Creators (36 page)

He spent money freely as fast as it came in. Like Turner as a teenager, Disney always bought the best paint, film, and other materials. He insisted on reanimation, however time-consuming and expensive, until the results were right. In the early 1930s, Disney’s production costs for an eight-minute movie were $13,000 and over, at a time when rival studios spent a maximum of $2,500. Like Dürer and Rubens, Disney put excellence before any other consideration, and the studio barely made a profit despite its huge bookings, since the incoming cash instantly went for investment in new technology and better artists. In many ways, the studio Disney ran in the 1930s was not totally unlike the big European studios of the seventeenth century. Disney hired the best artists he could get, and gave them tasks to the limits of their capacities if they proved good enough—just as Rubens pushed the career of Van Dyck, his greatest assistant. In addition to Iwerks’s work on Mickey Mouse, Carl Stalling designed
The Skeleton Dance
in the first of the
Silly Symphonies
, Albert Hurter did the settings and characters for
The Three Little Pigs
, Art Babbitt was responsible for Goofy, and Clarence Nash provided Donald Duck with a voice (and was henceforth known as Ducky Nash). The studio was a highly creative, interactive place,
tense and sometimes hysterical as new ideas were presented, debated, boosted, and discarded. There were arguments, and animators sometimes left after disputes; Iwerks and Stalling were two examples. In some ways the studio resembled the organization Guido Reni ran in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, when he was the most successful painter in Europe, with seventy assistants (at one point over 200). In Reni’s studio, too, there were clashes of personalities, quarrels, and abrupt departures. In the early 1930s, Disney’s studio was about the same size as Reni’s. But it continued to expand and later employed over 1,000 animators, artists, and other draftsmen. During the period 1930 to 1937, Disney and his studio, by trial and error and prodigies of industry and skill, acquired the art of animating figures, making them seem as “real” as human comedians on the stage, in essentially the same way as the Siennese and Florentine painters, from Duccio to Giotto, learned to reproduce people, in fresco, on walls, or in gesso on panels. What took the early Renaissance painters two centuries, the Disney studio did in a decade; but then Disney’s animators had the whole tradition of western art on which to build, just as the countless animators of today are inspired by Disney’s work of the 1930s.

