Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Walt in Wonderland The Silent Films of Walt Disney by Russell Merritt SF Silent Film Festival to Screen Rare Laugh-O-grams July 16. Disney historian and author J.B . Kaufman will introduce six of Walt Disney’s first cartoons—including two recently discovered and restored by New York’s Museum of Modern Art—at July’s Silent Film Festival at San Francisco’s legendary Castro Theatre, July 16, 2011, courtesy of The Walt Disney Family Museum and MOMA. Walt’s first company, Kansas City-based Laugh-O-gram Films, created black and white animated silent shorts based on classic fairytales. Jack the Giant Killer and Goldie Locks and the Three Bears, created in 1922, were re-discovered in 2010, having been mislabeled and languishing in MOMA archives for decades. Carefully restored, they will be screened along with Little Red Riding Hood (Walt’s first narrative cartoon), The Four Musicians of Bremen, both from 1922, and the Newman Laugh-O-grams, a sample reel created in 1921 to sell a topical cartoon series. Despite Walt’s dedication to Laugh-O-gram Films, his company declared bankruptcy in July 1923, prompting the 21-year-old to move to Hollywood, CA. The Laugh-O-gram films will be screened with musical accompaniment from the theatre’s Mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ. Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-grams, 1921-1923. Before Mickey Mouse, before the Fairbanksian moustache, and even before the Alice comedies, came Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-grams. Disney’s first animated films began in 1920 as after-work projects when Disney was a commercial artist for an advertising company in Kansas City. He made these cartoons by himself and with the help of a few friends. He started by persuading Frank Newman, Kansas City’s leading exhibitor, to include short snippets of animation in the series of weekly newsreels Newman produced for his chain of three theaters. Tactfully called “Newman Laugh-O-grams,” Disney’s footage was meant to mix advertising with topical humor. Of these fillers, only the pilot survives, a two-and-a-half minute sample reel that reveals the format: the hand of a lightning sketch artist composes gently satirical drawings that come to life in a final animated sequence. The last scene of the pilot, which editorializes on local police corruption headlines, was animated by Disney alone. It is one of the few surviving scenes he ever completed by himself. The Laugh-O-grams were a hit, leading to commissions for animated intermission fillers and coming attractions slides for Newman’s theaters. Spurred by his success, the 19-year-old Disney decided to try something more ambitious: animated fairy tales. Influenced by New York animator Paul Terry’s spoofs of Aesop’s Fables, which had premiered in June 1920, Disney decided not only to parody fairy-tale classics but also to modernize them by having them playing off recent events. With the help of high school student Rudy Ising, who later cofounded the Warner Brothers and MGM cartoon studios, and other local would-be cartoonists, Disney worked for six months putting together his first fairy tale cartoon. Little Red Riding Hood is a Jazz Age pastiche featuring a wolfish city slicker who drives a magic car, a grandma off to see the movies, and a hero who rescues his sweetheart from a wing-flapping airplane. It is very much a beginner’s effort—simple sketches of characters posed in front of minimal backgrounds, the animation derived from the slash-and-tear technique Disney was learning from Edwin Lutz’s classic animation textbook, the Paul Terry Aesop’s Fables, and John Bray’s Krazy Kat cartoons he and his friends cadged from a local film exchange. Working at first out of his garage, Disney improvised even with his equipment. His Universal camera was mounted on a stand made by stretching a plank across four-by- fours. Disney made six more Laugh-O-grams in Kansas City, which all survive, thanks to the remarkable detective work of animation collectors and historians working in collaboration with the Walt Disney Archives, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress. Simple and naïve, they also indicate a remarkable progression. Most apparent are the rapid advances Disney and his growing gang of collaborators were making from one cartoon to another in little over a year. In The Four Musicians of Bremen , made directly after Little Red Riding Hood , Disney, no longer content to sketch in a simple, unadorned story line, started creating ingenious gags—like luring jazz-crazy fish out of the water with jiving musical notes—and tried to build on them, creating smooth transitions from one to another. He also experimented with milking gags—how many ways can you dodge a cannon ball?