I’ve previously mentioned my all-abiding love for the 1990s cartoon series Animaniacs here on the blog. Produced by Steven Spielberg, the show was more than a mere cartoon–it was a cleverly-constructed show that appealed to both adults and children with a hilarious combination of slapstick-y violence, meta references, and witty send-ups of pop culture icons.
This week, the Mental Floss blog published an article on the show that instantly reminded me of how truly great Animaniacs was. When I was younger, I watched the show religiously. Though I didn’t understand all of the references at the time, there was nonetheless something appealing about the humor. It was cheeky and sly and filled with “adult” allusions, but most importantly, even though it was a “kid’s show,” the writers didn’t condescend to their audience.
The starring trio–the screwy Warner Brothers, Yakko and Wakko, and their so-cute-and-she-knows-it sister Princess Angelina Contessa Louisa Francesca Banana Fanna Bo Besca the Third (known more commonly as Dot)–were the guiding force of the show, aided by a sterling set of supporting characters, some of which became breakout stars in their own rights (as with Pinky and the Brain, the laboratory mice determined to take over the world, who were spun off into their own series). There was something for every taste on the show: from the adorable adventures of Mindy and her put-upon dog, Buttons, to the cranky septuagenarian Slappy Squirrel (whose catchphrase provides the title for this post), to the combative Goodfeathers (a parodic take on the 1990 Martin Scorsese film Goodfellas), to the musical cat Rita (voiced by the incomparable Bernadette Peters) and her dog pal, Runt.
Watching reruns and clips of the show from the perspective of a much more pop culture-savvy adult, I can now appreciate just how deft the film parodies on Animaniacs really were. The writers had an obvious love for classic film, and quite a few movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood were given the Animaniacs treatment: gentle (sometimes sarcastic) prodding, witty reenactment, and a healthy helping of innuendo, tempered by a great deal of affection for the source material and frequent breaking of the fourth wall.
For this week’s entry in our continuing Saturday Morning Cartoons series, here’s a sampling of some of my favorite classic movie parodies that were tackled by Animaniacs. Mind you, this is only a handful of the fantastic film spoofs this show has to offer …
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“Meatballs or Consequences”
Hands down, my favorite sketch from the show, ever. Yakko, Wakko, and Dot find themselves in Sweden facing “a literary personification of the state of non-being” in a game of checkers, in a phenomenal parody of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). This one is filled with quippy gems. “All is strange and vague.” “Are we dead?” “Or is this Ohio?”
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“Bumbie’s Mom”
Slappy Squirrel’s nephew, Skippy, is traumatized by the on-screen death of “Bumbie’s” mother … much like the rest of us were. The look on Skippy’s face at the pivotal moment: priceless. [Note for Disney fans: Sherri Stoner, the voice of Slappy Squirrel, was the "motion model" for the characters of Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989) and Belle in Beauty and the Beast (1991).]
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“Our Final Space Cartoon, We Promise”
A take on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). “AL 5000″ is not who you think he is. The animators went all-out for this one–even the wraparounds in the episode were parodies of the film.
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“The Boids”
The Goodfeathers get a job as extras/”stunt birds” in a Hitchcock film, and soon come to regret it as they clash with a Jack Nicholson-type crow on the set and realize acting is not exactly the easy life.
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“Mindy in Wonderland”
Of course, it should go without saying that the Alice in Wonderland parody is one of my favorites. Taking their cues from the 1951 Disney version of Lewis Carroll’s classic story, this one features Bernadette Peters stepping outside of her normal role as Rita and voicing the Cheshire Cat (Mindy, incidentally, is voiced by Nancy Cartwright, better known as the voice of Bart Simpson).
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“King Yakko”
One of the more in-depth and effective parodies offered by the show is this spoof on the 1933 Marx Brothers classics Duck Soup, with Yakko in Groucho’s place and Wakko taking on a Harpo-esque role.
It’s become a somewhat tragic cliché in the past few decades–the young, hopeful Hollywood star, making a big splash on screens big and small before the pains of growing up on camera manifest themselves in drug addiction and wasted talent. The list seems endless, from Danny Bonaduce to the Coreys (both Feldman and Haim) to Brad Renfro, from Tatum O’Neal to Dana Plato to Demi Lovato to the ongoing human train wreck that was once Lindsay Lohan.
But years before all of these young stars succumbed to the allures of drugs and alcohol and self-abuse, there was the sad story of Bobby Driscoll.
Driscoll’s Hollywood career started at the age of five with a bit part opposite fellow child star Margaret O’Brien in the 1943 film Lost Angel (incidentally, the film also featured a brief appearance by Robert “Bobby” Blake, who would grow up to face troubles of his own). This led to small roles as precocious youngsters in several films over the next two years before Driscoll was “discovered” by Walt Disney in 1946.
Disney put Driscoll under a long-term contract–the first actor given this status by the studio–and cast him as Johnny, the young boy whose becomes entranced by Uncle Remus’ tales in the 1946 film Song of the South (based on the stories by Joel Chandler Harris). The relationship between Uncle Remus (James Baskett) and Johnny is the centerpiece of the film, and there is an easy camaraderie between the two that makes their budding friendship that much more believable on the screen. Baskett is the twinkling, appealing star of the film, to be sure, but Driscoll more than holds his own, and rather admirably, too, for a nine-year-old.
