Yoshi MaeshiroWorking with Walt Interviews with Disney Artists by Don Peri
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Walt had learned a bitter lesson from his experience with the distributors, and he vowed that he would reach the movie-going public in spite of the distributor. If he could establish himself with the public, then he could control his entire business and then the distributors would have to come to him and not he to them. It was an extremely ambitious statement to make. All of my experience in the business prior to that had been that animated cartoons did not amount to much, that producers could not really sell them on their own merits. Distributors would buy them, but they often had to give them away to theaters on the strength of the feature that they were selling to them. It was not a very good position for the producer of cartoons.
And I was especially impressed with Walt’s statement after walking up that morning through the wild oats and hills of Hollywood and finally locating the studio. It just seemed to me to be an extra ambitious statement. But Walt made a simple statement, “You can lick ’em with product,” simply meaning that if you make your product good enough, then they cannot deny it.
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I began my first day at the studio with a certain amount of misgiv- ings about my own lack of ability and whether I could satisfy Walt. I was impressed that he held every moment of a scene as being important. He gave me a scene to animate from a picture, When the Cat’s Away [1929]. I was to animate a scene containing Mickey Mouse, and he showed me the drawings that had been made of Mickey Mouse so that I could follow the character and the style. It was a scene that I would have considered to be of run-of-the-mill importance, but I could see that he did not hold it that way.
In Walt’s estimation, everything that was done had to be executed with a great deal of thought toward finesse in order to make it better.
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Walt struck me as being absolutely sure of himself. There was nothing in his attitude that suggested the approach, “We’ll try this to see how it works.”
He was positive about what he was going to do. He im- pressed me as being “young”—the fact that he was several years younger than I and had been in the business several years less—and yet his ability to diagnose those requisites for making better pictures impressed me very much.
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It is difficult to sum up my impressions of that first day. The size of the operation was not impressive: a small studio about the size of a small grocery store of that day. Frankly, I wondered where he was getting his money.
But if the size and setting were not inspiring, their compensation was found in the attitude of Walt Disney. He was not concerned with speed, with the time it took to animate a scene; of paramount importance was the quality of the finished product.
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You could almost say that here he had hired this man as a finished animator from New York City and he had found him sorely lacking in producing many of the things that he was in quest of. My whole concep- tion was to produce animation that he would respect, that he would like and think higher of me for it, because I felt that he was the only man I had any conception of in the animation business that had that objective.
I was 100 percent for him. If I failed, I felt that it was my fault and not his. I was absorbed in that and naturally when I was given young men of doubtful abilities to use in the performance of my duties, that he thrust upon me, I did not realize that the man had a plan far beyond that of training men for the organization. Diagnosing that I was particularly adept at handling green people sparked him into realizing that there was a place for me in his organization where he could profit from that. Walt was a keen judge of abilities and capacities.
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I was 100 percent for him. If I failed, I felt that it was my fault and not his. I was absorbed in that and naturally when I was given young men of doubtful abilities to use in the performance of my duties, that he thrust upon me, I did not realize that the man had a plan far beyond that of training men for the organization. Diagnosing that I was particularly adept at handling green people sparked him into realizing that there was a place for me in his organization where he could profit from that. Walt was a keen judge of abilities and capacities.
While I was handing out work to beginning animators and Walt was probably giving me a couple of more men, he took the occasion to say, “You know, I don’t think that you need to feel you have to do any more animation.” Of course I thought that if I was not going to animate, then was I worth keeping on the payroll? He could read my expression and he said, “You can be just as valuable at that as at animation. I don’t animate. I found out a long time ago that I could hire much better artists than myself.” This was an example of his clear thinking.
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There was no hiring hall for animators. You could have pickedout the best animators in other studios and plunked them in Disney’s, which happened time and time again, and they had to go through a very humble indoctrination: learning how to animate the way we did, learn- ing how to pick your work apart, learning how to diagnose, learning to cooperate with others, learning to accept criticism without getting your feelings hurt, and all those things. We had a saying, “Look, this is Disney Democracy: your business is everybody’s business and everybody’s business is your business.” If you did not have that attitude, you were not going to stay very long.
Walt had long since realized that by himself he could not animate, direct the efforts of other people, take care of the story work, and so forth. He knew he would have to confine his efforts to supervising
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people and the only way he could accomplish this objective was through a staff. And the only way that he could handle a staff was to have it work under his direction, to do as he would have it done. His forte was in the supervision of his business—every bit of it—and in the feeling that everything that was done, every drawing that was made, was the result of his guidance. In his mind, he was determined to have a team.
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As time went on, some of us became directors. The added respon- sibility focused attention on us if the picture was poor. I remember the story of one director, Dave Hand, who was not at all happy with the way his picture had turned out and he did not like the idea of facing Walt after the preview. He picked an aisle seat in the rear section of the theater so he could easily slip out. The picture was indeed poor, so Dave raced out of the theater and up half a block to the parking lot to make his getaway.
He was delayed for a few minutes because some cars were blocking his path. When he finally was ready to drive across the side- walk and into the street, he almost hit a pedestrian who turned out to be Walt! Walt had come out there looking for him. Even though he was blocking traffic in the parking lot, Walt stood there and let him know how unhappy he was with the picture.
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One of the outstanding practices of the studio was the preview. As soon as a picture was finished, we would take it to some convenient the- ater not too far away and we would arrange to have it shown during the peak business hours when they had a full house.
After the picture was over, we would usually adjourn to the lobby where we would inevitably meet some of our co-workers. There was a good possibility that Walt would be there, especially if the picture was disappointing in any way and there was some way of putting a finger on the fault.
