Dick Huemer talks about accepting a job offer from Walt Disney in 1933—after turning him down once before.

JOE ADAMSON: How was it that you got the opportunity to work for Disney again, after turning him down in 1930 to take a job with Charles Mintz? Did he make you another offer, or did you go to him?

DICK HUEMER: When Mintz tried to cut our salaries during the Depression, we went on strike. And so I left Mintz. Instead of going on strike, though, I went over to Disney’s at last. I had regretted turning him down as he had predicted. Don’t forget Disney was the big boy in those days, and there wasn’t really anybody who was anywhere near him. I went to Ben Sharpsteen, who was my friend, and said, “Well, Ben, I’d like to come and work for Walt now.” And Ben just went and told Walt, and that was all it was.

JA: Was there that much difference in salary?

DH: There was quite a come-down in salary—almost half. Walt was not one for paying big salaries at that time. He cut salaries once, during the Depression. Everybody had to take a cut, but we were willing to do that.

Did I tell you about the first time I went to work for Walt? I was sitting in his sanctum, and we were talking; we were all set, had agreed on how much money and everything. Walt started to tell me that he was going to make a cartoon feature. He was already thinking of it in 1933! Not only that, but it was going to be Snow White. He started telling me a little about the story: how she eats the poison apple and dies, and, as she’s lying there, all the goddamn little animals are looking in the window with tears rolling down… Walt was such a wonderful actor that my throat started to get tight, and my eyes began to get moist at the way he was telling it. To begin with, the idea of doing a cartoon feature was such a brazen, daring idea in 1933. Then he told me that he might also like to have some kind of amusement park some day. The idea, the germ, was not the way it finally turned out, but it was there.

And while we were sitting and talking, in came Charlie Chaplin. I almost fell out of the chair, because after all Charlie Chaplin was one of my idols. And behind him was another one of my idols, H.G. Wells! Chaplin very proudly introduced, not Walt to Wells, but Wells to Walt! “Here’s somebody I want you to meet, Walt Disney, this great guy sitting here.” That was the feeling! It was a wonderful experience, but I don’t know what they said, because I left soon after.

JA: When you started to work for Disney, were you animating?

DH: I animated on a lot of his pictures, like Grasshopper and the Ants, The Tortoise and the Hare, and Water Babies. My first animation was in Lullaby Land and a number of Silly Symphonies. Then I animated on The Wise Little Hen, which was the first time Donald Duck appeared and the first time they used his voice. They hadn’t “found” him yet; they hadn’t determined how to use him. He became a cranky character later on, but in Wise Little Hen he was just a duck who spoke with Clarence “Ducky” Nash’s voice. And I animated the Duck in The Band Concert, which Richard Schickel says is one of the best of Disney’s shorts.

JA: So you did run into the problem of finding the voice for the Duck?

DH: No, that was all done. Walt had determined that. The story as I heard it is that “Ducky” Nash came to Walt looking for a job and demonstrated his voices, and said, “Here’s one that I got. How do you like this? I don’t know what it is.” And did it.

And Walt said, “Why that’s a duck!”

Another picture, which I didn’t animate on, called Orphans’ Benefit, became the first time Donald was a crank and did this come-on-and-fight bit. Dick Lundy animated and deserves credit for that.

And Freddie Spencer deserves credit for having drawn the Duck the way he looks today. The way we animated him at first—the original models were made by somebody else—Donald had a long, sort of pointed beak. Freddie Spencer became the Donald Duck specialist. He wasn’t only good but awfully fast; when Walt instituted the system of paying bonuses, I think he had Fred in mind, because he was the principal beneficiary. He made an awful lot of money on his duck stuff. He was red-headed and had a very unfortunate disfigurement: his lower jaw had been caved in as a child by a baseball bat, so he had a big hollow on one side of his face. If he’d had lived, he would have retired rich, but he was killed in an automobile accident in the thirties coming home from a football game.

JA: Did Walt actually discuss character and motivation over the storyboards?

DH: Did he? You bet your life! Storyboards! Sweatbox! Lunchroom! That’s the one thing that we got all the time. When I went to work for him, he was doing Silly Symphonies, and the characterizations were very clear-cut in those things. For instance, when they did The Tortoise and the Hare, it was clearly laid out to have the hare act the way he did, bombastic and boastful, yet talented. That was good, clear characterization. The tortoise was definitely staged as a stupid guy who could good-naturedly be taken advantage of. Actually, he won by default. This was the kind of strong characterization that Walt always insisted on. If anybody else had done The Tortoise and the Hare, it would have been a series of assorted gags about running, one after another. Not all this clever, boastful stuff, like stopping with the little girls and bragging and being admired, and showing off the way he could play tennis with himself.

