If you aren't visiting Amid Amidi's site 365 Days of Ward Kimball, you're missing out on some beautiful art. Currently, there's lots of Christmas related artwork.
During his talk on Kimball at the Ottawa International Animation Festival last September, Amidi made it a point to say that Kimball's style was evolving towards more modern graphics in the 1940s. The above cards (1945 on top and 1946 on the bottom) are great examples of the turn Kimball's style was taking. Both are, of course, well drawn. But while the 1945 card is conventional in its use of perspective and structure, the '46 card breaks away from realistic perspective and revels in flattening out shapes. While UPA would animate this stylistic approach a couple of years later, Kimball was prepared to do so but wouldn't get the chance until Melody, Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and the TV episodes he directed for the Disneyland series in the 1950s.
The Walt Disney company is responsible for delaying the publication of Full Steam Ahead!: The Life and Art of Ward Kimball by Amid Amidi. The reason, according to the author, is that Disney is unhappy that Kimball's life doesn't conform to the company's exacting standards. Disney has had the book since January of 2012 and has yet to approve it. The publication of the book has been delayed a minimum of seven months, preventing those who pre-ordered the book from reading it and delaying earnings for both the author and publisher.
I have not read the book and I certainly don't know the specific text that Disney is objecting to, but I find this situation to be very troubling for the chill it casts over our ability to comment on the world we live in.
We are now in a time where entertainment corporations have run amuck. I have recently written about Sony taking ownership of any artwork submitted by job applicants. In Finland, the police have confiscated the laptop of a nine year old girl for downloading a single song from the Pirate Bay. In addition, they have fined the girl 600 Euros, even though the girl's father has proved that the girl later bought the album and concert tickets for the band in question. Several countries have instituted laws where three copyright violations can result in a user being banned from the internet altogether.
One of the problems with this ban is how arbitrarily copyright violations are enforced. All over the web, there are sites which could be construed to be violating copyright. I say "could be" as a court could decide that material qualifies as fair use. And the copyright holder gets to selectively decide who to prosecute and who to ignore. In other words, if the company thinks the copyright violation is good marketing, it will turn a blind eye.
Beyond the logistics of corporations using the law to arbitrarily punish people, there is the much larger question of who owns history, culture and speech? When culture is manufactured for a profit, do we have the right to discuss it, criticize it and respond to it? Can we use examples to make our case or are we limited by the legal rights of the manufacturer?
As the entertainment corporations are now multinational behemoths with whole staffs of lawyers charged with protecting intellectual property, they use the threat of legal action as a deterrent. The Kimball book is a case in point. In court, it could be argued that any Disney artwork used in the book is fair use. What's one still image from the more than 100,000 frames in a feature film? How is the publication of a still depriving Disney of income? Disney could not suppress a book based on its text without proving libel, but it can suppress a book before the fact by denying the use of artwork and the threat of a lawsuit if a publisher decides to take a chance and publish anyway.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Disney owns Marvel and denied Sean Howe, the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, the use of illustrations unless they could approve the text of the book. Howe and his publisher decided to forgo illustrations, so the history of a comic book company has no images of the artwork that made the company worth writing about. And as I mentioned above, copyright prosecutions are arbitrary. Howe has a tumblr where he has included images that should have been included in the book and so far, Disney hasn't complained.
How strange is it that in the western world, it is permissible to comment on governments but not on companies that make cartoons? As corporations have increasingly lobbied governments to write laws for their own benefit, we may soon reach a point where criticizing governments is irrelevant and the corporations who should be criticized will stifle all dissent.
The Beat is reporting that Disney is in talks with Hasbro, which currently holds the toy licenses for Star Wars and the Marvel characters as well as owning Toy Story's Mr. Potato Head. Here is a list of the other things that Hasbro owns or licenses. While this could be as simple as a renegotiation of toy licenses, given Robert Iger's history it may be an indication that Hasbro is Disney's next purchase.
You can read the details everywhere, so I won't bother with them here.
I have no doubt that Wall Street and investors will see this as a good move, as all they are concerned about is money. However, I'm concerned with artists and Disney's trend is not artist friendly.
Why not? Well, if you happen to be somebody working in computer animation in the San Francisco bay area, there is now one less employer in the market. Pixar and ILM have been charged with collusion, cooperating to make sure that they didn't hire employees from each other. Now they're the same company and they can do what they like with hiring policies and pay scales. As neither studio is union, there is no floor to pay or benefits.
