Category: Blog

by John Canemaker

INTRODUCTION 

By the time I became a teenager in 1956, my childhood interest in the history and techniques of animated films had become an obsession.

 

 

 

 

 

My initial curiosity was sparked by two television series: Disneyland (1954), hosted by Walt Disney, and The Woody Woodpecker Show (1957), hosted by Walter Lantz.

Occasionally, both of those rival film producers would demonstrate animation “secrets” about how-to make cartoon drawings move. One 1955 Disneyland episode, “The Story of the Animated Drawing,” introduced audiences to the earliest of film animators.   Showcased among the pioneers of silent cinema was Winsor McCay (1867-1934), the genius comic strip cartoonist and pioneer animator, whose biography I would write three decades later.1

In my hometown of Elmira, New York, I scrambled for information on both the history of the art form and how to make my own cartoon film.  At that time, books on animation techniques and its history were few; but they were informative and inspiring to someone searching for information.

Walt Disney – The Art of Animation by Bob Thomas, published in 1958, a lavishly illustrated tome promoting the making of Disney’s 1959 feature film Sleeping Beauty, included a small history section on pre-Disney animation.

 

 

 

Another source, Advanced Animation, illustrated by master animator Preston Blair, an iteration of his 1947 how-to manual on principles of Hollywood animated cartoons, is still in print.

 

 

From Britain, The Technique of Film Animation (1959) by John Halas & Roger Manvell offered tantalizing glimpses of international and avant-garde animation.  I devoured each book while searching for more at local libraries.

At The Art Shop, a small store that sold artists’ materials and made picture frames, the kind-hearted owner Arthur Rosskam Abrams, an exhibited abstract painter and lecturer, encouraged my flipbook animation experiments, sequential drawings and persistent questions.2

An Art Shop store worker named Delos Smith generously gave me two older books on animation.  One was a 1941 paperback edition of How to Make Animated Cartoons written by illustrator Nat Falk.  It featured examples from animation producer Paul Terry’s Terrytoons studio in New Rochelle, New York, with a succinct section on animation history.3

The other gift book was The Art of Walt Disney, written by Harvard art professor Robert Durant Feild,  published in 1942.  Both books proved to be illuminating; but Feild’s was the first serious in-depth analysis in book form of the Walt Disney Studio’s contributions to the development of character (or personality) animation.  

This indigenously American type of animation was first explored by Winsor McCay in his early silent films, How a Mosquito Operates (1912), and Gertie (the Trained Dinosaur) (1914).  McCay’s mosquito and dinosaur were the first film cartoon characters to display naturalistic weight and, most important, distinctive personalities.

Gertie, for example, is a huge diplodocus who acts like a petulant little girl.  Her unique persona is revealed by the way she moves.  Audiences empathize with her pantomimic emotions, be she inquisitive, bad-tempered, disobedient or a shamed crybaby.

McCay set a high bar for animators.  For years, his extraordinary draftsmanship and illusion-of-life animation would not be emulated or surpassed until the Walt Disney Studio’s Golden Era in the mid-1930s.

“I want characters to be somebody,” Walt Disney said in 1927.  “I don’t want them just to be a drawing!”4 Disney‘s artists built upon McCay’s art by analyzing and codifying principles of motion and visual communication. They established their own animation art school at the Disney Studio to refine draftsmanship, explore design, color, soundtrack technology, cinematography and staging.  To the animated cartoon, they applied stylistic conventions of live-action films, with emotions and motions derived from a character’s personality.

In 1939, Professor Robert D. Feild received permission from Walt Disney himself to spend nearly a year exploring the Disney Studio in Hollywood.  The engagement offered rare access for a serious study of the studio’s innovative methods of film production, to ultimately be presented in book form.

His assignment took place in a brief sliver of time, before World War II profoundly changed everything.  Feild became an articulate eyewitness during the making of the now-classic feature-length animated films Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi — arguably, the peak creative period in Disney’s history.  The Disney Studio, which celebrated its 100^th anniversary in 2023, was only nineteen years old when Feild’s The Art of Walt Disney was published by The Macmillan Company in 1942.

Feild was a fine arts professor open to and passionate about modern art, including movies.  “The animated sound picture,” he wrote, is “the most potent form of artistic expression ever devised to evolve beneath our eyes . . . Fantasia is no more an animated cartoon than the Stanze of the Vatican are comic strips.”5

Feild’s deep dive research into Disney’s animation moviemaking was meticulous and probing; his elegant, witty writing is scholarly, yet highly readable.  Revelatory, too, are the color and black-and-white illustrations he chose to inform the text.

In his championing of the animated film, a relatively recent art form that merges traditional artforms with science, Feild was a rebel challenging the high/low art divisiveness of the period.  He eloquently argued that storytelling continues to regale humankind, “ever since the first story-teller called forth images in another’s mind.  Only the technique is different.  Now the painted picture, the movie camera, the animated cartoon, drama and stagecraft, choreography, and music make their contributions . . .  And through a magic made possible by thousands of years of experimentation, we have once again fallen under the old spell.”6

Professor Feild proved to be the right person at a special time to research, analyze and discuss the creative processes of films considered today to be animation masterworks.  However, his research and ardent admiration of Disney films cost him his position at Harvard.  And although Feild enjoyed researching the book at the Disney studio, its writing phase was stressful.

