Walt Disney: An American Original

“AFTER the war was over, we were like a bear coming out of hibernation,” Roy Disney once remarked. “We were skinny and gaunt and we had no fat on our bones. Those were lost years for us.”

For the rest of the movie industry, the war had been a period of unparalleled prosperity, and the demand for film entertainment continued in the immediate postwar years. Walt and Roy Disney found themselves in the anomalous position of facing financial peril—it usually happened that the cyclical trends of the film business had little effect on the Disney company. After four years of devoting most of its energies to government work, Walt Disney Productions was out of tune with public tastes, financially depleted, confused about its own destiny. It was a bad time for Walt Disney. His artists were returning from military service, and he faced the challenge of rebuilding his staff and charging it with enthusiasm. But he had no great, innovative challenge, like a Snow White or a Fantasia.

By the end of the first postwar year, the company’s indebtedness to the Bank of America had swollen to $4,300,000. The domestic market provided little income. Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo were now playing in the European markets which had been erased during the war, but the damaged economies of the countries would not allow export of the revenue. With the Disney debt mounting and the company’s future unpromising, the Bank of America urged Roy to effect economies. Roy related the bank’s concern to Walt. But Walt refused to cut down his staff or curtail production. His answer was the same as it had always been in beleaguered times: “We can lick ‘em with product.” That was his credo; when times were bad and the bankers were complaining, the studio needed to get its entertainment before the public.

Joe Rosenberg, who had helped arrange the money to finish Snow White, continued the bank’s pressure. Finally Roy told him: “Look, Joe, don’t keep beating me over the head about this thing. There is only so much I can do with Walt. You come out and talk to him. Maybe you can impress him with how serious this matter is.”

Rosenberg made an appointment with Walt, arriving at the studio in a driving rainstorm. Roy accompanied him to Walt’s office, and Rosenberg began expounding on the Disney financial condition. He explained that the bank had a responsibility to its depositors and had to invest its money prudently.

“Now you know that the Bank of America has always been friendly to the Disney company and has helped it in every way possible,” said Rosenberg. “But no matter how friendly we feel, we must protect our investors.”

“No. Roy and I are agreed that you must cut down on your outgo drastically. Your expenses each week are entirely too high in light of the amount of income you are receiving. You’ve simply got to cut back.”

“No, let me finish, let me finish.” Rosenberg went on with his lecture, despite Walt’s interruptions. Finally, Rosenberg said, “All right, I’m finished. What have you got to say?”

Walt gazed out at the rain falling in the studio streets. “You know, I’m disappointed in you, Joe,” he began. “I thought you were a different kind of banker. But it turns out you’re just a regular goddam banker. You’ll loan a guy an umbrella on a sunshiny day, but when it rains you want it back. Okay. You can have it back. We’ll take our business to another bank.”

Rosenberg stared at Walt in open-mouthed amazement. He realized Walt actually believed he could borrow from another bank when he was already more than $4,000,000 in debt. Rosenberg leaned back his head and laughed loudly. “Walt, you take the cake!” he exclaimed.

It was the end of the meeting, but not the end of pressures from both the bank and Roy. The exchanges between the two brothers became more argumentive, with each refusing to give ground. Before, they had always been able to resolve their differences by compromise, usually with Roy agreeing to try to find the money to support Walt’s projects. But now Roy was convinced that the money simply could not be found, and for Walt to expand production would be ruinous.

Their biggest quarrels came when Walt proposed embarking on the studio’s first postwar cartoon feature. He wanted to start production on Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland, which had been in story development before the war. Mindful of the financial debacle of Pinocchio, Roy insisted that the company could not undertake a lengthy, multi-million-dollar production. He claimed that neither Peter Pan nor Alice had public appeal. The two brothers argued until eight o’clock in Roy’s office one evening. After a heated exchange, Roy snapped, “Look—you’re letting this place drive you to the nuthouse. That’s one place I’m not going with you!” Roy stalked out of the office.

Both brothers slept poorly that night. Roy arrived at his office early the next morning, feeling totally depressed. He heard Walt’s cough down the hallway. Walt entered, his face as grim as Roy’s. Walt seemed too emotional to speak. Then he said, “Isn’t it amazing what a horse’s ass a fellow can be sometimes?” Both brothers smiled, and the argument was over.

