I'm only 20% through the book but I can report that what I've read so far is pretty amazing. If Mike is right then a lot of the character of the later studio was formed in the late twenties when Disney was struggling to keep his head above water amid betrayals by artists and predatory competitors.
A lot of his problems stemmed from location. He was trying to get an animation studio started in L.A. when all the good and experienced animators were in New York. He had to rely a lot on the few experienced people he was able to lure to Los Angeles and each one in their turn betrayed him, some at the worst possible time when his whole career hung in the balance.
He didn't have the experienced animators to compete with the East Coast so he had to rely on a technical innovation, sound, to stay in the race. The New York animators were funnier, gutsier, and were better at acting, but the people they were working for were slow to adapt to sound, which proved to be their undoing. Against great odds Disney (along with Carl Stalling who may also have betrayed him) made sound work.The book doesn't say so but it's hard to resist the conclusion that Disney began to believe that technology and advances in technique were more reliable allies than people. You could hire a funny guy and, sure the films would be funnier, but then he'd leave you. But if you had a patent or a unique organizational technique...well, that's something you can cling to.
Disney had a lot of people problems in the late 20s and the accounts are heartbreaking to read. In the absense of star animators Disney made a big effort to educate the artists he did have. He'd even drive them to the art classes he arranged. Sadly a lot of them didn't take it seriously and most tried to get out of it. The animators who left Disney tried to make a go of it in set-ups of their own but were too mild mannered to survive in the business world. You wonder what would have become of animation if these mild people had been its only champions.Now I know some fans of the Fleischers would say, "So what if Walt had gone under? New York was turning out gutsier animation and they'd have gone to sound eventually. Walt was stressing out because he was trying to start a studio on the wrong coast. His effort to get it started on uncongenial ground (the West Coast) ended up warping and twisting the medium and we've never recovered." I'm dying to see what answer the book makes to this.
My own suspicion is that New York animation was dying for reasons that had nothing to do with Disney but that's a guess and I could be completely wrong. After all, Popeye was popular enough to get an Oscar one year.
BTW, the terrific Disney caricatures on this page were done by Fred Osmond. They're ripped off from his blog: http://cartoonsandcaricatures.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html
27 comments:
I'm too sleepy to read this, I'll honestly admit, but wow- those drawings are great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I like the cigarette on the nose. INCREDIBLE.
Wow! Fascinating! I want to read this book now. Can I get the Lawyerese-to-Eddie Fitzgerald translation abridged version?
I think if Walt had gone to the East Coast he'd have changed things to the way he wanted anyway, and in the process he would have probably taken New York animators from Fleischer and the other New York studios. Thank God he chose the West Coast so the Fleischers could keep most of their animators.
Think, if Walt hadn't chosen LA, half the people on this blog community wouldn't live there. Eddie, if the industry wasn't in LA, where would you live?
Fred Osmond's blog is great. Those drawings are hilarious. And he has the best cartoonist name I've ever heard. The perfect blend of hard and soft consanants, high and low vowels.
Did Walt consider Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising as traitors?
I guess business always remained similarly in the animation field...
Disney chose L.A. partly because it was unsettled animation territory. The book (and a couple of other recent ones concerning Walt)details stories of Disney being swindled in NYC, and he wrote Roy more than once of feeling like he had no allies in that city. Though some perceived him as a rube, Walt Disney was ultimately too smart to have chosen old moneyed New York as the place to establish himself.
Hi, Eddie.
I wrote a blurb about the importance of The Animation Archive on my blog, but I'm afraid it's too longwinded, pretentious, and self-important.
What do you think?
It's difficult reading Barriers book so shortly after reading Gabler's- Barrier's has more outside second hand detail however.
I would say had Disney gone to New York, he would not have survived, and animation would be very different. Some of his reasons for going to California were the same reasons others making film in general had gone, escaping private patent cop/thugs, and needing the sunshine (Live Action, sort of, Alice being his first success).
Also, his rich uncle lived in california, his own private bank, if you will.
And he greatly
benefitted from the west coast growth of Bank of America, whereas New York money would have tossed him in the gutter.
Okay, now compare and contrast... why did the Fleishers move to Florida?
Jorge: Wow! A great essay! I couldn't agree more! Steve told me about the donation you made and I was floored! Thanks for being an example for the rest of us!
Anon: I didn't know that he had a rich uncle out here. I'll have to read the Gabler book when I'm finished this one.
Going to Florida didn't help the Fleischers to avoid gangsters. The way I heard it Max was taken out on a boat ride and told that if he didn't sign his studio away that he'd never reach the shore alive.
Hi Eddie
Can you give me a quote from the book where Barrier says this...
"The New York animators were funnier, gutsier, and were better at acting"
He totally slagged on the Fleischers in Hollywood Cartoons saying that the films were crude and Fleischer never made a good cartoon. Has he changed his opinion?
Thanks
Steve
Steve: LOL! I added that. Mike does say that Disney admired Terry's Aesops Fables and wished he could match the skill of the New York animators.
How were the New York studios slow to experiment with sound when Terry had done a sound film and the Fleischers had already produced seven syncronized sound Screen Song cartoons before Steamboat Willie?
