MickeyXtreme

For Disney, Something Old (and Short) Is New Again

Moviegoers who have become inured to pre-show car ads and trivia quizzes may soon get something old enough to seem new: cartoon shorts.

After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years — “Destino,” “Lorenzo” and “The Little Match Girl” — but those were more artistic exercise than commercial endeavor. The new cartoons, by contrast, are an effort by a new leadership team from Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the Burbank company back at the forefront of animation with a form it once pioneered.

“The impetus comes from John Lasseter, who takes the idea from Walt Disney and 100 years of film history,” said Don Hahn, producer of “The Lion King” and “The Little Match Girl,” in a recent interview at his studio office. “Shorts have always been a wellspring of techniques, ideas and young talent. It’s exactly what Walt did, because it’s a new studio now, with new talent coming up — as it should. I think the shorts program can really grow this studio as it grew Pixar, as it grew Walt’s studio.”

Although audiences today are more familiar with his feature films, Walt Disney’s reputation was originally built on shorts. In the 1930s “A Mickey Mouse Cartoon” appeared on theater marquees with the titles of the features, and Disney won 10 Oscars for cartoon shorts between 1932 and 1942. He used the “Silly Symphonies” to train his artists as they geared up to create “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” But after World War II Disney phased out short cartoons because of rising production costs and the minimal amount theater owners would pay for them.

Mr. Hahn said the new shorts would be screened in theaters along with Disney films. “You pay your 10 bucks to see a movie,” he said, “and you get a surprise you hadn’t counted on.” The new shorts will be done in traditional 2-D animation, computer graphics or a combination of the two media, depending on the story and the visual style.

This is not the first attempt at such a revival. Warner Brothers, for example, tried to bring back the classic Looney Tunes characters in new shorts in 2003, but they proved unsuccessful and most of them were never screened theatrically.

Chuck Williams, a veteran story artist who will produce the new films for Disney, said they do not have to become a profit center in order to perform a real commercial function.

“They allow you to develop new talent,” Mr. Williams said in an interview at the Disney studios. “Shorts are your farm team, where the new directors and art directors are going to come from. Instead of taking a chance on an $80 million feature with a first-time director, art director or head of story, you can spend a fraction of that on a short and see what they can do.”

It is not surprising that Mr. Lasseter is using short films to train and test the artists: he and his fellow Pixar animators spent almost 10 years making shorts, learning how to use computer graphics effectively before they made “Toy Story”and the string of hits that followed. Pixar continues to produce a cartoon short every year, and has won Oscars for the shorts “Tin Toy,” “Geri’s Game” and “For the Birds.”

Four new shorts are in development at Disney: “The Ballad of Nessie,” a stylized account of the origin of the Loch Ness monster; “Golgo’s Guest,” about a meeting between a Russian frontier guard and an extraterrestrial; “Prep and Landing,” in which two inept elves ready a house for Santa’s visit; and “How to Install Your Home Theater,” the return of Goofy’s popular “How to” shorts of the ’40s and ’50s, in which a deadpan narrator explains how to play a sport or execute a task, while Goofy attempts to demonstrate — with disastrous results. The new Goofy short is slated to go into production early next year.

The idea for “Home Theater” came from the experience Kevin Deters, one of its two directors, had buying a large-screen TV. “For years I’ve been saying to my wife, let’s get a nice, large TV, because I’ve been suffering with a 30-inch screen,” he said. “She finally acquiesced around the time of the Super Bowl. When we went shopping, we discovered the stores had ‘Delivery in Time for the Big Game!’ and similar promotions, some of which appear in the film.”

Over the years the studio has tried unsuccessfully to update the classic characters. Mr. Deters and his co-director, Stevie Wermers, for instance, unhappily recalled “Disco Mickey,” the 1979 album that suggested the trademark mouse could boogie like John Travolta. The cover featured Mickey in a white suit and open shirt, swinging his hips.

“You don’t want to put Goofy on a skateboard,” Mr. Deters said. “There’s no reason to attempt to make him hip and cool. Goofy isn’t cool. He’s the ultimate domesticated man, as the ‘How to’ shorts showed. I relate very well to him as the guy who’s sort of a schlub on his couch.”

“How to Install Your Home Theater” will be made with a fairly small crew: despite the triumph of computer animation, Disney still has a number of talented traditional animators who are eager to draw again.