First, he first had to learn and organize a myriad of technical production details from many artists and artisans; then, accommodate the demands for text changes from studio fact-checkers, the publisher and Walt Disney himself.

An exhausted Feild confided to a friend after The Art of Walt Disney was finally published

There was something more to it than writing a book! There was more to it than art or Walt Disney — there was so much mess from time to time that it’s a wonder that the book ever got itself between covers.  In fact, I’m amazed the darned words didn’t eventually come out backwards, and the plates get smooched with blood and sweat and tears!7

Nevertheless, Feild’s book became, and remains today, an important source of firsthand knowledge about the making of Disney film artworks in an early important period of their development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Through the years, the Disney book has inspired countless animators, and also writers on Walt Disney and animation history. When I wrote my animation history books, the format and content of Feild’s The Art of Walt Disney were often borne in mind.  Particularly the author’s passion for the subject, his wit and professorial detailed approach to explanations, and choice selection of photos and illustrations to add clarity to the text.

I have often wondered who Robert Durant Feild was, his background and creative processes in teaching about the art of animation, and particularly his research, writing and publishing of The Art of Walt Disney.  The answer to many of my questions was greatly aided by the Robert Durant Feild papers housed at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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Following here is what I found out.

EARLY LIFE

Robert (“Robin”) Durant Feild was born in London, England on September 8, 1893, and raised in affluent Kensington.1 His parents, Thomas Littlejohn Feild (1852 –  1937) and Meeta Armistead (Capehart) Feild (1862-1944), came from Raleigh, North Carolina, and, according to Robert D. Feild’s 1947 vita, “they never gave up their American citizenship.” (Robert D. Feild became a naturalized citizen of the USA on June 6, 1938.)2  

His parents’ marriage took place at a lavish ceremony at Christ Episcopal Church, in Raleigh, in February 1891, described by the Daily State Chronicle newspaper as “one of the most brilliant occasions ever witnessed” with the “contracting parties coming from the highest social circle.”3  The 39-year old groom was “a promising young shipping merchant of London, a member of a large transportation company whose steamers ply between that point and Baltimore.”4  His 29-year old bride, the daughter of a prominent citizen of Vance county, was “a woman well equipped by her culture to adorn a model English home.”  After an elaborate reception, the newlyweds left on a 1 a.m. train. “After visiting several points in this country, they will sail for Europe in April,” reported the State Chronical.5

Little more than a year later, Robert’s brother, Armistead Littlejohn Feild, was born in London on February 21, 1892.6 The next year in September, Robert was born.  By 1901, the affluent Feild family, including a governess, a maid, and a cook, were living in a posh three-story townhouse at 13 Palace Garden Terrace, in Kensington. 7

Robert’s early education was at St. Vincent’s Preparatory School (1903-07), and the prestigious Harrow School (1907-10), founded in 1572 under a Royal Charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I.  At age 17, he began to work in a London stockbroker’s office for two years, before deciding to “become an artist.” 8

ART TRAINING, WORLD WAR I AND INDIA

From 1913 until the outbreak of the First World War, in June 1914, Robert Feild studied at the Académie Julien in Paris.  One of his teachers, John Paul Laurens (1838-1921), was a highly respected “classical realist” painter in the grand French Academic style.  His staging, lighting of luminous color compositions of historical/religious subject matter hold a dramatic, cinematic quality.  Laurens was strongly anti-clerical in his paintings, often passing “on a message of opposition to monarchical and the churches mistreatment and oppression.”9

The painter’s artistic and political messaging may have influenced young Feild.  It presages his secular humanist beliefs, and his future clashes with academic defenders of fine art who derided his opinions about the merging of art and science.   “We in the West seem to have lost our belief that the joy of being alive is an essential factor in spiritual growth,” Feild commented years later in The Art of Walt Disney.  “With the rising power of the Church and its patronage of the arts, which amounted to a virtual monopoly, all outlets of humorous expression seem to have been discouraged.”10

In August 1914, less than a month after war was declared, 21-year-old Feild enlisted for military training in the Honorable Artillery Company, the oldest regiment in the British Army, which dated back to 1537 and the reign of Henry VIII. During World War I, Feild later became a commissioned lieutenant in the Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment), serving four years overseas, until December 1919 on the North-West Frontier of India. 11

His India experience “was to profoundly impact him for the rest of his life,” notes Dr. Susan House Wade, a design historian specializing in visual culture exchanges between East and West during the first half of the twentieth century.  Feild “wholeheartedly” embraced Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of democratic socialism and non-violence and “became involved with Indian art and philosophy. Indeed, India became one of his primary passions, with its art forming an integral part of his life.”12

WORKING IN THE USA

After the war, Feild continued to study painting in Paris and Rome “before deciding to ‘try my luck’ in the United States.”  He spent two years “turning my hand to odd jobs throughout the country,” including an apprenticeship in Boston to a stained-glass maker. “Light in one of Mr. Feild’s living room windows,” wrote Gwen Kinkead years later in The Harvard Crimson, “shines through a round stainglass [sic] of St. Francis, a gift of his employer [when he was an apprentice]. His sensitivity to light and color were further enhanced at the Disney studios in the late 1930s.”