In the wake of that film, Driscoll’s popularity exploded. Along with South co-star Luana Patten, Disney built up Driscoll as a fresh new star, throwing the two of them together twice more: first, in a brief cameo during the Pecos Bill segment of the package film Melody Time (1948), followed by the animated/live-action combo film So Dear to My Heart later that year.
In between projects for Disney, Driscoll appeared in The Window, a minor 1949 noir based on a story by Cornell Woolrich (whose work was adapted into numerous films over the years, perhaps most notably the similarly-named Alfred Hitchcock classic Rear Window in 1954). Driscoll’s work in The Window demonstrates the breadth of the young actor’s talent; outside of the strictures of the wholesome Disneyfied persona that had been crafted for him, Driscoll proves himself to be a capable, intriguing dramatic presence–in fact, in its review of the film upon its release, the New York Times labeled Driscoll’s performance as “brilliant,” his character’s reactions “projected with remarkable verisimilitude.” His performance in The Window, combined with his appearance in So Dear, led to his winning a special “Juvenile” Oscar in 1950.
That year, Driscoll returned to the Disney fold for the live-action adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure story Treasure Island, playing Jim Hawkins opposite Robert Newton’s memorable Long John Silver. The film was one of the biggest successes at the year’s box office, and marked a pinnacle in Driscoll’s career.
The young actor soon moved into voice acting for his home studio, providing the vocals for Goofy’s son, Goofy Jr., in a couple of shorts in the early 1950s. But his greatest voice-over performance came with his lead role in Disney’s 1953 adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. His playful take on the character, infused by turns with bravado and charm, results in a fantastic vocal performance opposite fellow Disney favorite Kathryn Beaumont (Wendy). In addition to voicing Peter, Driscoll also served as the model for the character, and he ended up performing some of Peter’s scenes on an empty soundstage so as to give the animators reference points for their work.
As Driscoll moved into puberty, his value to the Disney studio began to wane, and after the release of Peter Pan, his long-term contract was canceled, more than two years early. Reportedly, Driscoll was fired because he developed severe acne, and the studio claimed it would be difficult, if not impossible, to cover the offending marks with makeup. In the wake of leaving the studio, Driscoll found it hard to escape his Disneyfied past, and he moved from film to television acting, appearing in a number of anthologized series throughout the 1950s.
But by then, he had discovered drugs–heroin being his narcotic of choice–and he spent the next few years in a downward spiral. Attempts to revitalize his career, both in Hollywood and on Broadway, failed, and Driscoll eventually moved into the art world, becoming a regular presence at The Factory, Andy Warhol’s infamous art/film/writing/music studio in Manhattan.
Driscoll’s time as a “member” of The Factory didn’t last. After two years of immersing himself in his art, he disappeared from the scene. A couple of weeks after his thirty-first birthday, Driscoll’s body was discovered in an abandoned tenement in New York. But he was unidentified at the time, and he was buried in an unmarked grave in Potter’s Field. It wasn’t until his mother went looking for him, almost two years later, that the truth of his death was discovered. And even then, the details were not revealed to the public for another three years, until Song of the South was re-released in theaters in the early 1970s.
Bobby Driscoll died way too young and, sadly, so ignominiously that he was never fully given the chance for cinematic redemption. It’s heartbreaking to realize that his life, once marked by endearing performances and a breathtaking talent, has become over time a cautionary tale (though one not nearly as well-known as some of his unfortunate successors). One can only hope that current stars like Lovato and Lohan, who showed such early promise in their respective runs as products of the Disney machine, are able to meet with a much different fate in the end.
This post is my contribution to the “Gone Too Soon” blogathon hosted by Comet Over Hollywood. Check out the list of participating blogs to see more heartfelt tributes to the stars who died well before their time.
By 1930, Mickey Mouse had become a bona fide animated star. Since his creation two years earlier at the hands of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, he had starred in almost two dozen black-and-white shorts, ranging from his ever-popular debut in Steamboat Willie toMickey’s Follies (1929), which introduced “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo,” the song that would remain Mickey’s theme for several years. These early cartoons became immensely popular, but after a few years, Disney’s writers and animators began having trouble crafting new, interesting material for the company’s flagship character. It didn’t help that the character of Mickey had begun to evolve (likely at Walt’s behest) from a sly schemer (a la his predecessor, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit) into a paragon of “good” behavior (albeit with some killer dance moves).
The development of a strong supporting cast of characters solved this problem, as figures such as the temperamental Donald Duck, the appropriately-named Goofy, and the rascally chipmunks Chip ‘n’ Dale allowed the animators to indulge in more varied storylines, with new gags that were sometimes silly, sometimes mean-spirited. Donald could be the bully, Goofy could do the crazy stunts, and Chip ‘n’ Dale could provide the mischievousness that Mickey’s sometimes bland portrayal lacked.
But those characters didn’t emerge until later (Goofy in 1932, Donald in 1934, the chipmunks in 1943). The earliest supporting characters in the Mickey shorts–figures such as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar–would not prove to be as lasting a presence in the Mickey cartoons throughout the years. Though Mickey’s recurring early nemesis, Pete (who had originally debuted as a villain in the “Alice Comedies” and the Oswald shorts), would remain a go-to “bad guy” figure over the years, Clarabelle and Horace–and their barnyard friends–were not nearly as popular. By the late 1930s, the pair only appeared in a handful of shorts, and by the mid-1940s, they were essentially forgotten.