Walt postponed the start of his first postwar cartoon feature, agreeing the studio couldn’t afford a costly project which would not reach the theaters for three or four years. By that time his company might be insolvent—or forced to amalgamate with a bigger corporation. The thought of subjecting himself to the control of a parent company was repugnant to Walt—“I would rather liquidate or sell out than do that.”

Walt embarked on a series of brief cartoon subjects, based on musical themes. He did not choose the classics, as in Fantasia; he had once planned a sequel but abandoned it because of the commercial failure of Fantasia. This time he picked middlebrow or popular pieces, with stories based on legends such as the Martins and the Coys and Casey at the Bat. Dinah Shore, Benny Goodman, Jerry Colonna, Nelson Eddy and the Andrews Sisters were among the performers on the sound track. One modern classic was included—Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. The Russian composer offered the composition to Disney during a visit to the studio, declaring, “I have composed this with the hope that I would get to see you and that you would make a cartoon with my music.”

The short cartoons were combined in a feature called Make Mine Music, released in August 1946 for a modest profit. Except for the Peter and the Wolf episode, Walt was not pleased with the film. He realized that his animators were capable of much better.

Walt resumed production on Mickey and the Beanstalk, which had been interrupted by the war. It was combined with a cartoon based on a Sinclair Lewis story, “Bongo,” and released as Fun and Fancy Free. Donald Duck and Goofy, supposedly the supporting players, dominated Mickey and the Beanstalk, and it was the last important effort by Walt to revive Mickey’s career in films. It was also the first time that someone else recorded Mickey’s voice. Walt complained that his voice was getting too hoarse for the famous falsetto, and he said to the studio’s sound-effects expert, Jim Macdonald, “Why don’t you do it?” Macdonald delivered the voice of Mickey thereafter.

Song of the South derived from the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, which Walt had enjoyed since childhood. He planned it as a cartoon feature, but to reduce costs he interspersed cartoons with a live-action story. Song of the South proved an important transitional film, pointing the new direction that Walt believed he had to take.

“I knew that I must diversify,” he recalled later. “I knew the diversifying of the business would be the salvation of it. I tried that in the beginning, because I didn’t want to be stuck with the Mouse. So I went into the Silly Symphonies. It did work out. The Symphonies led to the features; without the work I did on the Symphonies, I’d never have been prepared even to tackle Snow White. A lot of the things I did in the Symphonies led to what I did in Fantasia. I took care of talents I couldn’t use any other way. Now I wanted to go beyond even that; I wanted to go beyond the cartoon. Because the cartoon had narrowed itself down. I could make them either seven or eight minutes long—or eighty minutes long. I tried the package things, where I put five or six together to make an eighty-minute feature. Now I needed to diversify further, and that meant live action.”

Song of the South was 70 percent live action and 30 percent cartoon, with some sequences of both. Combining live action and cartoons was not the simple matter that it had been in the Alice Comedies. Now Walt was dealing with Technicolor film and sophisticated animation, and the technical matters required meticulous planning. The live action was photographed first. James Baskett, who was portraying Uncle Remus, performed before actual sets that were painted to seem like cartoon backgrounds. The live-action footage was edited to its precise length, then given to the animators, who added the cartoon figures.

The introduction to the first cartoon sequence presented a special problem. The action called for Baskett to explain to the boy, played by Bobby Driscoll: “The critters was closer to the folks, and the folks was closer to the critters, and it was better all around. It was one of those Zip-a-dee-doo-dah days….” He was to begin the movie’s feature song against a real-life scene projected onto a transparent backdrop, then walk into the cartoon set. Wilfred Jackson, who was directing the sequence, realized the problem of making the transition from rear-projection to the actual set. He tried it once and it didn’t work. On the last day of the filming at Goldwyn studio, Walt arrived on the set, and Jackson admitted that he had no solution. At such times of crisis Walt became uncommonly gentle, and he gathered Jackson, cameraman Gregg Toland and other technicians into a circle for a discussion of the problem. None of the proposals seemed practical. Then Walt said, “Why don’t we do this? We’ll have Jim sitting in front of the fire, and we’ll light his face but not the background. We’ll be in tight, with a clear area of blue sky behind his head. We’ll have the other lights covered with cardboard. When Jim says ‘Zip’ all the lights will come on, and he’ll walk into the bright animation.” His solution not only worked; it gave the scene additional value.

