [local] youngsters."
All that came to pass, and more. Hal Stalmaster, the star of Disney's live-action feature Johnny Tremain, which had been released in June 1957, also took part in the parade, as did Roy Williams, the Disney story man and the Mickey Mouse Club's "big Mooseketeer."
The snapshot above left was taken during the parade; it sold on eBay for a startling price, but, fortunately, the scan on the eBay page was not defaced with the seller's marks, so I could pick it up for use here.
Even better, you can watch a home movie of the parade on YouTube:
But how did Walt wind up participating in what was, after all, a small-town Fourth of July parade, sponsored not even by the city of Evanston but by the North Evanston Fourth of July Association? As so often in such cases, it was a matter of what the Tribune called "a chain of friends." A member of the North Evanston association had a friend named James Reinhold, who was assistant to the president of the Santa Fe railroad and who knew Walt, perhaps through the Santa Fe's involvement in Disneyland or maybe even earlier, since Walt rode the Santa Fe frequently on his trips across the country. The Evanston association's "show committee" approached Walt not only through Reinhold and the Santa Fe, but also through Myron Cox, an executive of Swift & Co., the Chicago-based meat packer that was also a Disneyland concessionaire. That was in 1956. Walt pleaded a prior commitment—he would be in his hometown of Marceline, Missouri, that July 4, along with his brother Roy and their wives, for the dedication of a municipal park and swimming pool in his honor—but he asked for a rain check.
The next year, the Tribune reported in June 1957, "the association again called on its friend, Reinhold, friend of Disney—and Cox, another friend. But it was Reinhold who posed the second invitation to Disney several months ago, when he was in Hollywood on business in Disneyland where the Santa Fe operates all the railroads. ... 'Walt,' he reminded, 'it isn't too late to say you'll be on hand this year for the Evanston Fourth of July show.' 'You must have caught me in a weak moment,' replied Disney. 'I'll be there.'" The Tribune story continues:
Thus the association several weeks ago dispatched L. T. Kreutzig, association trustee, to "button up" the arrangements.
"When I arrived at the Disney studio, together with Henry O'Leary of the Santa Fe's Los Angeles office," Kreutzig recalled, "the animator met us in the fourth office to which we were moved in scrutinizing succession. After first asking us if we would have a drink—coffee is served by a Filipino houseboy at the office bar—Disney queried, 'Gentlemen, what are we here to talk about?'
"That was my moment of tension—I thought it was a good dream while it lasted," Kreutzig said. "But O'Leary reminded Disney were were there to make final arrangements for his appearance at the Evanston celebration."
Assured children would benefit from the programming, Disney then called in his representative, Tom Walker. "Figure out schedules and see who we can make available for this Fourth of July parade and twilight show in Evanston," said the producer.
"So," sighed Kreutzig summarizing his part of the story, "it has all been real friendly." He also noted, "It's nice that Santa Fe has the railway concession in Disneyland, and that Swift & Co. supplies all the meat used there."
(I'm not sure about the "Tom Walker" mentioned above; I suspect the person involved may actually have been Tom Wilck, but perhaps someone else knows for sure.)
[A March 17, 2011, update: Thanks to Jim Korkis, Hans Perk, and Stacia Martin for pointing out that "Tom Walker" was actually Tommy Walker, who was Disneyland's director of entertainment from 1955 to 1967. I suppose that that "Tom" fooled me, since I certainly have heard of Tommy Walker. Dave Smith's Disney A to Z describes his role: "Besides the park's parade and fireworks spectaculars, he was in charge of many special events, including the grand opening ceremonies for Disneyland, and later the pageantry for the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley." His father was Vesey Walker, the first director of the Disneyland band. I like what assigning Walker to the Evanston parade and fireworks show says about Walt. Having made a commitment that I'm sure he wished he could get out of, Walt nevertheless didn't cut any corners, putting one of his top people in charge and bringing in not just the Disney cartoon characters (in the strange early versions of the costumes) but also his biggest live-action stars of the time.]
Back to Marguerite Stitt Church for a moment...I can remember only one time when I saw her in person. She was retiring from Congress at the end of 1962—she turned seventy that year—and, in what I now see was a gracious gesture, Northwestern honored her by choosing her as that June's commencement speaker. That was the June that I graduated, and I remember listening to Mrs. Church with more annoyance than respect. Probably I'd be more sympathetic now.
Her successor had been chosen in a Republican primary in the spring, and for some reason—a class assignment, maybe, or a piece for the university newspaper—I did a telephone interview with the winner of that primary shortly after he won. He was an eager beaver whom I found just as disagreeable, in his own very different way, as Mrs. Church. What was his name? Oh yes: Donald Rumsfeld. I wonder what ever happened to that guy...