The problem goes beyond that, though. While Disney and Pixar continue to turn out some original films, Pixar has already been strong-armed into making sequels because Disney needs to pay off the purchase price. There will be many, many more Star Wars and Marvel films to pay off those purchases as well.
That takes money and oxygen away from original projects that potentially could become as big as Star Wars or the Marvel Universe. The company is clearly committed to milking existing intellectual property and acquiring more of it than creating new intellectual property. And so much of what Disney is buying is from the last century.
Robert Iger is clearly looking backwards more than forwards.
But don't forget that the Muppets started out as a small troop of puppeteers on local television, Marvel started out as a handful of creators working out of their homes, and George Lucas got turned down by everyone until Alan Ladd, Jr. took a chance (but didn't realize the value of sequel or merchandising rights or he would have kept them). What Robert Iger doesn't see is that great creations don't come from large companies, they come from people committed to their own ideas who work out of basements, garages, warehouses and other out of the way places. Sort of the way Walt Disney started. Remember him?
Which means that while Iger is busy grinding out Muppets, Marvels and Star Wars, the great creations of the 21st century will be happening elsewhere. Seek them out.
Let's see. There's seven of these little guys. Could it be? Why yes! It's the seven dwarfs. Well, they're public domain, so anybody can use them, right? What's that? This is a Disney project? DISNEY?
Welcome to 7D, a new TV series for Disney Jr. Quick! Which one is Doc and which one is Happy?
"In [animator Paul] Allen's defense, the Mickey Rooney design he was working from is one
of the clunkiest and most poorly constructed Disney models of all time. I
don't know what Joe Grant was thinking when he approved that one."
I certainly have to agree with Amid. The design is flat from both the front and side views. The only three quarter view on the model sheet doesn't work and is ugly to boot.
As I mentioned earlier, caricature is difficult for a still, but even harder for animation where the likeness has to be able to turn. Given this design, Paul Allen had a near impossible job.
It's been a while since I've done a mosiac. When Hans Perk posted the animator draft for this cartoon, I knew I wanted to break it down visually.
Donald Duck has never been a favorite animated character of mine. Where there are certain of his cartoons I admire (such as Duck Pimples), the admiration is based on things other than the character. I know that many cartoon fans are not impressed with the Duck cartoons directed by Jack Hannah, but I actually like those the best overall, as I like Hannah's posing and timing as well as the work of animators like Al Coe.
This cartoon is attractive to me because of the caricatures of Hollywood stars of the 1930s. Caricature is difficult to do well with still illustrations. When you start to move caricatures, the task of holding the likeness becomes even more difficult. The success of the caricatures varies widely in this film.
Paul Allen's Mickey Rooney is weak. Looking at the animation single frame in order to pick stills, it's clear that Allen was intimidated by holding the likeness. He doesn't vary Rooney's expressions much and there are some genuinely ugly drawings in there. The film's conception of Rooney doesn't capture his range or personality well either.
Dun Roman's Henry Armetta, the short waiter, is good, though Armetta was a limited performer even in live action. The walk is done well and that and the Italian accent probably sum up Armetta.
Bob Stokes did a very nice job on Sonja Henie. He had to be able to hold likeness through the various angles required by her ice skating. It's a very pleasing piece of animation both from a motion and caricature standpoint.
Ward Kimball's Ritz Brothers are a highlight of the cartoon. The Ritz Brothers are not well remembered today and the work of theirs I've seen seems build on being frantic more than being funny. I would compare them to Jim Carrey during the manic phase of his career. Kimball really pushes the poses and the timing. As the caricatures are pretty broad, he doesn't have to worry too much about holding the likenesses.
What's below is Kimball's animation slowed down to approximately 5 frames per second, instead of the standard 24 frames per second. See how freely Kimball changes the characters' shapes. Pay attention to the spacing between drawings. Some of it is very broad, followed by tighter spacing to cushion in to poses.