But in 1930, one of Mickey’s most popular and longest-lasting supporting characters was introduced, when he was given what every young, anthropomorphized mouse needs: a canine companion.
Pluto (or, as he was initially known, Pluto the Pup) didn’t start out as Mickey’s dog, however. In his first appearance, in 1930′s The Picnic, he was actually Minnie’s dog, and his name was Rover. But even before that cartoon, a precursor of Pluto popped up in The Chain Gang, which was released a month before The Picnic in 1930. In that short, Mickey escapes from jail and Pete is sent after him, trailing a pair of vaguely familiar-looking bloodhounds.
The design of these dogs was adapted and refined for The Picnic. In the cartoon, Minnie insists on bringing her “little Rover” along on the trip, and in a scene that likely enrages PETA advocates everywhere, Mickey ties the dog to the back of the car before driving off and dragging him behind. But when Pluto spots a pair of dancing (and honking) rabbits, the dog ends up dragging the car–and the hapless Mickey and Minnie–behind himself as he sets out on the chase.
Pluto debuted as Mickey’s companion almost seven months later, in the 1931 short The Moose Hunt. It is in this cartoon in which the character is first referred to as “Pluto.” The origins of the character’s name, however, have long been in dispute. More than a year earlier, in 1930, the current-dwarf-planet-formerly-known-as-a-”planet”-planet Pluto was discovered. It has long been believed that Disney subsequently named the dog after the planet (as opposed to the original source of the name–the Roman god of the underworld), but Disney never officially indicated why the name was ultimately given to the character. Still, it can’t be a coincidence that the name “Pluto” was in the news quite a bit while the dog was being created …
Over the years, Pluto has arguably become the most lovable Disney creation. And in many ways, this is due to his non-anthropomorphized nature. Unlike most of the other animal characters in the Disney universe, Pluto does not walk upright, nor does he speak, though he does occasionally snicker in addition to typical canine communication such as whining, barking, and growling. His movements and behavior are that of a dog–an uncommonly versatile dog, true, but a pet nonetheless.
In many ways, Pluto hearkens back to Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, the seminal animated short that inspired a generation of artists including Walt Disney himself. Gertie’s appeal as an animated creature that could communicate through sheer will of personality alone is revisited in Pluto’s antics. But Pluto also has the benefits of an overly expressive face, which can convey everything from joy to anger to utter befuddlement. Who needs words when the entire audience can tell what a character’s thinking with one quizzical glance or bared grimace?
This reliance on physicality is exemplified in Playful Pluto (1934), which is Pluto’s first significant role in a cartoon. It’s not the best Pluto cartoon–in essence, it’s little more than a series of funny vignettes in which Pluto’s titular playfulness interrupts Mickey’s attempts to get some work done around the house. But the scene that steals the show–and ultimately makes this cartoon an important one in the annals of animation–is a carefully-crafted sequence in which the dog has an uncomfortably close encounter with a sticky flystrip.
This scene has become famous over the years, and with good reason. Animated by Norm Ferguson, who had worked on developing the character from its earliest days, the “flypaper sequence” has been lauded by animators and historians for its realistic depiction of a “thinking” character. According to storied Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, authors of The Illusion of Life (considered the veritable bible of animation by many in the field), this single minute-long scene was a groundbreaking moment in the development of animated characters whose thoughts could be telegraphed solely through their movements on the screen, as opposed to relying on dialogue to express their feelings.
As animation scholar Michael Barrier states in Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age (2003):
“Throughout the sequence, Pluto’s state of mind is always visible, in his expressive face and body. The gags are well-constructed–everything that happens to Pluto seems possible, in a physical sense, with none of the gags forced–but it is the trajectory of the dog’s emotions that makes this sequence so vivid.”
Indeed, Pluto’s reactions to his predicament flow naturally from one impediment to the next. You can almost see the wheels turning in Pluto’s mind as he tries to extricate himself from the flypaper, his emotional responses running the gamut from startled to confused to determined to angry to purely frustrated. In an era when cartoon characters relied on witty dialogue and music to get their full intentions across to the audience, Pluto’s bout with the flypaper is truly a marvel.
Over the years, Pluto starred in a number of shorts, some with Mickey, some with Minnie, and some on his own. He’s been paired with Donald Duck and Chip ‘n’ Dale in several cartoons. He has a particularly antagonistic relationship with the last two, as evidenced by shorts such as 1943′s Private Pluto(the chipmunks’ first appearance), the Oscar-nominated Squatters’ Rights(1947), and 1952′s Pluto’s Christmas Tree(which has always been one of my particular favorites).
And any time Mickey welcomed another pet into the house, Pluto had something to say (bark?) about it, whether it be Figaro, the mischievous cat from the 1940 film Pinocchio (see Pluto’s Sweater, 1949) or a fun-loving seal, as in the Academy Award-nominated cartoon posted above, 1948′s Mickey and the Seal.
In the early 1950s, Disney ceased production on Pluto-starring cartoons while continuing to produce toons featuring other characters such as the ever-popular Donald. But the lovable pooch is still a welcome presence in Disney shows and other modern media, including the early-2000s series House of Mouse, the current computer-animated Disney Junior series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and the Kingdom Hearts video games. Still, for me, his appeal will always lie in those early cartoons, because Pluto’s two-decade run of shorts produced some seriously hilarious and aww-inducing bits of animated genius.