You can read my 1976 interview with the director of such groundbreaking UPA cartoons as Rooty Toot Toot (a publicity photo of a cel set-up from that cartoon is above—the cartoon itself was shot in Technicolor, of course) by clicking on this link.
Widgets: That's what amazon.com calls boxes like the one just above this item. Now, instead of generic product links, a widget can show items that I personally recommend, with pocket reviews. I really like this idea, because it permits me to plug books and DVDs and such that I might never get around to discussing in a review, or even in an item like this one. I'll be changing the lineup of recommended items from time to time, so stay tuned.
Needless to say, if you decide to order an item from amazon, I'd appreciate your ordering through a link in the widget or elsewhere on my site. My fees from amazon's links don't amount to a lot, but they usually cover the annual cost of my ISP, plus at least some of the related web-authoring software costs. That makes a difference, especially when I'm trying to persuade my wife that this site is not an expensive indulgence.
Radiolab: I've written about my general skepticism where radio interviews are concerned, but I'd like to make an exception for an interview I did some months back for the NPR show Radiolab. I enjoyed this interview more than most, and certainly more than my interview with the Huffington Post. The hook was my magnum opus, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, and I got to talk about the Road Runner and the Coyote. A refreshing change from all my interviews about Walt Disney; and the Radiolab people made clever and creative use of clips from the interview (but they also obscured my mention of the name of my book, dammit). You can hear the whole show by clicking on this link.
"5 Hollywood Secrets That Explain Why So Many Movies Suck": Milt Gray sent me the link to an article bearing that title, on Cracked.com. Cracked is a wiseass humor site, but its analysis is actually highly persuasive, especially when set alongside recent news reports like this one from the Los Angeles Times:
Movie ticket sales may have been flat in the U.S. and Canada last year, but Hollywood's international cinema business soared to new heights in 2010. Global box-office receipts for all films released last year reached a high of $31.8 billion, an increase of 8% over 2009, according to a newly released report from the Motion Picture Assn. of America. The theatrical market statistics report, which the MPAA conducts annually, found that though ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada remained unchanged at $10.6 billion, international revenue jumped 13% between 2010 and 2009.
As the folks at Cracked.com write, "Everything Is Simplified for the International Market" (Hollywood Secret #4). Ergo, as that market becomes more dominant, movies are going to get even more simple-minded. Having just watched Red on Blu-ray, I know exactly what that means.
Hollywood Secret #1 is "Merchandising Supremacy," with Pixar (and Cars 2) as Exhibit A. Just a couple of days after Milt sent me the Cracked.com link, the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled "Sequels Come Fast, Furious As Studios Aim to Cut Risk." Accompanying the article was a chart comparing Disney's take from Toy Story 3 with its take from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (which I liked, by the way). Both movies took in more than a billion dollars at the global box office—but Toy Story 3 had much greater "ancillary retail sales," $8.8 billion versus $600 million for Alice.
The Journal noted that Disney executives had just "told a gathering of investors that the company would spend 80% of its production budget this year on franchise films [like Cars 2 and the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean] versus 40% in 2010. ... Disney says that focusing on films that can spawn sequels and lines of merchandise allows it to generate revenue from multiple businesses, multiple geographic region and over multiple years. Disney Studios Chairman Rich Ross said a franchise movie 'starts with the human connection to the story and characters, but downstream there are opportunities to own the DVD, see live stage versions, buy apparel, toys, or other licensed products.'"
Ah, yes, that good ol' human connection. Comment would be superfluous, probably.
Børge Ring: The great Danish animator turned 90 last month, and to mark the occasion his daughter Anne-Mieke has set up a website for him. You can go to it by clicking on this link. Go to the "Talk to Børge" page to join me in wishing him many happy returns, and many more years.
Benzon on Clampett:As you know if you've read some of his pieces on this site—look under "Essays," or do a Google search of the site—Bill Benzon is that great rarity, a critic who applies the techniques of sophisticated literary analysis to cartoons. Most recently, Bill has scrutinized Bob Clampett's Porky in Wackyland, and you can read a summation of his thinking about that cartoon on his New Savanna blog.
Dick Kelsey:Vincent Randle, proprietor of the Drawn to Illusion blog, has undertaken the commendable task of bringing fresh information to light about some of the important but neglected figures in Disney animation's past, starting with Richmond "Dick" Kelsey, who worked for Disney for a dozen years and was credited for art direction, story, and color styling on many of the early Disney features, from Pinocchio through Alice in Wonderland. He was also deeply involved in work on the unfinished Hiawatha feature; in 1948 Disney sent him on a six-week trip through the Midwest and the Northeast, "sketching and documenting the settings of Longfellow's famous narrative poem," in the words of one contemporaneous report. If you have any Kelsey-related information that Vince might be able to use, write to him at drawntoillusion@comcast.net. His March 5 posting on his blog—you'll have to scroll down to get to it—reports on his progress to date.