The luminous full rainbow of three-color Technicolor in Disney films, which began in 1932 with a Silly Symphony (FLOWERS AND TREES), was equally enchanting to Jean Charlot, painter, muralist, and author of Art From The Mayans to Disney.  “[Disney artists] have now reached a stage,” Charlot wrote in 1939, “where local color has been added to the black outline, where they resemble Gothic windows whose opaque leading partitions light into color . . . We have already seen the seven dwarfs, emerging from their cave into the sunset, shed their flat Gothic livery for the contrasting light and shade of the High Renaissance!”13

On February 5, 1924, in New York City, Robert at age 31, wed 27-year-old Helen B. Stickney (1897-1992), an American born in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Now married, but with his “luck” as an artist not panning out, Feild urgently sought a new career. Helen, he wrote, “has been active in social work for many years.” Surely, it was she who sparked his attendance, brief though it was, at the Chicago University School of Social Service Administration (SSA) as a “Special Student.”14

During his time at the SSA, he worked under Paul H. Douglas (1892-1976), a passionate crusader for civil rights in the U.S. Senate, described by Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the greatest of all the Senators.”  Other teachers of note included T.V. Smith (1890-1964), professor of philosophy, who also became a U.S. senator and author of numerous bills aimed at reforming the legislative process; and Harry A. Millis (1873-1948), prominent economist and author of landmark writings on labor relations.

Feild’s Social Service Administration teachers and his war experiences greatly shaped his progressive world view regarding social consciousness. His love of Far Eastern art and the Gandhian philosophies that he and his wife shared were also important art influences.  “As a result of my experience at Chicago,” Feild wrote, he “decided to ‘become a teacher.’”15 Teaching in the classroom and writing would become his life work, with an avocation in painting.

TEACHING AT HARVARD

Harvard University’s Department of History of Art began in 1874 as one of twelve divisions.  In June 1927, the new Fogg Museum of Art opened to accommodate the growth of Harvard’s art collections.   That same year, Robert D. Feild was offered a position of Instructor in Harvard’s Fine Arts Department.  His eclectic credentials — studying art and painting in Paris and Rome, his practical work in a Boston stained-glass studio, his experiences at Chicago University School of Social Services Administration, and his military wartime service – so impressed the hiring committee that he simultaneously entered Harvard College as both a teacher and a freshman at age 34.

Feild graduated in 1930, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and a member of the exclusive Signet Society, which celebrates the arts of music, visual arts, and theatre.  Signet members are chosen “with regard to their intellectual, literary and artistic ability and achievements.” The club’s emblem holds a beehive and a Greek legend: “Create art and live it.” Another club motto is attributed to Virgil: “So do you bees make honey, not for yourselves.” 16

At Harvard, Dr. Wade notes, Feild taught design theory and practice, and the history of British painting, specializing in the art of J.M.W. Turner.  During this time, he also developed a lifelong friendship with Oriental Art lecturer Langdon Warner (1881-1955), among other East Asian art colleagues. “Up to our contemporary period,” Field wrote in The Art of Walt Disney, “Japanese Kamakura scroll-painting is perhaps the greatest example of dramatic and humorous story-telling ever attained.”17

His academic friendships also “formed Feild’s core views on the ‘Unknown Craftsman’ . . . with reference to those involved in anonymous craft production.”18   He would later find the Disney studio a modern example of a Renaissance workshop, made up of unknown artist/ craftsmen and women, where many hands contribute to a single artistic goal.

Robin Feild was a charming, witty, and gentle teacher, with an outspoken “fighting spirit” regarding art and his socialist politics.  He continued teaching at Harvard until 1939, the last six years as an Assistant Professor.  He was well-liked by his students.  The New York Times described him as “of the ‘studio type,’ sitting at ease with them at table and smoking over their common interests.” The Harvard Crimson noted that “most aspects of ‘the adventure of living’ absorb Mr. Feild, and he has no hesitation to speak a piece of his mind.”19

I had for many years become vitally interested in new materials and new techniques for the communication of contemporary ideas,” he later said. “20 Indeed, Feild could be passionate and straight-forward in challenging academic colleagues and fine art critics resistant to breaking down barriers between art and science. “Many continued to hold the belief that the machine is the enemy of art,” he wrote in 1942, “and that a picture not all done by hand is beyond the pale of artistic judgement. So it is that the work of Walt Disney, whose art has been developing steadily over a period of fifteen years, has taken us by surprise.21

Frequently, when Feild voiced his admiration of filmmaking as a new, vital, scientific art form, he championed the animated films of Walt Disney (1901-1966) as a prime example.  In less than a decade (from 1928-1937), Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoon shorts rapidly progressed technically and artistically using innovative camera and film optics in tandem with advances in sound, color, design, and expressive cinematic narratives.

The culmination came in 1937 with the world-wide success of Disney’s first feature-length cartoon, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, which revolutionized the art and commerce of animation.  Walt and his moving-image artists and technicians were at their highest creative peak in, what Feild described as, “perhaps the only universal art form in history . . . what I like to call 20th century folk art.”22   

Feild’s Harvard students were enthralled with their opinionated art teacher.  The Harvard Crimson, the undergraduate student-run newspaper, described him as the Fine Arts Department’s “most popular and successful professor.”  Despite Feild’s popularity with his students, a storm was brewing among his academic colleagues.