Like Mickey, I just can’t be mad at’cha, Pluto, old boy.
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Some more fun facts about the precocious pup:
For most of the first thirty years of his existence, Pluto’s barks and grunts were voiced by Pinto Colvig, who was also the original voice of Goofy (though he did not record Goofy’s infamous yodeling “holler”). Among numerous other roles, Colvig also played both Sleepy and Grumpy in 1937′s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Playful Pluto is the cartoon shown to the convicts near the end of Sullivan’s Travels (1941), which prompts Sullivan (Joel McCrea) to realize the importance of humor in helping people get through their daily lives.
Though Pluto is known for being a non-speaking character, he actually does speak briefly in The Moose Hunt. When Mickey believes he has (accidentally) shot Pluto, he weeps and begs the dog to “speak to me–say something!” At that, Pluto sits up and says, “Kiss me!” while batting his eyelashes.
Pluto appeared in twoentries in the Silly Symphonies series, both without Mickey: 1932′s Just Dogs, and 1936′s Mother Pluto.
In two different cartoons, Pluto is seen as having a family: in Pluto’s Quin-puplets(1937), he has a wife (Fifi the Pekinese) and five children, but in 1942′s Pluto Junior, he has a single son.
The Pluto-starring 1941 short Lend a Paw (a remake of the 1933 black-and-white cartoon Mickey’s Pal Pluto) won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, beating out an unprecedented NINE other nominees, including another Disney cartoon, Truant Officer Donald.
When Mickey’s Christmas Carol, the first theatrical Mickey Mouse cartoon in thirty years, was released in 1983, Pluto was the only Disney stock character not to be featured (even though the long-forgotten Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar were!).
This post is our (long-winded) contribution to the Classic Movie Dogathon hosted by the Classic Film & TV Cafe. Make sure to check out the other wonderful entries that will posted between now and Wednesday, February 22nd!
After leaving Disney Brothers, Ub Iwerks’ own self-named animation venture, the Iwerks Studio, opened in 1930. Backed by Celebrity Pictures, with a distribution deal from major studio MGM, Iwerks was in an enviable position right out of the gate, making more money than he had ever made working with Walt Disney. He hired a group of fresh animators to work with him (a group that briefly included a young Chuck Jones). His first creation under his own banner was an anthropomorphic musical frog named Flip, who debuted in the six-minute short Fiddlesticks.
Fiddlesticks is noteworthy for being the first synchronized-sound two-strip Technicolor cartoon (it’s interesting to note that, when the three-strip color process was perfected a couple of years later, Disney produced the first cartoon in that mode, 1932′s Flowers and Trees–which would go on to win the first Academy Award for Animated Short Subject). Fiddlesticks also appears to feature a thumb to the nose of Disney, as one of Flip’s animal co-stars is a violin-playing mouse who strongly resembles the early concept sketches of Mickey Mouse.
After the success of Fiddlesticks, most of Flip’s future adventures were shot in black-and-white as opposed to the costly, time-consuming Technicolor process. And over time, at the behest of MGM, Flip’s design changed from amphibious to a more obviously human-like characterization, all in an effort to challenge the notably more human-like qualities of Mickey Mouse and crew. In all, Flip the Frog cavorted his way through just over three dozen shorts in the period between 1930 and 1933. When the public (and MGM) grew tired of the character, Iwerks retired Flip and debuted a new creation, Willie Whopper.
As his name implies, young Willie is a big fat liar, spinning tall tales for anyone who will listen. In his first appearance, 1933′s The Air Race, Willie tells his schoolyard chums the story of “the time I won the National Air Race.” The short even features a brief animated cameo by aviatrix Amelia Earhart, who crowns Willie the winner at the end. However, The Air Race was never released in public because MGM did not care for the final version. The story was reworked as Spite Flight, which would become the second Willie Whopper short distributed to theaters.
As with his predecessor, Flip, Willie Whopper went through several design changes over the course of the production of the shorts. Whereas in The Air Race Willie is a relatively thin young boy, in later cartoons he is drawn as much more rotund. Still, the changes did not result in longevity for Willie Whopper: while the character enjoyed a brief moment of popularity, ultimately only fourteen shorts were produced between 1933 and 1934.
Iwerks’ next endeavor was a series of shorts called ComiColor Cartoons, which his studio produced between 1933 and 1936. The ComiColor series ultimately represented the best of the Iwerks Studio’s output in the 1930s. The shorts were based on fairy tales and classic stories from literature ranging from Jack and the Beanstalk (the first ComiColor produced in 1933) to Don Quixote to the controversial Little Black Sambo cartoon (which was eventually banned). One particular short, 1935′s Balloon Land, gained a new audience in the 1980s after being featured on the popular children’s show Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
The ComiColor series was created using the Cinecolor process. Throughout most of the 1930s, Walt Disney held an exclusive contract with Technicolor, and no other studio could use that (infinitely better) process to make their own cartoon shorts. Cinecolor was the next best option, and was widely utilized by the lower-budget Hollywood studios. Many of the shorts were filmed by Iwerks himself using a multi-plane camera he had built from random parts of an old Chevrolet. The use of this camera allowed Iwerks to implement a sort of three-dimensional effect in some of the ComiColor cartoons–an impressive technique for the time (and one that would soon be replicated by Disney for the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).
