Mique Nelson, though little known, nonetheless gives a fascinating account of the early Disney Studio.

Walt works almost entirely now with the story room. Before each picture is started, a gag meeting is held at which the entire animating and production staff submits gags for the picture under discussion. Two fifty is paid for every gag accepted. The Story Department gets these gags to build up.

When the story has been whipped into shape and gagged, it goes to the director who times it, plans the animation and the scenes with his layout men. As soon as this is done, the layout men get active and build up the scenes.

That is wonderfully interesting work. It means roughing out the whole picture in sketches. Every scene is plotted so that the action will be clear and in no way interfered with, and when the mechanical requirements of the scenes have been met, the picture goes to the background artists.

As soon as the picture is plotted by the director and layout men, elaborate production sheets are prepared, each line of which corresponds to a beat of music. The musician who builds the score has arranged his music to fit every scene perfectly, and the drawings are made to synchronize with the music. Every beat has to fit the animation.

An animator works on a drawing board that has a piece of plate glass set in the middle and a light shining thru the glass. There are two metal pegs on his board on which he fits pieces of punched bond paper. He makes his first drawing in a particular scene. Suppose it is a sequence where only the lifting on an arm is involved. To complete that movement normally, sixteen drawings will be required, because the eye has sixteen stopping points in every normal movement. The animator will draw perhaps three of these stopping points—the beginning, the halfway mark, and the end—each on a separate sheet. All sheets are punched alike,—all are placed on the pegs, and so the result will be smooth continuity.

The drawings made, he turns them over to an inbetweener who nearly traces them, supplying the necessary in-between positions. A tedious job. If fast action is required, fewer inbetweens. For slow action, more inbetweens. For very slow, the cameras will shoot each inbetween from two to four times.

Ordinarily we have about an average of 55 scenes to a picture, requiring about 35 separate background paintings. Some of these scenes are very short—one in my last picture was only 2½ seconds in length or 60 frames—less than 4 feet of film. It required the making of a very intricate panorama background which took me two days to paint.

Our average picture takes from ten to fifteen thousand separate animation drawings.

When an animator finishes a scene, all the drawings go to the inkers. At times three or four assistants have been working on one scene and maybe as many as four drawings will have to be assembled to make up the action of each shot on the camera. So the girls assemble all the drawings bearing the same number, put them on their drawing-board pegs, place a sheet of clear celluloid over the whole, and carefully trace the animation in ink on the celluloid, commonly termed a “cel”.

When a scene has been inked it goes to the painters. If it is a Mickey, all the characters are filled in in opaque grays, white, and black. I have previously had to decide on tones of gray for the painting that will contrast strongest with my backgrounds.

As I complete backgrounds, which are simply watercolor paintings, the background and cels are sent to the camera. There the cels are superimposed on the background and shot. Cels are removed and a fresh batch put on and shot and this goes on—four cels at each shot, until a scene is taken in sequence of action. You remember the books of prize fighters and ballplayers that we had when kids—flipped the pages and got action. Well, each assembly of cels over the background is like one page in one of those books. When they are run thru a projector at the rate of 24 frames or pictures per second, we get smooth and continuous action.

If the picture is a Symphony, the cels are painted in brilliant opaque colors instead of the grays. Our shooting then is done at Technicolor. Four negatives are shot—one black, and the others with filters to get the three primaries, red, yellow, and blue. Then, in some secret manner, they actually print their colors from positive prints of the four keys—all printed like process printing on a color press.

I have to draw my backgrounds from the layout designs and then paint them the same as I would paint from nature, except that I have to paint entirely from memory. There is a world of detail to be familiar with regarding the mechanics of animation, registration of characters to my backgrounds, so that when a character is to pass behind a tree, for example, he will pass behind that tree. Fortunately, I got deeply interested in photography about five years ago and have gone pretty far in the art. So I brought more knowledge of the mechanics of the camera to my job than the cameramen at the studio have brought to theirs. When we have to devise tests for definite gammas and so forth in printing, I usually get stuck for the job. But it has helped me go ahead.

Where lateral or horizontal action is required, I paint what we term “pans”. Some of these have reached 24 feet in length. The average is five feet. In pan action not only the animated characters move, but at each shot of the camera the background is moved. For very slow pan movement, we move the background a sixteenth of an inch at a shot. We scale from that up to speed where the pan moves an inch at a shot.

Before the picture is entirely shot, the sound and dialogue are recorded. I think you know the process. The sound is actually photographed and shot on film and the image of the soundwaves is transposed back into sound when projected with the picture. The musicians all wear earphones and get their beat from the film running thru the sound truck, so they are in perfect “sync” with the animation. We dub now in French and Spanish dialogue.

Now the preview. Usually at a Hollywood house. There we get the reaction of the audience. For ourselves, we have run the damned picture a hundred times on our small Moviola projector in the sweatbox. Every day the animators make test drawings and we project the negatives and criticize. As scenes are shot, the daily rushes come back from the lab and we run and criticize them: animation, painting, backgrounds.

