Art Babbitt, Gunther Lessing, and the Disney Strike

Jake Friedman is working on an authorized biography of animator Art Babbitt.  He also has a blog where he has been publishing various Babbitt-related documents and footage.  His latest entry is below, chronicling the relationship between Babbitt and Gunther Lessing, attorney for the Disney studio.  I wish that it had been uploaded at a higher resolution, so that the documents on screen would be clearer.

The Disney strike is one of those seismic events that continued to be influential long after it was over.  It caused people to leave Disney, others to be fired, and many of those people moved to other studios, spreading the knowledge they gained at Disney.  It also created animosities that continued for decades.

If the Disney studio had negotiated a contract with the Federation of Screen Cartoonists and blocked the entry of IATSE, would the strike have occurred?  The history of the Disney studio and unionism in animation might have been significantly different, but the opportunity was missed.

The Difference Between Walt Disney and Robert Iger

From Seth Godin:

"Capitalists take risks. They see an opportunity, an unmet need, and then they bring resources to bear to solve the problem and make a profit.

"Industrialists seek stability instead.

"Industrialists work to take working systems and polish them, insulate them from risk, maximize productivity and extract the maximum amount of profit. Much of society's wealth is due to the relentless march of productivity created by single-minded industrialists, particularly those that turned nascent industries (as Henry Ford did with cars) into efficient engines of profit.

"Industrialists don't mind government regulations if they write them, don't particularly like competition or creativity or change. They are maximizers of the existing status quo."

Walt Disney and Spencer Tracy

I’ve long been aware that Walt Disney knew Spencer Tracy.  There’s a 1938 photo of them together with Tracy in polo togs and I knew that Disney also played polo.  Having read the excellent Spencer Tracy: ABiography by James Curtis, I learned that the relationship was longer and deeper than I knew.

While the Tracys and Disneys knew each other from polo, the Tracys also entertained the Disneys at their home.

Perhaps the greatest link was John Tracy, Spencer and Louise Tracy’s son, who was born deaf.  John had an interest in art and as a child started a newspaper.  The first issue sported a Mickey Mouse cover with an inscription by Disney which read, “Good Luck to Johnny Tracy.”

Louise Tracy spent a great deal of her life establishing the John Tracy Clinic for families with deaf children.  Having struggled to understand the best way to educate her son, she wanted to provide the best medical advice to other parents in the same situation.  Disney donated $100 at the clinic’s inception and was a member of the original board of directors.  When Disney toured the facility in 1043 and saw that the children were napping on mats on the floor, he donated cots and at Christmas sent over “a truck load of gifts – puppets and toys, all Disney-licensed, that could be used in teaching.”

Disney later funded a $12,000 short film, Listening Eyes, made by the clinic to explain its procedures and supplied the director, Larry Lansburgh, from his studio.

When the Disneys sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to Europe in July of 1952, Spencer Tracy was also on board and they socialized during the trip.

In 1957, Disney hired John Tracy, who by then had attended Choinard, to work at the studio.  He eventually was in charge of the cel library.  John left Disney when his sight deteriorated and he was no longer able to do the job.

In 1961, Disney was on the ticket sales committee for a fundraiser for the John Tracy Clinic and in 1967 after Walt’s and Spencer’s respective deaths, the Disney Foundation donated $100,000 to the John Tracy Clinic.

Steve Jobs as Walt Disney

Left to right: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, John Lasseter. Image lifted from the Pixar website.

It's been a few days since Steve Jobs passed away and I've had some time to gather my thoughts. It occurs to me that Jobs was like Walt Disney in that they shared traits common to visionary entrepreneurs.

Walt Disney didn't create animation. He wasn't responsible for every advance that came from his studio. And while there were others in animation who broke ground, the public identified the animation medium with Walt Disney. Disney went through a bankruptcy and several setbacks (the loss of Oswald the Rabbit and the defection of staff), but still managed to overcome the problems and continue to pursue his goals.

