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time-sheet is completed, the director portions out sections of the action to the forty or more animators.
Then the animation begins. As each animator can do at the most in one day a number of drawings equal to five feet of film, it takes about a month for the animation alone. The animation is divided in various ways. The backgrounds are created by regular artists, and only the moving figures are animated. As some of the animators are more proficient for certain incidents and characters in the action (for example, there is one animator who is particularly adept in drawing dancing figures, another in depicting ferocious villains) they are so assigned. It is interesting that Disney himself no longer does any animation, and rarely submits a drawing. The animators, besides being imaginative artists, must be able to vivify characters and their movements. In order to give life to their characters, they resort to all sorts of antics, watch their mirrored reflections as they go through the movements of their subject, watch other people go through motions, and, when the subjects are animals (as they most often are), in order to give them their proper zoological characteristics as well as human attributes, they sometimes resort to observing animals perform in the zoo and on the screen. After a section is sketchily animated, it is photographed and observed by Disney, the director, and the animator as to its convincingness. If it is satisfactory, then girls copy the drawings on celluloid with black paint, or if it is a coloured cartoon in colour. Disney demands a definite quality in his cartoons, and if certain scenes do not seem satisfactory when screened, they must be re-done. Sometimes a whole cartoon is shelved because Disney or some of the other members in the studio do not feel it worthy of the studio. When every sequence is satisfactory, and painted on celluloid, it is filmed. The snooting takes a hundred hours or more, by means of a complexly rigged stop motion camera. The final endorsement, as in the major studios, is given the cartoon at a preview at one of the neighbourhood motion-picture theatres. Occasionally, if a sequence fails to get a reaction from the audience it is changed ; but, on account of the carefully worked out and synchronised scenario, there is rarely much changed after the final filming of the cartoon.
After four months, or thereabout, of co-operative labour the cartoon is ready for its brief seven minutes on the screen.
Apart from the creation of the cartoon, there is another com
munalistic factor in the Disney studio, and that is the course in
animated art. Any member of the studio may take the course, which
usually requires about six months of study.
The author is indebted for much of the material in this article to Dr. Morkovin, an advisor in the story department at the Disney Studio and professor of cinematography at the University of Southern California, where he has recently organized the first competent exhibition of the making of a Disney cartoon.
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