If something is sour at a preview, the offending department or persons are given a luncheon in the studio dining room the following day. Ann serves a lovely meal, the studio pays for it, but nobody but Walt enjoys it. Why? Because when the dishes have been cleared away and the cigars passed, hell will no doubt break loose and the alibis will flow. These usually last until 3pm and send the mob home with prize headaches. To be invited to a luncheon is to be fattened for the slaughter.

There is the process.

Continued in "Walt's People: Volume 18"!

In a long interview, animator Ken O'Connor talks about his career with Disney, his forced retirement and triumphant return, and his opinions about a few of his fellow Disney animators and artists.

RON MERK: Tell us a little about working with Ken Anderson.

KEN O'CONNOR: I thought he was a very brilliant guy. When he first came in, I thought he was old-fashioned and out of date [from a] cartoon thinking [standpoint]. But he proved to be really good at developing sequences to Walt’s satisfaction, which wasn’t easy, and developing and designing new characters. He was very good at that. He had a checkered career, when he first came in, almost the time I did, in 1935. Something went wrong and they put him out in the Machine Shop. They thought he had TB or something, some ailment that he had to be outdoors, and he couldn’t…. That was a terrible blow to him, to be told he couldn’t work indoors, because that was his life, in the studio, drawing and so on. Then he recovered from that, and he seemed to appear to come healthy.

RM: What was the project that you remember most closely working on with Ken?

KO: Well, actually, I was friends with him, but in the studio I had hardly any direct contact. The one time I seem to remember most was when he was a layout man, how he was for a while, and he was clever enough to get out of that. And he did a good pan of a stork flying away and back, in a picture I did, called Clock Cleaners. However, I just observed his work from afar, and he was a very good renderer.

RM: What was it like working with Art Babbitt?

KO: You’re touching on tender spots. Art Babbitt and I fell out at the time of the strike. I knew why they were striking, over the yellow-dog contracts, as they called them, that the studio was giving them. But my opinion was they should have talked first, and struck afterwards. They were a bunch of hotheads, and people of other inclinations, like [David] Hilberman, who decided to take the boys out. In those days, there was talk of a labor relations election to see if the Screen Cartoonists [Guild] would be our bargaining agent or not, and I have a feeling the boys felt that if we had an election they might lose it. So it was better to go out on strike and force the issue, rather than just go down quietly as a result of voting. I was completely against striking at that time. I understood what unions do: a thing that Walt never did. He was mystified by unions. He felt they were just against him, and that was it. So I had decided to become a strikebreaker, and I rode to work every day with a pipe wrench under the front seat of the car, thinking I might have to use it in self-defense because my dear friends were all climbing up telephone poles, and taking pictures of me to use at the union hall, and offering to turn my car over, and getting pretty offensive.

RM: Did you ever fall back in with Babbitt, and have to work with him?

KO: I was going to say I admired him. He did early, very good work in animation. And, of course, he was on the striker side. He and I had an argument. He met me on Dopey Drive, asking me why in the world I was a strikebreaker. I told him, and he hated me ever since, as far as I know. I didn’t think much of him because his thoughts were in the opposite direction.

RM: Were you ever in a situation where you were forced to work closely together, or were you always apart?

KO: I never worked closely in the studio with him. The only contact I had was this [strike] ruckus. I felt he was a very conceited man, and a man who held extreme positions. I’m not, so we didn’t get along.

RM: Tell us about working with Les Clark.

KO: I didn’t have much to do with him until Walt put in an educational unit. I worked for ten years with the layouts and doing these educationals. He was a very good-living chap. Generally, he was very nice to work with. He rushed in to bore me out one day, about something, and he got tired of punching me like a pillow, and after that he never bore me out again.

RM: How about Claude Coats?

KO: Claude was a marvelous background painter. In fact, he was called the paint machine. He had his mind so geared onto how to paint so that Technicolor would make it come out beautifully. Which meant you painted in the middle ranges, see. Technicolor tended to drop off darks into black, if they were below a certain value, and wash out lights, if they were above a level. He knew just where to work, and make it go in. Maybe the original didn’t look too strong, but once Technicolor hit it, and stepped up the contrast, it came out beautifully. He could paint regular decorative paintings, too, for his own amazement, which he did. I remember stuff I liked that he did, atmospheric stuff in Pinocchio, where Geppetto was looking for the puppet out in the street, and it was misty, and rainy, and foggy, and that’s pretty hard to do with this transparent sort of oil they used to post the colors, and he handled it just magnificently.

RM: Did you ever have to fight the Technicolor people to get them to do something the way you wanted it?