Jordan Zakarin of the Huffington Post website emailed me a week ago to ask for a phone interview about what he called "the hand drawn vs computer animation shift." I agreed, and we talked for forty-five minutes last Wednesday. I expected that I might be quoted once or twice in an article that was based on interviews with several people. I was startled when a link to the article was posted on Cartoon Brew, and it turned out that my comments—which mostly echo in compressed form arguments I've already made on this website—were instead the basis for Zakarin's piece.
It seems odd to say it, since I've conducted thousands of interviews in my professional life, but I don't much like being interviewed. I think that's because I'm a compulsive rewriter. When I'm answering an interviewer's questions, I can't help but try to revise my answers in my head as I speak, and so what I say is too often repetitious and meandering, whether I'm doing a radio interview or an on-camera interview for a DVD.
I've done a lot of interviews in the last few years, anyway, mainly to make potential readers aware of my books. I have to wonder if this latest interview actually worked against that aim. I've been reading the comments at both Huffington Post and Cartoon Brew, and now at Jim Hill's Disney-fan site, and although a few of the commenters have dismissed me as a bitter old grump (my wife would probably agree), the prevailing sentiment seems to be that if I can't feel Pixar's magic, I must be hopelessly out of touch. It's hard for me to imagine many of my critics buying anything written by such a pathetic fuddy-duddy.
I like to think that if I'd been asked to write a piece for Huffington Post, rather than be interviewed for one, I could have elicited a different response from readers. As it is, a lot of people seem to have read Zakarin's piece as if it's entirely mine. I've been relieved to come across a few comments by people who recognize that I'm not the author, like the commenter on Cartoon Brew identified only as "w":
Barrier’s just expressing an opinion, and kind of mildly, at that. It’s the author, Jordan Zakarin, who’s making the sweeping summaries telling you what Barrier’s “really” saying, and it seems that those words are the ones commenters are crapping their pants about.
Some commenters have made thoughtful criticisms of my own statements, as have Mark Mayerson and Jim Hill on their respective blogs. I want to address just a couple of points.
"Emotional Manipulation." A number of people have taken issue with my criticism of Pixar for its "emotional manipulation" of its audience, as in the opening sequence of Up. That's what all artists do, my critics say. Here's Mark Mayerson, for one:
All movies manipulate emotions. It's the reason we go see them. A person going to a horror film wants to feel scared. A person going to a comedy wants to laugh. Those emotional responses are the result of manipulation. The question is whether a person resents the manipulation or not.
I think that's largely false. Certainly we go to certain kinds of movies in the expectation that we will be entertained by having our emotions manipulated. Hitchcock was expert at that sort of manipulation, but there was never anything hidden about what he was doing; the suspense in a good Hitchcock movie is as enjoyable as being worked over by an expert masseur. But there's nothing comparable going on in many of the best live-action films, and certainly not in the great Disney animated features.
The difference between, say, the opening sequence in Up and Dumbo's reunion with his mother can be summed up in one word, the old Disney shibboleth "sincerity." That's not to say that Pete Docter and his animators were cynical and insincere, only that they took shortcuts that Bill Tytla (and Walt Disney) refused to take. The animation in Dumbo, like all the best Disney animation, is "sincere" because it never seems to step outside itself to gauge its effect on its audience. Instead, Dumbo depicts emotion with what I think is complete faithfulness to the human original. By contrast, Carl and Ellie in Up's opening minutes are puppets, they're dolls; to weep over them is to wallow in sentimentality, in what has been called "an outpouring of emotion unimpeded by thought." I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's remark about the death of the insufferably perfect child heroine in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop: "That man has no soul who can read of the death of Little Nell without laughing."
Perhaps the Pixar people fall back on the manipulation of emotion because they lack confidence that their medium is capable of as much as the older medium of hand-drawn animation. I've suggested that they might be right, and Mark Mayerson has challenged that suggestion on more than one occasion, as in this 2008 post. Mark may well be correct about CGI's capabilities; as I've written in my review of Tangled, Pixar's scrawny little sister Disney Feature Animation has made a CGI film some of whose animation is eye-opening in its freedom from computer animation's seemingly ineradicable bad habits. But is achieving such results simply too hard in most cases, or for most animators? Is Pixar itself interested in pursuing such results? Why should it be, when something guaranteed-to-be-awful like Cars 2 is assured of tremendous success not just at the box office but, more important, also in the toy department at Walmart?