Walt would take stories and act them out at a meeting, kill you laughing they were so funny. And not just because he was the boss either. There it would be! You’d have the feeling of the whole thing; you’d know exactly what he wanted. We often wondered if Walt could have been a great actor, or a comedian. The acting in them was what made his pictures so great. And the characterizations in Snow White were beautiful as well: Just think, taking each one of those dwarfs and making each one an entirely different personality. Seven of the little bastards! It was just unheard of!

Walt worked out his stories down to the last blink of the eye. In other cartoon studios, we might do little pre-sketches, but there was no time for real analysis. But that’s what Walt was able to do, give time to do these things, because he now for the first time had the money coming in on his licensee projects. Even so, he worked on a pretty short budget; we had to have a picture finished about every two weeks. Walt’s pictures cost him much more than he got for them, at first; even Three Little Pigs made not so much money as you may think. We’d sometimes come back at night, just to talk about the stories and save animation time. I don’t know how other studios operated around that time; I guess they were more or less one like the other.

The only ones who did anything comparable at all—and they didn’t ever quite reach Disney—were [Hugh] Harman and [Rudy] Ising. They were the only ones who ever had some of the feeling of a Disney. They occasionally would turn out a really good film. They would make a cartoon against war, which wasn’t half bad. Once, when they were in trouble with Schlesinger, Disney helped them out financially.

There’s a famous story about Walter Lantz. He used to give runnings of his cartoons in theaters for kids on Saturday. And one time he ran all his Oswalds, and then he appeared personally on stage and talked to the kids. When it was over, he said, “Now what is the best cartoon in the world?”

And all the kids yelled out, “Mickey Mouse!” This actually happened!

Great as Walt undeniably was, he never, in the opinion of some, would have accomplished what he did if he hadn’t attracted such talent. I’ve heard guys say, “All right, Walt’s a genius, but he couldn’t have done it with Zulus or Eskimos.” Like Napoleon had to have brilliant generals and marshals who were talented tacticians in their own right, Walt had to have this group of—as I call them—his paladins.

For instance, Norm Ferguson started as a bookkeeper at Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables. Then one day he thought he’d like to animate, tried it, and didn’t get much encouragement, because he left Terry’s and accepted an offer from Disney. Walt was hard-pressed for men in those days, and he was trying almost anybody who showed talent. Fergy hadn’t animated much, but he fell right into it. He was a naturals, like Freddie Moore or Ward Kimball. It just flowed out of their pencils, or heads, or wherever talent flows from. In every studio there was, and still is, the so-called Best Animator. When I came to work at Disney’s in 1933, Norm, or Fergy, was IT—not only the best at Disney’s, but consequently the best in the world.

Walt was just crazy about Fergy’s animation and with damn good reason. Fergy’s characters lived and breathed and seemed to have actual thought processes. His sequence with Pluto and the flypaper, for instance, was a real classic. It still holds up as well as ever today. I saw it just last week in connection with a show we’re doing for TV this Christmas, and we all laughed as much as ever. Fergy wasn’t just a Pluto and Pegleg Pete animator, either. He did all the Wicked Witch animation in Snow White.

Once, at a meeting, right in front of everybody, Walt said to Fergy, “Fergy, you’re a great actor.”

And Fergy sort of simpered and said, “Well, I don’t know.”

And Walt said, “Yes, you are. That’s why your animation is so good, because you feel. You feel what these characters feel.”

Fergy was one sweet little guy, that’s how everyone felt about him, and in his own way, he was also one of Walt’s demi-geniuses.

Ham Luske, long before he ever applied for a job in Hollywood, wanted to be an animator. He had worked up in San Francisco, I think, on a newspaper. Without the least bit of knowledge of animation, he made a pencil test of a tennis player serving, which was just great. I imagine he had probably copied live action in some way, but he never disclosed it.

Wilfred Jackson has been written up quite a bit; he was a very important man at Disney’s. I worked with him a lot. He was the only cartoon director who came to work in sneakers; he was quite careless in his dress. He was one of Walt’s very first men, came out of art school poor as a church mouse, hardly had the fare to get to the studio. He was very instrumental in working out the idea of music with a cartoon.

Continued in "Walt's People: Volume 4"!

John Hench talks philosophically about the connections between fantasy, reality, and myth.

ARMAND EISEN: It’s been said that in Disneyland, the fantasy elements of the comic strip and the animated film have been given three-dimensional form in which the audience participates.

