The Animated Man Read Online Free PDF

New York, he was in no position to supervise Iwerks’s animation closely, but an ongoing conflict between them festered even while they were a continent apart. Their continuing disagreement was over whether Iwerks would animate “straight ahead”—leaving to an assistant only details like the skeletons’ ribs—or as Disney wanted him to, with what were called
extremes
and
inbetweens
, the latter provided by an assistant called an
inbetweener
.
    When animators first began using inbetweeners in the 1920s, the idea was that they could increase their output by delegating the less important drawingsto less-experienced artists. The animators would draw the extremes, the key drawings that defined movement, while the inbetweener made the drawings needed to fill out the animation so it did not look jerky on the screen. That potential increase in productivity was an important consideration at a studio that relied so heavily on one animator, Iwerks, even though he already animated so rapidly. For Iwerks, though, the costs of the change were unacceptably great. His objections were summarized in notes from an interview with him around 1956: “Ub said he’d lose direction of action—he got better feeling of action [when] he animated straight ahead and left details to be filled in. Walt could never see this method.” 7
    It was only when Iwerks’s drawings were tightly synchronized with music that the dominant characteristics of his animation—smooth and regular and impersonal—became unmistakable virtues. What might have seemed merely mechanical was instead precise and pointed.
The Skeleton Dance
had no plot and few real gags, only simple and repetitive dances by skeletons with rubbery limbs, but so closely did the skeletons’ actions mirror the music that they tracked not just the beat but the individual notes.
    Disney said in 1956 that he had considerable difficulty getting
The Skeleton Dance
into theaters, citing one theater manager’s complaint: “It’s too gruesome.” He spoke of tracking down “a film salesman” in a pool hall and, through him, getting the cartoon seen by the manager of the prestigious Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. In early May, Disney let the Carthay Circle book
The Skeleton Dance
for what he called “an extended pre-release showing.” Disney wrote to Charles Giegerich of the Powers organization about the “unusual amount of attention” the cartoon was receiving during this run and urged him to “close a national release” for the
Silly Symphonies
“on the strength of this one subject, plus the reputation that we have created with the quality of our ‘Mickey Mouse’ series.” 8 A second showing, in New York at the Roxy on Broadway, was equally successful. In August, Giegerich signed a contract with Columbia Pictures Corporation for thirteen
Silly Symphonies
. 9
    Although the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons and the
Silly Symphonies
were supposed to differ in their emphasis on music, the two series quickly became alike in their reliance on tight synchronization. (In the summer of 1929, Disney said he had “decided upon a policy that from now on all the action [in the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons] will be set to a definite [rhythm] and we will have no more straight action to a mere musical background”—that is, the
Mickey Mouse
cartoons would be as thoroughly synchronized as the
Silly Symphonies
.) 10 None of the earliest Disney sound cartoons were overwhelmingly superior to competitors’ cartoons except in their use of sound, but that made all the difference.As other cartoon makers, ignorant of Disney’s system, scrambled to add sound tracks, the results were invariably noisy and distracting. Disney’s seamless synchronization was all the more impressive in contrast.
    Disney knew from the beginning that he was in a strong position, and he was eager to exploit it. Writing to Roy and