Hand-drawn's evolution v. CGI's evolution. I also got taken to task for comparing hand-drawn animation's highly compressed evolution, in the nine years between Steamboat Willie and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with what strikes me as CGI animation's less impressive rise from Toy Story in 1995 to Toy Story 3 in 2010. Someone suggested it would be fairer to measure Toy Story 3 against The Adventures of André & Wally B. the experimental Pixar short from 1984. Fair enough, I guess, and Pixar's progress in those twenty-six years has certainly been impressive. But then, wouldn't it be just as fair to measure Walt Disney's progress toward Snow White not from 1928 but from1922, when he was making his Laugh-O-grams in Kansas City? For my money, Walt's progress in those fifteen years, from 1922 to 1937, was far more dramatic than Pixar's in twenty-six.
But are such comparisons valid at all? Mark Mayerson says no:
I am at a loss to understand why the development of one medium is being measured against the development of another. It assumes that both media exist in a vacuum, not part of larger forces such as the Hollywood industrial model of the time, the availability of media to the public, the prevailing popular culture and the world economy. The conditions that existed when Walt Disney grew from Steamboat Willie to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are wholly different than those that exist today. ...
The state of live action films is a key point. Disney did not exceed the expectations of what a live action film was supposed to be in his time and computer animation is not exceeding it today. I can make an economic and cultural argument that computer animation is more successful than Walt Disney ever was in that cgi films have been nominated for Best Picture, are more numerous and have been more profitable on a consistent basis than the features Disney made himself. ... Computer animated films exist in the same economic structure and cultural zeitgeist as live action films and aren't going to escape the problems that plague the larger industry.
I have difficulty grasping Mark's point here. Perhaps it is that we should not expect too much from Pixar because its films are so successful, whereas Disney had the advantage of working on small budgets in a marginal and largely despised medium, at a time when the very idea of an animated feature was bizarre.
It seems to me that no other animated filmmakers have ever had the opportunity to do more than Pixar today, and no others have ever shown themselves to be more comfortable operating well within the bounds of the safely commercial. But maybe Pixar's success is more of a prison than I've thought—a prison that not only limits the studio's choices of subject matter but also forecloses advances in character animation, advances that might themselves lead to the making of different and better films.
Enough. I'm looking forward to not seeing Cars 2 next summer, and to not writing any more about Pixar. I've said about all that I want to say in my reviews of various Pixar films, whose titles you can find under the Commentary heading in the right-hand column on this page. Briefly: I admire Brad Bird's two features, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and I've grown increasingly fond of Pete Docter's Monsters, Inc., which I think is vastly superior to Up. The rest is dross.
When I was preparing my Robert McKimson interview for posting last week, McKimson's references to the political maneuvering at the Warner cartoon studio put me in mind of some of the photos I accumulated during my work on Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age and my sadly aborted art book on the Warner cartoons. Those photos show two or three of the Warner directors of the 1950s together, usually with someone else; in the photo above, for instance, John Burton, who succeeded Edward Selzer as the cartoons' producer, is at the left, with Chuck Jones, McKimson, and Friz Freleng. That photo was taken around 1958, after the Warner cartoons had been honored—an annual occurrence in those days, to judge from the wall behind the directors—by the exhibitors' magazine called Motion Picture Herald. In some such photos, the directors look a little more cheerful than in others, but the overall sense is usually something like this: why do I have to share the spotlight with these guys?
McKimson was exceptionally accurate and precise in most of what he said in the interview, but I've realized since posting it that some of his statements would benefit from clarification. To read what he said, and my gloss on it, click on these links to those parts of the interview dealing with Sylvester's origin and the Freleng cartoon Clean Pastures.
Bob McKimson's son, Robert Jr., has written in response to the interview—you can go directly to his comment by clicking here—and since I posted his comment he has written again to let me know that artwork by Bob McKimson and his brothers, Tom and Chuck, is on view at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, along with other drawings originating at the Warner cartoon studio. The museum's page about this show, which runs through May 15, is at this link. He has also sent me a list of artwork by the three McKimsons that is available for sale, and I've appended that list to his comment. If you're interested in those drawings, I'll be happy to forward your emails to him.
Almost invariably, when I'm posting something like the McKimson interview, it opens up new avenues of research that can lead to enjoyable discoveries. In this case, what I found online was the Scandia Journal, one of the weekly newspapers published and edited by Bob McKimson's father, C. E. McKimson. (Scandia is a town in north central Kansas, with a current population of less than 400.) Bob McKimson visited there occasionally, as the Journal reported; it also reported his promotion to be the Schlesinger studio's Chief Animator. Bob was named after an uncle, I gathered from the Journal's reports, and was nicknamed "Buddy," although I'm not clear on who called him that. Not his colleagues at the Schlesinger studio, surely; given how dismal that short-lived cartoon character was, to call someone "Buddy" would have been an invitation to a fistfight.