Steve Jobs didn't create personal computers. He wasn't responsible for every advance that came from Apple. Certainly there are others who broke ground in computing, but Jobs was the very public face of computers as lifestyle enhancers. Jobs was tossed out of the company he co-founded with Steve Wozniak, but during that period, he bought Pixar from George Lucas and created a second success before returning to Apple, where his second stint may have been more influential than his first.

I don't doubt that somebody would have made a cgi feature had Pixar not existed, but as we can see from films like Beowulf, cgi films might have been extensions of the visual effects world more than the animation world. As there have been animated films in every medium that were duds, who knows if that first cgi feature would have had the impact on audiences and on the marketplace if the film hadn't been Toy Story?

Pixar was not a sure thing. There were many technical problems to be solved and it was uncertain how an audience would react to an hour and a half of computer graphics. Jobs supported Catmull and Lasseter's goals, resulting in one of the most successful animation companies in history. Jobs' importance to animation history is secure for that alone.

So Jobs, like Disney, pursued his goals though they were risky. They both overcame setbacks to innovate in several fields. They both enhanced the lives of their audiences and were feted for it. That last item is a key point. Business schools may one day examine the careers of Michael Eisner or Robert Iger and take lessons from them, but the public won't. Jobs, like Disney, worked on a public stage, combining vision with showmanship. There are many successful business people, but few have the vision of these two men and fewer still have a vision that the public willingly embraces.

Animation is lucky to have crossed paths with both men.

(One of the best summations of Jobs' career I've read is an obituary written by animation fan and technology writer Harry McCracken for Time magazine.)

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Walt Disney and Tex Avery

In early 1975, Film Comment magazine devoted an entire, oversize issue to Hollywood cartoons. It's well worth finding in a library or through an online service, as it contains a comprehensive interview with Chuck Jones as well as an interview with Grim Natwick and articles by Greg Ford and Mark Langer.

One piece was an essay on Walt Disney by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Rosenbaum has now posted the first part of that essay on his website with the second part to follow shortly. As Thad has pointed out in the comments, part 2 is now up.

And here is Rosenbaum on Tex Avery.

False Comparisons

Michael Barrier was interviewed in the Huffington Post for an article entitled "Animated Man: Cartoon Expert Michael Barrier Decries Pixar, Computers." This article already has multiple comments about Barrier's views and the article was linked to on Cartoon Brew, where there are yet more comments.

Two quotes caught my eye.

"What I'd call the direct connection between the animator and the character that you have when the animator is drawing the character with a pencil on a sheet of paper, it simply doesn't have an equivalent as far as I'm aware, or if it has an equivalent, it's much harder to establish."

I've already attempted to debunk this based on the techniques of both drawn and computer animation. My opinion hasn't changed. It's not the technique, it's how the production is organized. Should a cgi feature want a strong connection between animator and character, there is no technical reason why it couldn't be accomplished.

There are other reasons, salaries being one, that are incentives to prevent it. The more animators remain anonymous and the less distinctive their work, the harder it will be for an animator to demand a higher wage. As it is unlikely that an animator's name will ever increase the box office gross the same way a star voice does, why create star animators who will only drive up the budget?

The other quote is this one:

"If you look back, we've had computer animated features for 16 years going back to 'Toy Story,' and we've had computer animated characters before that, I have not seen the kind of evolution of those characters anything like the extremely compressed and dramatic evolution of the hand drawn characters in the 30s. When you think about how Disney went from 'Steamboat Willie' in 1928 to 'Snow White' less than ten years later, I think that's an extremely compressed [growth] that I don't think computer animation has nearly approached. What you have instead in computer animation is a continuing elaboration on texture and surfaces and three dimensional space without anything comparable for characters."

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.

Let's examine what Walt Disney actually did. If you look at the Oswald cartoons, made immediately before Steamboat Willie, you see films that are ten or more years behind the times compared to live action films. The films are shorts instead of features and at the level of story, characterization and acting, they are not as accomplished as Chaplin's The Immigrant of 1917. Compare the Oswalds to the best live action of the time (The Big Parade, The General, The Gold Rush, Sunrise, Seventh Heaven, The Crowd, Underworld, etc.) and you see a medium that cannot compete as an equal. Except for its use of sound, Steamboat Willie was no better.