As innovative as some of the ComiColor shorts were, they marked the end of the Iwerks Studio. After MGM declined to continue distributing Iwerks’ products in 1934, distribution of the shorts fell to Celebrity Pictures. The arrangement would only last until 1936, and Iwerks was forced to close the studio that bore his name. For the next couple of years, Iwerks was a sort of freelance animator, producing several Looney Tunes shorts at Warner Bros. and working briefly for Columbia Pictures’ animation division.
It’s doubtful that the loss of the studio was particularly heartbreaking for Iwerks. Despite the initial success of the Iwerks Studio, the animator was never particularly happy in his new venture. By the end of the decade, he had to acknowledge to himself that his interests lay not in crafting new characters and stories, but in experimentation with the technology of the time, trying new, heretofore unseen tricks with the camera to better enhance the illusion at play. In 1940, Iwerks once again joined the Disney studio, albeit in a new capacity: as a special effects wizard.
Iwerks was more than up to the challenge. Within the first decade of his return to Disney, he invented a multi-head optical printer, a device which allowed for the realistic-looking combination of live-action and animation in 1940s package films such as The Three Caballeros and Song of the South. Never satisfied, Iwerks continued to tinker with his printer, improving its capabilities exponentially (and eventually winning the first of two technical Academy Awards for his efforts). Iwerks also conceived the idea of color traveling matte composite photography, the technology that made possible such sophisticated live-action/animation scenes as the penguin dance in 1964′s Mary Poppins.
Another innovation used in Mary Poppins that Iwerks helped to develop was the use of yellowscreen technology, in which actors were filmed in front of a white screen while being lit with sodium vapor lights. This process allowed for matte shots to be inserted into live-action shots, permitting live-action elements and animated scenes to blend together almost seamlessly. When Iwerks worked on the production of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds in 1963, he used the yellowscreen technology to compose the shots of the attacking birds (for his efforts, Iwerks was nominated once more for the Oscar for Special Effects, though he ultimately lost to Cleopatra, for some reason unbeknownst to yours truly).
Iwerks also took the existing technology of xerography and adapted it to the field of animation. He tinkered with a Xerox camera and eventually was able to design a device that would transfer animators’ drawings directly onto the animation cels as opposed to having each one individually hand-inked. This process was first used for the production of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it reportedly saved the Disney studios quite a bit of money that would have been spent trying to animate all of those multi-spotted dogs!
Not all of Iwerks’ time was spent working on films, however. In the 1960s, he joined what would later become the Disney Imagineering department, working on Disney theme park attractions such as “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “It’s a Small World.”
From animator to studio head to technical wizard, Ub Iwerks had a long, productive, and innovative career. By the time he passed away in 1971, at the age of seventy, he had secured his position as one of the true pioneers of modern animation. In recent years, his contributions have become even more well-known, and his role in elevating the House of Mouse to its storied heights has been recognized by the Disney company itself, which inducted Iwerks into its “Legends” hall of fame in 1989. Ub’s son, Don Iwerks, followed in his footsteps as a technical wizard in his own right, working for Disney for more than thirty-five years (and becoming a Legend himself in 2009).
The young innovators, Disney and Iwerks
Even though Walt and Ub’s friendship never recovered from Ub’s move towards independence in 1930, the two men truly comprised a partnership that was made in cinematic heaven. Each respected the other for what he could do, and each allowed the other to aspire to greatness. Though Iwerks was content to remain in the background in his later years, leaving the showmanship to Disney, his contributions were nonetheless vitally important to the development of the Walt Disney Company as a force to be reckoned with.
Strange to think that a dinosaur eventually gave birth to a talking mouse … but that is essentially what happened when two young animators named Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks met in 1919.
Disney is, of course, a legendary name in the history of animation, having arguably done more for the field than any other figure in the history of film. But Iwerks’ contributions to the very foundations of the Walt Disney Company are not as well-known. Iwerks was, for many years, Walt’s closest friend and confidant, and he was instrumental to the creation of Disney’s most beloved character.
Disney and Iwerks met when both were teenagers, working for an art studio in Kansas City, Iwerks’ hometown. The two young men had been greatly impressed by Winsor McCay’s groundbreaking 1914 animated short, Gertie the Dinosaur, and in 1920 formed their own short-lived company, Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. When that failed, first Disney and then Iwerks took up work at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, where the aspiring animators began to study the process of film animation.
Two years later, Disney formed the Laugh-O-Gram Studio and signed a contract to produce six short animated fairy tales. Iwerks was hired to assist on the animation, but soon went back to the ad company, as Disney barely had enough money to keep the studio open, let alone pay his animators (on that note, Laugh-O-Gram employed several animators who would later find their own measure of fame, including Rudy Ising and Hugh Harman, eventual founders of both Warner Bros. and MGM’s animation divisions, and Looney Tunes stalwart Friz Freleng). Still, Iwerks continued to work on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts, often for little or no pay.
Laugh-O-Gram only lasted for a little over a year before Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy. The company had produced ten short films (all of which have since fallen into the public domain). The first of these, Little Red Riding Hood (1922), was lost for decades and only rediscovered and restored in 1998.
The only credited name on Red Riding Hood is Disney’s own, though Iwerks was the chief animator for this and other Laugh-O-Gram productions.
When Laugh-O-Gram failed, Disney decided to try his luck in California, leaving Iwerks behind in Kansas City. But in 1924, Disney offered Iwerks a position in his new company, Disney Brothers Productions. Disney gave Iwerks 20% ownership of the new company, and the two embarked on the creation of a series of short films inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland.