And, speaking of Robert McKimson, Jr., his grandfather reported in the Journal for April 13, 1939, that his second son, Bob, had sent him "a photograph of our only grandson, little Bobby McKimson ... and we think him to be about the finest looking boy in the world, yet, he has has to go some to be a better looking boy than his dad was at his age, which seems as only yesterday to us." That sounds like the sort of father and grandfather every boy should have.
Thanks to my newfound mastery of scanning software, I've whipped my 1971 interview with the Warner cartoon director Robert McKimson into publishable shape, and you can read it by clicking on this link. That's McKimson above, at the right, with Mel Blanc, in a photo taken early in 1945. Other photos taken around the same time, for the in-house publication Warner Club News, accompany the McKimson interview.
As a sidebar to the McKimson interview, I've reproduced seven early Bugs Bunny model sheets, with accompanying text (mostly from my book Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age) tracing the evolution of that character from 1939 to his apotheosis in Bob McKimson's definitive 1943 sheet. You can go directly to that piece, "Remodeling the Rabbit," by clicking on this link.
I met Mark Kausler on my second visit to Los Angeles, in 1971—the same trip on which I interviewed Bob McKimson—and I met Tim Walker (or James Tim Walker, as he now prefers) on that trip or one soon after. Both have worked in animation most of their adult lives, and for both of them animation has been as much a passion as a vocation. Mark is the greatest student of animation I've ever known, with the keenest eye for different animators' styles, and Tim, as a collector of animation memorabilia, has an unmatched eye for the historically and artistically significant.
Mark and Tim have been in my thoughts recently, for different reasons. The Animation Guild's consistently valuable blog has been posting interviews with veteran members, including a two-part interview with Mark Kausler; you can go to the first part by clicking on this link. The interview reminds me, very pleasantly, of the many evenings I've spent with Mark, watching strange and sometimes wonderful cartoons and talking about them into the wee hours. Mark's enjoyment of cartoons, and of his own career in making them, is, to say the least, infectious, and I'm glad that others can share his company thanks to the TAG blog.
In 2007 I started to notice a weakness in my right arm. I thought it was Carpal Tunnel Syndrome after 50+ years of writing and drawing. I went to see my doctor and he told me to go see a Neurologist to be checked out. After several tests he threw me a left hook that dropped me to my knees. I was diagnosed with Lateral Parkinsons Disease on my right side. Since I am right handed, I crawled out of that office figuring my career was going to disintegrate right in front of my eyes. My head was spinning out of control. After about 15 minutes of chaos I remembered what one of my close friends has pounded into my head for the last 10 years, "Problem - Solution, Problem - Solution." I went to the art store and bought myself a sketchbook, opened it up and wrote, "Drawings from the left." The date was June 11th,2007. Since then I have successfully taught myself to write and draw left handed.
Drawings from the Left, a sketchbook filled with cartoons drawn in a fluid and unhampered style, is abundant proof of that. It's hard for me to imagine conquering such a disability more decisively than Tim has done, and it's wonderful to have his book as a record of his accomplishment. Certainly anyone who is suffering from a similar setback should find it encouraging and even inspirational.
...was considerably different from the usual view. Six to eight inches of snow is a great rarity in my part of the world. At least the enforced immobility encouraged me to keep trying to scan some of my typewritten interviews into electronic form. To the extent that there's real interest in potential new material for this website, it's probably concentrated on the many, many interviews that Milt Gray and I recorded with the veterans of Hollywood animation. I transcribed some of those interviews on a computer, starting in the late 1980s, but I transcribed far more on my faithful IBM Selectric. So far, scanning those typescripts into usable computer files has been maddeningly difficult. A scan—like the one I made today of my 1971 interview with Bob McKimson—may seem to require relatively minor tweaking, but touch the supposedly editable file and suddenly it seizes up and the words crumble into a hopelessly corrupted heap (despite the $79 I paid for an OCR software upgrade). I'll keep trying to find a solution, not only to meet the demand, such as it is, for more interviews, but also because the interviews, once I figure out how to scan them, will allow me to keep the site fresh with a reasonable investment of time.
[A February 10, 2011, update: After considerable time spent tweaking scanner settings and working around problems, I've finally come up with satisfactory scans. The McKimson interview is now in my computer, and I expect to post it next week.]
