Mike Barrier's book continues to amaze.For a while after Harman and Ising (third and sixth from the left in the group shot below) left, Iwerks (with Disney, above) was the only first string animator in the studio. To maximize Iwerks' impact Walt forced a system of assistants and inbetweeners on him, which he apparently resented.
I'm not surprised. It must be hard to come up with something good when a bunch of newcomers are let loose to redraw your scenes. I imagine Iwerks had to lose a lot of time supervising the new guys even though the new system was presented to him as a "time saver." Eventually Iwerks quit.
It didn't matter, Disney continued to tinker with improvements to the system until he came up with the collaborative way of doing things that we have today: the one where animators work from exposure sheets done by someone else, on a story they may have had no part in making, where someone else takes the guts out of their drawing and acting, where every drawing is supposed to be "on model," and their scenes are expected to fit seamlessly into the next guy's scenes.
Compare this to the early days of animation where an animator might be told simply to have his character fight with a turkey for half a minute. The new system might tell the animator exactly what frame the character should lift his leg during the fight. Some animators probably thrived under this kind of control but others like Iwerks must have been disheartened. You get the feeling that a kind of innocence and fun was removed from animation around 1930.
Was Disney's a bad system? No, of course not. It has obvious assets. If an animator works with assistants of his own choosing he really can go faster and sometimes the assistant is a better draughtsman than the animator. Not only that but animators like Scribner and Sibley managed to find sympathetic directors who would give them wider creative latitude. It's hard to imagine that animation's golden age could have occurred under the old system...even so.... did we lose something in exchange for what we gained? Is there a way to get that freshness back?
Just for the heck of it here's a picture of Disney's very first studio in Kansas City. That's the Laugh-O-Gram office on the second floor above the parked car on the right.
I really like these posts. We skimmed over early Disney in my animation history class, but this is great!
ReplyDeleteI've worked on group projects and sometimes the most annoying thing in the world is incompetent artists working on your animation. I completely empathize with Iwerks and find the greatest joy not producing big projects with lots of other people, but shorts that I can manage all to myself or with a few respected colleagues.
This makes me think that the only way to get cartoony animation back lies in the short format. We've lost the 2 to 7 minute cartoons, and look what's happened to animation. I think ultimately feature films are just too much work and not really conducive to what animation exclusively brings to the table. To get good results, we either need to get a slew of competent artists with ambitions of only being assistants and inbetweeners, or we just need to make shorter projects so our focus can be that much more on the quality.
I hope you keep these posts up, Eddie!
Iwerks didn't leave Disney because assistants were forced on him. He was doing all the work and Walt was taking all the credit- he was a partner, but Walt didn't treat him like one, and the first chance Iwerks had to go out on his own, he quietly jumped ship.
ReplyDeleteIwerks loved "systems" and "mechanization". He probably had a bigger hand in creating the production line system for the early cartoons than Walt did. When Iwerks formed his own studio, the first thing he did was hire junior animators to assist him. Later, he hired even more experienced animators and turned the entire production over to them, so he could spend his time tinkering with model planes in his shop. By the time Iwerks left Disney, he wasn't particularly interested in animating any more. He had a "been there- done that" attitude about animating.
See ya
Steve
Steve: Fascinating! My own guess is that you and Mike are both right on this issue but I'm not an historian so I'll leave it to guys to thrash out.
ReplyDeleteKatz: Interesting! I think I'll need a whole post to comment on what you said.
ReplyDeleteThe attitude around Disney's in the early 1990's was that Iwerks really blew it financially by selling his interest back to the studio when he departed. He came back years later as a mere employee, after all. Chances are that Disney would have bought back his share in the company anyhow, once they realized what a successful machine they would be. Iwerks might have been a mechanical, straight-ahead animator but his animation in "The Skeleton Dance" still holds up today.