The arrival of satisfactory color; the improvement of background technique; the perfection of the sound track, allowing high-quality orchestral music and singing; and financial factors persuaded Disney to break out of the limitations of the funny cartoon and make a feature-length fairy tale. The result was
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, conceived in 1934 and shown in cinemas all over the world in 1938.
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The idea was Disney’s, of course. He had been preparing for human animation for some time by holding life classes at the studio under Don Graham; and to create Snow White herself he appointed his best human anatomy draftsman, Jim Natwick, assisted by Ham Luske, who specialized in character development. The Queen, who is transformed into a witch, was also a joint work of two of his best animators: Art Babbitt did her as queen, Norm Ferguson as witch. The dwarfs were the work of four senior animators—Bill Tytler, Fred Moore, Frank Thomas, and Fred Spencer—heading a team of twenty-nine involved in the personalities of the seven sharply differentiated dwarfs. In today’s climate of political correctness, the movie
could never have been made. Snow White would have been vetoed as racist; the dwarfs would have been transformed into “vertically challenged people”; one of them, Dopey (the most popular with audiences), would have been attacked as making fun of a mental defective; two others—Sleepy and Sneezy—would have been seen as a cynical exploitation of medical conditions; and even Grumpy and Bashful might have been classed as objectionable. Only Happy and Doc are politically correct, by today’s criteria. As it was, in the climate of freedom in the 1930s, the movie introduced numerous artistic and technical innovations that transformed the art of movie cartooning. It involved over 2 million drawings and formed the largest single project in the history of draftsmanship, which had begun 40,000 years before in the caves of France and Spain. It was a huge critical and commercial success and marked the point at which animation achieved maturity as an art form. The impact on every form of commercial art, fashion art, and indeed fine art was incalculable. Snow White’s appearance even altered the way women, from teenagers to professional actresses and models, wanted to look, smile, and behave. Among children, the movie was the biggest instant success in juvenile entertainment ever recorded, as indicated by the exceptional numbers who missed classes to see afternoon showings; and art teaching in schools testified to its effect on the way pupils tried to draw. The storm scene and the flight through the forest were particularly dramatic in their effects on visual consciousness, and not just among the young.
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Disney’s art compounded and intensified the impact of cinema on the way humanity saw things. The movie houses themselves were part of this process. The years 1927 to 1929 (at the height of the pre-Depression boom) brought the architectural products of cinematic triumphalism. New York’s Roxy (1927), created by the designer Walter W. Aschlager, and financed by Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothapfel, was a blazing temple of light, seating 5,800 people. The Fox in San Francisco (1929), financed by William Fox (of Fox Studios) and designed by Thomas W. Laint, seated 5,000 and was even more visually lavish. In Berlin the Universum Luxor Palast (1926–1929) summoned up all the arrogant pride of ancient Egyptian architecture at the time of the New
Kingdom, and lit it with hundreds of thousands of lightbulbs. A new kind of visual experience, known as “night architecture,” came into being, thanks to the Odeon theaters.
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These prototypes were imitated throughout the new decade, in vast buildings in London, like the Carlton in Islington and the Astoria in Finsbury (both 1930); and in a variety of styles, chiefly Egyptian, Persian, Moorish, Spanish, and Italian, though the Granada, Tooting, was a Gothic fantasy. Most of these giant movie houses, physical tributes to the dominance of cinema in the 1930s, have been demolished. In their day, however, they filled the eyes of the public with monumental and exotic visions, inside and out, for the lavish lobbies and halls of these palaces, staffed by usherettes trying to look like Snow White, were even more luxurious than the exteriors.

Disney, however, never liked the artificial side of the Hollywood “picture palace” industry. He was really a product of the arts and crafts movement and of art nouveau, which had formed the aesthetic background to his first attempts to draw. Hollywood was art deco, quite a different visual influence. Disney’s instinct was always to get back to nature (whereas Picasso’s was to get away from it). The success of
Snow White
financed a series of four big feature movies, all made between 1938 and 1944:
Pinocchio
,
Fantasia
,
Dumbo
, and
Bambi
. All these successful movies explored natural phenomena, whether living, vegetable, or climatic, in new visual ways. Disney insisted on turning Pinocchio from a puppet into a little boy;
Fantasia
not only used his animals, including Mickey as
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
, but made astonishing use of sea, swamp, mountain, and forest backgrounds, using classical music compositions as the sound. The dinosaur sequence in the prehistoric swamp used to illustrate Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
was the first modern exploration of the age of reptiles for the benefit of children, a harbinger of countless images to come. The
Pastoral Symphony
in the movie inspired Disney to resurrect the nature portrayed by the Symbolist movement of the 1890s, and some of the preproduction studies made by the Disney studio for this section (done in pastel) are of great beauty. The dances in this movie are often extraordinary exercises in anthropomorphic animation, but the movements of
the animals are based on nature. So are the atmospheric effects of the final section,
Night on Bald Mountain
.
Dumbo
, the circus movie, and
Bambi
, essentially a nature film, show the immense distance Disney and his studio had traveled in the art of animation since he first made his mouse movie.