—and improving his comic timing. Jack and the Beanstalk is still unavailable to the public, but Goldie Locks and the Three Bears shows Disney paying attention to comic atmospherics, setting the mood with a pastoral sunrise. He then introduces what is likely the first of his many diabolical Rube Goldberg contraptions, in this case a cuckoo clock and a stove tricked out to streamline the production of pancakes. It’s impossible to watch these cartoons and not see the shape of things to come. The storm at sea in Jack the Giant Killer is a raw prefiguration of those elegant sea storms in Silly Symphonies like Father Noah’s Ark and Music Land , culminating in Little Toot . The comic, fearsome animals with all their sharp teeth and gleaming eyes that glance our way before pouncing on our heroes get started here too. Above all, Disney’s gift for music and rhythm is apparent from the first toot of Mom’s mail horn in Little Red Riding Hood . The Laugh-O-grams are silent movies born to swing. From the start, Disney conceives his cartoons as a form of visual novelty jazz, filled with mock concerts and dance routines. Many of them amount to silent musicals, a foretaste of the syncopated Mickey and the jazz-mad Silly Symphonies. They also offer the earliest versions of the Magic Kingdom, where kings live in palaces amid Midwestern small towns and little girls are given royal parades down Main Street. Also noticeable, however, is the strain of ongoing financial pressures. Disney’s Kansas City studio was in financial trouble from the start, and, thanks to predatory business deals and his own inexperience, he suffered bankruptcy before practically any of his cartoons were released. He thought he had found a distributor for his Laugh-O-gram fairy tales in a fly-by-night company called the Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee, which promised $11,100 for six cartoons but never paid. Overworked and desperate, by the end of 1922, Disney’s crew was working without pay and several quit. So while the actual drawing and design of the Laugh-O-grams steadily improve as the crew gains experience, the animation itself tends to regress, growing simpler and more crudely timed. Salvation came in the form of four-year-old Virginia Davis and Disney’s latest brainstorm of placing a live girl among cartoon figures. True, he simply inverted the Fleischer formula of putting a cartoon character in a live-action scene. But the idea revitalized Disney, inspiring his most imaginative and versatile creation yet. Brimming with self-confidence, he persuaded most of his crew, including Iwerks, Harman, Ising, and even Virginia’s parents, to leave Kansas City for California where they could start over again. The adventure continued. Disney sued Pictorial Clubs for breach of contract, eventually winning the suit but receiving very little recompense. His loss, however, is our gain. It was long thought that none of the pre-Alice Kansas City films were ever released. Like countless other silent shorts, Disney’s fledgling efforts were consigned to oblivion after the coming of sound. Pictorial Clubs, however, found ways of profiting from these films and, after the success of Mickey Mouse in 1928, the Laugh-O-grams were fitted with soundtracks and circulated internationally under different titles. The tangled story of how they were finally identified and rescued is best summarized in David Gerstein’s Ramapith blog. Four of the prints at the festival come from versions circulated by a British company, Wardour Film Ltd., which, in 1929 and 1930, released them as the Peter the Puss series, designed a title logo to make Peter look like Felix the Cat, and then gave them non-fairy-tale titles. The title credits give some idea of the tough law-of-the-jungle independent trade that Disney and other young animators encountered in the 1920s; the movies themselves show the kind of resilience that enabled him to endure. NEWMAN LAUGH-O-GRAMS Sample reel directed and animated by Walt Disney in his garage at 3028 Bellefontaine Avenue. Kansas City premiere at Newman Theater March 20, 1921. Print courtesy of Walt Disney Archives. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD Directed by Walt Disney, with animation by Disney, Rudolph Ising, and others unknown. Produced in Disney’s garage circa October 1921–May 1922; original release unknown. Reissued by U.K.’s Wardour Film Ltd. as Grandma Steps Out. Print courtesy of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) THE FOUR MUSICIANS OF BREMEN Directed by Walt Disney and animated by Disney, Rudolph Ising, and others unknown. Produced in the Disney garage circa April–May 1922. Distributed nontheatrically by Pictorial Clubs Inc. of New York on a regional circuit. Reissued by U.K.’s Wardour Film Ltd. as The Four Jazz Boys in 1930. Print Courtesy of Walt Disney Archives. GOLDIE LOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS Produced at 31st Street September–October 1922. Directed by Walt Disney and animated by Disney, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman “Max” Maxwell, Lorey Tague, and Otto Walliman, with photography by Red Lyon. Distributed nontheatrically on a regional circuit by Pictorial Clubs Inc. of New York. Reissued by U.K.’s Wardour Film Ltd. as The Peroxide Kid 1930. Print courtesy of MoMA. PUSS IN BOOTS Produced at 31st Street circa September–October 1922. Directed by Walt Disney and animated by Disney, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman “Max” Maxwell, Lorey Tague, and Otto Walliman, with photography by Red Lyon. Reissued by U.K.’s Wardour Film Ltd. as The Cat’s Whiskers 1930. Print courtesy of MoMA. JACK THE GIANT KILLER 1922, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Disney, Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, Rudolph Ising, Carman “Max” Maxwell, Lorey Tague, and Otto Walliman, with camera by Red Lyon. Reissued by U.K.’s Wardour Film Ltd. as The K-O Kid. Print courtesy of MoMA. ALICE’S WONDERLAND Produced at the Laugh-O-gram studio at 3239 Troost Avenue in Spring 1923 and delivered circa October 14, 1923. Starring Virginia Davis as Alice and Walt Disney as the animator, with Ub Iwerks, Hugh Harman, and Rudolph Ising as the other animators. Production, direction, and animation by Walt Disney, with camera by Ub Iwerks and Rudolph Ising, and technical direction by Hugh Harman and Carman “Max” Maxwell. Distributed nontheatrically on regional circuit by Pictorial Clubs Inc. of New York. Print courtesy of Walt Disney Archives. Alice in Disneyland. The myth, promoted by Walt Disney himself, was that the Disney empire “all began with a mouse.” In fact, according to Walt in Wonderland , Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman’s book on the silent films of Walt Disney, it all began with a little girl. The Alice series of silent films starring a live-action little girl adventuring in a cartoon world became the foundation of Disney’s career. The choices made in the production of these films formed the basis of his style, his business, and even his life. When the first of the Alice series was released in 1923, Disney was 21 years old, and employing a staff of teenage artists in a former real estate office in Kansas. By the time the last in the series premiered in 1927, he was running the Walt Disney Studio at Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, a major studio designed specifically for animation, which became the birthplace of Mickey Mouse, Snow White, and countless other classics. It took just four years for this move from Main Street, Missouri, to Hollywood. Virginia Davis, the first star of the Alice series, was a four-year-old dancer, actress, and model. Disney recognized that she would be ideal for the challenging pantomime required in these films, which feature the girl interacting with cartoon characters. “Walt would direct me and tell me what to do, to look scared or not look scared, to turn around, or if somebody’s behind you,”[ sic ] Davis recalled in a recent interview. “But he had it all in his head. And frankly, I think he had that kind of stuff even when he got into the Hyperion place and even when he got in his final studio. I think he had the whole story in the back of his head all the way along.” Disney had begun as an illustrator for Kansas City’s Film Ad company. Soon he began to experiment with the company’s stop-action camera. With his brother Roy’s help, Walt made a short animated film in his family garage. He showed this sample to a chain of local theaters, and they agreed to buy a series of shorts. Disney’s first business, Laugh-O-gram pictures, was born. He recruited a team of animators, including Ub Iwerks, a talented artist who later became Disney’s chief animator. Disney’s only guide for his new enterprise was a book he had borrowed on animation techniques, which he used to teach his staff. Disney grew immensely as both a director and a businessman during those first years. He had first financed his business by producing dental promotional films, and by taking home movies of babies that he sold to proud parents. He later learned to achieve self-financing through strategic business moves. Some of these methods, such as copyrighting and licensing all his characters, come from the hard lessons learned when he lost ownership of his main