In the late 1930s, Harvard’s art faculty was engaged in a raging debate over so-called high vs low art — a resistance to popular or commercial culture encroaching upon the temples of traditional fine art.  Use of technology to create photography and movies was looked upon by some with suspicion and disdain.

The debate continues today.  Artist David Hockney’s iPad pixel paintings, for example, and his theory that Old Master painters may have used optical aids, such as mirrors, lenses, and the camera obscura are controversial.  Hockney’s embrace of digital creativity “belongs to age-old suspicions about art’s relationship to machine technology,” observes Karen Fang, historian/author and University of Houston professor.  It is also “a distinctly twenty-first century anxiety about screen culture.”

When Feild’s situation climaxed in his dismissal from Harvard, the New York Times noted that “in the judgement of a majority of the fine arts faculty, Professor Feild put too much emphasis on modernistic styles.”23

MEETING WALT DISNEY   

Before that happened, fuel was added to the fire when Harvard University president James Bryant Conant invited Walt Disney to Harvard to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree on June 23, 1938.   It was said that Professor Feild “was responsible” for suggesting that the prestigious award be given to Disney, who accepted the invitation with enthusiasm. 24

So great was Walt Disney’s fame and popularity that on June 22, the day before arriving in Cambridge, Massachusetts to receive Harvard’s award, he stopped by New Haven, Connecticut to pick up another honorary M.A., this one from Yale University.  “Who was this man Disney, anyway?” Feild later wrote with wry wit about academia’s sudden regard for Disney:

He must be recognized as a social benefactor; and so, learned institutions competed with one another to show how much respect they had for a man with such a charming sense of humor.  But [Walt] . . . knew all about it.  He knew that immediately after Commencement the learned institutions would begin again exactly where they left off. They would return to the study of Art with a greater determination than ever to escape into the past.25 

At Cambridge, Professor Feild met Mr. Disney, where undoubtedly the former enthused about the latter’s filmmaking achievements in developing a new art form. They may also have conversed about the possibility of Feild visiting Los Angeles for a close look at the Disney animation processes, with an eye toward organizing an art exhibition.  Or, perhaps, writing a scholarly book that would inform an avid public curious about how Disney films are made.  A book to stimulate art students and contribute to “standards by which to judge the art of today,” as Feild later wrote in the Foreword to the tome that became The Art of Walt Disney. “Because his art does not fall into any one of those traditional categories which we have learned to accept as particularly ‘fine’ . . . it has been presumed that it is outside the range of legitimate art criticism.”26 

Walt Disney was receptive to producing an informational book on animation art and technique.  In fact, as a teenager beginning his career, he first learned how to animate from E. G. Lutz’s 1920 book Animated Cartoons – How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development (Charles Scribner’s Sons), which he frequently borrowed from Kansas City’s Public Library. 27

RESEARCH IN HOLLYWOOD 

The Harvard arts professor apparently impressed the Hollywood film producer.  Soon after Harvard’s ceremony, Feild spent six weeks of his 1938 summer exploring the Walt Disney studio in Hollywood.  During his stay (and a longer one the next year), Field was given free rein to explore the secrets of how the Disney sausage is made.

“No doors were closed to me,” he wrote, “no obstacles put in my way, lest I probe too deeply into the ‘mysteries of the craft’; nor was I ever made to feel that I was the nuisance I often knew myself to be.”28

Walt did request that Feild present a lecture about the animated cartoon as “the art of the future.”  On Tuesday evening August 9, 1938, a large gathering of Disney artists and artisans “jammed the Hollywood Las Palmas Theatre” to hear the professor’s talk.  “When I was asked by the authorities, if I would talk to you,” Feild joked in his opening remarks, “I felt, more or less, as if I was receiving orders from headquarters.”

Most of Feild’s lecture dealt with a question he often posed to his students: What is the meaning of the word Art? Ruminating at length in broad strokes, punctuated with humor, he sketched a history of Art, decrying a contemporary “unintelligent reverence for the past . . . and the stupid aversion to the machine.”  In film animation, “the machine” is the necessary integration of optical equipment and scientific electronics.  Cameras, lighting, film emulsion,  image projectors merge with traditional drawing/painting skills and tools to produce moving imagery, eliciting emotional responses from viewers.

Toward the end of his talk, Feild suggested recovering the “lost” and “correct” meaning and use of the word Art, as understood by Aristotle in Ancient Greece, Meister Eckhardt and other medieval scholars in the 12th century, “taken for granted throughout the whole of the Renaissance.”  He included art from his beloved India because “it is the way the word has been understood and acted upon through all history.”

“The ‘Art’ in anything,” Feild finally revealed, “is the degree in which it is well done.”

It applies to the doing of anything; writing a symphony, sailing a boat, making love. It also applies to running a business, punching a man on the nose or constructing a machine gun . . . We have always associated it with things pleasant, rather than unpleasant. But here again we have been careless in our thinking. We have avoided the main issue. It is the right use of “Art” which goes into the building of any worthwhile culture.

The most important problem, he explained, is “the worthwhile-ness of doing anything . . . to find the right use for Art.”