The logic of Disney’s invention meant that he eventually turned to filming nature itself, living but unanimated. The result was a series of movies like
Seal Island
, filmed in Alaska;
The Vanishing Prairie
, filmed in the midwest; and
The Living Desert
. These were not the first nature documentaries by any means, but their high professional quality and Disney’s name gave an impetus to the genre, which continued for the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, especially on television. Disney’s love of nature, of course, always jostled with fantasy, and this combination is reflected in his later feature-length movies, such as
Alice in Wonderland
(1957);
Peter Pan
(1953);
The Lady and the Tramp
(1955), made in the new CinemaScope; and
Sleeping Beauty
(1959). Disney was always experimenting with novel ideas and new technology—rather, it must be said, like Picasso—and
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
(1961) used the new Xerox camera, which greatly influenced both background and animation. His
Jungle Book
, Disney’s last animated film, released in 1967, the year after his death (from lung cancer; Disney was a heavy smoker), used new recording techniques to transform animal voices spoken by leading actors. Disney also resurrected his old technique (dating from
Alice
) of combining animation with real actors on film, in
Mary Poppins
(1964). This film exploited the new technologies that had become available—allowing Dick Van Dyke to dance with animated penguins, for instance—and made the studio more money than any other movie shown in Disney’s lifetime.

In Disney’s last years, and after his death, the studio continued to make major all-animated movies, following his prescription of heightening but never forgetting nature. In the 1990s the studio presented
The Lion King
. This had an original story, but—more important—it followed the direction pointed by
Bambi
in showing the animals in a vividly realistic environment, drawn and colored expertly by the artists, after countless studies of the
real thing but with the sequence movements assisted by computers. It produced, among other spectacular sequences, a musical turn by the evil hyenas and a cattle stampede of terrifying ebullience.
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However, long before the turn of the twenty-first century, Disney’s business had expanded from cartooning into completely new forms of entertainment. Disney wanted to retain nature and surrealize it (to coin a phrase), but he also wanted to combine it with a fantasy world. In a sense, this is exactly what Watteau had done with his paintings of fêtes and arcadia in the early eighteenth century.
Fantasia
had been an exercise in such juxtaposition, but during World War II Disney had brooded on the possibility of creating these worlds not in the studio, of paint and celluloid, but in real life. He thus produced the idea of a Disney park, constructed around a theme. He re-created his scenery in three dimensions, in the open air; peopled it with his animals, real and acted; and invited the public to enter. His first Disneyland opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California. Re-creating his own versions of Ludwig II’s Bavarian castles, or William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon, he revealed again his creative genius for satisfying the human demand for popular art as entertainment. Not content with this concept, which spread over the world, he hinted in 1954, when he introduced Disneyland on television, that he had a further project, called Experimental Prototype Communities of Tomorrow, or EPCOT.
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This revived the vision of experimental architects during Disney’s boyhood before World War I, in which ideal communities would be planted, using the latest technology, in “controlled environments,” a phrase minted in Disney’s youthful heyday in the 1920s. This project was not fulfilled until after Disney’s death, when Disney World, covering 27,000 acres of Florida, came into being in 1971. This, besides being a vacation destination on an unprecedented scale, was an experiment in urban design, with nonpolluting vehicles, a monorail system, the first pedestrian malls, novel uses of prefabrication, and a vertical takeoff and landing to eliminate aircraft noise. The first test center, at Orlando, Florida, completed in 1992, had three areas: Port Orleans, a simulation of a typical
quartier
of old New Orleans; Magnolia Bend, resurrecting a
plantation of the deep south; and Alligator Bayou, a way of moving tourists through Louisiana swamps without discomfort or danger. Large raised gardens, and all the facilities of resorts from golf to swimming pools, were grouped around these theme centers. So the work of Disney continued after his death, and the first decade of the twenty-first century was marked by various innovations in his tradition, including what was voted the world’s perfect concert hall in Los Angeles (2005).

Clearly, the influence of Disney on the presentation of visual images in the twentieth century and beyond was immense, almost past computation. Even directly, for instance, his
Snow White
was the ur-document of a school that had branched out with over 200 systems of animated cartooning by the end of the twentieth century. Disney himself trained over 1,000 artists, almost as many as the Académie Julien, the most successful art school in history. Cartoons were the basis of most fashion art during the second half of the twentieth century, and they also had a direct influence on clothes, hairstyles, interior decoration, furniture, and architecture. Postmodernism was part of cartoonland. And the influence of cartoons was reinforced by Disney’s parks, worlds, and physical experiments in landscape and urban planning.