Working with Disney (16 page)

DP:
That's what it seems like to me. Can you recall your first meeting with Walt Disney? Or I suppose your first contact with him?

XA:
One of my early memorable contacts—you'd see Walt all the time, you know—but one day at the new studio here, I was standing at the elevator waiting to go upstairs, and Walt came up. Every time you'd see him in the hall, you'd say, “Hi, Walt.” He'd say, “Hiya.” This day, he came up to the elevator, and I said, “Hi, Walt,” and he said, “Hi, X.” He knows my name! I practically dropped to my knees and kissed his feet. I was so thrilled, here's this great man [who] knows my name. I could just relive that moment with you; [just as] vividly [as] the day it happened. Such a great impression.

DP:
How long had you been there?

XA:
I didn't have any contact with Walt at Hyperion at all other than just saying hi, and this was at the new studio, so this was probably two or three years. I found out later that he knew people, you know, but trying to recall everybody's name at the spur of the moment like that was pretty rough.

DP:
I suppose everybody was involved in the strike one way or another.

XA:
I went out on strike. I was Woolie's assistant, as I said, at the time, a young kid of twenty years old. They said, “Well, we're going to have a strike.” “Okay, we're going to have a strike.” They said, “It'll be over right away.” So I went out. I told Woolie, “Well, all my friends are going out. I can't stay in, you know.” “Well, do what you want. Do what you have to do.” So I went out. But the strike lasted the whole summer. At the end of the summer, the end of the strike, Hal Adelquist, who was the personnel guy at the time, called me [and told me] that the strike had been settled and that they were taking some of them back. So he called me to go back to work. In the meantime, I had just got my draft notice, and I said, “Well, I'll see you in a year's time, Hal. Save my place for me.” Well, it turned out it was four years later that I came back. So I missed the things that probably went on at the studio—you know, the bad feelings that were created by those who stayed in and those who went out, because some of those guys took it pretty damn seriously. I couldn't. We weren't supposed to fraternize, but I'd be carrying my picket sign and Woolie'd come out the main gate in his convertible. I'd stick my sign in the back of his car, and we'd go out to lunch together. Some of these radical guys would jump up, “You can't do that! You're not supposed to fraternize with those guys.”

DP:
The Art Babbitt followers?

XA:
Yeah. Well, then after the war, I came back, and Art Babbitt had to be hired back according to the terms of the contract because he had been in the service, too. Then they asked me if I would mind being Art's assistant. I said, “No, I have no feelings about it one way or the other.” So I was his assistant. I think the terms of the contract with him [were that]
they had to keep him for a year. So at the end of the year's time, why, then he was let go, and then I went on to other assistant-type work.

DP:
Did you find there was any stigma attached to having been out on strike?

XA:
No. As I say, by the time I came back, everything had calmed down. As I understood from some of the other fellows, there were some awful bad feelings. But I never felt that I was deprived of any advancements or anything by the mere fact that I had been out on strike. Some of the guys who'd been out—for instance, Ken Peterson, who was one of the active people in the strike, he had a position of importance. So I think it was just a few individuals that bore a grudge. But Walt's feelings—I'm sure he must have been very hurt at the time by guys like Babbitt who went out. Babbitt was one of those people who was always fostering a cause, you know, no matter what it was. So this must have been awfully hard on Walt. But to me, being very young and not understanding things too well at that point in time, I went out because it seemed like kind of a lark. I had no family, no obligations. Some of the fellows that were out who were married had a rough time. But to me, if I'd go down and get the union welfare and enough to make my car payment, that's all I cared about. So it was a different situation. I wasn't a radical type. The guys that went out and formed UPA, they were radical at the time.

DP:
I guess the time you missed was a time of making mainly training films and a lot of things that were a way of keeping the studio surviving.

XA:
Yeah. They got the War Department contracts to do films and things like that, so I guess they were operating on a pretty tight shoestring. Even after I got back, there were lean times. For instance, I came back as an assistant to the position I had left. So they couldn't touch me for a year. But in the meantime, when we finished a picture—I can't remember which one it was—everybody was demoted. Well, not everybody, but animators were demoted to assistants and assistants to inbetweeners, etc. After my year's grace, why, then I was touched, and I had to go back down to being a breakdown [man], an inbetweener for a short period.

DP:
Was that just for financial reasons?

XA:
Yeah. So if they didn't have a picture going through right off, why, they'd just—they did fire quite a few guys at the time. And the industry, I guess—other than Disney's—operates that way today. Like Hanna-Barbera, they have these big schedules, and the kids work their butts off for three or four months, and then while their TV commitments are met, everybody is laid off. It generally comes around Christmastime, which is one of those unfortunate things. But they've learned to live with it somehow. It's rather unfortunate, because I don't think the animation [pay] scale has risen to that point where, like live action, a guy makes enough money on a live-action picture that he can afford to live on nothing for a few months. But in the animation business, they don't do that, so these kids fall on hard times. Some of those people that were in the business when I came and are still there are just professional inbetweeners or professional assistants who never had the ability to really go any further than that, and they're still doing the same thing. They seem to be content with it.

DP:
When you came back after the war, did you work on the short subjects that were still being made, or did you work on the features?

XA:
I worked on
Lady and the Tramp
as an assistant. Then I was mostly on short subjects. I was working with Jack Kinney then, who was a director on the Goofy short subjects. So I was the key clean up man on the Goof. I'd just key the drawings for all the animators, and then they had their own assistants who would follow them up. So I did that for several years after the war. Then I worked with Ward Kimball on
Melody
and
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom.
That's where I got my first screen credit on my first animation.

DP:
An Academy Award winner.