January 2011: Flogging the Dell/Disney comic books, Tangled, potpourris of items about Walt Disney and Bob Clampett and new books, Glen Keane speaks about Tangled in French, a "Flying Gauchito" mystery, Walt meets Princess Margaret and suffers under a double standard.
December 2010: Home again, with a memory of True Grit's author.
November 2010: Carl Stalling on acetate, lost Laugh-O-grams found, Børge Ring on Alice in Wonderland, Tim Susanin's book.
October 2010: Books: Jim Korkis's Vault of Walt, Craig Yoe's Felix, John Canemaker's Two Guys Named Joe and J. B. Kaufman's South of the Border with Disney.
September 2010: John Benson on Avatar and IMAX 3-D, Mike Maltese and his Bugs Bunny painting, Craig Yoe writes, Satoshi Kon, The Ducktators in the flesh, Chronicle Books' animation volumes.
July 2010: Toy Story 3, Milt Gray's web comic strip, sad news about Roy Rogers and Harvey Pekar, my 1997 interview with John K., more on the mysterious Mortimer Mouse, reprinted comic books.
June 2010: Dave Smith retires, more on the Dumbo Roll-A-Book, Barks on a T-shirt, Waking Sleeping Beauty.
May 2010: "Mickey Mouse" and D-Day, animation: the delusion of life, Børge Ring on Jack Kinney, my visit to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, George Sherman's Barks painting, more on the Dumbo Roll-A-Book.
April 2010:How to Train Your Dragon, Carl Barks tells how he worked, Fantasia and the fundamentalists
March 2010: More on the Dumbo Roll-A-Book, questions for Walt Disney, the "family tree" of animation, a 1967 gathering of pioneers at Montreal, Dumbo's premiere, Dumbo in print, Walt's adventures in the Ivy League, Fess Parker remembered.
February 2010: The mysterious Dumbo Roll-A-Book, Oscars and Annies, Disney and Tolkien.
January 2010: More on The Princess and the Frog, Kurtzman's Humbug, Dumbo's crows, The Animated Man in Italy, Richard Todd and Walt Disney on the set.
December 2009:The Princess and the Frog and Fantastic Mr. Fox, a cel fire at the Mintz studio, Richard Todd, Roy Edward Disney, Hal Sintzenich's diaries, more hot air from an "archivist."
November 2009: On the sidewalk with Charlie Mintz, a visit to Saint Louis, when Fantasia spread out, on the barricades with Art Babbitt.
October 2009: "Sincerity," Ward Kimball photographs R. Crumb, Walt Kelly writes to Walt Disney, losing illusions in today's Hollywood animation business, more on Walt Disney at Harvard (and Yale), Art Spiegelman in Arkansas, the Walt Disney Family Museum opens its doors.
September 2009: What Walt Disney was doing in London in 1935 and New York in 1940, George Winkler and Andrew Stone and Charlie Mintz, Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell, Dr. Seuss' advertising films, Li'l Eight Ball's disappearance from comic books, shipboard with Walt and family in 1949, the curious case of Mortimer Mouse.
August 2009: Carl Barks on exhibit in Baltimore, the mystery of Barks's Donald Duck, Lillian Disney speaks in public, early omens on The Princess and the Frog, Classic Children's Comics, Walt Disney in Ireland, home again from a long summer journey.
June 2009: Taking a summer break, Egghead and Elmer, more on Sita Sings the Blues, Pixar's Up, the role of words and drawings in early Disney story work.
May 2009: Reading the funnies in bulk, Keith Lango's ideas about "visual harmony," Walt Disney goes to Harvard, John Canemaker goes to Kansas City, Sita Sings the Blues, Disney and Columbia, fictitious "Walt Disneys" on stage and screen, David Gerstein's blog, Monsters vs. Aliens, more on Dave Hand, Milt Kahl as "the animation Michelangelo."
April 2009: Easter greetings from Warner Bros. Cartoons, Børge Ring on David Hand, Ken Annakin, Dick Huemer, Floyd Norman, Ferguson's flypaper sequence revisited, Disney's walled garden, Don Bluth, the Walt Disney Family Museum, Bob Clampett's secret life.
March 2009: Walt Kelly comics from Fairy Tale Parade, Chuck Jones on TCM, Walt Disney at Dumbo's premiere, Emil Flohri, Coraline, Watchmen, in the Disney music rooms in 1931, a case of mistaken identity, ten years of Hollywood Cartoons.
February 2009: Acting in animation, with a riveting memory of Bill Tytla, Coraline, 3-D pro and con, cartoon cocktails, the first Disney annual report, Marceline faces from Walt Disney's time, a Marceline myth.
January 2009: "The Three Little Pigs" as drawn by Walt Kelly, Ted Eshbaugh's studio in 1931, "card check" in 1941 and 2009, The Tale of Despereaux, Walt Disney sails from Chile to New York on the Santa Clara.
