Working with Disney (19 page)

DP:
I guess if you got off tempo, it would be obvious as soon as you looked at it. I have a couple of old home-movie prints of some early Disney films, including
The Klondike Kid
(1932), and they are silent, but you can see the rhythm because Mickey Mouse is moving to the beat. I can imagine what the music sounds like. In my classes, everybody loves the black and white cartoons with the vintage Mickey Mouse.

BJ:
When I was working on Mickey's Madhouse, which I worked on for four or five months, I looked at one hundred old black and white short subjects that were made from 1928 until 1934. Along about 1934 is when they started getting into color. I wanted these to be the old authentic black and whites, and I chose certain footage from the different pictures that I wanted to use. Like in the musical part of the thing that I told you about, in the first big room that you go through, everything would have to do with music. They'd either be playing instruments or dancing, that kind of thing. Then in the next room with the spooky stuff, I chose a lot of stuff like
The Skeleton Dance
and
Lonesome Ghosts
and a bunch of funny things. Those old black and white cartoons had a lot of nutty stuff that nobody would ever do now. They had a lot of spitting gags and they had a lot of panty gags. The drop seat would fall open someway!

DP:
All the scenes with the cows' udders!

BJ:
Cows' udders! I had that in Mickey's Madhouse.

DP:
Well, it's certainly obvious that the audience sophistication changed over the years. But then maybe that's part of the appeal. Mickey became such a straight character that maybe part of the appeal of the old Mickey is that he's a little more adventurous and a little more worldly.

BJ:
He was funny in those days. Then he got to be like a good little Boy Scout. The story men just had trouble with him because of his personality.

DP:
Do you think that there is any truth to the idea that Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney's alter ego and that as Walt evolved over the years from a young producer in a struggling studio to eventually becoming a television host, Mickey kind of followed suit?

BJ:
I don't see any relation at all. One thing that kind of upsets me is that they are celebrating Mickey's fiftieth anniversary. I don't think the kids want to relate to a fifty-year-old mouse. They don't want to relate to anybody that's fifty years or older. They want people of their own generation. All of their idols are young people. To me, it's a shame to think of Mickey as being fifty years old.

DP:
I guess I don't think of him as being fifty years old, because he doesn't look older. The beauty of Mickey is that he is intangible; you can't touch him as you can the Mickey at Disneyland. It's like a Santa Claus in a department store versus your image of Santa Claus when you're a little kid. They are much more fun when not put into real terms.

BJ:
Right.

DP:
I am interested in the studio strike. I was wondering how you fit in with that. Were you a striker? A nonstriker?

BJ:
Well, at that time, I was so interested in animation that the night before the strike happened was the first time I had heard anything about it. I know a lot of guys had been having meetings and talking about it and all that, and boy, this came as a complete surprise to me. I went to a meeting and I heard all this strike talk and everything, how everybody hated everybody else, and how nobody made any money, and all this stuff, and they were going to close down the studio. Jeez! I was dumbfounded, you know! I thought, “This is not for me. I'm going to get out of here.” So I just got out. The next morning, I went to work. I didn't want to hear any more of that stuff.

DP:
Did you have any problems going through the—

BJ:
Oh, yeah. They scratched my car up and tried to turn it over one time.

DP:
Really!

BJ:
Called you all kinds of names. People that you knew and that you had worked with. They were on the other side, and you were on your own side. At that time, I had been animating for maybe a year, maybe not quite a year. When they made the settlement of the strike, [that was] the only time I ever got set back. One of the deals was that they would have so many animators, so many directors, so many people who would be hired back, and so many stayed. They guaranteed me that I would go back to animation after ninety days. I guess it was a union punishment to be put down because you had been working or something. Like Ham Luske, who had been a director for several years, he had to go back to being an animator. So I worked with Ham Luske for three months. At the end of the three months, I went back to animation. That was the strike, and there were a lot of bitter feelings that never were healed.

DP:
Yeah, they're still there, I think, with some people. Did you find it hard to work with some of the strikers after it was settled?

BJ:
Well, when people call you names, you know, it's hard to forget. I know that there were feelings that never were healed in a lot of cases. Then there were other people that were really looking for the good in all of us, I guess, that came out of it all right.

DP:
Did the tension that existed after the strike tend to dissipate at all when Art Babbitt left?

BJ:
That helped. I know he had a bad time, because he'd walk down the hall and people would just turn their head. He was treated terribly. In fact, I know he was very uncomfortable even being there.

DP:
In some accounts, he seems to be the focal point of the strikers.

BJ:
Yeah. He was kind of the rabble-rouser that got them all stirred up. I know a lot of artists, a lot of good artists really couldn't—you see, the Disney product was always a result of a lot of teamwork. You might have been a real good artist, but you had your own way of working, you wanted to express your own personality that didn't go along with what was being done. For instance, the background painters are a lot of terrific artists, and a lot of them are great landscape painters who sell a
lot of their own work. Well, when they're painting for a picture, the backgrounds have to look pretty much alike through a certain sequence and then lead into the next sequence. There has to be a transition of mood and color and so forth that is coordinated through the making of a feature picture where they work as a team. A lot of artists just couldn't bring themselves to be on the team. They were too independent, and some of them weren't capable. You know, I don't mean that they're all terrific artists, that they're just too stubborn to do the work, but a lot of them weren't capable of it. A lot of the guys in animation, they had so much talent, but they weren't talented enough to be an animator. They would bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, you know. Once they had the opportunity to do it, they found out they couldn't do it. They weren't good enough to be Disney animators. You get so much flak and so much criticism and so much downgrading of Disney and the Disney Studio and the Disney product and everything from a lot of these people that either didn't want to do it or didn't like the way it was done or weren't able to help. A lot of your key people in other studios that were very successful were Disney people.

