The Animated Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

Iwerks from New York in February 1929, he was encouraged by the favorable response to
The Opry House
and by what he had heard about Charles Mintz’s troubles (Universal was not renewing its contract with Mintz but was going to make the
Oswald
cartoons at a studio of its own instead). “Now is our chance to get a hold on the industry,” he wrote. He was buying sound equipment from Powers so he could set up his own recording studio in Los Angeles, and he was seriously thinking about making a series of live-action shorts—“dialogue comedies”—in addition to his cartoons. 11 Those live-action comedies never happened, although the Disneys did set up a short-lived Disney Film Recording Company at 5360 Melrose Avenue after Walt returned to Los Angeles.
    Disney also knew he needed more help, since Iwerks was the only experienced animator on his staff, backed up by several novices—Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, John Cannon. As he had in 1928, Disney talked with animators in New York about coming to work for him. (There was no place else Disney could have found experienced animators, apart from the few who had already left him to work for Mintz.) In March, after Disney and Stalling returned to Los Angeles, the Disney staff “heard that some
real
animators were going to be brought out from New York,” Jackson said. The first new hire was Ben Sharpsteen, a veteran of several New York studios, notably Max Fleischer’s.
    â€œHe came in,” Jackson said, “and was given his place to work, and given a scene to do, and he spent the whole morning working on it. We were real curious to see what he had done, and so when lunchtime came, none of us wanted to go to lunch, we wanted to see what he’d done. And Ben was a new guy there, he didn’t want to be the first guy to go to lunch. So we were all there working, twenty minutes after our lunch hour, before Ben finally said, ‘Hey, don’t you guys ever go to lunch around here?’ And we all pretended, ‘Oh, my goodness, yes, it’s lunchtime.’
    â€œAnd Ben went out, and so we all went over to Ben’s desk to see what he had done. Ub took the drawings and flipped them, and we all stood respectfully back to see what Ub’s opinion would be. After he flipped them, Ub said, ‘Huh! They look just like the clown’ ”—that is, like the Fleischer cartoons. “Ben did draw Mickey with funny little eyes that were like the clown, and a kind of a pinched little nose, at first.” 12
    When he was in New York, Disney had visited Pat Sullivan’s
Felix the Cat
studio, which was, thanks to Sullivan’s stubbornness, as committed to silence as Disney was to sound—and thus was the kind of studio that an animator with an eye on the future would try to escape. “I think he wanted to hire Otto [Messmer],” said Al Eugster, a young animator on the Sullivan staff—Messmer actually made the cartoons that appeared under Sullivan’s name—“and he took Burt Gillett with him.” 13 Gillett, who had been animating for more than a decade, started work for Disney in April 1929 as the second New York animator to join the staff.
    Roles began to change in response to the Disney cartoons’ success. After the first few
Mickey Mouse
sound cartoons, Iwerks animated less, working instead with Disney and Stalling in the office called the “music room” because Stalling’s piano was there (that term was later applied to a Disney director’s room even after a musician no longer shared it). Iwerks’s principal duty now was to make sketches that showed the growing staff of animators how to stage their scenes. “Walt still handed out the scenes to the animators for the most part,” Jackson said, “but I believe Ub occasionally did this for him at this time.” 14
    Disney had always been the de facto director of his cartoons—no one used that exact