December 2008:The Spirit on the screen, cartoon directors' Christmas cards, trying to identify a mystery man, books: Spirited Away, Popeye, and The Animated Man, Bolt and Madagascar 2, Dave Hilberman's FBI file.
November 2008: Back from Italy, live-action Disney on Turner Classic Movies.
October 2008:The Wall Street Journal on Pixar and Disney,Walt at the keyboard, Chuck Jones and Eddie Selzer, Chuck at MGM, "Directors and Directions," salvaging Disney's California Adventure, Walt Disney's attitude toward women, "Of Cabbages and Kleins," The Perfect American as novel and opera, on the set of Invitation to the Dance.
September 2008: Visiting J. R. Bray, Ben Sharpsteen and his museum, Elias Disney in his own words, the ancestral Disney lands in Ontario, a book ban in Burbank.
August 2008: Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising remembered, Michael Sporn's role on The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, more on Wertham, Sporn DVDs.
July 2008: More Looney Tunes on DVD, WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda, Walt Disney's stump, Bill Tytla's voice, Disney anniversaries, Wertham's locked vault, Schulz and Peanuts demolished, more on Walt and Dolores.
May-June 2008: Walt Disney's Kansas City building, Walt and polo (and polo-related deaths), Japanese features, Walt and Dolores Del Rio, late-period Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett in Canada, Walt Disney meets Robert Taylor in 1938 and visits Marceline and Saint Louis in 1946, the post-modern Goofy, The Colored Cartoon.
April 2008: The Jones-Avery letter, what Walt Disney really thought about Goofy, the "Censored 11," Borge Ring on Hans Perk, remembering Ollie Johnston, Two Days in the Life: Kansas City, 1922, more on Walt Disney's 1922 want ads, Walt's skeptical supervisor at Kansas City Film Ad, Bob Clampett and Ollie Johnston share a table, the Schulz kidnaping, Nick Cross and The Waif of Persephone.
March 2008: Walt Disney's want ads in 1922, Dick Huemer's Buck O'Rue, A Day in the Life: Disney, January 1930 and February 1927, A Day in the Life: Walt Kelly, 1955, The Animated Man in trade paper, Walt Disney meets Yma Sumac and visits Atlanta, responding to complaints about negative criticism, Bob Clampett at work, "What Would Bob Do?"
February 2008: Walt Disney and Joan Bennett in 1942, an interview with Elias and Flora Disney, debate about Buckaroo Bugs, Emery Hawkins at Lantz, Walt Disney in England, Carl Barks's first issue of Uncle Scrooge, Jim Bodrero interview, photos of Warner story man Lloyd Turner, remembering Roger Armstrong.
January 2008: Dell comic books, Ward Kimball, Chuck Jones, Joe Grant and hero worship, more on writing for animation (and why some people spread falsehoods about it), Walt Disney's 1934 trip to Hawaii, Hanna-Barbera celebrated in a book, Bob Clampett, Satoshi Kon, more on the voices of Walt's Alice.
December 2007: Writing for animation, Margaret O'Brien and Walt Disney's Alice, Jack Zander, more on UPA, Rod Scribner at work, Borge Ring, a "mystery studio," Byron Haskin and Disney's Treasure Island, more on Coal Black, Walt and Lillian on the town, revisiting Raggedy Ann & Andy and Wizards, Satoshi Kon's budgets.
November 2007:Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, Mickey's birthplace in New York, the UPA book, the Michael Sporn retrospective at MoMA, the ideas that interviews can stimulate.
October 2007: Carl Stalling interviewed, Dick Huemer remembered, more on Walt Disney and Zorro, the controversy over the Schulz biography, Joe Penner and the "Agony, agony!" catchphrase, Walt and The Art Spirit, Walt in Hawaii, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, The Jungle Book revisited.
August 2007: Walt and the librarians, independent animators, the mystery of Walt's Goldwater button solved, Diane Disney Miller blasts Neal Gabler, Paprika, interviews with Clarence Nash, Jim Macdonald, and Billy Bletcher, Pete Emslie's guidelines for animal characters, Ratatouille.
July 2007: More on Harry Reichenbach, Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky, Surf'sUp, Walt at Smoke Tree Ranch, Dave Hilberman, The Iron Giant revisited, Michael Sporn and Walter Lantz on DVD, Ratatouille.
June 2007: More on Walt Disney's Goldwater button, more on the flypaper sequence, Roger Armstrong, Disney in Deutschland, Ratatouille, Walt and Zorro, more on Walt and T. H. White, Harry Reichenbach and Steamboat Willie, the auctioning of Carl Barks's estate.