These “Alice comedies” had gotten their start at Laugh-O-Gram, where in 1923, the first short, Alice’s Wonderland, had been produced. The Alice shorts were notable for featuring live-action combined with animation, much in the same vein as Gertie the Dinosaur. In 57 shorts, Alice, initially played by young Virginia Davis (and later played by Margie Gay, Lois Hardwick, and a young Dawn O’Day–who would eventually rechristen herself Anne Shirley), interacted with the animated creatures on screen in various adventures.
Disney directed the shorts, while Iwerks took charge of the animation. The Alice comedies were popular, and the pair continued to produce them through 1927. By then, the conceit had grown tired, and Disney and Iwerks had moved on to the creation of new character: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who made his premiere in the 1927 short Trolley Troubles.
The first two dozen Oswald shorts were, by and large, animated by Iwerks, with contributions from other animators like Harman and Freleng (who, like Iwerks, had been brought to California by Disney after the failure of Laugh-O-Gram). Sadly, many of those initial Oswald cartoons have been lost over time, and the original versions of many of the existing shorts are missing.
Oswald presented Disney with his first true animated success. Whatever joy Disney felt at this, however, was soon tempered by the realization that his contract with the distributor of the cartoons, Universal, dictated that the studio now owned the rights to the Oswald character. When Disney asked for a budget increase for the Oswald shorts, he was told that he would instead have to accept a drastic pay cut himself, and was further informed that most of his animators had signed with Universal, something Disney saw as a horrible betrayal. In the end, Universal went on to produce several dozen Oswald shorts under the auspices of Walter Lantz (who would go on to create Woody the Woodpecker in 1940). Disney and Iwerks lost control of their creation, and found themselves without an animated star for Disney Brothers Studio.
In the wake of the Oswald fiasco, Disney was determined to protect his future characters. He turned to Iwerks to create a new face for the Disney company. Iwerks was inspired by some sketches of mice that fellow animator Harman had jotted on a photograph of Disney in 1925 (Walt had had a pet mouse in Kansas City of which he was particularly fond). Iwerks modified the original Oswald design (so as to avoid any accusations of copyright infringement) and created a simplistic, rounded body design for the new mouse character, featuring the iconic rounded ears that even today remain an instantly recognizable symbol of the Walt Disney Company. Walt originally intended to name the new character “Mortimer Mouse,” but his wife Lillian thought “Mortimer” to be too pretentious a name, and the new creation was instead christened “Mickey” (incidentally, the name “Mortimer” would reappear about a decade later, used as the name for Mickey’s rival for Minnie Mouse’s affection).
Iwerks served as the main animator for the first two years of Mickey’s existence, a daunting job that was made no easier by the shared sense of perfectionism between Iwerks and Disney. While Walt composed the stories for the Mickey shorts, Iwerks was almost solely responsible for the animation, which required his producing an average of seven hundred drawings every day before each short could be completed. With this unheard-of level of production, the first Mickey cartoon was completed in a mere three weeks.
That first cartoon, the 1928 silent short Plane Crazy, did not manage to attract a distributor, much to Disney’s disappointment. A second silent short, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, also failed to attract notice from studios. But the third time was the charm: in November 1928, Disney secured a distribution deal with Celebrity Productions, and Steamboat Willie was released to almost instant acclaim.
Steamboat Willie is often credited as the first sound cartoon, but this is not exactly true: several sound cartoons had been released by Fleischer Studios earlier in the decade under the Song Car-Tunes title (these shorts are notable for the innovation of a “bouncing ball” to help audiences keep track of the melody). But the sound on these shorts was not fully synchronized to the action onscreen. To avoid this problem in his own cartoons, Disney utilized a click track, which helped the studio musicians maintain exact timing during recording. Because of this, Willie is widely considered to be the first commercially successful animated short to feature precisely synchronized sound. After its warm reception, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin’ Gaucho were both synchronized to sound and released on their own, again to much praise.
While Mickey became a huge hit, the friendship between Disney and Iwerks began to disintegrate under Disney’s growing demands. Iwerks believed that he was not receiving all of the credit he should have gotten as Disney’s proverbial right-hand man, and he chafed at Disney’s notoriously temperamental attitude. Disney, for his part, was frustrated by his distribution deal with Pat Powers, the owner of Celebrity Pictures, who was not paying Disney everything he was owed through the deal. Walt took out his frustration on his animators, and Iwerks bore the brunt of his displeasure. Angry and tired of the fractious working relationship, Iwerks signed a deal with Powers to leave Disney Brothers Studios and found an animation company under his own name.
It was the end of an era. Walt was infuriated at Iwerks’ perceived betrayal. Their friendship–and the prolific partnership that had given the world one of its most beloved animated creations–was over … at least for the time being.
Like many early figures in the slowly-emerging field of animated film, Winsor McCay initially developed his artistic talent as a comic strip artist and vaudevillian. Born in Canada and educated in the United States, McCay got his start in entertainment doing “chalk talks” on the vaudeville circuit. Much like J. Stuart Blackton, a groundbreaking figure in early animation in his own right, McCay drew figures on a chalkboard and altered them during his performance. His act, “The Seven Ages of Man,” depicted the gradual aging of two sketched faces, and was not wholly dissimilar from Blackton’s own “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (which is considered by many scholars to be the first truly “animated” short film).