JOHN HENCH: Yes, only I have a certain disagreement with that word “fantasy”. Commonly, “fantasy” is used in contrast to “reality”. These terms may be necessary as a convenience, but they don’t define anything. As a matter of fact, so-called “reality” is more fantastic than “fantasy”. More often than not, they switch places. And if you try to judge things on that basis, you’re completely lost; the minute you say, “That’s too fantastic to believe,” you’re sunk. Nothing you can consider is too fantastic to be real.

When someone compares Disneyland or cartoons to fantasy, it really doesn’t mean anything. Those two terms are not only interchangeable, they often overlap so that even for convenience’s sake, they have no meaning.

AE: Myth embodies certain universal ideas. Let’s consider the Greek myth of Odysseus; on the superficial level, his adventures are fantastic. But on the symbolic level, they are dealing with very real human ideas.

JH: Yes, and I think they are more real than we give them credit for. In a symbolic way, they reflect principles of which we are the result. They are survival patterns, the “realest” things we know. These stories hold them up to us. We are here; we were there at one point, and these patterns still hold true.

Take fairytales, so-called “children’s stories”—they reflect something else entirely. They all fall into a pattern, often a Biblical pattern. In the case of Cinderella, she was very high born. Through some set of circumstances, she was reduced to a kitchen maid. This is clearly Man being kicked out of Eden. Along comes a redeemer, a prince, and there’s always a gimmick, a key, a talisman. In Sleeping Beauty it’s a kiss, in Cinderella it’s a glass slipper. And the person is returned to the former state.

It’s something we seem to have acquired. I don’t know whether it came from actual experience or whether it’s an instinctive concept.

AE: Campbell and others talk about universal myths, which manifest themselves in different cultures in different forms. You suggest that the myth of Cinderella is in this category; that man has a vision of an exalted position he once occupied but has lost. This memory/ frustration lives within the greater cultural consciousness.

JH: And man’s faith that he’ll be redeemed, that someone will find the gimmick and restore him to what he believes he really is.

Cartoons reflect those things. Every successful cartoon has that in its basis. I think we, as humans, have only one dynamic, one thing that makes us tick: survival. The single command: survive. We have inherited the patterns designed and tested for 100 million years. Whether we need them now or not, we can’t ignore them. Image is the most powerful way to it.

The whole mechanism of vision is extraordinary. It’s hooked up to a little computer, and the memory banks keep all the information stored up. A baby duck that has been hatched with chickens has a little reference in the DNA chapter all about water. And even though he considers himself a chicken, he walks over to the water with confidence and swims. We are in the same predicament; we have all that locked in. I think our environment has outstripped our evolutionary processes. We couldn’t evolve as fast as our environment, so we carry a lot of useless things that color our world. And that’s what cartooning is all about.

AE: Jung says that modern man has lost a great deal of his spiritual essence. We have become “rational,” cut off from nature, and we’ve lost our mysticism. Do you feel that the Disney works are, through these mythic structures such as Cinderella, restoring this subliminal mysticism—and this is why we respond to it so strongly?

JH: Yes, in a way. We haven’t lost it, we’ve simply ignored it. And we pay for this in a kind of underlying anxiety, a base which we find very difficult to touch. Again, the question is survival. The things that reassure us, that make these survival instincts tangible, make us happy. We often misunderstand the stimulation for pleasure. Battle really has a lot to do with pleasure; pleasure is sweetest when we are triumphant, when we have survived. The implication is that we have one struggle behind, and we are that much stronger for the next one. That is, I think, why kids love being frightened in haunted houses and some of our rides—they come out of the threat to their survival. They are here, they beat it, and a wave of pleasure comes over them for that.

The cartoon tends to ensure that. It gives us back some of those symbols, saying, “You are going to survive.” The old morality plays were doing the same thing.

AE: Ray Bradbury wrote an article some years ago on the horror film and why our culture needs the horror film…

JH: Yes, it’s the same thing that he was talking about. Ray is a good friend of this place, he comes here often. We speak the same language, oddly enough, and he’s one of the true “intellectuals” who have noticed something different going on in Disneyland and with Walt in particular.

Walt had a very acute awareness of what he was dealing with. He wasn’t the most articulate guy when it came to rationalizing himself, but I suppose that’s because he was an intuitive man. People with such a very high awareness this way are not apt to be good at explaining why. To communicate, you have to start with a common ground. That’s the nature of Gestalt—you have to provide something as a ground, so that when you introduce a new form it takes the proper identity. You can’t always do that to people, and the identity is lost or distorted.

Continued in "Walt's People: Volume 4"!