“The Goofy short will be very funny, but we won’t have to spend a lot of money and time on it, which won’t diminish it one bit,” Mr. Hahn said. “Obviously there’s a financial component to these films. We have to make them responsibly. But the big investment is for the long haul. We’re saying we believe in new talent and new techniques, and they’ll pay dividends in 10 to 20 years, just as we’re reaping the benefits now from the investment we made 25 years ago, training John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton and Tim Burton and John Musker and Ron Clemmons.”

Disney also intends the new talent to reflect an increasingly diverse work force. For most of its 100-year history American animation has been the creation of male artists, a situation that is slowly changing.

“It’s kind of shocking to realize that once the Goofy short gets made, I’ll officially be the first woman director at Disney Feature Animation,” Ms. Wermers said. “Considering that probably more than 50 percent of the audience for the short will be female, because of moms taking the kids, there should be more female voices out there.”

Ms. Wermers is not alone in her sense that Mr. Lasseter and his fellow Pixar alumni are already having an impact.

“I feel Disney is a very different place than it was a year ago,” said Chris Williams, a story artist who is developing “Golgo’s Guest” and “Prep and Landing,” “and the shorts program is just part of that. It’s become a very exciting place to work.”

Escape Artist

Walt Disney Pictures must be the most enduring entertainment brand ever created. Look at the studio’s peers, all forged, like Disney, in the 1910s or ’20s. What does it mean, many decades later, to be a Warner Brothers picture, an MGM film or a Paramount movie? Who cares anymore that one was once the home of Humphrey Bogart and Bugs Bunny, another of Judy Garland and Gene Kelly, the third of Preston Sturges and Hope and Crosby? As brands, the studios are meaningless to most contemporary audiences, of interest only to people who can hear melodies in the names Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. Disney, however, is still Disney. When my mother was a little girl, she knew what she was getting with a Disney picture. So did I when I was a kid. And so do my kids today (although, at the ages of 10 and 8, they’re now more interested in the tween shows on the Disney Channel). And what were/are we getting? Wholesome family entertainment with cheerful humor, wisecracking sidekicks, happy forest creatures, scary parts, some occasionally disturbing psychological or social implications, and often — this is the part my mom, the softy, has hated her whole life — a dead animal. Plus a sentimental ending. While the recipe has coarsened in the hands of the studio’s more recent stewards, the basic idea remains.

But you, most likely being one of the vast majority of the world’s citizens who at some point in their lives have seen a Disney feature or short or TV show, already knew that. A subject you probably know less about is the man who built the studio and gave it his name: Walter Elias Disney, the subject of Neal Gabler’s meticulously researched, sometimes engrossing, sometimes illuminating, sometimes wearying biography. Forty years after his death at the age of 65 from lung cancer — he was a heavy, lifelong smoker — the man himself has largely receded. Those of us old enough remember the midcentury mustache and the warm but ragged “Uncle Walt” voice, familiar from his gig as host of his “Wonderful World of Color” TV show. Otherwise, he’s the George Washington of popular culture: familiar but indistinct, ubiquitous but remote. Like his most famous but oddly personality-less creation, Mickey Mouse, Disney became a talking, moving logo. He himself was complicit in this, at once fostering it and resenting it. Gabler quotes him telling a colleague: “I’m not Walt Disney anymore. Walt Disney is a thing. It’s grown to become a whole different meaning than just one man.”

The job of his biographer, of course, is to grapple with both the meaning and the man. And grapple Gabler does, over the course of 633 pages of text and another 218 pages of appendix, source notes, bibliography, acknowledgments and index, but Disney proves a tough nut to crack. Perhaps because he and his works loom so large in nearly every living American’s childhood imagination, the lap for our national story time, he often seems to have been preserved in bland, archetypal amber. As Gabler writes in his introduction, “There was always something in Disney that pegged him not just as a populist but as peculiarly American, and though an early biography of him was subtitled ‘An American Original,’ he was less original in many respects than quintessential.” This is a kinder, less condescending echo of what Disney’s first serious biographer, the critic Richard Schickel, wrote about him shortly after his death: “To me, Disney was a type as well as an individual, and part of his fascination for me was that he was a type that I have known and conducted a sort of love-hate relationship with since I was child — the Midwestern go-getter.” Gabler and Schickel both have a point, but let’s face it: typecasting doesn’t set the stage for incisive biography. Neither does Gabler’s subtitle, “The Triumph of the American Imagination,” so broad and generically uplifting as to be meaningless; it could be the name for one of those World’s Fair-style corporate propaganda pavilions at Disney World’s Epcot, promising a Disney no fleshier than one of his beloved “audio-animatronic” robots. Great Moments With Mr. Disney — presented by Monsanto!