What Disney was able to do in ten years was bring animation up to the level of live action films. Snow White and the films that followed were taken as seriously by film professionals, critics and audiences as the live action films of the time.

While computer animation struggled mightily against its technical limitations in the '80s and '90s (and I know because I was there), the advances made by Disney were taken for granted. The techniques developed at the studio were codified to the point where they could be taught in a classroom to 18 year olds at Cal Arts, including John Lasseter, and put between book covers by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Computer animation's problem wasn't knowing what was needed, which was often the case in the '30s, it was figuring out how to make characters flexible enough via software. Which is to say that computer animation didn't start as crudely as Disney animation did and had less far to go to get up to the level of live action films.

And 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.

You can't criticize computer animation without looking at the bigger picture. This article in GQ, entitled "The Day the Movies Died," is subtitled "No, Hollywood films aren't going to get better anytime soon." 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'm not defending the current state of computer animated features. I just saw a preview of Rango, directed by Gore Verbinski, and while the people at ILM have done a great job on the technical side, the film itself is thoroughly mediocre. It's emotional tone is all over the map; sometimes it's a parody and sometimes it wants to be taken seriously. Its references to other films only reminded me that it's inferior to the films it's quoting. And it is a perfect example of Barrier's observation that "computer animation is a continuing elaboration on texture and surfaces and three dimensional space without anything comparable for characters."

But I insist that it's not the medium. It's the structure of Hollywood and its economic model and it's what the public expects from movies. If computer animation sucks (and it often does), there are many more reasons than technology that are the cause. Furthermore, I don't think comparing it to Disney in the '30s is a valid or useful comparison.

Walt & El Grupo

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.

Miscellaneous Links

Kris Graft of Gamasutra writes that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment will be opening a gaming studio in Montreal that will gradually grow t0 300 employees by 2015.

Bhob Stewart writes about The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air, a 1938 radio series which initially featured Walt Disney himself as host and the voice of Mickey Mouse. Stewart provides a player for seven episodes of the series.

Fantagraphics will soon publish the fourth volume of Our Gang comics by Walt Kelly. A complete 14 page story from the book in PDF format can be found here.

Farhad Manjoo of Slate reviews Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, about creating an online business with minimal start-up costs. You can read excerpts from the book here.

(Gamasutra link via James Caswell.)

Rare Mickey

Last June, I posted about Michael Sragow's biography, Victor Fleming: American Movie Master. One of the films that Fleming directed was Around the World in 80 Minutes (1931), a documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks. The reason for my post was that the film contained original Disney animation of Mickey Mouse. I was not aware of this and a quick scan of the animation history books on my shelf didn't lead to any information.

Over at Didier Ghez's Disney History site, JB Kaufman was able to provide some information, as he had screened the film at the Library of Congress.

I recently learned that the film is now on DVD from Grapevine Video. I purchased a copy, and below you'll see some extremely rare Mickey animation. I have no idea who animated it, though I might guess Dick Lundy. Enjoy.

Another Mickey Mystery

I am reading Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master by Michael Sragow, and Sragow discusses Around the World in 80 Minutes, a 1931 documentary starring Douglas Fairbanks and directed by Fleming.

What's interesting is that the film apparently contains an original animated segment with Mickey Mouse. There is no mention of this in Disney biographies by Bob Thomas, Neal Gabler or Michael Barrier. There's no mention of it either in Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic or Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons. Here's what Sragow has to say about this film.

While Fairbanks and company visit Siam, they watch a performance of a classical Siamese dance troupe; Fairbanks says that the rhythm beneath the exotic moves and music is the same as the fox-trot, then tries to demonstrate that notion by twirling a Siamese gal around a ballroom. Out of nowhere, he announces, "Now, here's Hollywood's most famous star dancing to Siamese music. C'mon, Mickey!" The film turns into a cartoon and Mickey Mouse prances out from a doorway on the right side of the screen. Against a temple backdrop, the mouse pulls off a mix of traditional Oriental choreography and American folk dancing. His hands try to pull off elegant courtly gestures, but his feet can't help tapping or clogging. He slants his eyes for a second or two, in a mixture of frustration and homage -- no slur intended, all in good fun -- then does a series of keep-on-truckin' clogs that would make R. Crumb proud.

