The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Page B

As an inbetweener, “you’d be on the board with a drawing,” Larson said of Drake, “and he’d sit down and make a correction for you, and he couldn’t draw worth a damn. He’d make a correction—didn’t like it—he’d erase it. He’d make another one—erase it. Pretty soon, everything was so black, you couldn’t see what was on the board.” 13
    Ben Sharpsteen described Drake—“a remote cousin-in-law from my mother’s side of the family” and previously an assistant animator of limited talents—as a victim of Walt Disney’s tendency to put people in jobs they were not capable of filling. As Sharpsteen put it, “Walt was often entirely too optimistic in the parceling out of responsibilities.” 14 Said Ollie Johnston, one of the Stanford alumni who joined the Disney staff: “It was a strange thing about that studio. There were so many impossible people, and there was a genius like Walt who sometimes didn’t recognize these problems.” 15
    Disney’s attitude was consistent with his entrepreneurial temperament: he was interested in what he wanted to do himself, not in assembling a management team, and he concerned himself with filling certain jobs only because someone had to be in them for the studio to function.
    In the late spring of 1934, the
New York Times
’s Douglas Churchill reported on a visit to Disney’s office, where he found an energetic man who was engrossed in his work. “Swimming, ice-skating, polo and riding are his diversions,” Churchill wrote. “Seven of his studio associates play polo with him, but purely for recreation, unlike those actors and executives on other lots towhom the game is serious business. He mixes little in Hollywood night life, feeling that he cannot do good work if he loses sleep.” 16
    In a curious comment, Disney spoke dismissively to Churchill of “a professor” he had brought in “to lecture the boys on the psychology of humor. . . . None of us knew what he was talking about.” He was undoubtedly referring to Boris V. Morkovin of the University of Southern California, who in April 1933 opened a ten-part lecture series at the Disney studio. Morkovin survived in the memories of some of his auditors as a heavy-handed pedant; his lectures bore such numbing titles as (for the sixth one) “cinematic treatment of characterization and externalization of mental states—normal and by distortion, by means of acting, mannerisms, symbolism, of animate and inanimate objects, atmosphere, contrast and different means of cinematic emphasis.” But Morkovin evidently impressed Disney. Later in 1933, at Disney’s request, he prepared a formal critique in which he worried to death an innocuous
Mickey Mouse
cartoon,
The Steeplechase
, and he continued to work at the studio for several more years. 17
    Perhaps Disney was reluctant to admit to an outsider like Churchill just how seriously he was now approaching his work. He spoke to Churchill of making his first feature for only a quarter of a million dollars—that is, ten times the cost of a typical
Silly Symphony
, for a film about ten times as long—and, quite unbelievably, of destroying the feature if it didn’t please him. He was just a few weeks away from handing out scenes for
The Golden Touch
to the two animators he had chosen to animate that entire cartoon—Fred Moore and Norm Ferguson, the most admired members of his staff.
    It was those animators’ breakthroughs that were making a feature cartoon conceivable not just as a business proposition but as a piece of animation. In
Three Little Pigs
and then in
The Flying Mouse
—not yet released when Churchill interviewed Disney—Moore had animated characters that were warm and appealing like none before them. Ferguson, in the March 1934 release
Playful Pluto
, had through pointed changes in expression and