I think the most successful caricature, though is Shirley Temple. I was surprised to see that the good shots weren't the work of a single animator. Dun Roman has her introductory shot with some very nice dance animation. He draws her with a larger head than Ray Patin, who does an extended scene with Shirley and Donald. In terms of capturing a likeness and a personality, Patin's scenes are great. They are also lengthy, a real challenge for sustaining any performance. Claude Smith and Johnny Cannon have lesser scenes with Shirley, but don't ruin the illusion. Her final scene, however, animated by Judge Whitaker, is a real failure. It's poorly drawn and doesn't match the earlier Shirley scenes in quality.
The final montage is interesting for being so chaotic. Montages were common in 1930s live action films and there were film makers like Slavko Vorkapitch who specialized in them and often got screen credit for them. The montage here uses footage from Society Dog Show in spots and the layouts between background characters and the caricatures in the foreground don't match at all in size or perspective.
For the record, as many of these performers are forgotten, here's a list of who appears in the montage:
Sc 66.7 - Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. Garbo retired in 1941 after a career in silent films and talkies playing many doomed romantic characters. Gable was Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.
Sc 66.8 - Charlie McCarthy, the dummy operated by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen
Sc 67.4 - Stepin Fetchit, the stage name of Lincoln Perry. Perry is a controversial figure today, with some accusing him of reinforcing racial stereotypes and others celebrating him for subverting the racial status quo of the time.
Sc 67.3 - Roland Young, who starred as Topper and can be seen in films such as Ruggles of Red Gap
Sc 67.8 - Joe E. Brown, a starring comedian of the early '30s but probably best known these days for his role in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot.
Sc 67.6 - Martha Raye, a musical comedy performer who is in Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux.
Sc 67.7 - Hugh Herbert, a supporting comedian in many '30s films at Warner Bros.
Sc 79 - Irvin S. Cobb is smoking the cigar. An author who wrote the Judge Priest stories adapted by John Ford and who appeared in Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend. Edward Arnold was a villain in many films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe, both directed by Frank Capra.
Sc 67.5 - Left to right: Eddie Cantor, a singer and comedian whose films are infrequently shown due to his use of blackface; Katherine Hepburn, whose career spanned 50 years of movies; and Slim Summerville, a former Keystone Kop who continued to do supporting comedy roles.
Sc 67.9 - Lionel Barrymore, dramatic actor, brother of John Barrymore and great great uncle of Drew Barrymore.
Sc 68 - Bette Davis, probably best remembered for Jezebel; The Little Foxes; The Letter; Now, Voyager and All About Eve.
Sc 68.1 - Groucho Marx, star of Vaudeville, Broadway, Movies, Radio and Television. Member of the Marx Brothers.
Sc 68.2 - Harpo Marx, pantomime comedian, brother of Groucho and the star of the same media except for radio.
Sc 71 - Micha Auer - character comedian in films like My Man Godfrey and You Can't Take it With You.
Sc 74 - Joan Crawford, star at MGM and Warner Bros. for decades in films such as Mildred Pierce.
Sc 75 - Charles Boyer, French romantic actor.
Another copyright case from the comics world, but one that has implications for people working in animation.
Writer Gary Friedrich created Marvel's version of Ghost Rider. He sued Marvel claiming that it was created and offered to them and was not done as work for hire. He lost the suit.
Previously, Friedrich commissioned artwork of the character which he sold at various comics conventions. Here's where it gets ugly:
"As per the courts instructions Friedrich has to account for any and all money that he has received, “...relating to the gross and net amount derived from Plaintiffs' sale of goods bearing the Ghost Rider image, likeness, or Marvel trademark.” This means that Friedrich has to account for every cent each and every time he sold a print at a convention or any other item to anyone, that has the Ghost Rider image or name on it, and he has to account to all of the defendants in the case, and there’s quite a few of those, including, but not limited to, Marvel Defendants, Movie Defendants, Hasbro, Inc. and Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. If the defendants don’t like, or don't agree with, the numbers that Friedrich supplies then they can, and probably will, ask for a deposition whereby they can question him, under oath. It was no secret that Friedrich commissioned artists such as Herb Trimpe, Arthur Suydam and others to draw Ghost Rider images which were then sold as prints over the years. If you bought one thinking you were helping Gary, well, that cash will most likely end up in Marvels pockets. This amount will be factored into any damages that the defendants can claim from Friedrich, all of which will be bundled up neatly into a final judgement so the case can then proceed to the appeal stage."
