Working with Disney (11 page)

DP:
Steven Spielberg, who made
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
is also a big Disney fan.

MD:
Well, I'm very pleased to see that they're bringing in a lot of people. I feel that when you don't have Walt, you should now give this thing a different look. Walt never hired big-name directors for his live-action films because he liked to direct them. He wanted people who would do what he wanted done. This was a thing from his early days.

DP:
It was always his studio.

MD:
Right. It took a long time to realize that he was hiring you to do what he wanted done. He wanted you to give him something to judge from, and he wanted the best you could do and then better than that.

DP:
As a director of shorts and feature films, you worked closely with Walt Disney. Was it difficult for you to keep up with his innovations and experimentations? Was it difficult to follow his lead?

DH:
No, it was not difficult for me to keep up with Walt Disney's innovations and experimentations. No, it was not difficult to follow his lead. Sometimes it was difficult for him to know just where he himself was going—he would be trying to get a handle on his dreams.

DP:
How did you happen to go to work for Walt Disney?

DH:
I left New York to go to Hollywood to look the live-action situation over. It didn't look so good, so I applied at Disney.

DP:
What were your first impressions of Walt? Did they change over the years?

DH:
My first impressions of Walt were that “he was always right.” Even if I didn't think he was—but I had enlisted to learn his way of doing things, so I followed his wishes.

DP:
As a supervising director of
Snow White,
did your approach vary greatly from the supervision or direction of shorts? In other words, how
does one go about directing the first animated feature? Were you allowed much latitude, or did Walt monitor all that you did?

DH:
No, my approach did not vary in my supervision of
Snow White—
there was simply greater scope.
Snow White
was really a group of shorts (which were sequences of
Snow White),
so the only added problem was to hold it all together as a unified whole. I was allowed full latitude on all details of production—Walt monitored the
results
from Story to Preview.

DP:
As one of the “New York animators,” was it difficult to adjust to the Disney approach to the production of animated cartoons?

DH:
The only difficulty in “adjusting” to the Disney approach was that there was no acceptance of slipshod animation (as there had been in New York) and no thought of cost relative to quality.

DP:
How did the Disney Studio compare to other animation studios where you have worked?

DH:
I saw no difference in working at the Disney Studio except as noted above.

DP:
I have heard several accounts of Walt's on-the-spot evaluations at previews of shorts that disappointed him. Did these sessions create a great deal of anxiety?

DH:
Walt's evaluations at previews of shorts that disappointed him didn't bother me. I knew that those I directed had certain weaknesses, which were evident after a preview. If criticism came my way, I sat quietly and took it—whether it was justified or not.

DP:
As one of the first directors in a constantly evolving medium, how did you coordinate the work of animators? As the art of animation became more sophisticated, did you supervise animators differently, or was your approach to direction basically the same?

DH:
I think coordinating the work of animators took care of itself. All of us had complete dedication to Walt and the medium, and because of this we were all anxious to help each other get the very best results. As a director, I never thought I was in any way superior to the animator
(and certainly did not act it). It was teamwork—animators helped animators, directors helped animators, and animators helped directors—total unity.

I always considered animators—each one separately—as marvelous human beings with wonderful ideas (some maybe not so good as others—the ideas, I mean) and always encouraged them not to take a scene until they were completely satisfied that it worked. And besides, they were all I had to “get it on the screen”!

I never changed my basis for directing—I only worked to get better at it.

DP:
What was it like for you to work at the Disney Studio during the 1930s and early 1940s, the period historians generally regard as the Golden Age of Animation?

DH:
For me, working at the Disney Studio was an intense twenty-four-hour-a-day experience, with ever-new challenges always over the horizon. The problem for me (and I suppose for all of us) was that there wasn't any way that we would know whether something was good or bad until the idea was shown to the theater audience (and then it was too late to correct—that is, if it were bad). There seemed always to be a struggle to make an idea work—from story to final animation approval. There just wasn't any way to positively know whether the idea was going to get over. It would be only through experience and a sixth sense (which Walt had in abundance) that could in a manner assure some measure of success. Even so, we weren't always right (including Walt) in the way we presented an idea.

Speaking only for myself, as I gained experience, I would never take an idea that I was responsible for putting on the screen (whether when I was an animator and later when I was a director) until I was satisfied that it would work. When I became a director, I encouraged my animators to do the same thing. When I was an animator, I would argue with the director until the idea was somehow changed so that I would be happy with it—and when I became a director, I would argue with the story men (including Walt) until the idea was acceptable to me. However much Walt fussed about my approach if his idea and mine didn't
agree, I'm quite sure he secretly liked it. Why else did he select me to direct
Snow White?

DP:
On
Snow White,
animators were cast by characters, but on
Bambi,
the film was broken down by sequences, and any animator could animate any character. What kind of problems did these two approaches pose for you as the supervising director? Did you prefer one approach to the other?

DH:
I don't think you have your conclusions altogether right about the casting of animators on either
Snow White
or
Bambi.
Animators were selected for their type (style) of animation. Those animators whose style seemed to be compatible with the particular character(s) would be given key scenes in order to establish (for all the animators) a basis for the personality of the character because the character would be used in many scenes (say) throughout the picture. All key men would confer back and forth about all characters, but usually one guy would be the “authority” on his character. This was the general plan, although sometimes it was altered. This would be my approach.

DP:
How did you happen to get started in animation? I understand that you went to work at the Bray Studio.

WL:
Long before that. I really started in 1916. My first job was for William Randolph Hearst, who had started a cartoon studio.

DP:
Hearst International?

WL:
Hearst International, yeah. Cosmopolitan Pictures. It was set up by a cartoonist named Gregory La Cava. I wasn't an animator; I was just starting in the business—such characters that were famous in the Hearst papers like the Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan, Jerry on the Job, and all of those. We didn't create any new characters. That's where I learned how to animate. When I was eighteen, I was an animator. From there, I went to the Bray Studios. That was about 1922. I was at Bray working with George Stallings, who was in charge. Then George left and I took charge of the entire studio. I made those combination [live action and animation] pictures. I guess it must have been about 1924. They talk
now about how combination animation is new. Gosh, I did it almost sixty years ago, because I've been producing with Universal now for fifty years.

DP:
One article discusses using blow-up photographs as opposed to combining live action and animation. I haven't seen any of the films where the backgrounds are actually photographs of a room. Did that work fairly well? Was it very effective at the time?

WL:
No. The way I did it, the cameraman would photograph me going through my action, pantomiming with an imaginary character, assuming that the character is only maybe a foot high. We'd shoot that action first. Then we would take the negative and take about every other frame and make an eight-by-ten bromide photograph of every one of them. Then I'd take these photographs and put them on my drawing board and animate on tissue paper over the photograph. For instance, if I had him in my hand—I'd pantomime the action in my hand—and then I'd place the Colonel Heeza Liar or Dinky Doodle—what I was doing at the time—in the hand. Then we'd ink and paint cels from the drawing. Then we'd photograph each one of those photographs with that particular cel. They were numbered. We'd have maybe two or three thousand of those in a picture. We developed them in racks of fifty at a time so the density would be the same. That's how it was done. That was the first method of combining characters. Before that, Max Fleischer combined himself in the Out of the Inkwell series, but that was something different. That was rear projection. But he never used the system. In fact, I was the first one to ever use this system.