Gabler’s book is much, much better than that, which won’t be surprising to his previous readers. A veteran journalist and critic, he is the author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” a now-classic study of early Hollywood seen as a drama of assimilation, with the studios’ all-American secular myths a kind of bulwark against anti-Semitism. His follow-ups were a definitive biography of Walter Winchell and a book-length essay called “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” While Disney isn’t exactly virgin territory for biography, criticism and general rumination, Gabler has gone the extra mile, interviewing dozens of Disney’s still-living colleagues and snuffling through every last box and shelf, he says, of the Disney corporate archive. “Scholars are fortunate,” he writes, “that Walt, who practically from childhood had an inflated sense of his own importance, seemed to keep everything ... and the archive has retained nearly all of this detritus. ... I endeavored to read every letter, memo, story-meeting transcript, financial ledger, chart, desk diary, annotation and doodle.” We should ask no less of a scrupulous biographer, I guess, but one of this book’s flaws is that the drama of Disney’s life — and there was a lot of it — is sometimes lost in, or slowed down to a crawl by, dense thickets of minutiae. For instance, you may be surprised to know that despite employing such hard workers as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White, Dopey and Bambi, the Disney studio had limped along financially, frequently teetering on the edge of ruin, from its founding in 1923 until the grand opening of Disneyland’s cash-flow faucet in 1955. But, if you are like me, you will probably not want to read about every loan, every capitalization, every renegotiation with the Bank of America.

Arguably, there is no more important figure in American popular culture. Only adequately gifted as a cartoonist and animator, as a producer and studio head he was the goad that turned animation from a crude entertainment into an art form; he was as well the auteur behind some of Hollywood’s most enduring works. (“Our product is practically eternal” is how his brother and business partner, Roy, who wore the green eyeshades in the family, put it in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.) Walt drove himself and his animators mercilessly, pushing the boundaries of the medium, demanding greater and greater realism and ever richer expression. He produced the first cartoon to take full advantage of synchronized sound (Mickey Mouse’s 1928 debut, “Steamboat Willie,” a bigger risk than it might seem in hindsight, since at the time no one knew whether audiences would accept voices coming from drawings); the first color cartoon (“Flowers and Trees,” 1932); the first cartoon feature (“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” 1937); and that singular melding of high-, low- and middlebrow culture, “Fantasia” (1940), a bonkers masterpiece that pushed the medium to the brink of abstraction. Not a bad 12-year run.

For a time in the ’30s the studio was a near-utopian animation academy, a kind of grove of cartooniana. Gabler quotes Disney growling at a storyman who asked if the studio was taking full advantage of the medium: “This is not the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here.” Still, though he claimed authorship of all his creations in the public eye, it was sometimes hard even for insiders to explain what, precisely, Disney did. “Walt himself compared the cartoons to a symphony,” Gabler writes, “with him as the conductor who took all the employees — the storymen, the animators, the composers and musicians, the voice artists, the ink and paint girls — and got them to ‘produce one whole thing which is beautiful.’ ” At other times Disney likened himself to a bee, dropping his loads of pollen here and there around the studio.

Aside from pushing for technical advances, he was also the studio’s best storyman, pushing equally hard to get the narratives right, famed among his employees for acting out scenes with hammy abandon. The notes from a “Snow White” story meeting give a sense of what a Disney performance could be like at its most engaged: “Birds disturb dwarfs at work — ‘The Queen!’ Wham! Over rocks — thru’ the trees — swing on vines — ‘Tarzan’ to the rescue — slip off log over stream — down cliffs — sandbanks — see Queen beating it. ... Dwarfs back at house — ‘Too late.’ Pull hats off — one leads in prayer — Sobbing pierces hush — all weep and sob.”

The making of “Snow White” was probably the climax of his creative life, and in the telling it’s the highlight of Gabler’s book, with Disney a Patton in sweater vests, exhorting his troops further and further toward perfection, nearly breaking the studio’s back in the march to complete what could have been a folly. “Walt lived every sprocket hole of this film,” one animator said. “It was the love of his life at that time,” said another. Fortunately, the passion paid off. At the Los Angeles premiere, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard teared up along with the dwarfs while Snow White lay on her funeral bier. Critics loved the film, non-movie-star audiences too, and it would go on to gross a record $6.7 million. But after “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” sank at the box office, and the harmony of the studio was shattered by a 1941 strike, the wind went out of Disney’s sails as a filmmaker. For the rest of his life, with a few exceptions, making movies was a job.

