Foreword

by Bill Justice

I will always be grateful to Jack Hannah.

Some people call me the father of Chip ‘n’ Dale. It is true that I have animated almost all of their scenes, except for the very earliest appearances where they looked much different.

It is not really accurate to think of me as their “father.” I think that accolade belongs to Jack Hannah. He directed all of their shorts and deserves much of the credit for their success.

In fact, he was responsible for their names. One of Jack’s assistants was Bea Selke who mentioned the Chippendale line of antique furniture and Jack was the one who realized it would be the perfect name for these feisty chipmunks.

I still don’t know why I was “cast” as the main animator for Chip ‘n’ Dale. One day, Jack simply handed me a batch of scenes for the cartoon Chip an’ Dale (1947). The characters became stars and more cartoons were developed and Jack kept giving me the chipmunk scenes to animate. I loved working on them even though they required more drawings than usual.

Jack and I worked well together and he always had great scenes for me to work on. I was part of his unit and one of the things that I remember is that he was always willing to listen to whatever ideas I had. He felt I had a good “story sense,” as he called it. He listened to everyone else on his team as well and I think that was one of the reasons he was such a great cartoon director.

He had experience in animating and doing story work and he brought those perspectives with him to his directing that made him different from anyone else I worked with. He knew how to communicate to an artist like Walt did because he was one.

Even though he was open to suggestions, he was a fighter and no push-over. He knew what he wanted. He always challenged me and others to put something “extra” into whatever I was doing. He really wanted me to bring out the personalities of Chip ‘n’ Dale and he never hesitated to push me to get it just right.

He once told me that we always need to do the best we can because we would have to live with all this stuff the rest of our lives. I didn’t realize at the time how right he was. Things I did almost half a century ago are up there on a huge screen for new audiences.

I always tried to do my very best work for Jack. When I became a director, I always thought back to working for Jack and how he did things and it helped me tremendously in how I did things and made decisions.

Every blank sheet of paper is a challenge. Every scene is a challenge. People ask, “Don’t you get bored sitting there drawing chipmunk after chipmunk?” I am trying to bring that chipmunk to life. That is the challenge of animation.

If you are thinking, “Oh, gosh, I got to make another drawing and then another drawing and another…,” then you are in the wrong business and you better get out because you don’t like to draw and that’s what this business is all about.

Walt Disney and the people I worked with at the studio like Jack really wrote the book on quality animation. I’d like to think I helped with a page here and there.

I was brought to tears when Jim Korkis told me that Jack held me in high esteem as well. Talking with Jim was like hearing Jack again as he told me the stories that Jack had told him. Jim knows and loves Disney animation. There’s no better person to tell Jack’s story.

I am happy he has decided to put together his interviews with Jack to share with a new generation. I don’t think people know about artists like Jack these days and their contributions. I am eagerly looking forward to reading all of this and reliving one of the best times of my life and learning some things I never knew.

Introduction

Jack Hannah was the first animator I ever met and the first animator I ever interviewed.

To this day, I have nothing but respect and fond memories of him and many of his Disney short cartoons still make me laugh out loud. He was always kind and patient and it was meeting him that led me to become a real Disney historian rather than just a Disney fan.

I was a teenager living in Glendale, California, and I was fascinated with animation. I would watch the weekly Disney television show and on the episodes that spotlighted animation, I would write down the names in the credits at the end of the show.

One of the first names I wrote down was “Jack Hannah” whose name appeared in several episodes devoted to animation. I found his address and phone number in the Glendale phone book.

I wrote a formal letter to “Mr. Hannah,” explaining my interest in animation and that I had many questions. I rewrote that letter several times before mailing it.

To my surprise, he wrote back within a few days “I would be most happy to meet with you on the early days of Donald Duck and my new affiliations with the Disney Studios. Please call me.” I did and we agreed to meet at his house on a Saturday afternoon.

It was August 1977.

Even though he lived in Glendale, he was a good fifteen minutes or more by car from where I lived, so my mother drove me and dropped me off. I was wearing the suit that I wore to church. It was solid black with a thin black tie on my starched white shirt. The temperature was in the high 80s. I wanted to look like someone who was mature and serious and not just a kid.

I had a rickety cassette tape recorder with a tiny attachable microphone. I also had several pens (because I feared they might run out of ink) and two spiral-bound school notebooks.

In one, I had written as much as I knew about Disney animation and some questions about Donald Duck. In those days, there really were not any easily obtainable source materials on animation or Disney history.

I had also arrived almost one hour early because I was fearful of being late and seeming rude. So, to kill time, I walked slowly around the block. That didn’t eat up enough time so I walked around the block again the other way, and then once more.