XA:
Yeah. That was a great picture. Then after that, Bill Justice and I teamed up, and we started doing crazy little pictures:
Jack and Old Mac, Noah's Ark, Symposium on Popular Songs.
Two were nominated for Academy Awards. We got beat out by [John] Hubley
[Moonbird]
on one of them
[Noah's Ark]
and I don't know who else
[The Hole
by the Hubleys]
on the other one [
A Symposium on Popular Songs]. Noah's Ark
was all stop-motion animation.
A Symposium on Popular Songs
was a combination of cartoon animation and stop-motion. [Ludwig] von Drake was in that. It was not really a new approach—they did stop-motion back way back in Walt's first days in the animation business—but he was intrigued by it. The fact that Bill and I ventured forth and did something fresh intrigued him, and he supported us. We did these pictures, and I think they were successful. We showed
A Symposium
here the other day to the younger fellows that hadn't seen it. They were rather intrigued by it.

DP:
I understand that the Sherman Brothers had written some special songs for that, takeoffs on different songs.

XA:
Yeah. These were parodies on the styles. They did a ragtime song called “Rudabaga Rag.”

DP:
They had one that sounded like Bing Crosby.

XA:
They had a Crosby and a Rudy Vallee type—

DP:
Did the work on these cartoons lead into the special titles that you did for
The Shaggy Dog?

XA:
Yeah.

DP:
When you do titles, is that pretty much up to you how you are going to do it, or is it carefully structured as a cartoon would be?

XA:
We storyboard it just as we would a regular cartoon. You take your elements. You know how many titles you have and how you're going to get from one to the other and use a character. I think
The Shaggy Dog
was the first one we did—how we'd wipe off one with the dog animating through, back and forth.

DP:
Do you plan that yourself, or does that come from the story department?

XA:
No, we were our own story department. We took the whole thing from the beginning to end. Bill was a very good animator on it. I did the styling and layout on that, and Bill did the directing and animation on it.
Bill has an uncanny sense of timing and phrasing. An animator with less experience than Bill would have a character mouthing the action and no phrasing of the head. This is very difficult in that type of animation in that you have to animate straight ahead. It's not doing two extremes and then going back and putting your inbetweens in. You know that at a certain time, you've got to be over here. On your exposure sheet, you have, say, a twelve beat. Well, exposure number one is here and then when you get down to twelve, he's got to be in this position. So you've got to move him there and just anticipate him getting to that point, instead of working back in regular animation where you just put your drawings in between. It's a lot easier. And then remembering where you were is another thing. If you have two or three characters, we'd have to work closely together and work out a pattern. We started on top and worked clockwise around the scene here, so you remember that you made a move on each one of these characters. You just don't go around and move them haphazardly, because you never remember, “Well, did I move that one or not?” And if you forget, did I or didn't I, you just say, well, we'll scrap it and start all over again, because there's no sense in proceeding if you can't remember, and if you're going to have a jump in it, why, it will have to be done over anyway.

DP:
I was thinking as you were talking about that, it seems to me from some of the things I read about Walt Disney that using stick-figure type of movement or cutouts was about the stage animation was in when he started back in Kansas City. So it was probably nostalgic for him.

XA:
I think it was, because he kind of sparked to it when we proposed it.

DP:
I had a question concerning the Disney short subjects and the short subjects of other studios. Some articles I have read have suggested that the studio led in short subjects through the 1930s but then went into features and started paying less attention to short subjects. Other studios started to supersede Disney in the sense that they took the Disney style and went beyond it, either with emotions that weren't in Disney films, such as in
Bacall to Arms
with the wolf lusting over a Lauren Bacall-type character or doing the kind of impossible gags that Tex Avery
specialized in. Other articles have talked about Disney's emphasis on personality animation in contrast to many of the other studios. Do you feel that either of these ideas is accurate?

XA:
Yeah. As a matter of fact, we discussed it at the studio at the time. MGM was doing the cat-and-mouse films, Tom and Jerry, and they went into the slapstick part. We had been doing more than the cute personality stuff, the little fat bunnies, as we called it. Ward Kimball was chafing at the bit to get into some stylized animation as we finally did in
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom.
UPA was winning all the Academy Awards with their stylized cartoons. I asked Walt point-blank one day. I said, “Walt, how come you don't do any of those stylized things?” He said, “Oh, hell, X, they're making pictures for the so-called intellects, and I'm doing them for the heart. There's a hell of a lot more hearts than there are so-called intellects.” I couldn't argue with that point! So that was his remark. As a matter of fact, when we did
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom
and won the Academy Award, he never really claimed it as his picture. [He said,] “That's Kimball's picture.” I'm sure he was happy that we got the award on it, but it was still not his type of animation.

DP:
Closer to UPA?

XA:
Yeah. So we took what UPA had done and refined it. Now you have it to the point where Hanna-Barbera does the limited animation thing. Sometimes you run across one that's got some nice styling in it, but mostly the character is designed for full animation, and it is done in limited animation, and it just doesn't come across.

DP:
So you would feel then that it was not a question of one being better than the other, it was just a different approach.

XA:
Just a different approach. And as you say, we'd gotten into the feature business, so I think as a result, the short subjects suffered to the point that they weren't making the money. My understanding is that they weren't justifying the expense of making the cartoons. It had gotten so damn expensive to do a short subject that they finally decided they couldn't afford to make them anymore. That's why Walt let us go on these pictures that Bill and I did, because they were two
reelers—featurettes as they called them—and they could be released as a package with a feature, and they could make money on them. At that time, they weren't making any more six-minute short subjects. They were just giveaways, you know.