As dark political clouds gathered in Europe, where within a month Hitler would invade Poland initiating World War II, Feild’s lecture referenced Gandhian values of truth, non-violence, harmony and simplicity:

I suppose we are all agreed that one of man’s functions as a social animal is to work for the good of the whole. In a sane world, then, rather than making a machine gun well, rather than to exploit mankind and torture him to death, Art should be used in the endeavor to preserve life and beyond that, to make the world a better place to live in. To strive to make people happy, then, is no unworthy artistic aspiration.

“You are rediscovering the real art of representation,” Feild assured his Disney audience, “and bringing it into line with all the accumulated resources of man’s discoveries and inventions up to date.”

You have broken down utterly all possible conflict between man and the machine. And you are putting science to use to aid in the production of something essentially for a man’s good in terms of what is Beautiful.

In conclusion, Feild spoke to the Disney staffers about “the privilege to consider himself or herself an artist in their own right.” Showing off what he’d learned about animation production processes in his brief time at the studio, he noted:

Whether you are in what is referred to as the Creative or the Process section of the plant — from what may be considered routine work on the cells [celluloid acetate pages on which the paper cartoon characters are inked and painted], to the Unit Directors; from the mechanics to the head engineers. For if what I have said about “Art” means anything to you, you will realize that only to the degree that you do each part well can the whole be done well. And actually, there is just as much “Art” in painting a cell well as in the work of the animator. That I know is a shock to some of you, but such is the case. 29

That fall, Feild returned to Cambridge to resume teaching his classes, confident in the knowledge he gained firsthand about Disney’s art.  He planned a series of lectures on the subject for Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.  And a book proposal.

At the same time, he was contacted by Alfred Barr, first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  Barr wished to discuss Feild’s work at the Fogg “which interests me so much and about which I heard a great deal . . . My secretary tells me that you have some Disney material. Have you talked to the [MoMA] Film Library about its use?” 30

Where did Barr’s keen interest in Feild and his lectures come from? The answer arrived the next day in a letter from Barr’s assistant, Allen Porter: “Mr. Edward Warburg has told us of your summer at the Disney Studios and of the material you collected there which you hope to incorporate into a lecture.”31

Edward M.M. Warburg (1908-1992), a philanthropist, was one of the founders of MoMA and a co-founder of the American Ballet company with George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, Warburg’s Harvard classmate.  Warburg graduated from Harvard Class of 1930, the same year as Feild.  As a student in 1928, Warburg founded the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which “gave the public its first look at one startling art form after another.”

 

It was a precedent for what MoMA  became. Warburg explained, it was “our form of militancy” against the “all reactionary” Fogg Art Museum.  Feild’s interest in modern art forms was nourished by the educational art exhibitions held by his classmates Walburg and Kirstein.  In rented rooms at Cambridge, they exhibited original artworks by Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Buckminster Fuller, among others.

 

Warburg, now intrigued by alumnus Feild’s progressive film theories and the Disney lectures he was planning for Harvard’s staid Fogg , recommended that Barr also consider them for MoMA.32 John Abbott, Director of MoMA’s newly formed Film Library and Iris Barry, its first curator, soon began a correspondence and meetings in New York with Feild.  A letter from Abbott, dated January 26, 1939, discussed “the question of the Animated Cartoon Exhibit, coupled with the possibility of three lectures on this subject by yourself.” 33

Professor Feild was not only popular among Harvard students, but becoming a figure of increasing attention at a major art institution. The new year was moving along well for Professor Feild. Until it wasn’t.

DISMISSAL AT HARVARD

In early February 1939, Harvard pulled the rug from beneath R. D. Feild by not renewing his teaching contract.  The term of the popular art teacher of distinction, with twelve years of experience at Harvard, would cease at the end of the academic year in September.

Reaction was swift and intense. The New York Times reported the termination “is causing alarums and excursions not only in the [Harvard] Yard but throughout the university. About 100 of the ‘concentration’ Harvard students in art and an additional number of Radcliffe girls have petitioned the departmental board for reconsideration.”34

The reason for Feild’s dismissal was never officially revealed.  However, The Nation magazine repeated The Harvard Crimson’s assertion that the university’s art department had been “rankling” over Walt Disney’s honorary award since June.  The “incident was the immediate reason, though Dr. Feild’s general approach to art, which made his classes so popular that not all applicants could be accommodated, was a more fundamental reason.”

A Harvard Crimson editorial claimed the problem lay in the department’s stressing a chronological, historical, factual approach to the Fine Arts “filled with names and dates.”  The students felt it failed to offer them methods to judge art for themselves, “the universal essentials which lie behind all art.”  Attainment of such a goal meant teaching the R.D. Feild way:

. . . greater stress on practical art and design; and more than this, a close integration of practical work and history.  It means the coordination of art with other branches of knowledge. It means finally the demonstration of the connection between the Fine Arts and the present-day world.  The arts would consequently cease to be beautiful expressions from a past period of history and would become something of living significance. 35 

The Cambridge Union of University Teachers expressed “profound regret” over the failure of Harvard University to renew Feild’s teaching appointment. “Seeing in the incident an illustration of the ‘need for reform in the system of appointment and tenure at Harvard,’ the teacher’s union questioned whether ‘efforts for a fresh point of view’ were being made in the fine arts department and asked further, whether Harvard could afford at this time to lose ‘another undergraduate teacher of proved distinction.’” 36