character, Oswald the Rabbit, to his distributors. These core business values, which became the foundation of his corporation, are illustrated in a 1926 contract with distributor Charles Mintz: Disney would make each picture “in a high-class manner,” but with the condition that “the nature of the comedies are to be left to me (Disney).” He further stipulated that “should the idea, or name of Alice Comedies be exploited in any way, other than motion pictures, such as toys, novelties, newspaper strips, etc., it is agreed that we shall share equally in profits derived there from.” These conditions, in addition to the key point that Walt would own the copyright to all the Alice Comedies, set a precedent for an industry previously controlled exclusively by distributors. Disney set another precedent for the animation industry, then based mostly in New York, by relocating his studio to Los Angeles in 1923, at the urging of his brother Roy. The Disney brothers went on to become longtime collaborators, with Roy’s business management providing a practical grounding to Walt’s soaring imagination. It is not only his business model that developed from these first choices, but also the Disney style. By taking the popular forms of the time and presenting them in novel ways, Disney was able to form characteristics of animated entertainment that are still the norm today. Cartoons starring mischievous little boys, direct offshoots of such comic strips as Little Nemo and Buster Brown, were very popular at the time. Disney, a great enthusiast of popular culture, had a fan’s ability to recognize what made something truly popular, and the entrepreneur’s ability to turn it around and make it new. Instead of the boy adventure theme, he made it about a little girl. He also reversed a then-popular technique of inserting cartoon protagonists in live-action settings and made it instead a live-action heroine in a cartoon world. One of those cartoon characters was Julius the Cat, Alice’s trusty sidekick, who toward the end became the focus of the series. Eventually, Julius became rounder and more rubbery, developing first into Oswald the Lucky Rabbit before finally settling into Walt Disney’s alter ego, Mickey Mouse. Over time, Alice’s position in the series gave way to a starring role for Julius, and Disney’s interest in the cartoon world grew to the exclusion of the live action. Yet it’s the mix of the two that forms a crucial formula of Disney’s later work, both in style and story. This juxtaposition of a real little girl with animated animals and objects developed into two parallel styles for Disney Studios: super-realism, and one which differentiated the personalities of the characters by the characteristics of their movements. This personality-based style has been called Disney’s most important contribution to animation and first began to emerge in the Alice films. Virginia Davis was named a “Legend of Disney” in 1998. She still remembers “Uncle Walt” very fondly. ”When I got out of high school, I wrote him a letter,” she said recently. “It was just when he was starting to do Snow White , and it was at Hyperion Studios. And he wrote me a nice letter back, and invited me out to the studio. And he said, ‘It was so nice of you to remember me.’ Really, in his heart, he was still a country boy.” Program details: Alice’s Wonderland (1923), Newman Laugh-O-grams (sample reel 1921), Alice and the Three Bears (1924), The Four Musicians of Bremen (Laugh-O-gram 1922), Alice the Peacemaker (1924), Puss in Boots (Laugh-O-gram 1922), Alice Gets in Dutch (1924), Trolley Troubles (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 1927), Alice the Toreador (1925), The Mechanical Cow (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 1927), and Alice’s Wild West Show (1924) Presented at SFSFF 2003 with live music by Michael Mortilla. Life Before Mickey. WALT IN WONDERLAND The Silent Films of Walt Disney. By Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman. Illustrated. 164 pp. Baltimore: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/ The Johns Hopkins University Press. THE famous part of Walt Disney's extraordinary career began in 1928 with a Mickey Mouse cartoon titled "Steamboat Willie." The film's tightly synchronized soundtrack combined with the spunky performance of the cartoon rodent established Disney as an innovator in animated films; it also popularized soundtracks for cartoons as decisively as "The Jazz Singer" had done for live-action films the year before. But "Steamboat Willie" capped eight years of struggle by Disney to make his way in the rough-and-tumble, highly competitive world of film animation. He tenaciously survived bankruptcy, broken promises