Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (6 page)

Disney’s non-Mickey series of animated shorts, labeled
Silly Symphonies,
also showed a marked shift in attitude. The
Sillies
began only a year after Mickey’s premiere in
Steamboat Willie. The Skeleton Dance
(1929) and many of the early
Sillies
shared much of the barnyard humor and animal abuse. Following the torture of black cats in
The Skeleton
Dance, Hell’s Bells
(1930) used the Underworld as its setting, “whose inhabitants include a three-headed dog and a dragon cow that gives fiery milk (even Hades has its barnyard aspects).”32 Another in the series,
King Neptune
(1932), managed to include a few topless mermaids in its burlesque of an undersea kingdom. Before Disney animation came under the censor’s eye, the
Sillies
tended to present a fantastic or foreign environment and used it for a random series of gags accompanied and patterned after a piece of classical music. Although wedding classical 16

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music to animation might be read as an attempt by Disney to gain some cultural notice (i.e., respectability), there is a marked Rabelaisian atmosphere in most of these early
Sillies
that link them to the bawdy/

body humor of Disney’s silent cartoons.

The carnivalesque died much more quickly in the
Silly Symphonies
than it did in the Mickeys, as the series took on a decidedly moral tone in its subject matter. No more
Skeleton Dances
or
Hell’s Bells.
By the end of 1932, the emphasis on classical music had waned and the importance of narrative began to take precedence over the random anarchy of gags.

In 1933, Disney would enjoy its biggest success since the introduction of Mickey Mouse when one of these new
Sillies
—
The Three Little Pigs
—became a box-office phenomenon. The Radio City Music Hall actually brought back the cartoon twice during the next year, and the cartoon would eventually earn $125,000, an unheard of amount for a short subject. With this success, the
Sillies
were dominated by popular fables and fairy tales traditionally used in socializing children.
The Three Little Pigs
taught audiences about the importance of hard work. A number of “lesson” stories followed:
The Grasshopper and the Ants
(1934),
The Wise Little Hen
(1934),
The Tortoise and the Hare
(1935),
The Golden Touch
(about King Midas) (1935),
The Country Cousin
(1936), and
The Moth and the
Flame
(1938).
Lullaby Land
(1933) came almost directly after
The Three Little Pigs
and, in an almost nightmarish fashion, portrays a baby’s dream-land in which the poor infant is set upon by all those things (scissors, ra-zors, matches, pins) that its parents had warned, “Baby mustn’t touch.”

This phrase echoes ominously as giant bogeymen chase the poor child and its little stuffed dog across the quilted comfort landscape after they dared to enter the “Forbidden Garden.”

A more telling example of the direction that Disney and his studio went with the
Sillies
in the late 1930s is
The Flying Mouse
(1934). A young mouse, ostracized by the rest of the children mice, wishes that he could fly. After rescuing a small fly from a spider web, the fly turns into a beautiful female fairy. With misgivings, she grants the mouse’s wish and gives him wings. Unfortunately, when the mouse goes to show off his newfound wings, he scares the entire mouse community who take him for a bat about to scoop off their children. Then, when he tries to live with the bats, they send him away by singing the song “You’re Nothing But a Nothing.” Finally, as the little mouse cries all alone, the fairy returns and rescinds his wish, and he scurries back home to the loving arms of his mother, having learned the lesson “Be yourself.”

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While this initial description of the short imparts the message that seems intended by the short, it is quite easy to find another lesson. Harry Benshoff’s appraisal of the message is “that it is better to be like everyone else, because being different causes ostracism and misery.”33 Most of the fables Disney adapted for its
Sillies
similarly advised audiences to do what they were told and to not upset the status quo. Whereas the early
Sillies
often presented carnivalesque free-for-alls that celebrated the exotic and partying for its own sake, the later
Sillies
stress conformity and the value of work over play. Robert Sklar describes the tone as “Don’t be too imaginative, don’t be too in-quisitive, don’t be too willful, or you’ll get into trouble—though there’s always time to learn your lesson and come out all right.”34

There was to be no cheerful overturning of the established order as had happened in the Alice Comedies, the Oswald shorts or the early Mickeys or
Sillies.