A general investigation of the Harvard tenure and appointment system had, in fact, been under way for months. Feild may have been involved in attempts to form a non-tenured teacher’s union at Harvard, “which cost Feild . . . and other faculty members their jobs.” The Cambridge Union was demanding an answer to “how long a department could utilize a teacher without ‘incurring responsibility for his career.’”37

Dean George H. Chase, a member of the “high-ranking” Harvard art department committee that recommended against Feild’s reappointment, downplayed the angry campus reaction: “It is just one of those cases where a man is not recommend for reappointment.” Harvard president Conant was silent on the matter.38

Walt Disney, however, was not.  He responded to a query from The Christian Science Monitor with a telegram: “Robert Feild is held in high esteem by our staff of over 300 practical artists. I don’t know of a better recommendation and can only say Harvard’s loss will be someone’s gain.” 39

At the time of his firing, Feild, was “ill at his home from influenza” and made no comment. However, one week later (February 16) he recovered sufficiently to offer the first of four lectures on “the art of Walt Disney” and the animated cartoon at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. It may have been cold comfort to Feild that, as The Boston Globe reported, the talk “drew such a large crowd last night that 500 were turned away. The capacity of the lecture hall is 400.” 40

The Nation magazine, noting that students and teachers at Harvard were organizing, commented with amusement: “We look forward to a good fight. The spectacle of Harvard defending its dignity against a Mouse should be almost as funny as an animated cartoon; it should inspire Mr. Disney to send Donald Duck and all his other extra-curricular animals to Cambridge.”41

A DISNEY BOOK PROPOSAL  

Academia being academia, nothing came of the tempest. Feild was not rehired. But during the short-lived fracas, he proposed a book on Disney’s art and creative processes to the Boston publishing company Houghton Mifflin.  In mid-March, Houghton editor Richard J. Eaton wrote, “My dear Mr. Feild, I am curious to know whether you have yet found time to write to Walt Disney” for the necessary permissions to proceed with the project.42

Field indeed planned to meet with Disney in New York in May after Walt oversaw music recordings conducted by Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia for the soundtrack of the “concert feature” in production, later titled FANTASIA (1940).  But Disney was taken ill in New York and returned to California.  He finally responded to “Robin” Feild on May 17, expressing he was “very sorry to hear what happened at Harvard, but, after all, it may be for the best.”

He then got down to business regarding Feild’s book proposal:

I have given a lot of thought to your suggestion that you write a book on the animation of cartoons. I want to be frank and say that I think anything of this nature, which has our approval, should be done in close cooperation with the studio, because there are many angles we have learned from the practical side that should be incorporated into a book of this sort if it is going to serve its purpose of stimulating interest in the art student and also be a contribution to the cartoon industry. We definitely feel that you are qualified to write this book and we want you to know that you have our complete confidence and cooperation, not only in the writing of this material but also in the marketing of it. Please let me know how your plans develop, and with all good wishes, I am

Sincerely, Walt Disney 43

On May 26, Feild assured Eaton of Disney’s full cooperation, and revealed plans to travel with his wife, Helen, to Los Angeles for an extended research period at the Disney Studio.  Delighted, Eaton responded:

Will it be possible for you to prepare a tentative plan or prospectus of your book before you leave? . . . I am very glad to hear that you are still willing to give Houghton, Mifflin Company the first chance at your book because of my being first on the ground, as it were. Judging from your course of lectures early this year, I am inclined to believe with you that you will not encounter any difficulty finding a publisher in the event Houghton Mifflin Company prove to have cold feet. 44

However, the book eventually was published in 1942 by The Macmillan Company. Whitman Publishing, a subsidiary of Western Publishing Company and Disney’s book publisher since 1933, arranged for Feild’s book to be published by Macmillan “under our authorization, the complete manuscript and arrangement of the material, as approved by Walt Disney Productions.”45

“The material upon which this book is based,” Feild explained in his Author’s Note in The Art of Walt Disney, “I collected in Hollywood between June 1939 and May 1940.”46  Feild financed some of his research-gathering trip with an extra year’s salary given to him by Harvard “as a solatium,” a compensation for the inconvenience of his recent unemployment.47 The book contract wasn’t worked out until late March 1941, when Feild’s manuscript was nearly finished.  The publisher paid the author an advance against royalties of $1,750.00, comparable in today’s dollars to approximately $38,000. (According to the 1940 U.S. Census, the average annual salary  was $1,368.)

Feild would complain later that the actual writing and editing of the book was “a God-awful series of vicissitudes” in “the publishing racket,” which is “like any other exploitation-for-profit-concern.”  By contrast, he and Helen always remembered their nearly year-long Hollywood stay, with Robin freely touring the Disney studio gathering information and learning about the art of animation, as “one of the happiest of our lives.  I got something out of the Disney Studios,” he wrote to a friend in 1941, “which in some strange way has meant more to me than I ever remember having experienced before.”48

RETURN TO HOLLYWOOD  

Before the Feild’s arrival in Hollywood in June 1939, and before Robin reported to the Disney studio in July, he contacted artists he had befriended there the previous year.

