Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (10 page)

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society preferred the “soft-sell” approach. Although the company would expand in a number of different directions during the 1950s (documentaries, live-action features, television, theme parks), all the product returned to messages that “naturalized” the middle-class patriarchal heterosexual paradigm instead of the overt discussions prevalent in the films made during the war. This development did not occur overnight. Each of the areas that had been affected by the war effort show a gradual adaptation to this aesthetic during the postwar 1940s, resulting in a new and phenomenally successful Walt Disney Company by the beginning of the 1950s.

Nowhere was the realignment more apparent than in the studio’s theatrical animated features. During the 1940s, Disney’s bread-and-butter product, its animation, declined in popularity and critical regard.

The box-office disappointments of
Pinocchio
and
Fantasia,
and the ballooned budget of
Bambi,
necessitated scaling down the ambitions of future animated features and ended Disney’s “Golden Period.” For the next eight years, the studio’s animated features consisted of collections of short subjects (some longer than the normal half-reel, some shorter) released as “package” films. Although the first of these packages,
Saludos Amigos,
was very well received, each successive feature (
The Three
Caballeros, Make Mine Music
[1946],
Fun and Fancy Free
[1947],
Melody
Time
[1948] and
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
[1949]) gained less and less favorable reaction.

Although most analyses of Disney’s animated features during this period stress the lack of budget and vision on the part of the studio during these lean times, one can also find in the contemporary criticism of these films a distinct disfavor with the sexual nature of certain sections of these films. In fact, during the mid-1940s, there is a marked return to the carnivalesque atmosphere that suffused Disney animation in the early years—and reviewers didn’t seem to take kindly to it. The critical reaction to
The Three Caballeros
quickly expressed the discomfort of seeing Donald Duck in a sexual frenzy as he runs pell-mell towards every live-action Latin American beauty that crosses his path, sometimes embracing his male cohorts in the midst of the chaos.
Time
’s review of the film stated baldly that Donald’s “erotomaniacal regard for these full-blown young ladies is of strictly pathological interest.”103
The Saturday
Review
concurred, wondering “why Mr. Disney and his staff should ever have sent their caballeros on that magic serapi [
sic
] ride across a beach full of bathing beauties.”104 Smoodin’s analysis of the reaction to M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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The
Three Caballeros
points out that the studio was not some innocent party while “perverted” critics lambasted the sexual ferocity of the film.

He points out that

In the same
Saturday Review
that discussed
The Three Caballeros,
an advertisement appeared for the film. It showed none of the animated characters but only a woman in a bathing suit, hand poised on hip in typical bathing suit fashion. The ad copy exclaimed “Yes! She’s real!

Alive and lovely in a Walt Disney Picture! It’s amazing, wonderful and thrilling!”105

This was not only an isolated incident, as publicity photos of Walt sketching a lineup of bathing beauties on the Disney lot during this period point out.106 Clearly, the studio’s promotional strategy accentuated rather than diminished the sexuality in the film.

In “All the Cats Join In,” one of the shorts that comprise
Make Mine
Music,
a teenage girl’s naked silhouette appears behind an opaque shower door, and possibly “too much” is revealed as she reaches out for a towel. The Production Code Administration thought it was too much at least and wrote to the studio that “These scenes should be eliminated” from “All the Cats Join In,” one of the rare times in which Disney was admonished.107 Yet, somehow the offending scenes were able to be retained and still get a Seal of Approval. Their inclusion resulted in
Time
describing the piece as “a jukebox setting of Benny Goodman’s record, in which orgiastic hepcats and bobbysoxers, mad on chocolate malteds, tear all over the place.”108

The appearance of such elements in Disney animation at this point needs to be seen in the larger context of social and industrial changes during the 1940s. The entire country had experienced during the war a huge upsurge in more explicit sexuality. An entire industry of “cheese-cake” posters and glossy photos was created to keep overseas soldiers aware of “what they were fighting for.” With the American population basically segregated by gender (whether in the armed forces or on the home front), the restrictions placed on sexual relations became more pronounced. Of course, being segregated by gender, many homosexual men and women who had never come in contact with others who felt the way they did were suddenly thrust into close quarters with each other. Men and women in the service were also lectured to specifically about sexual matters in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease 40

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and to warn against homosexual tendencies. Film was used as part of this education, and, as the overview of Disney’s relationship with the government shows, animation figured strongly. Hence, with such blatant reference to sexuality occurring in American culture, it is not un-reasonable to find Disney participating in it.

Such considerations take on further merit when looking at the status of Disney animation itself during this period. During the 1930s, Walt Disney and his studio stood so far ahead of other animation departments at other studios that it often seemed as if Disney was the only studio making cartoons. Yet, by the 1940s, the other animation factories had shortened the lead that Disney held and created a distinctly different philosophy and style than Disney. The work of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at MGM (with Tom and Jerry), and numerous artists at Warner Bros. (with their menagerie of cartoon characters led by Bugs Bunny) challenged the preeminence of Disney animation. Their work adopted much of the “full animation” style that Disney’s studio developed in the 1930s, but was not as concerned with the “illusion of life,”

and furthermore stressed the violent, burlesque and risqué humor that was rarely found in Disney animation.