But even before he gained fame on the vaudeville circuit alongside such notable names as Harry Houdini and W.C. Fields, McCay had already established himself as a skilled writer and illustrator of comic strips. In 1903, McCay created his first strip while working for the Cincinnati Enquirer, called A Tale of the Jungle Imps by Felix Fiddle. It ran for forty-three weeks that year, and by the time the final installment was published in November, McCay had accepted a job at the New York Herald as a staff cartoonist.
While at the Herald, McCay created a number of strips, of which two became his most successful: Dream of the Rarebit Fiend(which ran from 1904 through 1911) and Little Nemo in Slumberland(which ran from 1905 through 1914). The former was a more adult comic strip–and was actually published in the Herald-owned Evening Telegram–and depicted a series of characters whose love for rich foods like the titular Welsh rarebit right before bedtime caused an unending series of nightmares.
While Rarebit Fiend was more popular among readers, Little Nemo would ultimately be the most groundbreaking strip McCay ever produced. Depicting the dream adventures of an imaginative young boy, Nemo was boldly drawn in a surrealistic style befitting the dreamlike subject matter. The strips are beautifully detailed, and though they take up a full newspaper page, no space is wasted, and the narrative flows smoothly from panel to panel. The Nemo strips are sometimes crazy and bizarre, but always entertaining and wonderfully inventive. Nemo was published by the Herald until 1911; that year, in a bid for more creative and personal freedom, McCay jumped to William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, where the strip continued (under the name In the Land of Wonderful Dreams so as to avoid legal entanglements with the Herald) until 1914.
"The Walking Bed," 1908
In 1911, Blackton and McCay teamed up to produce a short film based on Little Nemo, titled Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (nowadays, it’s generally just referred to as Little Nemo). The film depicts McCay revealing his intentions to animate his comic strip to his “artist friends,” who then ridicule him for the notion. The short takes us through the process of creating and filming the animated segment from conception to completion. And in the end, we’re treated to one of the earliest examples of the future riches that animation would shower upon the world.
[If you're the impatient type, in the clip posted below, the animated segment begins around 7:25 and pops into color around 8:12.]
What is most impressive about Nemo is that the animation portion was almost entirely done by McCay alone. He personally drew over 4000 individual ink-and-paper drawings, crafting and timing the “animated” movements by stopwatch. The only thing McCay did not do by himself was the coloring of the frames; the cartoonist hired an outside artist to tint every single frame by hand.
There’s no narrative quality to the Nemo animation, and the surrealistic nature of the Nemo comic strips translates well into animated form. The short is a series of vignettes, an exhibition of character movement and humor as Nemo takes two of the strip’s supporting characters, Flip and The Imp, through a series of comical paces. Nemo then sketches the figure of the Princess (daughter of King Morpheus of Slumberland), who comes to “life” and rides away with Nemo on a throne inside the mouth of a dragon. The entire segment is delightful and whimsical, though its abbreviated running time only serves to whet the audience’s appetite for more.
McCay delivered “more” in 1914 with the creation of the short film Gertie the Dinosaur. Gertie is considered by many scholars to be the first instance of an animated character showing true elements of individualized personality. Gertie is, by turns, playful, mischievous, recalcitrant, repentant, and utterly adorable (the way she scratches her head with her tail is endearingly cute). As in Nemo, there’s no real sense of narration. McCay appears briefly at the beginning of the film to introduce Gertie before stepping off-screen and running the dinosaur through a series of tricks via title cards. The animator then reappears at the end, closing the cartoon by taking a ride on “Gertie’s” back.
The creation of Gertie was just as painstaking as the earlier process with Nemo. McCay ultimately sketched nearly 10,000 drawings of Gertie, and he hired another artist to sketch all of the backgrounds, which were unusually finely detailed. The drawings were done on rice paper, which was then mounted to cardboard for the process of animating the sequences. McCay crafted a revolutionary method for ensuring a smooth transition between different frames, the precursor to “keyframe” animation (which allowed for relatively seamless movement in traditionally hand-drawn animated features).
McCay would go on to make several more animated short features, including one depicting (in a documentary-type form) the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania. But his animated output was ultimately limited at the demand of his employer. McCay came to regret his move from the Herald to the American. He reluctantly turned his focus back to drawing editorial cartoons at the behest of Hearst, but his heart was not in the work. Hearst, for his part, exerted his influence to try to prevent theater owners from booking McCay’s showings of animated films like Gertie–he felt that the artist’s “childish” cartooning work detracted from the more important business of crafting political cartoons, particularly during the height of World War I. As a result, in 1924, McCay declined renewing his contract with Hearst and returned to the Herald, where he restarted the Little Nemo strip, but it only lasted for a couple of years.
In his later years, McCay grew resentful of what he viewed as the commercialization of animation. In 1927, when a group of young animators decided to host a dinner in his honor, McCay delivered a speech in which he stated, ”Animation should be an art, that is how I conceived it … but as I see what you fellows have done with it is making it into a trade … not an art, but a trade.” McCay died in 1934, and his work was nearly forgotten for more than a decade until 1947, when his films were discovered in storage and properly restored and preserved for posterity.