Song of the South had its premiere in Atlanta, where Joel Chandler Harris was still revered, and the film drew almost as warm a response as Gone with the Wind. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” the best movie song of 1946, and James Baskett won a special Oscar for his performance as Uncle Remus. Theater business for Song of the South was generally good, but the production cost had been high—$2,125,000—and the profit was only $226,000.

In his search for ways to sustain the studio during the postwar period, Walt considered the making of commercial and educational films. Such an activity seemed a natural outgrowth of the informational films the studio had made during the war, and it held the promise of much-needed revenue. Walt brought educators to the studio for conferences on how films could augment instruction in the schools. The educators offered a multitude of theories, and Walt listened to them all. Disney agents solicited contracts from big corporations for informational films, and several firms sought the Disney expertise. The studio made films on tire-making for Firestone and hand tools for General Motors.

Ben Sharpsteen, who had been in charge of the industrial films, one day showed Walt a storyboard for a film sponsored by a Midwestern electrical company. Walt remarked, “This isn’t for Disney. We should be in the entertainment business. Let’s stop all this.”

Walt came to the same conclusion about the educational films: “That’s not for us. Let’s stick to entertainment. We’ll make educational films, but they’ll be sugar-coated education.” The genesis of his plan came soon afterward when he stopped Sharpsteen in the hallway of the Animation Building and asked, “Do we have any photographers in Alaska?”

“Well, we should. That’s a fascinating place, Alaska. A lot of servicemen were stationed up there during the war, and they learned about it. Some of them are going back as homesteaders. That’s our last frontier, the last undeveloped place in the United States. We should have some photographers up there. Look into it.”

Sharpsteen prepared some storyboards about the folklore of Alaska. Walt wasn’t interested. He pointed to photographs of seals and Eskimos in their winter and summer lives, and he said, “That’s the sort of thing we should look for. Let’s get going on this.”

Alfred and Elma Milotte, a couple who had made travelogues and industrial and training films, were hired by Disney to spend a year in Alaska photographing all aspects of human and animal life, with special emphasis on the seasonal activities of the seals and the Eskimos. They began making regular shipments of film to the studio. Walt saw little in the footage to interest him, but he instructed Sharpsteen to have an editor classify the film by subject matter and keep a running file. The volume of film mounted; Roy Disney became concerned over growing costs. He asked Sharpsteen, “What is Walt going to do with all that Alaska stuff?” Sharpsteen suggested that Walt might make “some kind of glorified travelogue out of it.”

Walt decided to see Alaska for himself. In August of 1947, he accepted the invitation of a friend, Russell Havenstrite, for a flying tour of Alaska. Lilly and Sharon were also invited, Diane being away at summer camp. Shortly before departure time, Lilly decided the trip would be too rugged for her, and so Walt went off with his ten-year-old Sharon. The party flew in Havenstrite’s luxurious DC3, landing for fuel in Seattle, then proceeding to Juneau and Anchorage. Walt played both father and mother to Sharon, braiding her hair and washing out her underwear and rescuing her when she went sleepwalking. The trip continued beyond the Arctic Circle and to the base of Mount McKinley, and Walt took photographs everywhere. Near the end of the journey, a flight was scheduled from Nome to the Eskimo hamlet of Candle. Havenstrite had just received news that he had become a grandfather for the first time, and he and Walt began to celebrate during the flight. Soon the pilot announced that the radio had gone out, and there was no way to find a landing field through the dense clouds. The surrounding country was mountainous, and visibility was getting worse. The pilot could do nothing but continue circling and hope for a break in the clouds. Walt contemplated the fate of his old polo friend, Will Rogers. He took another drink.