So, if you work in animation and sit at conventions selling your drawings of characters that you've worked on (or not) but don't own, you are not only violating copyright, you may have to account for each and every sale if the copyright owner ever comes after you.
Cartoonist Dave Sim once said that no corporation will ever pay you enough to successfully sue them. He's certainly right in Friedrich's case. Friedrich is appealing the copyright decision, but is already broke. He owes his lawyers $100,000.
"If his appeal fails Friedrich will be a financially ruined man. He stands to lose everything he owns, and ever will own. Naturally the court doesn’t care for this, but Marvel might. With the imminent release of the second Ghost Rider movie, a franchise that draws heavily from the mythos that Friedrich helped create and has never been compensated for from Marvel (outside of payments for the comic books), Marvel is set to see another financial windfall of multiple millions of dollars. It’d be nice to think that, perhaps, someone at Marvel can see the logic that a settlement would have in this case, if only in the value of good publicity alone. As it is Marvel have done to Friedrich what DC did to Siegel, Shuster, Bill Finger and many others – ground him into the dirt, taken his creation, made more money in a week than the original creator will see in a lifetime and then keep on keeping on. Perhaps it’s time that a campaign designed to embarrass Marvel be undertaken – the sheer threat of such a campaign worked for Dave Cockrum. While Cockrum didn’t get millions, nor did Gene Colan when he approached and asked Marvel, they did get sizable amounts which, in Cockrum’s case alone, allowed him to live his remaining years out in relative comfort and ease. As it stands the people who’ll be making the most money from the Ghost Rider sequel will be people who had nothing to do with the character. As it stands, according to Box Office Mojo, the first Ghost Rider movie has grossed over $115,800,000 worldwide. The sequel should do similar amounts, meaning Marvel will clear a nice sum, again, while denying the creator a cent."
Profiles in History is having an auction entitled Icons of Animation on December 17. While the majority of items are out of my price range (maybe all of them actually), you can download a catalog of the auction for free.
Even if you're not in the market to buy, the catalog is a mini history lesson by itself. It contains art from Disney, MGM, Warner Bros, Fleischer and Hanna Barbera. There is work by Bill Tytla, Fred Moore, Carl Barks, Bob Clampett, Virgil Ross, Irv Wyner, Mary Blair, Preston Blair, Gustav Tenggren, Charles Schulz, etc. There are worse ways to spend time than by paging through the download and admiring so much beautiful stuff.
Disneyscreencaps.com features thousands of screen captures from shorts, features, and made for DVD films. It also includes work from Pixar and Dreamworks.
I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason for the particular captures. It doesn't appear that they were selected by an animator. For all I know, the captures were done by an automated process. In any case, if you're looking for a handy visual reference from any of the films they've covered, it may be quicker than hauling out the DVD.
Someone known as lostvocals4 has taken live action footage from Operation Wonderland, a live action promotional piece that Disney made for Alice in Wonderland, and synched it up with the finished film.
Disney was shooting live action reference footage at least as early as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. That procedure continued in the 1950s, especially because the budgets were tighter and the films had to be made more efficiently. Ed Wynn was filmed as the Mad Hatter and Jerry Colonna was filmed as the March Hare, with Kathryn Beaumont as Alice. What's interesting is that the audio from the reference footage was used as the final audio in the film.
The artists on screen, in order of their first appearance, are Les Clark, Fred Moore (at left) with John Lounsbery, and Ward Kimball.
If you want to see the entire Operation in Wonderland, which contains additional live action reference for the Walrus's dance and the march of the playing cards, you can see it here and here. Look for Walt Disney manning the animation camera. I doubt that he did that much after the 1920s.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and savior of Pixar, has lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. The official announcement is here.
Jobs was also a major shareholder in Disney after he sold Pixar to Disney. While he clearly prepared Apple to continue without him, we'll have to see who inherits his Disney shares. In any case, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull have lost an ally and Robert Iger's hand is no doubt strengthened.
Men like Jobs are rare and he will be missed. There was no one in the computer or electronics field to compare with him.
I've been on the road for the last ten days: Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley (second time!) and now Loveland, Colorado. I'm guessing that readers are scratching their heads over the final location, but this weekend was the occasion for two annual shows that attract hundreds of sculptors who display their work. As I've been sculpting for the last two years, I wanted to see what was being done.