Finally, it was just ten minutes from the agreed-upon time so I hesitantly walked up the stone steps that were on an incline to the front door and ran the bell. A smiling older woman opened the door and I explained that I was Jim Korkis and that I had an appointment with Mr. Hannah.

She turned and yelled to the living room. “It is him! You were right!”

A cheerful Jack dressed in a sporty short-sleeve shirt came to meet me at the door. “We’ve been watching you from the front window for about an hour. We were wondering when you might come in.”

He ushered me into his living room. It was a pleasant, homey room, and he sat in an overstuffed chair by the front window. Near it was a small end table with a lamp and I set up my tape recorder and sat in a straight chair that was on the other side.

A smiling Mrs. Hannah left to do something in the kitchen.

I think we both expected that the interview might be a half hour or so. It lasted over three hours. I was lucky I brought several extra blank cassette tapes.

Fortunately, Jack was enthusiastic in talking about the good old days to an appreciative and awestruck teenager. It was as if the doors to wonderland had been opened wide to me as he rattled off unfamiliar names, interesting stories, and patiently explained some animation concepts.

The room only had one item that indicated Jack had ever worked at Disney. It sat proudly on the mantel above the fireplace: the famous bronze Duckster statuette that he had been given to Jack by Walt and Roy Disney for his years of exemplary service when he left the studio on May 27, 1959. The first Duckster was given out in 1952 to Martha Torge.

The Disney studio also gave out Mousecars (a Mickey Mouse Oscar statuette) to distinguished people at the studio. Walt gave the first Mousecar to Roy in 1947. The Disney company has no official record of how many Ducksters or Mousecars were handed out over the years.

The Duckster is a rarer award since fewer of them were given out, but it is known that ones were given to Carl Barks, Bob Karp, Al Taliaferro, and Clarence Nash, among others who were involved with Donald Duck. In 2005, Hannah’s family auctioned off his statuette for $4,813.

I later found out that Jack had sold off most of his Disney stuff. Los Angeles Dodgers’ baseball player Wes Parker got much of it. Parker specifically contacted Disney artists to purchase the material from them or their widows and offered a sizeable sum that would have been foolish to turn down.

The rest of the living room was decorated with photos of Jack’s family and some of his landscape paintings that had been exhibited in art galleries. “My wife won’t let me sell those,” he smiled. “I’m taking a break right now from another one I am working on. Usually I spend my Saturday in a room I converted into my art studio, but it is much too messy to hold a conversation there.”

Jack was 64 years old when I first interviewed him, which seemed ancient to me. He obviously embraced what he was doing at that time rather than nostalgically living in the past. In that first interview, his statement that “nobody seems old in this business” was never truer than applied to Hannah himself. He could easily have been mistaken for someone twenty years younger.

His eyes twinkled with mischief and an easy smile often came to light up his entire face as we talked. His voice was clear and deep. When it started to become a little raspy after three hours, I realized it was time to end the interview.

When he moved from his chair to illustrate the movements of some character, his body and face were as fluid and distinct as any character he ever directed.

He was short and stout and resembled a boxer, which may be one of the reasons he moved so easily. I later found out he had been in Golden Gloves tournaments when he was younger. “I didn’t like getting hit,” he smiled. “Doing art was safer, at least physically.”

He was filled with energy and was excited to be teaching character animation at California Institute of the Arts. He was not only passionate but articulate and I envied his students, one of whom he mentioned was a kid that he said showed a lot of promise, John Lasseter.

When we started the interview, Jack’s answers came slowly as he carefully worded his responses to make sure he stayed close to whatever the Disney studio might want to see in print. As the conversation continued and he began to trust my enthusiasm, he loosened up and was geniunely happy to relive the days at the studio, even regaling me with some off-color stories of studio parties.

Several times he asked that the tape recorder be turned off so he could gather his thoughts or to talk “off the record,” despite my assuring him that he could edit the final manuscript.

It took me several weeks to transcribe the interview and take it back to him and my heart dropped as he crossed out entire paragraphs. He had spent some time railing about Ben Sharpsteen being Walt’s “hatchet man” at the studio and how he was hated and Jack cut all of that out.

“It doesn’t add to the knowledge of animation to attack guys who can no longer defend themselves,” he told me as I pleaded with him to let me include some of the stories that he cut out. “Sometimes you get in a mood and days later you start thinking a little clearer. I think you’ve got enough stuff here.”

We did another interview over Christmas vacation that year to fill in some gaps and because his reading the transcript prompted some additional memories.