The flight had been scheduled for a half-hour; after two hours, the plane was still circling, and gasoline was running low. The pilot could wait no longer, and he descended into the clouds. Finally the fog thinned out and the ground came in sight; the plane was directly over Candle! The travelers rejoiced as they landed, and when Walt stepped out of the small plane, he fell on his face. When he later related the adventure, he admitted, “I don’t know whether I kissed the ground—or fell on it.”

After his Alaska trip, Walt viewed the Milotte footage with greater interest. But he could see no theatrical value in the endless views of canneries, forests, glaciers and mountain peaks. One sequence intrigued him. The Milottes had spent two seasons in the Pribilof Islands, filming the habits of the vast herds of seals.

“Ben, I’ve been thinking about those Alaska films,” Walt said to Sharpsteen. “Why don’t we take what we have and build a story around the life cycle of the seals? Focus on them—don’t show any humans at all. We’ll plan this for a theatrical release, but don’t worry about the length. Make it just as long as it needs to be so you can tell the story of the seals.” The completed picture ran twenty-seven minutes.

Walt himself suggested the title: “Well, it’s about seals on an island, so why don’t we call it Seal Island?” He announced that Seal Island would be the first of a series to be called True-Life Adventures—even though he hadn’t yet thought of other subjects to follow. The RKO salesmen declared it was impossible to sell a half-hour film and argued that it should be an hour and ten minutes. “I can’t make it an hour and ten minutes,” Walt replied. “I’d rather have the audience enjoy a half-hour than say the thing’s too long.”

He decided to prove the appeal of Seal Island as he had with Steamboat Willie and The Skeleton Dance: by going directly to the audience. In December 1948, Walt persuaded Albert Levoy, who operated the Crown Theater in Pasadena, to book Seal Island on a bill with a lengthy feature. Five thousand questionnaires were handed out to the theater’s customers; most of them replied that they preferred to see a film like Seal Island than another feature. Because Seal Island appeared in the Los Angeles area during the calendar year, it qualified for the Academy Awards, and it won as best two-reel documentary. The film was booked into the Loew’s State in New York on a bill with The Barkleys of Broadway, and it drew an excellent critical reaction. RKO was finally convinced to push Seal Island, and the company learned it could make as much money from a half-hour featurette as it could from a second feature.

As his first venture into non-cartoon features, Walt planned a film So Dear to My Heart, based on a Sterling North novel about a Kansas farm family of the same period when Walt was growing up in Marceline. The RKO salesmen argued that it would be hard to sell a Disney picture without cartoons, and he grudgingly included animated sequences. The film starred Burl Ives, Beulah Bondi, Harry Carey and the two child performers from Song of the South, Bobby Driscoll and Luana Patten. The two youngsters were the Disney studio’s first contract players since the Alice Comedies.

So Dear to My Heart continued the lackluster record of the postwar Disney films, and other “package” movies—Melody Time, another musical potpourri, and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, combining The Wind in the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow—also produced disappointing returns. The Disney product had failed to recapture its market, and now the entire film industry was beginning to undergo a convulsion which would shatter its foundations. Television had started to take its hold on the American public.

The Disney debt to the Bank of America mounted alarmingly, and the bankers were adamant: economies must be made. Walt reluctantly agreed, and he issued a communication to his staff requiring “a constructive attitude toward every dollar which goes into developing, producing and selling the scheduled pictures.” He announced he was enforcing a 34-percent reduction in payroll accounts, payroll taxes and capital additions and listed his objectives for the future:

Walt acknowledged the need for sound economic policies at the studio, but he emphasized to the bankers that slashing of production would be suicidal; the only way back to financial health, he was convinced, was to “lick ‘em with product.” But what kind of product? The “package” pictures were not the answer. Walt realized that he had to return to the full-length cartoon.

