American cinematographer (Jan-Dec 1941)

Twelve years' progress in animated not the first feature-length cartoon by twenty years, while the first cartoon mechanically colored dates back to 1919. The greatest single contribution of the pioneers came from Earl Hurd who invented (1915) the idea of tracing the moving' parts of a cartoon on celluloids superimposed over opaque backgrounds. This great labor-saving device is still the foundation of our modem method. The miracle of seeing drawings move was enough to enthrall the early motion picture audiences. Then, as the edge of the miracle wore off, interest in cartoons was revived by numerous series of cartoons built around the antics of stock characters. Some of these series were very popular. Whether or not these preMickey cartoonists ever sat back and thought about the possibilities in the medium, I don't know. I was ambitious and wanted to make better pictures, but the length of my foresight is measured by this admission: Even as late as 1930, my ambition was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop's Fables series. I was knocking out a series called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for Universal at the time sound exploded like a bomb under silent pictures. The series was going over. We had built up a little organization. Roy and I each had our own homes and a "flivver." We had money in the bank and security. But we didn't like the looks of the future. The cartoon business didn't seem to be going anywhere except in circles. The pictures were kicked out in a hurry and made to a price. Money was the only object. Cartoons had become the shabby Cinderella of the picture industry. They were thrown in for nothing as a bonus to exhibitors buying features. I resented that. Some of the possibilities in the cartoon medium had begun to dawn on me. And at the same time we saw that the medium was dying. You could feel rigor mortis setting in. I could feel it in myself. Yet with more money and time, I felt we could make better pictures and shake ourselves out of the rut. When our distributor, Universal, wouldn't give us the money, we quit. Most of our staff went over to Universal. That hurt! But I had made my Declaration of Independence and traded security for self-respect. An artist who wouldn't is a dead mackerel. Thereafter, we were to make pictures for quality and not for price. The public has been willing to pay for this quality. Out on my own again, I looked for a cartoons: scenes from "Steamboat Willie" (1928), "Fantasia," (1941). new character and hit on Mickey Mouse. The first two Mickey Mouse pictures were silent. We couldn't peddle them. It occurred to me that in a world gone sound-mad, since the release of Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer, sl cartoon with action synchronized to sound would be something of a sensation. My third Mickey, Steamboat Willie, was planned with this in mind. By some miracle we managed to figure out the basic method for synchronizing sound and action that we still use. When the picture was half finished, we had a showing with sound. A couple of my boys could read music and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouthorganist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronism was pretty close. The effect 011 our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful ! And it was something new! I took Steamboat Willie to New York and started a dreary hunt for a sound company which was not too busy or too expensive to record the sound for me. I finally made a deal with Cinephone. Theirs was a pretty punk sound system until Bill Garity redesigned it later on. But in spite of that, Steamboat Willie was an instant hit. It played the Colony, then moved to Roxy's. Mickey was a big shot over night. Lush offers poured in from Hollywood, but Cinephone had us nailed to a contract. A year later, in a joint deal with Columbia, we bought up the contract. Cinephone had given me a bigger picture budget than had Universal, and Columbia had upped the figure considerably again. But soon the increasing quality on which we were building our business demanded bigger and bigger advances. Columbia couldn't take it, so in 1931, we made a deal with United Artists to distribute our cartoons. This new deal, for all practical purposes, gave us financial independence. Since then, we alone have determined how much our pictures will cost. Not the first "Mickey Mouse," and that the industry hasn't had a great deal to say about our picture costs, in one sense. Time and again, it has been said that we were crazy and would go broke. Mack Sennett claimed that we put liveaction shorts out of business because they could not afford to spend the money to compete with us. The fact was the reverse. Live-action shorts could not afford not to spend more money if it would improve their quality. By 1931, production costs had risen from $5,400 to $13,500 per cartoon. This was an unheard of and outrageous thing, it seemed. And a year later, when we turned down Carl Laemmle's offer to advance us $15,000 on each picture, he told me quite frankly that I was headed for bankruptcy. This was not short-sighted on his part. He had no way of seeing what we saw in the future of the medium. As Mickey Mouse became a universal favorite and the money rolled in, we had been able to afford the time and money to analyze our craft. I think it is astounding that we were the first group of animators, so far as I can learn, who ever had the chance to study their own work and correct its errors before it reached the screen. In our little studio on Hyperion Street, every foot of rough animation was projected on the screen for analysis, and every foot was drawn and redrawn until we could say, "This is the best that we can do." We had become perfectionists, and as nothing is ever perfect in this business, we were continually dissatisfied. In fact, our studio had become more like a school than a business. As a result, our characters were beginning to act and behave in general like real persons. Because of this we could begin to put real feeling and charm in our characterization. After all, you can't expect charm from animated sticks, and that's about what Mickey Mouse was in his first pictures. We were growing as craftsmen, through study, self-criticism, and experiment. In this way, the inherent possibilities in our medium were dug into and brought to light. Each year we could handle a wider range of story material, attempt things we wTould not have dreamed of tackling the year before. I claim that this is not genius or even remarkable. It is the way men build a sound business of any kind — sweat, intelligence, and love of the job. Viewed in this light of steady, intelligent growth, there is nothing remarkable about the Three Little Pigs or (Continued on Page 139) American Cinematographer March, 1941 107