Sun Dog by Ellen Woodbury
I knew that I'd see Ellen Woodbury at Sculpture in the Park. I met Ellen a year or so ago when she visited Sheridan College and I learned that she's now living in Loveland and sculpting full time. Ellen works in stone and her subject is animals, not a surprise given her animal animation at Disney on characters like Pegasus in Hercules.
Reviewing the Troops by Mark Henn
I did not expect to see Mark Henn, who participated in the Loveland Sculpture Invitational Show. Mark is still at Disney, having recently completed work on the Winnie the Pooh film, but sculpts subjects from American history as a hobby and casts the work in bronze.
The link between animation and sculpture is a strong one. I know that Bill Tytla, Blaine Gibson, Milt Kahl and Andreas Deja, all associated with Disney, have done both. As Disney-style animation requires drawings that are structured and dimensional, it's only logical that animators can transfer their knowledge into a three-dimensional medium.
I am sure that this judgment will be appealed, but a Federal court has ruled that the work Jack Kirby did for Marvel was "work-for-hire." This is despite the fact that the legal term was not part of the copyright law at the time Kirby co-created characters such as The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, The Silver Surfer, Thor, etc.
While I am sure that there is a celebration occurring in the Disney and Marvel boardrooms as a result of this ruling, it's a questionable victory. When the artists at Marvel realized that the company was not going to compensate them beyond paying them by the page, they simply stopped creating new characters. Image Comics exists because a group of artists realized they would never be fairly compensated for their work at Marvel and so they formed their own company. Marvel's treatment of their artists has been consistently bad. See this article on the recently deceased Gene Colan.
Corporate copyright is strangling creativity, not promoting it.
Kirby's case and the ongoing litigation regarding the Superman copyright are just more evidence that anyone who creates something without securing ownership is a chump. It's one thing to be hired onto an ongoing project or series to make a contribution, but quite another to originate an idea and only be paid a regular salary or a flat price.
Stop giving your ideas to corporations. Own them and control them. Or else there will be more Jack Kirbys, Jerry Siegels, Joe Shusters, and Gene Colans ad infinitum.
Why in hell should stockholders and executives who weren't born when the work was created be profiting from it when the people who created it and their heirs get nothing?
(For my earlier take on the benefits of ownership, go here. For Heidi MacDonald, a comics news columnist, on the Kirby decision go here. It's worth quoting her conclusion: "Don’t ever create characters for work for hire, no matter how much “back end” you’re promised. In this day and age there is NO excuse for giving up your creations. We may never see another Jack Kirby among us, but let his lessons stand, both the triumphs and the sadness." )
It's noon on Saturday as I write this, but Deadline Hollywood is estimating that the Winnie the Pooh film will finish sixth for the weekend with a gross of $8 million. No sane person expected the Pooh film to outgross the Harry Potter finale, but it's interesting that films two through five are hold overs. Pooh couldn't outgross Transformers 3, Horrible Bosses, Zookeeper or Cars 2. Cars 2 is in it's 4th week and may still outgross the Pooh film. That's bad as both are aimed at similar audiences of young children.
The final domestic gross for the Pooh film should be somewhere between $20 and $32 million, depending on how it holds up. That will undoubtedly put downward pressure on the budgets of any future drawn films to come out of Disney as neither Pooh nor The Princess and the Frog have gotten close to the grosses for cgi films. I would be the last to blame the grosses on the fact that the films are drawn -- both films are retreads of what audiences have seen too many times before -- but from a business perspective there isn't much justification for Disney making drawn films.
I haven't seen Cars 2 (and won't), but the critical drubbing it took and Pixar's move into sequels has me wondering about the bigger picture.
Companies, like individuals, go through a life cycle. They grow, they mature and eventually they decline. The only difference between companies and individuals is that because companies can outlive individuals or change their personnel, they sometimes revive.
Growth is a phase where companies get larger but also expand their skills and discover their point of view. If we look at the Disney studio during Walt Disney's lifetime, we can see growth from 1923 to 1942. We can argue the exact dates or films, but the overall pattern is clear. During that time period, the skills and what exactly a Disney cartoon was supposed to be continued to evolve.
After Bambi, the studio was mature. A Disney cartoon was a particular, identifiable thing . When the studio deviated from that, in The Three Caballeros or Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, it was imitating Tex Avery and UPA respectively. It wasn't breaking new ground, it was trying to stay current with other studios that were in growth mode.