Even those
Sillies
that still presented fantastic worlds, and weren’t specifically aimed at teaching a moral, were affected by this change.

Sklar states that in these later cartoons “there is one right way to imagine (as elsewhere there is one right way to behave). The borders to fantasy are closed now.”35 Whereas something like
Hell’s Bells
randomly threw in gags about the Underworld, later cartoons such as
Flowers and
Trees
(1932),
The China Shop
(1934),
Music Land
(1935),
The Cookie Carnival
(1936) and
Woodland Cafe
(1937) all center around a male-female courtship.36 The courtship (whether between two trees, two porcelain figures, two musical instruments, two bugs, etc.) always played out as if the American middle-class ideal was the norm even in these realms of fantasy. There were no lascivious looks, no unbridled passion, no innuendo. Rather, it was all flowers and candy and sitting on the front porch swing. This tendency to paint all romance as innocent heterosexual courtship rituals grew quite similar to Mickey and Minnie’s small-town world of spending the evening singing at the piano.

Since most of the humor in Disney’s pre-1930 animation focused on the polymorphous perversity of characters’ bodies, the studio began to alter not just its carnivalesque
subject matter,
but also its animation
style.

The elimination of the udder from the cow was only the beginning of a process that continued apace throughout the 1930s, exacting ever more control over animated bodies. As Pluto and the baby kittens ably showed, characters acting “naturally” quickly became a crusade at the Disney studio during this new period, and, in order to get the desired 18

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effect, Walt soon decreed that a new type of animation was needed. This was done primarily by rejecting many of the early tenets of animated film in order to make bodies cohere to the “laws of nature.”

Before Disney’s ascent, bodies of characters in animated cartoons were often plastic and polymorphous, continually emphasizing their

“flatness” and that these were, after all, only drawings and hence capable of manipulating their bodies in any possible manner.37 Characters were instances of graphic design rather than volume and weight. Felix was made up of a series of right angles that served for a few specific poses. Mickey and Minnie were drawn using a number of circles—for ears, face, eyes, nose, hands and feet—with a pear-shaped body. Barely resembling an actual mouse, the rounded shape of Mickey made him visually appealing. Just as his predecessors, “from 1928 to 1931, the graphic design of Mickey Mouse was a fixed formula of circular shapes that seldom suggested weight, solidity, or life forces.”38

As such, characters could be poked, prodded, flattened, taken apart by the limbs without any apparent discomfort or lingering harm. Often, the characters would just go on in this newly acquired appearance, or the dismembered parts would move around with a mind of their own.39

Felix would constantly remove his tail to use it as a baseball bat or a tel-escope, for example. Koko the Clown was specifically shown as only a drop of ink, and parts of his body were erased and redrawn within the shorts themselves. Mickey, too, in his early days would adopt this plasticity. In
Gallopin’ Gaucho
(1928), for example, he pulls out yard after yard from his tail until he has enough “rope” to scale a wall and rescue Minnie. In
Steamboat Willie,
Pegleg Pete yanks Mickey by the midsection and Mickey’s body gets stretched like a piece of taffy that the mouse has to stuff back into his pants. Such jokes tended to emphasize the body as a site for polymorphous pleasure.40 Yet, it was precisely this “pleasure”

that parents were finding disturbing as Mickey gained more and more notoriety.

The move away from this older conception of animation began

through the studio’s use of technological advances. Since Disney had risen to popularity by wedding sound to his cartoons, the studio logically looked to further technological developments to maintain stature and success. An exclusive contract with Technicolor’s new and improved (and “more lifelike”) three-strip process resulted in
Flowers and
Trees
(1932), which would win Walt his first Academy Award.41 In 1937,
The Old Mill
premiered Disney’s latest technological advance—the Mul-M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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tiplane camera, a device that created an illusion of depth.42
The Old Mill
would win Walt yet another Academy Award.

