Feature Article
Walt Disney's Lost and Found:
Exploring the Hidden Artwork from Never-Produced Animation
By Charles Solomon
Charles Solomon’s new book “Walt Disney’s Lost and Found” is a celebration of the visual development of shorts, scenes and entire feature-length films created by the Walt Disney Animation Studios that for one reason or another never made it to the screen. Following is the introduction to the book.
* * * * * * *
"Our field of entertainment still has many new and exciting and wonderful things to bring to the restless public wanting variety and novelty in the movie theater. The only thing we should fear and be on constant guard against is getting bogged down––getting into the ruts of monotony and timeworn repetitions which the business of entertainment cannot long stand."
––Walt Disney
To date, The Walt Disney Studio has released 79 animated features and 544 short cartoons. But the Studio artists began work on hundreds of others over the years that were left in varying stages of completion. A few went into production and had animation done before they were abandoned; others never progressed beyond a few sketches or pages of notes.
Like a medieval cathedral or a performance of a grand opera, an animated film requires the coordinated efforts of a large group of artists and technicians to create a work that is greater than the sum of its individual parts. But the most essential part of this intricate creation is the story, a fact no one understood better than Walt Disney. In his quest to find the "new and exciting and wonderful," he employed crews of talented artists to explore and develop story ideas, a practice that continues at the Studio he founded.
By all accounts, Walt Disney was a spellbinding storyteller. The animators who worked with him never forgot how he became the characters in his films, demonstrating the way they would make a gesture or perform an action. The artists would strive to match his performances in their animation. Marc Davis, one of the celebrated Nine Old Men of the Disney Studio, recalled, "Walt's performances were extraordinary, after he did something, you wondered how you'd be able to do it that well. You'd suffer a little at your desk, wondering, 'How did he do that? That was pretty good!'"
Walt knew that a good story could carry weak animation, but that the reverse was not true. Of the hundreds of stories his artists developed, many were never completed, for a variety of reasons. Some ideas were too weak or unsuited to animation; others wouldn't appeal to the Studio's large, general audience. Some stories would have required more artists than could be assigned to the film.
In a meeting in 1939, Walt told director Frank Tashlin that they couldn't put the Donald short, Museum Keeper, into production because animating the extra characters would require too many man-hours. "You don't get the idea. I haven't got the men. We have to keep them in the features. We're committed over there. We have to keep those things going … We can make it (Museum Keeper) if we stick to those characters we know, characters that we have good models for. It's a peculiar situation we have here, we have to work to it."
Depending on how well a story was progressing––and the state of the Studio's finances––Walt would move a project into or out of pre-production. Some stories went back and forth for years and even decades. Work began on "Peter Pan" in the late 1930s, but the film wasn't completed until 1953, four different crews tried to adapt "Don Quixote" to animation. Some ideas begun under Walt weren't completed until decades after his death; he considered animating both "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" during the 1930s.
A number of films remained at the inspirational artwork stage. Talented artists would sketch and paint ideas to suggest the mood or tone or color or graphic shapes a story might encompass. Kay Nielsen and David Hall were famous book illustrators when they came to Disney. Martin Provensen and Campbell Grant became popular illustrators after they left the Studio; Tyrus Wong enjoyed a long career in live-action film. Others were painters and artists in their own right. The inspirational art department was also one of the few places in the animation industry where women were allowed a creative role.
"We didn't try to do what Disney did," said Warner Bros. Director Friz Freleng. "We didn't have the budget or that kind of talent. Walt hired major artists just to paint scenes to influence the mood; he spent more on storyboards than we did on films."
Today, a new generation of artists still looks to the work done at the Studio in the '30s and '40s for inspiration in their own art. "Tyrus Wong's work emphasizes suggestion, rather than explicit detail," explains Paul Felix, art director on Bolt. "In ‘Bambi,’ there are areas of the screen that are just washes of color, which suggests the tone and allows the viewer to feel elements of the composition, rather than see everything rendered in a way that competes with the characters and effects."
"That modulation of color and detail creates a much more satisfying experience for the audience, because they complete the image in their minds," he continues. "Today, we're still striving to control the level of detail and focus the viewer's eye where it should be, which has become more difficult now that the computer can render everything."
Other ideas reached the storyboard stage. During production on a live-action film, the director and actors do multiple takes of an individual line or scene until they are satisfied. Dialogue is rewritten or improvised, and a shift in the sun's position can radically alter the look of a shot. An animation director doesn't enjoy those options or surprises. Changing the animation would be time-consuming and expensive, so all the decisions have to be made before the film is shot. The filmmakers use storyboards to work out in advance the way a scene should unfold.
Devised by animator Win Smith around 1933, a storyboard consists of a series of small drawings and captions pinned to large cork panels. Because the drawings are affixed with pins, the artists can easily add, remove, or change sketches until they are satisfied with each sequence. The storyboard enabled Walt Disney to bring order to the chaotic cartoons of the '20s and early '30s, which consisted of haphazardly linked gags. Disney and his directors could edit the story, adjusting the pacing, color, and action of a film before the animation began.