Still, despite his misgivings about the future direction of the animated feature, Winsor McCay’s legacy as the venerable “Father of Animation” (a title he sometimes shares with Blackton, depending upon the historian telling the tale) lives on. The annual Annie Awards, which celebrate the year’s best achievements in the field of animation, named its lifetime achievement award after McCay. Over the years, that prize has been awarded to some of the biggest names in modern animation, most of whom (one could argue) were directly influenced by McCay’s work: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc, Ub Iwerks, Bob Clampett, Mary Blair, Hayao Miyazaki, Don Bluth, John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Brad Bird, Matt Groening, and Walt Disney, among many more. In 1994, Gertie was voted the sixth greatest cartoon of all time in a peer-reviewed survey of 1000 professionals in the field; it was the oldest cartoon to appear on the list. McCay’s comic strip work is still highly influential, and vestiges of the Nemo style can still be seen in the Sunday morning funny pages.
Bill Waterson, the creator of my favorite comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes (still miss it!), was particularly influenced by Nemo. The beautifully-crafted half-page Sunday Calvin strips, particularly from the latter half of the comic’s run, are reminiscent of McCay’s glorious full-page Nemo adventures.
Without McCay’s talent and belief in the still-new medium of animated film, who knows how the history of animation would ultimately have been written? Winsor McCay’s importance in the development of animation as both art and entertainment is undeniable. With the help of an overly precocious young boy and an adorably obedient pen-and-ink dinosaur, one man set the stage for animation’s evolution from parlor trick to beloved cinematic and artistic medium.
Yesterday’s Google doodle honored the 100th birthday of Disney artist Mary Blair, and you know I couldn’t let that go by without a mention. So this week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons entry is dedicated to the beautiful, bold, and brilliant work of a true pioneer in the art of animation.
Blair showed her talent for art from a very young age. She was an alumna of the Chouinard Art Institute, and went to work for Disney rival Ub Iwerks’ cartoon studio (whose shorts were largely released by MGM) in 1933, alongside her husband, Lee Blair. The Blairs eventually ended up working for Disney, and Mary cut her teeth working on an ultimately unreleased extra segment of the 1940 musical Fantasiaand contributing to the production of Dumbo(1941).
Throughout the 1940s, she worked on the series of Disney package films that were created to save money when the animation studio was essentially forced to shut down production during World War II. Blair traveled to South America with other animators as a part of FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policy, which resulted in the production of the first two package films: Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Cabelleros (1944). Both Blairs appear in the flesh (along with Walt and fellow animators Norman Ferguson–the creator of Pluto–and Frank Thomas–one of the legendary “Nine Old Men”) during the live-action segments that are interspersed between the animation of Amigos. Blair ultimately served as one of the art supervisors for both of these films, and many of the South American landscapes present in these films are based on watercolors that she painted while on that trip (an example of the concept art she created in South America is posted above).
Though she worked on other package films, shorts, and live-action/animation combo films like Song of the South (1946) throughout the decade, Blair’s greatest contribution to the Disney canon arguably came with her work as the color stylist and concept artist for the studio’s first three forays back into the world of feature-length animation: Cinderella(1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953). Her somewhat Modernist artistic style is all over these films, and so influential that homages to it continue to pop up in animated features even today.
The two most popular terms used to describe Blair’s work seem to be “childlike” and “innocent.” And while these qualities are abundant, there is also a casual elegance to the forms that she designs. The color combinations Blair uses are deceptively simple, yet beautifully blended to create candy-coated worlds of visual splendor. This is particularly evident in Alice, where the story itself, with all its illogical genius, needs the burst of eye-popping, resplendent color to fully convey the nuances of author Lewis Carroll’s wonderful world. Blair’s freedom with bold swaths of color enhances the surrealism of the film while adding an endearing touch of whimsy that makes the film so very appealing.
Blair’s work went beyond her storied work for the House of Mouse–she also was responsible for numerous advertising campaigns throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and she was also, fittingly, a children’s book illustrator. In that capacity, Blair illustrated several stories in the popular Little Golden Books series, including I Can Fly (1951) and the Golden Book of Little Verses (1953).
Though Blair left the Disney studios after production on Peter Pan was completed, Walt (who had long demonstrated that he was one of Blair’s biggest fans) asked her to design the “It’s a Small World” pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. The attraction was later installed at Disneyland in California and replicated at other Disney parks around the world (some of her concept art for the ride is posted above). Blair also created murals for the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland and the Contemporary Resort at Disney World in Florida.
Mary Blair passed away in 1978, but her influence on the history of animation is undeniable. Blair was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. Not only did she do remarkable things with color and design, but she paved the way for female animators to be taken seriously in the field (though, admittedly, the number of female animators is sadly still disproportionate to their male counterparts even today). In recognition of her contributions, Blair was named a Disney Legend in 1991. Her work continues to be studied and admired for its beauty, charm, and sheer inventiveness. Over a career spanning more than four decades, Blair didn’t just design cartoons–she helped elevate animation into an art form.
Today, my blog partners Carrie and Nikki celebrate their (mmph mmphth) birthday! Yes, they were born on the exact same day on the exact same year (and no, they aren’t twins).
To celebrate the occasion, for today’s Saturday Morning Cartoons entry, I’m posting the appropriately-titled Disney short ”Donald’s Happy Birthday” from 1949. Enjoy!
Wishing a very happy day for two of the loveliest people I know. I’m looking forward to seeing both of you in a couple of weeks! :)
[P.S. Our next post will be our 300th on this blog!!]