Such use of technological developments pushed the studio towards a greater “realism” that gave characters more solidity and dimension than during the silent days.43 For example,
Flowers and Trees
used color to add depth to its forest setting. The figures in the background were painted in light pastels, while the figures in the foreground used bolder primary colors.44 The Multiplane camera furthered the illusion of dimensionality and perspective. Consequently, animation styles at the studio had to adapt to fit this greater realism. In November of 1932, Walt instituted art classes for the studio, run by Donald Graham from the Chouinard Art Institute of Los Angeles. Walt believed that this “could give his output a kind of
fluidity
and
realism
such as had never been achieved in animated cartoons before.”45 Giannalberto Bendazzi’s epic history of animated cartoons states plainly that Disney’s cartoons were

“no longer pure graphics, . . . [but] had become a real world in caricature, which obeyed logical laws.”46 In 1935, as this process was beginning to reap praise from critics and audiences, Walt explained the philosophy behind this trend towards more realistic motion: “I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things, based on the real, unless we first know the real.”47

The most important experiments during this shift in styles dealt with drawing characters. As former Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston state, “Disney animation has become synonymous with character drawings that appear to think, make decisions, and act of their own volition.”48 The success of “character animation” in differentiating the motions and personalities of the almost identical Three Little Pigs in 1933 strengthened this push for “realistic” action.

Now, characters not only appeared to think, they appeared to have a solid mass that would have to answer to the “natural” laws of gravity and physics. Characters were no longer able to take off their tails and use them as tools. No one walked around in a flattened state after being hit with a falling safe. The body in Disney animation was no longer polymorphous and potentially perverse. It was proper and

“natural”—an “illusion of life,” as the new style came to be called around the studio.

The shift to the “illusion of life” style had its effect on Disney’s new moralism—an effect that was more powerful because it wasn’t as manifest. While Disney artists purportedly strived to create a more 20

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realistic world, the new style of drawing was never necessarily any more real than the previous “primitive” style; it only gave the
illusion
that it was more real. Richard Schickel’s analysis of the development of rendering animals at Disney furthers this idea and points out the ramifications:

At first glance they were natural representations, but over the course of a long film it became clear that the true intention of the artists was easy adorability. . . . To some degree the style of the early animators

. . . served to check this tendency toward the cuddlesome; those creatures were much more clearly—if crudely—cartoon conventions, bearing only superficial resemblance to real animals. . . . The animals of . . . Disney . . . , as they grew more real, paradoxically grew more subtly false.49

By being able to hide the manipulation of animation conventions behind an “illusion of life,” the audience member is more likely to be drawn into the world of the cartoon and not be distanced enough from the text to objectively analyze the messages being imparted by the work. Leonard Maltin, while attempting to praise Disney’s technique in
The Flying Mouse,
inadvertently points out how the “realist” technique in the piece furthers its moralistic aims:

The emotional impact of this fairy tale is realized . . . by remarkable use of color. The story takes place from morning till night, and the
light
changes
in each successive sequence. The film opens brightly, with soft pastel colors; the sky is not a deep blue as yet. The colors become more intense as the story progresses, and when the mouse heads for the cave the colors deepen around him. The cave itself is dark; when the bats sing their song to the frightened mouse, the entire frame is jet black except for the characters in center frame. Outside the cave, the sky is still rich with color, but darkening. As the mouse sees his reflection in a pond, the sun is going down; rays of yellow and gold still light the horizon, while a deeper blue settles in above. When the princess transforms our hero back into an ordinary mouse and he heads for home, he casts a long shadow along the ground; by the time he reaches the front gate it is dark outside and there are stars in the sky. His mother stands in the open doorway, bathed in a warm glow of light, awaiting her son’s return.50