Working with Disney (13 page)

When I first came out here from New York, I didn't know what I was going to do. I drove out here and went to work for Mack Sennett in the story department. He wanted certain animation done, and I did it for him. I worked in the story department for three or four months, before I went to Universal. I learned an awful lot from Sennett. If he had a barrel of water and a body going to fall in, there'd be a label on it, “Water.” Dynamite was labeled “Dynamite,” you know. I just believe in a type of humor that's visual—nobody gets hurt, but it's funny. They're striving for something. It's too bad. It's a lovely art. I don't know whether it'll ever come back again, unless it comes back in features, where you can afford to spend several million dollars to make a feature. We still have a lot of talent in the business. There's a lot talent. This school that Disney has out in Valencia—CalArts. They're doing a good job out there. In fact, I give two scholarships a year there to two students. They're developing some good animators, but as soon as they develop them, they go right to Disney's, you see. I'm very happy. And Hanna-Barbera is training people. But the thing is that they don't realize that if an animator gets, say, two hundred dollars a week and he's doing full animation, he can turn out 16 feet a week. If you give him four thousand dollars a week, he still can only turn out 16 feet of that kind of animation. Now, that's simply arithmetic. I think that explains it to you, doesn't it? Now, my animators never turned out more than 20 feet a week. Now in limited animation, you'd have to turn out 180 feet a week. Let's take a pose. The mouth will move in four drawings, and they time it to read a whole paragraph of dialogue. But we acted out the dialogue. We used arm action, body action, and everything else.

FDT:
I was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, which is supposed to be an exaggerated state like Texas. I was naturalized American in Los Angeles. I was always proud of that. While I was at the Disney Studios, I became a naturalized American. I'm a Canadian-born Frenchman. They butcher the French around here [the Veterans' Home] all the time. I've met some of the boys that were in World War I. Some of their “trench French” is terrible.

DP:
You were telling me earlier that you and Wilfred Jackson attended the same art school?

FDT:
Otis Art Institute.

DP:
Did Wilfred Jackson call you to come to the Disney Studio initially?

FDT:
Yeah. The interview was by Walt. I was always proud of the fact that Walt Disney was going back east to New York on some cartoon business, and before he left, he phoned, I think it was Jackson, and he told him to hire me. In those days, Walt used to do the interviews.

DP:
What was he like?

FDT:
He was a tough driver.

DP:
Did you like him in spite of that?

FDT:
Oh, yeah. We used to call him Uncle Walt, but he was more like a father. He had a funny sense of humor. Some of the books don't credit him with much humor, but he had a keen wit.

DP:
Did he play practical jokes?

FDT:
He used to be the victim of jokes. We had a guy named Rudy Zamora, and Rudy was always clowning around. One morning, he had on a bandmaster's outfit. He marched up and down the hallway. All of a sudden, he turned a corner of the hallway and walked right into Walt. Walt told him to come up to his office and bring his animation. So Rudy Zamora went up to the office with a stack of the animation paper, but he only had two drawings completed, so he put one on the bottom and one on the top. He handed the stack of drawings to Walt. But Walt crossed him up. Walt took the paper and flipped through them and all he saw was this one drawing at the bottom and one at the top! So he was fired. Well, Walt later made fun of that situation on TV, so I guess he wasn't completely disgusted.

DP:
You said before we started that you didn't like UPA very much when you went there?

FDT:
Well, I didn't like the politics. I mean, I couldn't warm up to [Mr.] Magoo. I was a Mickey Mouse man, although I animated practically all of the early characters. I also was a gagman and story man and sketch man.

DP:
Did you work with Roy Williams?