It's a genuine novelty: the rarest Mickey Mouse cartoon. How it ended up in Around the World in Eighty Minutes remains anybody's guess. United Artists (of course) released the movie, and UA had agreed to distribute Disney's cartoons after the animator had fulfilled his still-running contract with Columbia. But no Disney cartoon received an official UA release until the summer of 1932; Around the World opened in December 1931. And Disney kept no record of any contract or correspondence between him and Fairbanks. Disney must have known that Fairbanks and Fleming were big fans of his. By then Doug had told the press that only Mickey Mouse fully exploited the capacity of the sound film: "These cartoons get their tremendous appeal from the perfect rhythm, in comedy tempo. of the little characters and of the accompanying sound. It is not merely synchronization; it is more than that; it is a rhythmic, winging, lilting thing, with what musicians call the proper accent-structure." So Disney might have simply done Doug a favor and cooked up that Mickey cameo for a renowned, vocal supporter.

Barrier's The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney reports that Disney signed with United Artists in December of 1930, so while Around the World in 80 Minutes predates the start of releasing his cartoons through UA, the deal was already in place at that time. Furthermore, my assumption is that because the animation was included in a feature, it fell outside the shorts distribution contract that Disney had with Columbia, as did the animation in MGM's Hollywood Party, made while Disney was releasing through UA.

The Museum of Modern Art has a print of Around the World in 80 Minutes and there is another copy at the Library of Congress. To the best of my knowledge, the film is not available on VHS or DVD. Has anyone seen this sequence or have more information to add?

UPDATE: You can read more about this clip thanks to Didier Ghez and JB Kaufman.

UPDATE 2: If you want to see the animation from the film, go here.

The Mystique of the Nine

While publicity has fixed the nine old men in the publics' consciousness, I think that it's important to realize that the "nine old men" was something of an arbitrary title. That's not to cast aspersions on any of the nine, but the title was as much a result of studio politics as it was a testament to their abilities.

There were important animators at Disney before the nine rose to prominence. They include Ub Iwerks, Fred Moore, Ham Luske, Bill Tytla, Dick Lundy, Norm Ferguson, Dick Huemer, Grim Natwick and Art Babbitt. There were other excellent animators during the early feature years including Ken Muse, Don Towsley, Marvin Woodward, Don Lusk, Preston Blair, Bill Roberts, Berny Wolf and John Sibley.

There were several things that separated the nine from the rest, and not all of them had to do with art. All nine started their animation careers at Disney, so they had no other studio as a frame of reference; as a result they didn't question Walt Disney's artistic or managerial style. All of the nine stayed loyal during the strike and stayed with the company until their retirements. What Walt Disney had in the nine, besides fantastic animation chops, was confidence that they would execute his vision without arguing with him or abandoning the company.

While Disney no doubt valued their artistic ability, he himself was willing to break up the team. He moved Ward Kimball and Les Clark into directing for TV and he took Marc Davis away from animation for good after 101 Dalmatians to work on the theme park. By the time The Jungle Book was in production, only five of the nine were still animating. While the nine may have been running the animation department, their association was more managerial than artistic.

I am sorry about Ollie Johnston's death. He did great work and deserves to be remembered. I'm sorry about the eight who preceded him in death. Every animation artist who passes away diminishes the field to some degree by his or her absence. But I believe that artists needs to have their work judged and appreciated as individuals. Walt Disney's decision to tag nine artists with a nickname was as much a political and corporate decision as an artistic one, and as a result those animators who failed to fit into Disney's comfort zone for whatever reason have been cheated of attention they deserve.