The most blatant example of using Disney’s “full animation” to ends other than those of the moral-driven narratives of the Disney studio was the work of Tex Avery (at both Warner Bros. and MGM). In one of the most popular cartoon shorts of the war,
Red Hot Riding Hood
(1943), the wolf goes after not a sweet young girl but a voluptuous leggy redhead performing at a nightclub in various stages of undress. The wolf’s reactions visualize quite strongly his raging hormones in a variety of hilarious and physically impossible ways. The liberties taken with the wolf’s body (eyes popping out larger than his body, tongue rolling out for miles, etc.) as well as the “illusion of life” fetishism of Red’s body on stage (animated by Preston Blair) was antithetical to the Disney philosophy. Yet, the short often garnered such a strong reaction from audiences (particularly soldiers) that some theatres reported having to stop the feature film and run the short again to appease the crowd.109

Disney animators in the 1940s tried to answer the challenge that Avery and the other animation factories had created by inserting more violence and more sexuality into their work. The influence of these other studios can be seen in the slapstick and violent humor of the 1940s series of Goofy cartoons comically demonstrating different sports (
The
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Art of Skiing
[1941],
How to Play Football
[1944],
Hockey Homicide
[1945]).

Mickey Mouse’s sweet persona appeared less and less on screen in favor of the angry antics of Donald Duck, who seemed to more suit the challenge posed by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. It is also more understandable why Disney would have Donald chasing Latin lovelies around in feature films when Avery’s wolf was hooting at Red’s bumps and grinds.

Unfortunately, Disney and his studio’s public relations department had already staked out an image for itself as wholesome and family oriented, and such displays of sexual aggressiveness (although no more suggestive than Mickey in his early period) were not appreciated. Disney could speak overtly of the female body in manifestly pedagogical texts such as
The Story of Menstruation,
but audiences did not approve of such things in the studio’s theatrical product. The studio eventually learned this lesson, and 1950 saw a full-scale return to the fairy-tale format that audiences wanted from Disney.
Cinderella
was the biggest animated success the studio had had since
Dumbo
and gained a sizable profit due to the cutbacks and “cheats” that kept the cost of the production low. (Disney animators admit to using more rotoscoping, or tracing live-action figures, on this film than in any other.)110 Sexual imagery was again submerged into images of patriarchal heterosexual romance—dancing, walking in the moonlight and a chaste kiss in the wedding carriage.111 Throughout the rest of the decade, the studio would continue animating famous children’s tales (
Alice in Wonderland

[1951],
Peter Pan
[1953],
Sleeping Beauty
[1959]). In adapting the familiar stories, contemporary concepts of gender and sexuality are conveyed more benignly than in the educational shorts of the 1940s. For example, Alice is made less willful and independent than in the original texts. On the other hand, Disney’s Peter Pan is one of the most masculine versions of the character, a definite attempt to downplay the gender bending that traditionally occurs when actresses play the title role on stage.

Donald Crafton’s analysis of the film points out how the text attempts to teach young children the roles of masculinity and femininity as conceived in postwar America, even linking the pedagogical methods of
The Story of Menstruation
to
Peter Pan.
112 Whether or not the studio consciously used its research for
The Story of Menstruation
in preparation for
Peter Pan,
the studio definitely found more financial success by presenting its messages about motherhood under the guise of Barrie’s classic tale than in the more explicit lecturing on “the change of life.”

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The move into 16 mm educational films turned out to be more

minor than the studio seemed to anticipate, and, after 1951, official production seems to have stopped.113 The profit margin for these films was slim, since schools or libraries would buy one print of the film and then own it outright, often lending out the prints to other schools or institutions. As Carl Nater, head of the Educational Division for twenty years, explained, “Frankly, there was just not enough money to even get the cost [of production] back.”114 Yet, an outgrowth of Disney’s educational productions during the war did result in a lucrative new direction for the studio in the late 1940s. A production made for the CIAA entitled
The Amazon Awakens
(1944) put the studio in contact with documentary filmmakers. By the end of the 1940s, the studio was producing a series of documentary shorts (and, by the 1950s, features) under the titles

“True-Life Adventures” and (in the 1950s) “People and Places.” Unlike the Educational Division, these productions were made for exhibition in major film theatres, and, when
Seal Island
(1949) turned a sizable profit and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, the studio quickly turned out more. Just as the studio found that a return to the moral fairy-tale narrative that had begun the studio’s feature film production was more successful than the rampant sexuality in the package films had been, the entertainment-oriented animal documentaries proved more economically viable and popular than the more specifically educational productions.

The “True-Life Adventures” became immensely popular and were converted to 16 mm for classroom exhibition and edited for episodes of Disney’s television series. Focusing mainly on animal life, audiences warmed to vivid displays of what seemed to be creatures functioning in their normal habitat. Yet, as time went on, many began to notice the liberties the studio was taking with the footage shot by the documentari-ans. Many of the people working on the films had originally worked in animation. James Algar, who had been a sequence director on animated features, went on to direct many of the feature-length films in the True-Life Series. Ben Sharpsteen, who had worked on animated shorts and features during the 1930s and ’40s, served as associate producer and later producer of the True-Life series. Consequently, the True-Life shorts and features often took on the look and feel of Disney animation, particularly
Bambi.

Music was used blatantly to provide commentary on footage, making various animal activities seem like high comedy. One of the most M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY

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notorious of these sequences is the “scorpion dance” from the feature film
The Living Desert
(1954). As the scorpions circle each other, the soundtrack blares a square dance, complete with a humorous dance caller. The studio also effectively used slow motion and reverse motion to get desired effects from the animals, such as ducks slowly slipping on ice and crashing into each other in
The Vanishing Prairie
(1955). Lastly, although always purporting to be examining animals in the wild, environments were often recreated within the studio’s confines to better control the filming conditions. For example, in
The Vanishing Prairie,
a large section of the film is devoted to the life of prairie dogs. This is often done by presenting glass walled cutouts of prairie dog burrows—

the better to see them scamper about underground—without regard to how such conditions might change how the animals act and react.