For me, Disney's decline takes place when Woolie Reitherman was the sole director of the films. The narrative energy was dissipated, budgets were cramped, and there were significant amounts of re-used footage.
None of these stages is without variation. There are better and worse films in every stage and there's always room for differences of opinion. In broad terms, though, I think these descriptions work for Disney.
You can apply the same categories to individuals. If we take Chaplin as an example, his growth is roughly 1914-1917, the years at Keystone, Essanay and Mutual (where he perfected his art in shorts). His maturity is 1918 to 1940, the years of his best known features: The Kid, The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. His decline is 1947 to 1967, the years from Monsieur Verdoux to A Countess from Hong Kong. There are critics who find much valuable work in those later films and I agree with them, but there's no question that Chaplin's popularity was waning and that the films lack consistency.
Which brings us to Pixar. We now know what a Pixar film is like and what it isn't. That's a sign of a mature studio. The firing of various directors says that they were not capable of producing a Pixar film. We're also seeing less artistic growth. The preponderance of sequels proves that. What's going to be the ratio of sequels to original films? Two to one? Three to one?
The larger question is how long will Pixar's maturity last? Are the reviews of Cars 2 a sign that the studio is tipping into decline? If the film is a relative failure at the box office (acknowledging that the merchandising will more than make up for it), is that also an indication of decline? Did the studio actually reach maturity with Monsters, Inc. or Finding Nemo and it's maturity phase is now ending?
It may be too soon to get answers to these questions, but the pattern is inescapable. Disney revived and entered a new growth phase for a while in the years following The Great Mouse Detective. There's no reason that a declining Pixar couldn't revive as well, but it usually takes new management and a new creative team. There's no indication that's about to happen at Pixar, and it may be years before Pixar enters an indisputable decline. However, I sense that the studio is on the cusp and I'm curious to see if the next few films confirm my suspicions.
From left to right: Tyrus Wong, Diane Disney Miller and Kim Wong, Tyrus's daughter.
From left to right: Paul Felix (Disney animator), Tyrus Wong and Ralph Eggleston (Pixar art director)
I wish that I could have attended this event. Tyrus Wong, whose style was a major influence on the look of Disney's Bambi, appeared at the Walt Disney Family Museum on June 11. Wong is now 100 years old and had a lengthy career in live action films after leaving the Disney studio.
“Mars Needs Moms” may lead to the end for the Zemeckis style of motion-capture filmmaking, which has proven increasingly unpopular with audiences. Unlike the digital animation used by Pixar, in which movies are created entirely by computer, the Zemeckis technique requires actors to perform on bare sets while wearing uniforms outfitted with sensors to record their movements. Those movements are then transferred into a digital model that computer animators use to create a movie.
Critics and audiences alike, with audiences voicing their opinions on Twitter, blogs and other social media, complained that the Zemeckis technique can result in character facial expressions that look unnatural. Another common criticism is that Mr. Zemeckis focuses so much on technological wizardry that he neglects storytelling.
This is an excellent documentary chronicling the three month tour of South America by Walt Disney and assorted artists at the request of the U.S. State Department. With World War II already underway in Europe in 1941, the State Department was concerned that South America might align itself with the Axis powers, giving the Axis military bases on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Their response, when the U.S. was still officially a neutral country, was to send cultural celebrities such as Disney (and, separately, Orson Welles) to South America to promote ties between North and South America.
This documentary, now on DVD, is written and directed by Ted Thomas, the son of Disney animator Frank Thomas who was one of the artists on the trip. Other participants included Lee and Mary Blair, Jim Bodrero, Herb Ryman, Ted Sears and Norm Ferguson. As all of the participants have passed away, the documentary relies on the memories of spouses, children and grandchildren who have often saved letters from the trip and read from them. Animation historians John Canemaker and J.B. Kaufman add their perspectives.
I have to say that I prefer this documentary to Waking Sleeping Beauty. The time period of Walt & El Grupo was a complex one, affected by both world and studio politics. In addition to the threat of war, the trip coincided with the famous strike at Disney and one incentive for Disney's participation was to get away from the studio so that less emotionally involved parties might work out a settlement. Beyond politics, the film is also good at focusing on the artists. We learn of their backgrounds and their contributions to the expedition while seeing examples of the art created during the trip. In this regard, the film is better balanced than Waking Sleeping Beauty.