and betrayals regarding money, contracts, employees and character ownership -- even Mickey Mouse was invented as a replacement for a rabbit look-alike named Oswald to which a wily distributor laid claim. Disney's little-known but crucially formative period in animation is the subject of "Walt in Wonderland," a scholarly and entertaining book that is a combination of film critique, studio history and oral history illustrated with wonderful original animation drawings, storyboards and rare photos. Because we are dazzled by Disney's later works, his silent films have, until now, been paid far less attention. But the animation historians Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman make clear that Disney's roles as public figure, entrepreneur, entertainer and purveyor of Middle American values and mores "find their origins in a single source: the ambitious young man who struggled to establish his first animation studio in the 1920's." In 1920, the 19-year-old Disney was employed as a commercial artist at the Kansas City Film Ad Company when he began experimenting with animation on his own time. Singlehandedly he produced a series of cartoon fillers about local happenings ("Newman Laugh-O-Grams") that were shown with newsreels in the Newman theater chain. He learned animation from a book published that year -- "Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development," a guide that emphasized formulas and labor-saving tricks of the trade. Disney also scrutinized films made by the top animation producers of the day: Paul Terry ("Aesop's Fables"), Pat Sullivan ("Felix the Cat"), Bill Nolan ("Krazy Kat") and Max and Dave Fleischer ("Out of the Inkwell"). Disney's ambition and drive were apparent from the start, according to Mr. Merritt and Mr. Kaufman. By 1921 Disney had quit his job to produce a series of animated fairy tales (including "Little Red Riding Hood," "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots") in his own studio, Laugh-O-Gram, which he had staffed with Kansas City youngsters whom he taught animation. (Several of his trainees would later make important contributions to animation, including Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising, who together founded the cartoon studios at both Warner Brothers and MGM, and the estimable Ubbe Iwerks, who designed Mickey Mouse and later created the special effects for "Mary Poppins" and "The Birds." The years 1921-24 marked the emergence of Disney the director and storyteller and the demise of Disney the animator, who, the authors tell us, eventually quit drawing altogether. But Disney's inexperience as an entrepreneur led to the bankruptcy of his Kansas City studio. And in 1923 he went to Hollywood to begin writing and directing the "Alice" comedies, a series of more than 50 shorts featuring a live-action little girl in a cartoon world. Mr. Merritt and Mr. Kaufman point out that the "Alice" shorts Disney directed in Hollywood and the six fairy tales he directed in Kansas City revealed themes, gags and visual motifs that he would recycle again and again in later films and even in theme parks. For example, in "Puss in Boots" (1922) Disney combines his love of farm and barnyard humor with his passion for royalty and pageantry, and he has the king of Kingville living in a castle on Main Street near a movie theater in a small Midwestern town -- a precursor to similarly incongruous settings at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. THE authors note another Disney motif that made its way from his earliest films all the way into "Fantasia" (1940): music as a lively expression of misbehavior. Even though Disney's early films were silent, characters could often be found dancing on musical notes, and mundane objects would often be metamorphosed into musical instruments -- towels becoming piano rolls, tails turning into violins. Despite these tricks, the authors maintain that Disney did not so much lead his competitors as follow them. His gags were better organized than theirs and he strove for more detail and nicer drawings, but he learned his craft by imitating the formula stories, graphics and humor of his peers. For example, his first animal character with a name, Julius the Cat, is a blatant clone of Felix the Cat -- from the rubber-hose-and-circle design to the detachable body parts. Disney was so eager to please his demanding distributors and gain economic stability that he fell victim to what Mr. Merritt and Mr. Kaufman call "the tyranny of the gag." He filled his films with continuous slapstick routines that "sharply restricted narrative development and characterization." For this reason, the authors maintain, Disney the mythologist and