May 2007: UPA wars on the blogs, Ferguson's flypaper sequence, Walt Disney's employment contract, Harry Reichenbach, Disney art at Montreal, Walt writes to T. H. White, selling The Animated Man in L.A.
April 2007:The Animated Man, Fergy ruffs, Meet the Robinsons.
March 2007:The Animated Man, Cartoon Brew Films, a Cock Robin mosaic and documents, a Dumbo essay, the Goldwater button again, Walt and the space program.
February 2007: More on writing v. drawing, Paul Hindemith meets Walt Disney, Fantasia, Van Beuren dolls, Bob Clampett and Edgar Bergen.
January 2007: Walt's Goldwater button, Neal Gabler's errors, writing v. drawing cartoon stories, a Disney exhibition at Paris, Happy Feet.
November
2004: SpongeBob SquarePants, the illusion of spontaneity in
computer animation, The Incredibles.
October
2004: Roy Rogers in Branson, The Polar Express, Richard
Todd, "ViewMaster Animation."
September
2004: Frank Thomas, the Barrier-Kricfalusi debate continues.
July-August
2004: The Barrier-Kricfalusi debate, John Fawcett, Walt Kelly.
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Evanston's representative in Congress then was Marguerite Stitt Church, whom you can see above shaking hands with Walt Disney on July 4, 1957. Mrs. Church, who has always looked to me as if she were posing for one of Helen Hokinson's cartoons in The New Yorker (and voted the same way), was of course a Republican, as was Walt.
Crystal Bridges, as the serious museumgoers among you know by now, opened on November 11, after months of anticipation and lots of attention from mainstream media like The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CBS News. The museum is in Bentonville, in the Ozarks, because that's the home town of its founder, Alice Walton, the only daughter of Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. Alice Walton is, thanks to her father, one of the nation's wealthiest people, and she has poured many millions of that wealth into building the museum and filling it with American paintings and sculpture.
* In my comments on Fantagraphics' first Carl Barks reprint volume, Donald Duck "Lost in the Andes," I regarded skeptically Donald Ault's introduction, in which he writes about how Barks's stories 
As my correspondent's message indicates, people who are enthusiastic about Barks's work are not necessarily inspired to emulate his scrupulous use of the English language, or, for that matter, any of the other admirable things about him. I suppose you could try to draw a line between belligerent fans of the paintings, like my correspondent, and those of us who care about the stories, but has anyone ever come to feel genuine enthusiasm for the paintings—setting aside purely monetary motives—without reading and loving the stories first? How could they?
This independent animated feature by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger was in and out of my local art theater too quickly last year for me to see it, but I finally caught up with it on DVD a few days ago. The timing seemed right. After Phyllis and I returned from Europe in late September, we house- and dog-sat for two weeks for former neighbors in our old home town, Alexandria, Virginia. The dog in question was the estimable Louie, a sweet-tempered dachshund. So we were exceptionally dog-conscious when we saw My Dog Tulip.
I think I have plugged every volume of Didier Ghez's invaluable Disney interview anthologies as they've appeared, and I'm happy to do so again. Here's Didier himself:
But what Kevin is saying, I suspect, is that such pleasure, however great it may be, is hopelessly compromised by what he calls a "lack of innocence"—a lack to which I cheerfully plead guilty, although if I were totally innocence-free I would be working harder to suppress other people's awareness of my many eccentric habits: watching cartoons, reading comic books, riding the bus downtown to the library, walking as many places as possible, and so on. There are a lot of fans, of whom Kevin may or may not be one, who think that the only valid response to a cartoon is the response they felt when they first watched it as a child. I think these tend to be the same people whose dietary habits are locked into those of a ten-year-old, so that they resist eating anything but hamburgers, hot dogs, milkshakes, and the like. No sushi for them! And let's not even talk about rabid sports fans, than whom there's no one more infantile, or people who listen only to the pop music they heard as teenagers, or...
* ART BABBITT: If you share my taste for animation history, and especially for the history of the Disney studio in its golden age of the '30s and early '40s, you'll certainly want to read
Back in 2006, when my biography The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney was about six months away from publication, I filled one of the last gaps in my research by visiting the Hermosa neighborhood in Chicago. Walt Disney was born and spent his first four and a half years there, until his father Elias moved the family to Marceline, Missouri. I'd saved Chicago for last because it seemed obvious that the places where Walt lived later—Marceline, Kansas City, Los Angeles—were much more significant in his life.
Elias is mentioned in both articles, which is how I found them. Elias, a contractor, was one of the five members of the church's building committee; according to the Tribune's reporter, he didn't care for being hitched to the plow.