An edited version (for space) of that first interview appeared in the animation fanzine Mindrot #11 (July 1978) published by David Mruz. Jack even did a quick sketch of Donald painting a painting for me to include in the piece.

With Jack’s help I was even able to put together a filmography of his work at Disney. It was the first time he received published recognition for his animation work. A Florida art magazine had interviewed him previously over the phone and ran a short article on Jack and his paintings but had never sent him a copy.

This interview brought some much-deserved attention to Jack’s many accomplishments and the people at the Disney studio started contacting him for event appearances and projects.

I continued to interview him over the next decade, gathering material for articles that eventually appeared in Animania, Persistence of Vision, The Carl Barks Library, In Toon, Animato!, Walt’s People, and many other publications.

Jack used to joke that I was the official “Hannah Historian” and one night when he had to introduce Walter Lantz at some function, he frantically phoned me up and asked me to remind him of some of the stories he had shared about working at Lantz and what cartoons he had worked on there. I was happy to do so.

College, a girlfriend, and my interest in theater stole most of my time and I spent less and less of it with Jack, to my everlasting regret because he had so much more to share. My last interviews with him were done over the phone. He passed away from cancer in June 1994.

It amused but also irritated him that people confused him with Jack Hanna, the animal expert who regularly appeared on talk shows like Johnny Carson and David Letterman, and with animator and producer Bill Hanna of the famous television animation studio Hanna-Barbera.

“Don’t they see that I have an “h” at the end of my name?” he would laugh. “People send me mail all the time that should be going to these guys and I had to figure out how to forward it.”

While I was visiting him one day, Jack picked up the phone and talked with three other animators and told them they should let me interview them. One of them was Ward Kimball, the next animator I met in person. With a smile, Jack warned me to be careful because Ward was “crazy” and not to trust everything he told me.

What I remember about Jack was that he was feisty, funny, friendly, and an inspiration. His family was important to him. He loved getting together with friends from his days at the Disney studio and mourned the ones who had already died much too soon.

He was excited about his teaching work at CalArts and beamed with fatherly pride when he talked about his students. “When they go up to present their stuff, I’m just as nervous as they are,” he confided to me.

Even though Jack Kinney interviewed Jack several times when he was writing his book about his Disney days, he doesn’t mention Jack in the book. Jack told me that he had gone into great detail describing the push pin throwing contests at the studio, in which he apparently had some skill.

I gave Jack copies of books like Of Mice and Magic by Leonard Maltin where he was mentioned and other gifts to thank him for his patience and generosity.

When Jack passed away, I decided that I should write a book about him using the interviews we had done over the years. He deserved to be remembered. Even when he was alive, Jack never exploited his career as many of his peers did and was relatively unknown to most Disney and animation fans, so publishers weren’t interested in my project.

One told me that Jack was probably not that important since he wasn’t one of the fabled Nine Old Men, who at the time people thought were the best of the best and the only ones who really did the animation.

Moving to Florida to take care of my parents also slowed down the project. In the last five years I have built up a wonderful working relationship with publisher Bob McLain and his Theme Park Press that has enriched Disney history with its extensive catalog of books. Bob encouraged me to pull out my old original notes and put together a book about Jack Hannah.

While I had known Bill Justice since his many appearances in Los Angeles at Disney fan club conventions, I built up more of a friendship with him when I moved to Orlando. Bill and I would both perform at Give Kids the World. He would draw sketches of Disney characters and hand them out to the children and I did comedy magic and balloon animals.

He graciously agreed to write a foreword for my proposed Jack Hannah book. That foreword appears here now, after being filed away for almost twenty years.

There is material in this book that exists nowhere else, and over the years it has been annoying that some of the Jack Hannah quotes that have appeared elsewhere are from my interviews, often without credit. I wish others had taken the opportunity to interview Jack as well, getting material that I missed.

I have made corrections in Jack’s credit listings because he was often credited for things he never did or his credit was left off of other things that he worked on.

This is not a full biography but rather a scrapbook of memories. Try to imagine yourself on a warm August day sitting in a comfortable living room while a master storyteller takes a few moments for the first time to remember some of his old friends and the fun he had.

I enjoyed that feeling as I was putting together this material and looking at my scribbled notes in an old school notebook. I wish I had been smart enough to ask more questions.

Jack was not an angel. Walt often thought of him as a “problem child” because he could get so argumentative. In addition, like so many other Disney animators, he was sometimes too friendly with alcohol because of all the stress, but in his later years, removed from those studio pressures, he was very much in control.

Jack was full of life and good humor and no nonsense. I hope some of that comes across in the text. I miss him and will forever be grateful to him.