DP:
That's what it seems like. I guess the core artists at UPA were former Disney people. Can you tell me about your transition to WED?

BJ:
Walt sent me over here to help on the audio-animatronics animation because of my knowledge of animation. They needed somebody here that was a trained animator, that could interpret animation into these figures. I've always felt that things like America Sings and the Pirates [of the Caribbean] and things like that are fun to do, because you're doing a cartoon-type of thing, whereas [Great Moments with] Mr. Lincoln is the hardest thing in the world to do. I don't think that the state of the art is good enough to do something like that. It comes off fairly well, but I know myself that I have never been satisfied. I've programmed the one that's in [Walt] Disney World. I programmed both Washington and Lincoln, and I've never been proud of their performance because they are so limited. For instance, standing up and sitting down. An ordinary person—I always think in terms of footage—it takes about three feet to stand up from a sitting position, and it takes two and a half feet to
sit down. Well, if I tried real hard to get him to stand up in those time limits, when he'd hit the top, he'd just vibrate. When you sit or stand up slowly, watch what happens [demonstrates].

DP:
That looks like Mr. Lincoln.

BJ:
That's about the speed he goes. It looks like he's got a bad back, and it always will look that way, because I can make him go faster, and I can make him sit down faster, but he'll vibrate at the top—he'll tear himself up—and if he sits down faster, he'll break the chair. So what choice do you have?

DP:
I understand. I guess most people don't realize how much power is involved in those figures.

BJ:
Oh, God! If he raised his arm up, and you were standing there, he'd lift you right off the stage. He could lift five hundred pounds just by doing that.

DP:
One thing I noticed at the Hall of Presidents and with Lincoln at Disneyland that I think is really effective is the movement when they are just sitting there while the narrator is talking, the head turning looking at the audience. At the Hall of Presidents, I could see the light reflect off of Harry Truman's glasses as he turned his head.

BJ:
That's one of the reasons I was asked to program, just that particular problem. You have to be a movie director and an animator to appreciate what is supposed to happen. The audience is supposed to watch Lincoln and listen to him talk, but for the other figures, it's just like a crowd scene. The other figures still have to be alive, but there's no scratching or combing their hair or blowing their nose or anything like that that could steal the scene, so it's a very subtle thing to make them move just enough to keep alive, but not to steal the scene. But you watch each one of them, like two of them kind of chat together, and they look, and they nod at each other, and they agree with Lincoln here and there, and there are eye blinks and they change their weight from one foot to another, or they might move their head a little bit. Just enough to keep them alive and not to attract your attention.

DP:
It's really effective.

BJ:
It's a subtle problem really with a stage that big. Wathel Rogers and I are the only two that do any programming. The way I approach these things, first we get the mouth working properly. Ken O'Brien does most of that before I get the figure. Then I listen to the dialogue, and I know that the first thing I try is to get his head turned to look in the right way. [In the Country Bear Jamboree,] he looks over here at Gomer, he looks over that way at Wendell, he looks up that way at Teddi Barra in the swing. So the first thing after the mouth movement, I run the knob with the head turns, and I get him looking from one place to another. Then the next thing is the head nods, so that when he says “I” and he's looking up at Teddi Barra, I have his head tilted higher or nod his head higher. Then when you turn your head from side to side, when you look to the right, your head usually tilts slightly that way. So as soon as I get through with all those three deals, then I've got him looking in the right direction, and he begins to come to life. Then after that, I do eye blinks and eye turns. When you are attracted to something over here, the first thing that moves are your eyes, then your head follows, and you usually blink before and after the turn.

DP:
That's amazing that you are aware of all of that!

BJ:
So you put all of this information into that bear head and pretty soon, he looks like he's thinking and talking and looking around! And hell, he's just a stuffed bear! Then after that, you get his body turns that work with the rest of it. Maybe he leans forward or maybe he leans back when he looks up there. All of these things kind of loosen him up. Then, if he's got a guitar, he looks down at the guitar, and he's got the rhythm going with this hand. When you turn this knob in tempo with the music, he responds just like that—sometimes not as fast as I would like it. But anyway, then you get the hand slide going up and down. No musician is ever going to think that he's playing the chords, but it looks pretty good. You accumulate all these things and you run it with the music and the dialogue, and pretty soon, the bear begins to come to life. Marc Davis and Al Bertino planned the whole show, wrote the dialogue, designed the characters, and all this stuff. Then Blaine Gibson and his crew sculpted them.
Then they get cast over at MAPO [the manufacturing arm of WED, incorporated in 1965 and named after Mary Poppins], and then other people put the fur cloth on them and do the makeup and the costuming. Then they come over here and they set them up and hook them up to this machine, and I get to make them come to life! This is the fun part of it.

DP:
It's amazing, because everything you say is true, but it's not the kind of thing—unless, I guess, you were animating—that you might be aware of.

BJ:
I can tell you a true story that I heard from Freddy Moore. Freddy was one of the best animators years ago, and his drawings were just fantastic. He was the one that kind of put cuteness into the Disney product with the dwarfs, the Three Little Pigs, and stuff like that. But Freddy told me—and he told other people, too—that one morning Walt came into his room and he was real excited. He said, “Say, Freddy, do you know when you blink your eyes, the lower lid doesn't move?” So when you're thinking about animation, the tiniest little thing in analyzing good animation is important. This is the kind of thinking that a Disney animator does that a lot of other people wouldn't even consider.