Should “Walt Disney” have been subtitled “The Taming of the American Imagination”? This is one of the main raps against Disney, that he sanded down the rough edges of childhood narratives, of folk and fairy tales and more personal works like “Peter Pan,” until there was nothing left but smooth, bland surface. This perception prevails, I think, largely because his legacy as a filmmaker has been colored by the merely competent and sometimes drecky fare his studio turned out later in his life — the lesser animations, the dopey live-action comedies and tear-jerkers. “We’re making corn,” he told a studio artist in the ’60s. “But it’s got to be good corn. Let’s make it the best we possibly can” — a far piece from the producer who had worlds to conquer. Even more to the point, his films have probably been overshadowed by the theme parks, the passion of his later years, in which he and his corporate heirs came as close as anyone could to the odd but lucrative goal of perfecting ersatzness. But the perception of Disney as the Great Homogenizer, or what Robert Hughes once called “the Old Master of masscult,” doesn’t reckon with the richness of his early and best work, the dark, dangerous, unstable world of “Snow White” or the weird nightmare that is “Pinocchio,” where boys turn into donkeys and loved ones are swallowed by whales. Disney took somewhat rudimentary forms, at least with fairy tales, fleshed out their psychology and, perhaps even more important, added humor. I’ll say it if no one else will: Disney’s “Snow White” is scarier and funnier than the Grimms’, even 70 years on. Also, not that “everyone does it” is a defense, but Disney was hardly alone in giving source materials a good Hollywood spackling.

Though Gabler superbly shows how the pictures got made, he doesn’t really bring the films themselves to life. His main analytic feat is to provide a psychological through-line for Disney’s art and career: that as a reaction to a deprived childhood in which he bounced around the Midwest while his dour, demanding, anhedonic father failed at one occupation after another — “I was working all the time,” Walt once said of his youth. “I mean, I never had any real playtime” — he spent the rest of his life craving both escape and control, and that he melded those two possibly conflicting impulses into his rigorously constructed fantasies and fantasylands. At times, though, Gabler rides this theme a little too hard, running in tight rhetorical circles like a collie trying to corral a lowing, restless herd of cattle. Sometimes, too, the effort can lead to baggy writing: “It had always been about control, about crafting a better reality than the one outside the studio, and about demonstrating that one had the capacity to do so. That was what Walt Disney provided to America — not escape, as so many analysts would surmise, but control and the vicarious empowerment that accompanied it.” Sure. But, so broadly put, isn’t this true of Hollywood in general, and, for that matter, pretty much any kind of art, period?

If Gabler’s Disney can seem both elusive and the trim sum of a few neon parts, maybe that’s because the scope and impact of the achievement are so broad while the protagonist himself is frustratingly narrow. A problem with the book — and it’s Disney’s fault, not Gabler’s — is that Disney, the man, isn’t the best companion for a 600-plus-page marathon. Largely friendless, moody, impatient, not much interested in sex or acquisition, increasingly unpleasant and imperious as he grew older, he was a workaholic and not, it seems, much else. “No matter what you were talking about, he’d get back to this goddamn studio,” Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s greatest animators, was once quoted as saying. “He wanted to talk about it. This was him. This was his sex! This was everything. ... The orgasms were all here.” (Gabler provides a nice snapshot of Disney’s lukewarm marriage when he quotes the wife, Lillian, during the period Walt was in heedless thrall to “Snow White”: “I can’t stand the sight of dwarfs. ... I predict nobody’ll ever pay a dime to see a dwarf picture.”) At the same time, Disney was opaque even to colleagues he was in the trenches with. “He never made his motives clear,” one key employee said. “When I added up 30 years of employment, I found I understood him less at the end.” Gabler paints a vivid portrait, and a generous one in comparison with those of some earlier biographers, but in the end it’s a vivid portrait of a cold fish.

Though his wife and two daughters were attentive during Disney’s final illness, he happened to die alone. Gabler quotes one of his nurses writing to the family afterward: “I took care of Walt in his final days, and just want you to know that the poor man was so fearful.” How bizarrely cruel to take the effort to point that out, but maybe she thought she was sticking up for him. By the end of the book, though, even his biographer seems tired of him. Gabler finishes his volume with a description of the Forest Lawn plot where Disney’s ashes are interred — no, he wasn’t frozen — and then concludes with, at least as I read it, the slightest hint of a sneer: “Walt Disney had at last attained perfection.” Who would have thought the story of Uncle Walt would end with such a chill in the air?