KO: No, I didn’t. See, I went in on the dailies, every day, and I had the capacity of a layout person, and I was very responsible because they wouldn’t shoot anything without it being painted and backgrounded and didn’t have my signature on it. I’d pull it through in the sweatboxes, and I had to look at them. I only had to say, “The yellow looks two points too strong,” and they’d take a note, and they’d change it. They didn’t question what I said at all, thank God. I had the authority of Walt behind me, you see. I was never excessively critical, but I could be quite picky, because I felt I had to be, in my own defense, because I was responsible, not only for staging the picture, but also to see that everything looked good, looked right. I got very expert there. They would flick scenes through the sweatbox, and I could pick out a flyspeck on one frame, and it’d hit me. I was geared to this nervous condition. So I’d say there was a mark on that frame, and they’d back up and play it slowly. Ham Luske, and some of these others, developed abilities to [spot] the most minute differences in sound and color and everything else, at just a frame or two, which was part of the reason Disney got credit for quality. We got fussy, and then they’d change it, and Walt got the credit. [Laughs]

RM: You said you were thrown out of the studio.

KO: That’s right. I think it goes back to J. F. Kennedy. He had a bunch of guys, they were called young Turks, and they apparently instituted this idea that people should retire when they’re 65, period. It became quite general in business. And I was called in one day, and they asked if I was 65. They knew damn well I was 65. The man said, “We’d like you to take retirement.” I said, “Okay, all right, I’ll see you later.” And that was it. At that time, they were throwing the gold out of Fort Knox as fast as they could pick it up. A number of people, anyone who got near that age, was pushed out, and that’s all there was to it. I know that guys like Jack Cummings…. It was unceremonious.

RM: You went back to Disney a few times to consult on some things, and for them to re-mine the gold that they—

KO: After a while, there was no gold. Their credit wasn’t too good. I wasn’t the only one who had to retire. I was at the top of my artistic form, I would say, and getting better, if anything. Because I’ve always studied and practiced, and creative people are like that, some of them.

I got other work from guys like Ben Sharpsteen, for instance, who was putting Calistoga, up north of San Francisco, on the map. He gave them a museum. He needed a muralist and they called me up. So I did a 46-foot mural for him, and damn near froze to death. There was no heat in the place. Anyway, I seemed to get a continuity of work. After a short while, Disney asked me, for the second time, if I’d teach at CalArts. I had refused to before because I didn’t think they were doing it the way Walt wanted it, or would have even put up with. So I said yes, and I went and I taught for three years there, and then I pulled out because I wanted to be more creative than repetitive.

Then they started Tokyo Disneyland, and they called me back for that. So I worked with Imagineering, and then I made a film called Meet the World, that I made entirely out of Japanese prints, which I thought looked pretty good. That was satisfactory. Then they had a thing called Epcot.

Walt had taken me and others in the plane back [in the days] to look at the site, and it was just a black lake. They had to drain the whole damn lake there. These cypress, all these trees blackened the stuff with their juice, and had to be completely taken out, and new water put in. That’s what we saw there that time. It wasn’t any Disney then. I was a barman on the plane, which was a terrible thing because I didn’t know how to be a barman. Here I was a barman with Roy Disney and Walt, but thank God they just drank whiskey, steadily.

When they did the World Showcase and those things, for General Motors, I made a film with Collin Campbell on the history of transportation. Then I did stuff on the history of energy, for Exxon. Since then, they subbed the job out to a guy up here who made another film for Disney-MGM Studios, called Return to Neverland, and I set the color on that, and it runs 300 times a day, I guess, back there.

RM: You’ve also done some work on their recent features.

KO: Yes, I’m told, now, that I’m consultant to the Animation Department, although in the last year or so they haven’t remembered I’m alive, I guess. I worked on The Little Mermaid. I did what they call “visual development”. I did inspirational paintings of what Ariel’s room of treasures under the sea might look like, what she had up there. They changed it completely before it got on the screen. And I designed some characters and some systems that they could use, of layout. When you’re flying like a merman or a mergirl, you’re not limited by gravity, and so you come along, and there’s a big cliff, and they just go right down the cliff on the bottom. Things that—when you’re young, you dream you can fly, and you can do things that you can’t. This is like the relaxation of your imagination. And I also designed a wonderful sea witch, which they didn’t use. They used an old whore, I mean madam, who had been cut off at the waist and jammed into a decapitated octopus.

RM: What did your Ursula look like?

KO: I thought what they got didn’t look as if she came from the sea. There’s a real woman’s torso, you know, and this looks of the land, although I made mine out of the great manta ray, those huge great big things that fly through the sea, and they have a black, built-in cape, see. They go like this, with those wings. The manta rays don’t do it, but she could. And I was gonna have a head, and a body, underneath, and a stingray if necessary. At the point of black hat, and the point of the black manta rays, I thought they’re beautiful to see, and they look as if they’re out of the sea, you know, that shape, like a fishy shape, and I thought it would be great when she swept her cape around because she can have this kind of a wand, if you want, and her black cape can be her own wings. But they didn’t use it in the picture, and I thought mine was much more appropriate.

Continued in "Walt's People: Volume 18"!