FDT:
Oh, boy. Some of the stories he told us—I wonder how he survived some of them. He worked out pretty well as a clown with the Mouseketeers. Roy was an unusual gagman. I see where he is credited with thinking up the idea of the Mickey Mouse hat. Roy got the idea from an animated drawing of Mickey tipping the top of his head
[The Karnival Kid,
1929]. In the early days, there was no limit, like Mickey would pull his spinal column out and he'd use it for a sword, but Ben Sharpsteen helped bring things within [reason]. Walt Disney's logic was if a chair had legs and if it had life, it would dance. Or even a piano stool. We kept within human boundaries. Marcellite [Garner] was one of my first girl friends, although I never dated her. But we used to ride to the studio together. I kidded Marcellite. I'll have to tell you the joke since you might publish this. Marcellite lived in Los Gatos [California] for a while. I told Marcellite, “So there you are, Minnie Mouse. I told you if you weren't careful, you'd end up in the cats!” meaning Los Gatos [Spanish for “the cats”].

Once Walt opened the door and a can full of banana peelings fell on him. That was another gag where he didn't think it was very funny. They tell about the early days of Walt when he worked on Oswald [the Lucky Rabbit]. The doctor told him to keep away from cigarettes. So one morning they found the garden hose throughout the building from Walt's animation desk. At the other end of the garden hose he put a cigarette. When people asked him, “What's the big idea?” he said, “Well, the doctor told me to keep away from cigarettes.” So who says that Walt Disney didn't have a sense of humor?

LN:
At the time I went to work for Disney, they were in a rather desperate need for artists. There was actually a shortage of artists, and they were combing the country. They found me in Dallas, Texas. We corresponded back and forth. This is back in 1937. They offered me a job, and I accepted and came out here towards the last of 1937.

DP:
Towards the end of
Snow White?

LN:
Well, they had just finished
Snow White.
I got out here in time for the premiere out in Beverly Hills.

DP:
What were you doing before you came to Disney?

LN:
I was a newspaper artist. I worked on the
New York Herald Tribune,
and I worked for the Associated Press, and then things got kind of bad during the depression, so I came home to Texas. I was doing commercial art then, trying to work with different studios in the Dallas area, and I was getting along fairly well, but then Disney saw some of my artwork, and they wrote to me and asked me if I would like to go to work for them. As I say, I accepted and I came out then. They had just finished
Snow White,
and not to repeat myself, but I was at the premiere. They gave everyone tickets—all the employees—and I got to see it. It was an affair, believe me—tremendous.

[Starting work at Disney] like everyone else, you'd go to school for three months in training and were taught by different animators. Don Graham was head of the teaching class then. Actually, most of the drawing at that time was design and life drawing. The human figure, as Don used to say, is the basis of all art, so we studied that. Then I got into animation. I was Norm Ferguson's assistant. Now, for your information, Norm Ferguson was the man who developed Pluto right from the ground up. He made a real dog out of him. And so I was honored
to be his assistant. His drawing was so rough that I didn't have any trouble following it! I didn't have to draw too clean. So at any rate, after that, I became a little disenchanted with my progress in animation, and through Charlie Philippi, I got into layout and started on the next feature, which was
Pinocchio.
Then I worked on all the features: as I can remember,
Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella.
[Lance worked on almost all of the features through
Lady and the Tramp,
but I cannot find a credit for him on
Bambi.]
I worked with them up to I think about 1960 and went over to Hanna-Barbera on
The Flintstones.
I stayed there about ten years, and then I retired. I'd had enough. But you know, I went back there last December and worked for six months at Hanna-Barbera. They don't do
The Flintstones
there anymore. It was all sent overseas to Australia. I worked on those, what we'd call adventure pictures, like
Godzilla, Captain Caveman and the Teenager, Scooby Doo.
I worked on those sorts of things. And finally I'll tell you, that's such doggone hard work. It was really hard and tedious. It took a lot of concentration. I just had to give it up and go back to playing golf.

DP:
When you went from Disney to Hanna-Barbera, was that quite a contrast?

LN:
Yes, it was. Every studio works a little differently, but basically, it all has to go through the same—more or less—process of story to layout to animation. I worked in layout with a chap named Richard Bickenbach. That's quite a name, but he was a fine man and a great artist. He's retired now. So I had good training. If you can draw, basically you can handle it.