Working with Walt

I have not read this new book by Don Peri, but the line-up of interview subjects has certainly caught my attention. The interviews include Ken Anderson, Les Clark, Larry Clemmons, Jack Cutting, Don Duckwall, Marcellite Garner, Harper Goff, Floyd Gottfredson, Dick Huemer, Wilfred Jackson, Eric Larson, Clarence Nash, Ken O'Connor, Herb Ryman and Ben Sharpsteen.

You can read more about the book here, including ordering information. The hardcover is $50 and the paperback is $22. Both figures in U.S. funds.

Hanna and Barbera

There's a discussion going on about Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, probably prompted by the release of Jerry Beck's book, The Hanna Barbera Treasury. (Mike Barrier talks about them here and here; Thad K talks about them here.) For baby boomers, there's a strong nostalgia for Hanna-Barbera's early work such as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat. Hanna and Barbera are undeniably important to TV animation from a historical standpoint as they were the first to crack prime time with an animated series and their studio was able to work with TV budgets and schedules while creating successful shows.

Furthermore, many boomers in the animation industry had direct contact with Hanna and Barbera and have pleasant memories of them as individuals. By all accounts, Joe Barbera was an expert salesman, so his ability to charm people should come as no surprise.

As theatrical animation collapsed in the 1950s and '60s, Hanna-Barbera was there to offer employment to animation artists who suddenly found themselves jobless. While no one claimed that TV work was the same quality as theatrical shorts, it did allow many animation veterans to close out their careers doing work that they were familiar with. They were spared the upset of re-inventing themselves in middle age or later.

Those are the good things that can be said for Hanna-Barbera. There are, however, many bad things that can be said about them. In some ways, it's amazing that animation managed to survive them.

There is no question that TV budgets and schedules were and are brutal for the creation of animation. Hanna-Barbera did nothing to fight this. That is their single biggest failing. Rather than attempt to reform or beat a system that was clearly stacked against the production of good work, Hanna-Barbera embraced that system and milked it for their own personal gain. They expanded the number of shows they produced and with each expansion, the quality of the product suffered. They opened studios overseas in order to take advantage of cheaper labour. The savings went into their pockets, not onto the screen. After their initial decade, when they had the opportunity to work in prime time or in features where budgets were better, the projects were only marginally better than the low-budget work they turned out for Saturday mornings. The thinking and procedures behind their Saturday morning shows infected the entire company. In their hands, the art of animation (and here I'm talking about the entire process from writing to post-production), was degraded and debased without apology.

Some might argue that Hanna-Barbera did not have the leverage to change the way the TV business dealt with animation. I disagree and my evidence is Walt Disney and the movie business. In the early 1930s, Disney was a small company that was not affiliated with a major studio. Theatrical shorts were not all that lucrative, which is why live action comedians in the 1920s like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Harry Langdon, worked hard to graduate to feature films. Walt Disney re-invested his profits, including those from merchandising, into improving the quality of his cartoons. By raising his standards, he forced other animation studios to raise theirs in order to compete.

Hanna and Barbera were no worse off than Disney at the time they entered TV. If anything, they were in a better position having won multiple Oscars for the Tom and Jerry series. They entered TV with a greater reputation and more experience than Walt Disney had in the early 1930s. As Disney expanded his company in that decade, the quality of the studio's work went up. As Hanna-Barbera expanded in the 1960s and beyond, their quality went down. Like Disney, they had merchandising revenue coming in from early on, but that money was never redirected to the cartoons. Where Disney increased his budgets with the hope that quality would lead to increased revenues, Hanna-Barbera never increased theirs. Walt Disney exceeded the expectations of his distributors and his audience. Hanna and Barbera were satisfied with meeting their minimum requirements, and often failed to do that.

Regardless of what you think of Disney's films, there is no question that Walt Disney enriched the animation industry by raising standards for the entire field. Hanna and Barbera impoverished animation by strip mining it, taking all the wealth for themselves and leaving behind an industrial disaster. There is no question that the animation industry suffered a major blow with the death of theatrical shorts and the rise of television. It took the industry more than 25 years to recover from that blow. Hanna and Barbera had no part in that recovery and if anything, they probably delayed it.