Ted Thomas traveled to the places visited by the group, interviewing surviving participants or their descendants, showing newspaper clippings and movie footage of the time. The trip was well documented, both by the participants and by the local media, so Thomas has a wealth of material to work with.
The documentary does reveal that certain live action scenes of the trip used in Saludos Amigos were taken back in Burbank when the editors needed bridging material. (And if my eye doesn't deceive me, they were shot in 35mm where the actual footage was shot in 16mm.) The original release of Saludos Amigos is included as an extra. It's "original" in that it includes footage of Goofy smoking cigarettes, something deleted from later releases in order to protect children.
The film has a very large cast and if I have any criticism it's that I wish people were repeatedly identified. Seeing so many adult children of the group, it is easy to forget who they are relatives of. I also wish that more of the artwork produced on the trip was identified by artist where possible.
Walt & El Grupo does a good job of capturing a time and place in both world and Disney history. It's a pleasure to spend time with the artists and to see the magnitude of Walt Disney's popularity at the time.
Watching this film, I got the feeling that Don Hahn and Peter Schneider made it because they realized their best days were behind them and they were looking to celebrate and mourn the end of their greatest successes.
This film covers the period of Disney animation history from the change in management in 1984, when Frank Wells, Michael Eisner, Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over from Ron Miller until Katzenberg's resignation after The Lion King. Because the film is bookended by these two changes in management, the film gives the impression that the rise and fall of the studio during this period was due to the people at the top. While they undoubtedly had a strong influence, such as deciding which films were made, the quality of those films was determined by the literally hundreds of people who created them.
Those people are portrayed as bystanders to management politics and the film is curiously selective about who gets identified. I don't believe that Andreas Deja or Eric Goldberg, while they are shown, ever have their names on screen and (except for a deleted clip in the extras) Goldberg is not heard either. I spent a great deal of the film wondering who I was looking at or knowing and waiting in vain for the film to identify them. In an odd way, the film is like a monster movie where giant executives face off while anonymous artists run for cover. Even when the artists are identified, there is no sense of what part they played in the making of the films or their individual sensibilities.
The film is fascinating for anyone interested in animation history, but I think that overall the film is a failure. It doesn't explain why the animated features became successful except to talk about management shaking up the animation staff and the presence of Howard Ashman. There is no doubt that Ashman was a major influence in terms of the musical numbers and story construction, but he had nothing to do with the creation of the visuals. Those are left unexplained.
The film takes for granted the status of the animated features, measuring them only by box office. There's no further attempt to evaluate them in terms of quality or dissect why some were more successful than others.
The management infighting that led to the collapse of Disney animation is spelled out and no one comes off looking good. Once Frank Wells died, the remaining executive team was jealous of each other and couldn't put aside their differences for the good of the stockholders or the art form. The studio may have run out of energy anyway, but it took only seven years from The Lion King to Atlantis: The Lost Empire. For an explanation of that decline, see Dream On, Silly Dreamer.
There is one segment in the extras that shows perfectly what's missing from this film. The recording session for The Little Mermaid's song "Part of Your World" was videotaped. Inside the recording booth, Howard Ashman and Jodi Benson work on getting the interpretation right amidst the chatter from the control room. While Benson hasn't yet nailed what Ashman is looking for, her performance is superb. Her voice is beautiful and her phrasing is masterful. Music is more cinematic than animation in that it can be created in real time, but this is perhaps the only example on the DVD of the creative act, the thing at the center of the films that this documentary is supposed to be celebrating. The Disney artists were Benson's equal in their own field, though the film doesn't acknowledge this. No matter how sharp Wells, Eisner, Katzenberg, and Disney were, they were not the ones writing, directing or drawing. In this film, all the glory goes to the jockeys and too little to the horses.
It's only the popularity of the films covered in this documentary that justify its existence. Few would care to see a documentary about Hanna Barbera during the same time period. But as this film does little to explain the success of the animated features from 1984-'94, what's left is little more than a souvenir for the crew and those fans with a hunger for a look behind the scenes.
I've worked as an animator, writer, producer and director in TV animation for 29 years. I created the cgi series Monster By Mistake.
I hold a Masters degree from York University in Cinema and Media Studies.
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