One was Phil Dike, a conceptual sketch artist, color coordinator/advisor for SNOW WHITE and FANTASIA.  A founder of the California school of watercolor, Dike taught drawing and composition at the Disney studio from 1935-45.  He shared with Feild a mutual interest in art history and teaching, and became one of several Disney staffers who gave Feild “unsparingly of their time in all emergencies.”

To the professor’s inquiry about locating a Los Angeles apartment, Dike responded immediately with a June 5 letter of welcoming warmth, good humor and encouragement:

Dear Robin,
I have been hearing of your escapades of the past few months and can well imagine that Cambridge has held an unusually exciting spring. Your assignment with us sounds like a very interesting opportunity, not only for the Studio, but for this thing called “animation,” or “the animated picture.” I am sure you will get a big kick out of digging into the many possibilities that come to mind when one thinks of the inner workings of such a place as this. It is fortunate that you were here last summer and it should not be as if you were stepping into a place where angels fear to tread. I shall be looking forward to seeing you in July, and if I hear of a place in the vicinity of which you spoke, I shall make a note of it so that you may have some choice when you arrive. 49

The Feilds rented a cozy apartment at 1901 Commonwealth Avenue at Franklin Avenue.  It was conveniently located about a mile from 2719 Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district, an address housing, since January 1926, the Walt Disney Studio.50  The now-legendary Hyperion studio was the birthplace of Mickey Mouse, a fact no one entering the small greenery-lined courtyard could doubt.  For above Spanish-style stucco buildings with balconies, a giant neon sign of the famed mouse smiled and waved, as if in welcome.   The returning ex-Harvard professor did indeed feel welcomed, and ready to immerse himself fully in a Hollywood dream factory like no other, during a peak creative year.

That summer of 1939, Walt Disney’s bustling film studio was enjoying worldwide acclaim as the home of Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts, and the breakthrough animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.   Released in 1937, after three years of creative innovation and sheer toil, Snow White immediately achieved worldwide critical and popular success, becoming America’s highest grossing film.  Product merchandising of the many beloved Disney film characters in toys, books, clothing, alongside lucrative European film distribution deals, added additional profitability to the studio’s coffers.

Emboldened and flush with money, Walt Disney ambitiously planned to produce two animated features per year, as well as a full plate of shorts.  But the way forward was not easy.  “The two years between Snow White and Pinocchio,” he wrote, “were years of confusion, swift expansion, reorganization,” During 1938-40, eight hundred people were added to the payroll, bringing the total of employees to approximately 1,400.51  

The creative challenges of upcoming productions (Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi) and those in early development (Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella) were formidable and expensive.  Physically, the Hyperion Avenue studio was bursting with new infusions of artists, technicians, and equipment.  For extra space, additional neighborhood buildings, apartment houses and bungalows were rented, purchased or leased. Story artists for Bambi (released in 1942) were housed across town on Seward Street. “We needed a new studio,” Walt decided, “and in a hurry.”

Planning began in May 1938 for construction of an elaborate $3 million, air-conditioned facility on 51 acres in Burbank, eight miles away in the San Fernando Valley.   The first wave of Hyperion studio employees to abandon the old facility began arriving in the new but unfinished Burbank studio in late August 1939.

For nearly a year, from summer 1939 to May 1940, first at Disney’s Hyperion studio and then at the new Burbank studio, Robert D. Feild was a keen eyewitness, to a remarkable, exciting, but brief, creative period in animation history.  His intelligent on-site observations in elegant prose would be published in 1942 in a landmark book, the first its kind to reveal and explain in depth the art and craft of animation at the Walt Disney Studio.

 

RESEARCH AT DISNEY, SUMMER 1939 – MAY 1940

Feild’s methodical research at the Disney studio began by visiting every area of production:  administrative, creative, and technical.  Early on, he was impressed and delighted by the “Story Conference Technique,” perhaps because it was close to a writer’s task.  But here it is a group effort, in which crews of story artists and writers write and draw sequential pictures.  A lapidary method in which scenes and sequences of a film are developed, discussed, made fun of, and defended narratives (often passionately).  A stenographer recorded their spontaneous arguments for later reference (profanity removed), and the inspirations sparked hundreds of hand-drawn storyboards.

At first, Feild was taken aback by the participants’ seriousness of purpose toward even the funniest narratives:

I would sit back and chuckle at the adventures of Mickey and the gang . . .when I would happen to look up and see perhaps ten or twelve strong, silent men – their jaws well set, looking as if they were attending a war conference . . . I would be on the verge of exploding with uncontrolled laughter when suddenly, whoever was in charge, would positively thunder out, “My God! [Donald Duck] would not act that way!” And with an expression of withering scorn, he would turn upon the poor wretched storyteller . . . I suppose only an outsider can fully appreciate the mysteries of the gag session.  They are sort of unnerving if you are not accustomed to them.52

Feild’s book offers several glimpses inside Disney story conferences and how story continuities came to life in Snow White and her animal friends’ inventive house-cleaning sequence; Night on Bald Mountain’s Halloween imagery in Fantasia; earliest ideas for Dumbo; story continuity for a Donald Duck short, among others.

