A Mickey Mystery

A fan/historian going under the internet handle The Spectre pointed out that the draft for Mickey's Birthday Party lists the Music Room as responsible for the majority of footage in the two Mickey Mouse dance sequences. Ken Muse is credited with a small amount of footage for the first scene and Riley Thomson a small amount of footage for the second. Footage attributed to the Music Room (which was really the director's room) means that the scene either had no animation or had existing animation lifted from another film.

When I did the mosaic for the film, I definitely didn't look closely enough at the draft and assumed that the credited animators were responsible for the whole thing.

In comments when I printed the mosaic, Galen Fott said that he had a drawing of Mickey that he was told was from Mickey's Surprise Party, which was a commercial that the Disney studio made for Nabisco for use at the 1939 World's Fair. Galen's drawing matches the costuming of Mickey in that cartoon, but there is no dance animation in it. Furthermore, the pose in Galen's drawing matches a frame in Mickey's Birthday Party pretty closely.

At this point, I do believe that the dance animation pre-existed Mickey's Birthday Party, but there are several unanswered questions. Was the animation originally done for Mickey's Surprise Party and cut from the film for some reason? If not, what film was the footage done for? Finally, who animated this great dance? It always looked like Ward Kimball to me before I got a look at the draft. Is it Kimball? Fred Moore? Of course, it's possible that Muse and Thomson animated the scenes for an earlier film and then added some new material to make it fit into the new film.

If there is anybody out there who can shed some light on this mystery, I'd love to hear from you.

Mickey's Birthday Party Part 3

Like many others, I assumed that Mickey's wild dancing in this cartoon was done by Ward Kimball. Kimball used it under the end credits of The Mouse Factory, a TV series that he produced for Disney. However, we can see that the animation was done by Ken Muse and Riley Thomson.

Muse is better known for his work on the Tom and Jerry series, but he made an impression on somebody at Disney who talked to film critic Frank Nugent. In 1947, Nugent wrote an article called "That Million-Dollar Mouse" for the N.Y. Times Magazine. It's reprinted in the book Walt Disney Conversations edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson. In the article, Nugent writes, "Artists like Fred Moore, Marvin Woodward, Les Clark and Kenny Muse have helped [Mickey] to express himself." This was half a dozen years after Muse left, but his name still came up in connection with the Mouse.

Muse only gets three scenes here, but the third one is just plain stunning. Muse was a very strong draftsman and as wild as Mickey's action is, the drawing stays controlled. Mickey is appealing in every drawing.

Thanks to Galen Fott, you can click here and see a rough drawing of Mickey dancing by Ken Muse. Note the difference in costume. That led to some confusion as to whether the drawing came from Mickey's Surprise Party (a 1939 World's Fair industrial Disney did for Nabisco) or Mickey's Birthday Party. We've determined that the drawing doesn't appear in the industrial, so my guess is that Muse animated the scene before somebody decided to change Mickey's outfit. Some poor assistant animator got stuck making the change.

Director Riley Thomson follows Muse to wrap up Mickey's dance and in my opinion is even better. Thomson is more willing to push his timing accents, uses a stronger line of action and is generally more willing to distort Mickey for effect. I can imagine Thomson directing this cartoon and deciding the scene was too juicy to give away, so he kept it for himself.

This cartoon is heavily cast by character, and Bernie Wolf gets Donald. Wolf was an important animator in the '30's, working for Fleischer, Iwerks and Disney. He was in the First Motion Picture Unit during the war and later worked for Hanna Barbera and Film Roman, though I have no idea what he was doing in the period between the war and his TV years.

Scene 28 starts out with some solo dancing by Donald, and Wolf is willing to push his poses for the musical beats as much as Les Clark. What's really interesting is that for scenes 36.2 and 36.4, Clark and Wolf each take a character in the scene. 36.4, in particular, has a lot of character interaction. Donald rides on Clara's rear and she bounces him against the wall several times. I'm guessing that Clark had to go first, with Wolf working to Clark's drawings. When the interaction really gets wild in scenes 40 and 40.1, it was impractical for two animators to handle it, so Clark did it all.

This is the third Mickey cartoon directed by Thomson that's been discussed here. They're great cartoons and every one of them contains great animation. It's clear that Thomson valued that, being an animator himself, and he really gave his crew opportunities to shine.

Mickey's Birthday Party Part 2

Mickey's Birthday Party is a very loose remake of the 1931 Mickey cartoon The Birthday Party. It borrows the basic situation and some gags, but doesn't re-use any animation and expands on things such as the cake gag considerably.

It seems that every one of these shorts reveals another "unknown" animator. Marvin Woodward animates an awful lot of this cartoon and does a great job. His Mickey and Minnie are very appealing and solidly drawn. His work is not as flamboyant as some other animators' scenes in this cartoon, but Woodward gets all the Mickey and Minnie acting scenes. The characters are likeable and you can really feel the relationship between them.

According to Alberto Becattini, Woodward started at Disney around 1931. He's got work in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, The Three Caballeros, Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, but what scenes did he do? I can't think of any, yet he was clearly a very capable animator.

The mysterious Shafer (who is probably Milt Schaffer, but not definitely) handles most of the Goofy scenes with James Moore picking up the rest. These scenes could easily come out of a two-reel comedy as they're close to slapstick sitcom. The animators manage to make the cake gags believable, even though they're fairly cartoony and Goofy is an appealing victim of his own ineptitude.

My admiration for Les Clark continues to rise. Here, he gets away with some risque breast gags with Clara Cluck and Donald. I'm surprised that the Hays office let this get through, considering how skittish they were about udders just a few years before.

When Clara is dancing, there are some extreme visual accents used for a single frame to really hit the musical beat. Take a look at this drawing. Her rear, breasts and shoulder are all pushed uncomfortably, but because it's for a single frame it doesn't bother you at normal speed. Clark does all of Clara's dancing scenes and they're full of this kind of distortion to match the musical beat.

I'd have to know more about Clark's feature work, but I wonder if he might not have had more freedom on the shorts. It doesn't seem that he was often the lead on a feature character, so he was forced to make his work fit in with other people's. Maybe that watered it down. On the shorts, Clark's characters exude confidence and liveliness. Were those qualities present in his feature work?

Can somebody define what the Music Room was? My understanding is that it was where the directors and the composers worked out the timing and score of the cartoon, but why are the first scene (which is just a background) and 4.1 (Minnie putting on lipstick) credited to the Music Room? Were there artists and animators assigned to it?

I'll talk about Ken Muse, Riley Thomson and Bernie Wolf in a future entry.

Mickey's Birthday Party

Here's a mystery that I hope someone can solve. The animator draft lists Shafer, but there was nobody at Disney that I'm aware of whose last name was spelled that way. There was Armin Schafer and Milt Schaffer, both of whom animated at Disney in the 1930's, but Albert Becattini doesn't list either of them animating into the 1940's. Did either of them work on this cartoon, or is it somebody else?

I'll write more about this film in a future entry.