Did Barrier say the part about Disney substituting technology for funny artists, or did you add that part?
I'm guessing that I might rather read your paraphrase of this book than the book itself.
See ya
Steve
I'm guessing that I might rather read your paraphrase of this book than the book itself.
Wash your mouth out with soap!
Steve: It strikes me that Mike mentioned the other attempts at sound but I can't remember what he said about them. I think I'll let you guys thrash that one out.
I doubt this but I wonder if Barrier wrote about how disney made sure no one will ever remember Ub Iwerks.
Disney knew about Terry's and the Fleischer's experiments with sound, and wrote to Roy and uncharitably mentioned that films were awful and that they could do much better. I can't remember the specifics. I'm at work right now shirking my responsibilities. I'll look up the details when I get home, including what was written in Barrier's book.)
Oh, and by the way, those caricatures look great!
Eddie, what cartoon/year are you thinking of? To my knowledge, no Fleischer short ever won for best Animated Short Subject. I believe only Disney and MGM won that honour up until 1947, when WB won for the first time.
Well, Hollywood HAD to be a better film production location than Kansas! I think Roy had moved to California to be cured of TB and Walt hit on him for some of his brother's disability stipend.
Yeah, that thing about Popeye winning an Oscar doesn't sound right. (Though, in my book, many whole YEARS of Popeye cartoons deserve this recognition!)
Keep us apprised of your progress and impressions as you work your way through this book...
Those Walt caricatures are hilarious! And by hilarious, I mean good!
Sinbad got a nomination. It was beaten by Disney's "The Country Cousin".
Max Fleischer pionered the sound cartoon with the Screen Cartune "My Old Kentucky Home", made using Dr. Le DeForest's sound-on-disc system, in 1924, four years before Paul Terry's "Dinner Time" (1928) or Disney's "Steamboat Willie" (also 1928). The problem was that the sound-on-disc system was cumbersome and unreliable (off synchronation, especially with how the fragile films kept breaking, and the fragility of the discs themselves.), plus as it turned out, the Fleischers were being ripped off by their distributor, which curtailed any further experiments with sound until 1929, by which time Disney had taken the lead.
Paul Terry, on th other hand, NEVER wanted to add sound to his cartoons, as it was a gamble, and Terry NEVER gambled (if you believe Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic" {1980}, where I got most of this information from); indeed, the only reason Terry added sound to "Dinner Time" was ecause his boss, Amadee J. Van Bueuren, made him do it. Terry's reluctance and, not to gloss over the subject, cheapskated-ness got him kicked to the curb by Van Bueruen, which, in hindsight, was probably the best thing that could have happened to him...
The De Forest Phonofilm process was a sound on film technology, not a sound on disk process like Warner Bros' Vitaphone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_De_Forest
The De Forest Phonofilms play in perfect sync. Ray Pointer put out a great DVD collection of them. The very first Fleischer sound Song Cartoon has lipsync, which Disney didn't attempt until a year into Mickey's run.
As soon as Paul Terry got free of his partnership with Van Beuren, he started making sound cartoons. I think his resistance to sound had something to do with his resistance to working with Van Beuren.
See ya
Steve
The thing is, though Fleischerr's and Terry's sound films sucked ass.
From Barrier's "Hollywood Cartoons" regarding Disney and other early sound cartoons, these paragraphs take place after Barrier notes that Disney probably decided to go with sound by June 27, 1928 --
"Excluding a few cartoons the Fleischers made with the unsuccessful De Forest sound-recording process earlier in the decade, other producers had made hardly any sound cartoons by the time Steamboat Willie premiered (November 18, 1928). Disney saw one of them, an Aesop's Fable - evidently the one called Dinner Time, although he didn't mention its title - in September, and he dismissed it scornfully as 'a lot of racket and nothing else.... It merely had an orchestra playing and adding some noises.' In October, though, Disney saw a sound cartoon he liked, The Sidewalks of New York,...It was a Fleischer cartoon, a song cartoon of the kind the Fleischers had been making since 1924 along with their Inkwell cartoons. Animation was a relatively minor part of the silent Song Cartunes, since they consisted largely of a song's lyrics, shown with a bouncing ball that guided the audience's singing. Neither lyrics nor ball was animated...
The new sound cartoon...was much the same for most of its length. 'Most of it was just synchronized with [the] Orchestra playing the tune,' Walt Disney wrote to Roy Disney and Ub Iwerks...but he singled out for praise the last part of the film, where 'they had the letters and characters doing all kinds of funny things in time to the music that got lots of laughs.' What had been added was metamorphosis animation of a kind that had become a Fleischer specialty and that Disney rarely if ever used; he noted that the Fleischer cartoon 'is an entirely different sort of thing than ours.'"
Thanks for the clarification on De Forest's system, Steve...I always assumed he did sound on disc...now i know better!!
IDRC, CartoonJoe, Steve, Hunsecker: Thanks much! It looks like I got the Oscar attribution wrong and the sound information was very useful! A tip of the hat!
Thanks, Eddie!
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