ReplyDeleteNow Steve, Disney treated Iwerks very well.He was the highest paid member of the studio,--according to the ledgers in the studio archives, Ub's salary was higher than Walt's! There is no indication that He didn't appreciate Ub's contribution to the studio and Walt was genuinely hurt when MGM hired him away.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't there, so I only know what I've been told- in this case by Leslie Iwerks. Pat Powers wouldn't have been able to get Iwerks to quit if there wasn't some sort of feeling that Walt was taking him for granted.
ReplyDeleteGrim Natwick comments on the relationship between Walt and Ub after Iwerks returned to Disney HERE.
I personally think the truth doesn't lie in ledgers and drafts- it's in the way people interacted with each other. I understand that some people are more interested in facts and figures though.
See ya
Steve
Look,all I know is that Disney paid him more and gave him screen credit on the cartoons from Steamboat Willie on, up until he left the studio in 1930. I don't know about their personal lives, if Disney cussed him out daily, or if they regularily had fistfights in the parking lot. I do know that the other studios at the time had a very keen interest in Walt's success and thought they could duplicate it by hiring away Walt's key men. That's GOT to make a person paranoid over time. Iwerks was a prolific animator, but Walt was the driving force behind the studio. I think Iwerk's own cartoon output pretty much speaks for itself. Nicely drawn,but nothing special.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me think that the only way to get cartoony animation back lies in the short format.
ReplyDeleteAt first I am tempted to agree because it seems like it's a lot easier to pack a whallop into 5 or 10 minutes and leave an audience wanting more. When you take out the filler and formula from an animated feature you are usually left with maybe 5-10 minutes anyway.
But, then I think, could Clampett have made a great feature cartoon? Why not? I think he could've kept me laffing at Bugs for an hour and a half. It's about characters and story structure.
Nemo has to first get your sympathy by losing his whole family except his dad and having a bum fin. Bugs never needed this kind of backstory because he was compelling by himself. Making characters you want to watch because they are compelling by themselves is the first obstacle almost nobody has enough talent for anymore. A Pixar short is no more compelling than a Pixar feature. They're all just fun to look at.
Something tells me that even Clampett or Jones at the peak of their powers would have had second thoughts about the prevalent corny 3-act Disney feature format. It takes too long to get to the point. A good cartoon feature should be more like a W.C. Fields movie or a Zucker brothers movie. What would be so hard about it, for someone with real talent?
When I was coming up, I would've killed for a chance to be "only" an in-betweener under somebody like Scribner. Better than being lead guy on Fat Albert.
...One edge I think the short format has is that multiple iterations of the same characters are possible, so characters can get honed from one pass to the next. They don't have to get everything right the first time, and the next time they can tweak it. That seems like a big advantage.
ReplyDeleteSorry for being so off-topic.
I really wish I could get together with a few other artists and start our own animation studio..
ReplyDeleteBut, like someone wrote on John's blog wrote , the people I work with don't have that ambition. they just do their work and go home.
I think of all the amazing stuff that was done in the early years of animation. or for limmitted tv budgets in the 50's...and I don't see anything happening like thart now.
Now we have incredible computer tools, that could be used to innnovate , but as far as I know nobodies gettin' together. When they do it's to make adult swim style simplistic stuff.
Even John k , what's he waiting for he has more info on this than anybody it seems ....What is he doing? waiting for hollywood money?
why?
Seems like the real need for exposure sheets, thus their development, came with sound, the necessity to sync.
ReplyDeleteWhat always fascinates me about early animation history, is how often they kept doing animation first, then adding sound later. It fascinates me for a different reason when it is reported as the modus operandi for animation today, even in those cases where it is true some voiceover or sound effects or music was added later. Check practically any interview with a voice artist (especially the movie star actors, rather than voice artists) that will gladly give wrong info on this.
I don't think Ub was disheartned for technical reasons, (in fact he loved that aspect). He was amongst the most loyal, and the most needed. And the quietest and the most overlooked, and as prone as anyone else to staff raids from competition.
Fleischer was animating to a beat earliest of all. They needed to synchronize to the live organist in the silent bouncing ball singalongs.
ReplyDeleteSee ya
Steve