symbolist is nowhere to be seen in the silents. Only when Disney invented Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 1927 did he begin to explore the concept of "personality animation," in which cartoon characters are defined as individuals not just by their design but by their movements, mannerisms and acting. As Disney put it at the time: "I want the characters to be somebody. I don't want them just to be a drawing." Building on the work of predecessors in this special area -- Winsor McCay, who created Gertie the Dinosaur in 1914, and Otto Messmer, who directed the "Felix the Cat" series throughout the 1920's -- Disney eventually made his greatest contribution to the art of animation: the development of personality animation in its most subtle and powerful form, which culminated, in 1937, in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." But first there was Oswald. To make his Oswald cartoons look "real," Disney turned away from the magical world of Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown and Krazy Kat and started emulating the camera angles, effects and editing of live-action films. He studied Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and especially Buster Keaton to learn how to base gags on personality and how to build comic routines, rather than piling one gag on top of another. And by scrutinizing the shadow effects, cross-cutting and staging of action in films starring Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney, Disney learned how to stir emotion in an audience. I recall an unexpectedly affecting scene in "Great Guns," a 1927 cartoon that flutters between humor and poignancy and that hints of things to come in Disney's later work: Oswald the Rabbit, about to leave for Army service, gives his girlfriend a series of heartfelt goodbye kisses that, comically, go on and on. Slowly, the surrounding living room dissolves into a foxhole in the midst of a heated battle, with rockets bursting all around. His girlfriend simultaneously dissolves into a photograph of herself, which the oblivious and lovesick Oswald continues to kiss, until a bomb pierces and destroys it. The decision to bestow feelings on his characters and to use situational humor led to a significant "darkening of Disney's world," the authors say. Disney replaced the old free-form magical animation -- in which cartoon characters and their unreal bodies always bounce back to life after disasters -- with characters who use their bodies to explore pleasure and pain. Their behavior seemed to have moral implications, which Disney exploited in the anarchic Mickey Mouse cartoons, in the "Silly Symphonies" series and then in his feature-length cartoons. Even though 57 years separate "The Lion King" from "Snow White," these two films are remarkably similar. Both express powerful and believable emotions by imitating the techniques of live-action movies; both show a fascination with animals, pageantry, hierarchical society, immortality, marriage, romance and transcendence. As "Walt in Wonderland" makes clear, once Disney discovered personality animation, his transformation was permanent and quick. The distance between an audience bemused by Oswald's bittersweet farewell and an audience weeping in sincere sympathy with seven cartoon dwarfs mourning a dead cartoon princess was less than a decade. Walt in Wonderland : the silent films of Walt Disney. What the Disney silents reveal is absorbing: a director taking his first tentative steps, then gathering confidence and exploring new avenues of expression with images that are still fresh and exhilarating today. They bear out the intuition of common sense: that Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphonies were not created in a vacuum, and that Disney was developing his gifts as a producer from the beginning. They also reveal a director soaking up the work of the best silent filmmakers of the time - not only rival animators, but live-action directors and comic strip characters as well. Disney's sources ranged from Buster Keaton and Felix the Cat to Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Tom Mix, Barney Google, and The Big Parade. Through it all, Disney's gifts for creating witty gags and charming characters become immediately apparent. So do his skills as a teacher, and his growing appetite for the macabre and the sado-masochistic. Drawing on interviews with Disney's co-workers, Disney's business papers, promotional materials, scripts, drawings, and correspondence, Walt in Wonderland attempts to reconstruct Disney's silent film career and place his early films in critical perspective. It also provides a detailed filmography of Disney's silent work. Read more.