Storyboard drawings vary enormously in style, as each artist draws in an individual way. Some are beautifully rendered and filled with details; others are little more than collections of stick figures. Like a drawing for a game of Pictionary™, the aim of a storyboard drawing is to communicate an idea, a movement, a mood, and expression. Creating a clear image that can be read quickly is more important than fine draftsmanship. In the '30s and '40s, the storyboard drawings were filmed to make a so-called Leica reel to test how the story played in real time. Today, the drawings are scanned into computer systems that enable the editors and directors to continue refining the film.
In a few cases, animation was done for an unmade film or sequence. As the story nears completion and the Studio prepares to move the film into full production, the key animators do test scenes to see if the designs for their characters work, if the voice acting meshes with the character's movements, if the characters look good on-screen. Just as the animation process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, it is also expensive. The directors and producers try to avoid having any animation done that won't appear in the final film.
The story crew continues to polish the plot after the animation begins. As the production progresses, the filmmakers may discover a character has greater potential than they realized, and his role will be expanded. Chip in "Beauty and the Beast" began as a minor character, but when the artists realized how appealing he was, they enlarged his part. And sometimes the filmmakers realize they're on the wrong track; Walt scrapped the first months of work on "Pinocchio" when the original conception of the title character as a sarcastic wise guy along the lines of Charlie McCarthy proved too unappealing.
The story of an animated film inevitably goes through multiple versions before a satisfactory one emerges. "The Rescuers" (1977) was the Studio's most successful and entertaining feature between Walt's death in 1966 and the arrival of the new management team in 1984. Notes on "The Rescuers" preserved in the Animation Research Library illustrate the many changes a story undergoes before it reaches the screen.
Artists began working on an adaptation of Margery Sharp's juvenile novel "The Rescuers: A Fantasy" for the first time in 1962. The first version stuck closely to the book: Prisoners' Aid Society agents Bernard and Bianca, and Nils, the Norwegian mouse, rescued a poet imprisoned in the Black Castle. The Studio artists added a shoot-out between the guards and the mice riding a stolen gunboat to punch up the escape from the grim fortress. Artist Burny Mattinson remembers Walt rejected this version as "too much like World War II."
Nine years later, the Disney artists returned to "The Rescuers." In a new story, Bernard and Bianca would rescue a polar bear who had been conned by an unscrupulous penguin into leaving his home in a zoo for Antarctica. Story notes from November 1971, say that the penguin "gets his" when Bernard and Bianca send for his wife, a very possessive, wild-haired, shrill-voiced Phyllis Diller-type who soon cuts him down to size."
The pace of development accelerated during 1972 and 1973. The artists played up Louie the Bear's happy days in the zoo and made him a musical performer, changing his voice from Pat Butram's to Louie Prima's. They also expanded the role of his best friend, Gus the Lion. By August 1973, the artists had added a villainess who adopts a little girl the mice rescue. The first villainess was the Grand Duchess (voiced by Phyllis Diller), assisted by the bumbling Mandrake, who creates elaborate mechanical-doll shows in a crumbling mansion on the Black Bayou.
A month later, the villainess had been changed to Cruella DeVil from "One Hundred and One Dalmatians." Aided and impeded by the Professor, who shoots off fireworks, and her pet crocodiles, Cruella was a jewel smuggler who planned to use an orphan girl to carry the loot through customs. By mid-November 1973, the story was reaching its final form. The role of Louie the Bear was cut back, then eliminated. All that remained of the zoo story was the brief visit by Bernard and Bianca early in the film. Madame Medusa, Mr. Snoops, and Penny were assuming their familiar forms.
To viewers watching the finished film, the story seems so right it's impossible to imagine it any other way. The work required to construct a satisfying plot is never apparent, nor should it be. The story should seem to flow effortlessly across the screen, as if the characters were creating it around them. The greatest compliment the audience can pay to the artists and technicians who labor to create the film is to forget that the characters are lines or pixels on the screen and just to care about them.
Decades after Walt Disney's death, artists at his Studio continue to search for the "new and exciting and wonderful," the way they did during his lifetime. Artists read books, write scenarios, paint inspirational artwork, draw storyboards, design characters, and pitch ideas. They may use computers as well as pencils and brushes, but the process remains the same; the quest for interesting stories that will entertain audiences goes on. Some ideas will be made into films and become the new "Beauty and the Beast" or "Lion King," others will go in and out of development until the key to the story is found; and others will be abandoned.
The artwork from all of them will be lovingly preserved in the Animation Research Library, where the Disney artists can refer to it. These extraordinary drawings, paintings, and sketches attest to the talent of the men and women who created them and offer rare insights into the creative process behind the Disney animated films.
* * * * * * *
To link to the Museum Gift Shop and purchase this book,
click here
.
