Animation Guild

Spring 2020

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46 KEYFRAME F I N A L N O T E Walt Disney. I met him twice. Once outside the animation building when a group of us apprentices were on our break. Walt and Wooley Ritherman came out to where we were standing to wait for some studio guest. I'd only seen Walt on those old black and white TV shows he hosted 15 years earlier. His head looked larger now and his body drooped. The same thing happened to my grandfather—the very common aging process. Walt looked at us and said, "Wooley, these must be some of the new 'fellas. Introduce me to them." Wooley, the studio's animation feature director, didn't know any of us so he turned to Chuck Menville, the closest one of us to him, and said, "I'm sorry, I forget your first name." "It's Chuck," Chuck answered. Wooley slyly said, "Chuck, will you introduce the other 'fellas to Walt." Another time, we were sneaking back to our work desks from watching a live-action shoot on our break. We pushed a sound stage door open to get out that was being pushed on from the other side. We thought it was by one of our friends trying to make us late. It wasn't. It was Walt and we'd sandwiched him between the door and a side wall. We released him and got out of there fast. Walt was told by Ward Kimball that a group of us was making a comedy movie on the weekends. Ward was giving us notes on our work print as we built it. Walt asked to see it. He liked it well enough to give us permission to use one of the studio's editing rooms and he gave us a key to the sound library for sound effects. I thought this was really nice of him. Thirty years later, I understood why he did it when, at the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco, I saw pictures of Walt and Ub Iwerks and a few other young people in the countryside near Kansas City in the early 1920's shooting a comedy short on a weekend. Walt had remembered himself as a young man when he looked at our footage. One more thing about Walt. This is a story I heard about him as a young man. I heard it when listening to Dick Huemer speak at a hotel banquet in Hollywood around 1970. Huemer was one of Walt Disney's early story men. He was 10 years or so older than Walt and first met him at a small New York studio just after WWI. Dick was a gag designer and animator. The jobs were one and the same in those early days. Walt was a general assistant at the studio, just learning how animated cartoons were put together. At that time, the studio head would gather everyone and say something like, "The circus is coming to town in a month. The advance posters are going up all over town. Let's have our character run a small circus. Give me gags about circus stuff—the animals, the acts, building and striking the A MAN CALLED WALT ANIMATOR AND DIRECTOR DAVID BRAIN MUSES ON CROSSING PATHS WITH DISNEY David Brain (right) on the picket line while working for Disney. tents… that sort of stuff." The crew would draw gag panel sequences and pin them on a display wall. Walt was looking at the panels one day when one of the artists asked, "What do you think, kid?" Dick Huemer said, "Walt turned to the artist and said, 'I don't like it… These beginning panels show how worried the cat is about losing his roughneck job because his truck broke down. I was concerned. I felt for him. It seemed real…. Then you have him pull his tail off and bend it into a metal crank to start the truck and the cat becomes just an ink drawing again. It loses its reality, its humanity." "We all thought Walt was strange to want these cartoons to be anything but ink drawings," Dick said. "Complicated emotions and deep feelings were for live actors not cartoons. That's the first time I saw Walt show the desire he had to introduce an entirely new emotional aspect to animated film."

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