Three classics had been in development for several years—Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella. Walt did not feel comfortable with either Peter Pan or Alice, finding the characters too cold. Cinderella, on the other hand, possessed the qualities of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and he chose to go ahead with it. Walt assigned all of his top talent to the production. Ben Sharpsteen supervised production, with Wilfred Jackson, Ham Luske and Gerry Geronimi as directors. The story men were Bill Peet, Ted Sears, Homer Brightman, Ken Anderson, Ed Penner, Winston Hibler, Harry Reeves and Joe Rinaldi. Walt attended every story meeting, contributing his usual flood of ideas:

[The Fairy Godmother sequence] The carriage should be dainty. The wheels shouldn’t be enough to hold the weight. We should feel that it’s a fairy carriage….Cut out all excess dialogue and work on some new dialogue for Cinderella in counter to the melody while she is crying. Have her run out and hit the spot, and as she is saying this, let the animals come up and get closer. Have them gather around in a sympathetic manner. They don’t know whether they should approach her or not….Have the miracle happen at the end of the song. “The dream that you wish will come true” is where we start to bring the Fairy Godmother in. She materializes because she is there to grant the wish. The voices come back at Cinderella. Her faith is being thrown back at her. Everybody has gone through a “the hell with it” feeling….

[The Fairy Godmother’s Magic Song, “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”] We can get orchestral effects. The pumpkin can carry the beat. We might get the effect we want by having the music go up an octave. We should get something like a verse to come to, instead of returning to the chorus….We can get personality into the song. It shouldn’t be the Deanna Durbin type of thing. I don’t see her as goofy or stupid, but rather as having a wonderful sense of humor. Edna May Oliver had sort of what I mean—dignity, humor, etc., although she was more on the sarcastic side….I think the Fairy Godmother should be elderly—old enough to have wisdom. She should have a certain sincerity. She should have no identity, just be a type….

[The warning scene] Have the Fairy Godmother warn Cinderella. Work out some little thing—the dress will become rags again, the coach will become a pumpkin—after the stroke of twelve everything will be just as it was before. The Fairy Godmother is apologetic about this, but she is giving Cinderella an opportunity and hopes that by twelve something will happen….The Fairy Godmother could say, “Be on your way, child. Break hearts. Have fun. But don’t forget on the stroke of twelve everything will be as it was before.” The Fairy Godmother Union has set this up. If she performed miracles that lasted, she’d be out of business….

The directing animators for Cinderella were the Disney reliables: Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Eric Larson, Ward Kimball, Ollie Johnston, Marc Davis, Les Clark, John Lounsbery, Woolie Reitherman and Norm Ferguson. Extensive live-action photography was done as a guide for the animation. While the live action was helpful for the directors, who could determine beforehand whether the action would prove effective as cartoon, it restricted the animators. One of them remarked later that the human characters of Cinderella “seemed to have muddy feet.”

It had always been difficult to invent new mice in the studio that Mickey Mouse built, but Ward Kimball managed to make the Cinderella mice original and charming. Their nemesis, Lucifer the spoiled housecat, presented more of a problem. None of the character renderings pleased Walt. Then one day he was visiting Kimball’s steam train at his San Gabriel home. Walt saw the Kimball’s housecat, a round, furry calico, and he exclaimed, “Hey—there’s your model for Lucifer.”

The economics of the postwar movie business provided the opportunity for Disney’s first completely live-action feature. Like most war-damaged countries, England had frozen the payments due to American film companies, and Disney and RKO had amassed millions of dollars that could be spent only in the United Kingdom. RKO suggested that Walt use it to make films in England. He liked the idea and at first contemplated establishing a cartoon studio in England. But that would have meant training a complete staff of English animators, or else taking his own artists to England. He decided to use the frozen funds to make a live-action version of Treasure Island. He assigned a veteran Disney hand, Perce Pearce, as producer and another American, Byron Haskin, to direct. Lawrence Edward Watkin, whose novel On Borrowed Time Walt had admired, adapted the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, and Bobby Driscoll starred as Jim Hawkins. The rest of the cast and production staff were English.

Treasure Island gave Walt the opportunity to take Lilly, Diane and Sharon to England and leave behind the day-to-day concerns of the studio. He was stimulated by the challenges of live-action filming. When he returned to Burbank, he needled his animators: “Those actors over there in England, they’re great. You give ‘em the lines, and they rehearse it a couple of times, and you’ve got it on film—it’s finished. You guys take six months to draw a scene.”

The animators took his kidding good-naturedly, but they understood what was happening: Walt had found a new toy. Said one of the animators: “We realized that as soon as Walt rode on a camera crane, we were going to lose him.”