One poetic storyboard, adapted from Felix Salten’s original 1923 novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods, attracted the existentialist in Feild.  It was a sequence of nine delicately-drawn pencil renderings of two autumn leaves. Wind-blown, about to detach from a tree branch, they have a sensitive and final conversation about life and death.

“Each moment of action,” Feild wrote, “had to be described in detail and every word of the dialogue phrased with the greatest artistic fidelity.”  Unfortunately, the episode did not make it into the final film.  But in Feild’s book, his inclusion and preservation of this lost moment reveals a ruthless creative process, wherein painstakingly developed ideas are often discarded.53

Feild’s 290-page The Art of Walt Disney briefly surveys pre-cinema art (cave drawings to comic strips), works that strived to bring vitality to still imagery in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.  In another early chapter (“Flickers of Promise”), he admires silent-era cartoon films:

Many were crude to a degree, but at their best they not only fulfilled their purpose effectively but also attained a high standard of artistic accomplishment.    In directness of appeal, in economy of means, consistent with the quality of humor they attempted to convey, they have never been surpassed. . . These early masters of the animated cartoon were laying the foundation for a new art form, a new way of appealing to the imagination; they were liberating us from our dependence upon the “still” picture as the ultimate form of drawing and painting. 54

Feild questioned scenarists; storyboard and concept artists; designers of color, characters and background; layout composition planners, cel inkers and painters; camera operators and directors, supervising master animators and their assistants; and Walt Disney himself.  He spoke with early animation veterans who improvised drawing and animation principles.  Now working at Disney’s, their discoveries were developed, codified, and shared with younger colleagues.

Roaming the Disney production labyrinth during the making of the features and shorts, Feild visited supervising directors’ offices called “Music Rooms.”  They were so named during the transition from silent to sound films when a composer at a piano helped the director determine a cartoon’s tempo and pacing.

Feild developed a warm camaraderie with the Music Room denizens of Fantasia’s “Dance of the Hours” sequence, a wild satirical ballet of ostriches, elephants, and a hippo and alligator pas de deux.

In a letter written in early 1941 to T. (Thornton) Hee, co-director of the sequence, Feild recalled:

. . . the raucous tones that used to reverberate round your music room while I urged the gang to work — or did I used to whisper diffidently while you, Fergy (co-director Norman Ferguson), Ken (art director Kendall O’Connor) and Co. (Asst. Director Larry Lansburgh) scowled at my interference?  Anyway, I had a swell time with you all, and if the book ever gets written, and any of it is passably good, you can all claim the credit.

Feild later reiterated to Disney publicist Janet Martin Lansburgh that the “happiest days I spent in the studio were in [her husband] Larry [Lansburgh]’s unit.”55

Feild visited numerous animator’s rooms as well, and was especially impressed with the artistry of master animators Art Babbitt and his close friend, Vladimir (Bill) Tytla.  Babbitt and Feild, in fact, would maintain a friendship through the years, mostly exchanging letters.

 

In one, he told Babbitt, “You were greatly responsible for the positive goodness of the experience.”56 Informational explorations with top studio animators enabled Feild to elucidate about “a far higher standard of drawing” required at Disney for “an art of a new order.”

 

 

It was no longer sufficient merely to endow little cartoon characters with vitality.  Animation began to demand an increased knowledge of organic structure, a new approach to the problems of design, and a more acute sense of timing. 57

Animators, Feild learned, must gain “a psychological insight” into cartoon characters, but “must also possess one more faculty hitherto never called into play in pictorial representation . . . [the ability] to feel exactly how the particular character would behave under all circumstances.”  He concludes that to attain quality personality animation, what counts most is “the understanding the artists have derived from direct experience.”

Many of the book’s illustrations favor the processes of animation revealed in rough conceptual drawings made of graphite, pastel, watercolor.  Most of the showcased character drawings are off-model from their final film designs.

For example, a single page featuring thirteen energetic drawings, full of life, of the head and facial expressions of Stromboli, PINOCCHIO’s bombastic villain, are rendered in sketchy, bold, quickly-made lines by the  supervising animator (Tytla).  On the next page a Stromboli scene is composed of sequential animation drawings by a “clean-up artist.”

The assistants to each master animator had a difficult task: bring all loose, graphite lines on the sequential original drawings into tight, consistent shapes, with added details on new sheets of paper.  Now on-model, the detailed clean-up drawings next went to “Inkers,” who traced the tightened lines onto transparent celluloid sheets (“cels”), filled in by “opaquers,” who painted colors on each cel.

Feild acknowledges that the drawings during this assembly line manage to “retain their monumental quality despite the rigors of the clean-up process.” But although “the vital spark [of the master’s roughs] has been retained,” Feild laments that often “they have been so cleaned-up and the lines reinforced with such a graven quality that they are almost offensively precise.”58

Feild’s nimble words dance alongside the book’s well-chosen 267 drawings and photographs, many in color.  His text is also accompanied by a judicious selection of a tour of the new Burbank studio in photos, blueprints, and production diagrams.

Feild illuminates as he entertains.  Whether it’s Thumper reciting a homily, or a dancing hippo, or Zeus tossing lightning bolts, the reader is informed about the character’s visual development and, more important, the creative thinking behind the choices made.  Storyboard continuity drawings of Pinocchio encountering a sly Fox and Cat; layout drawings of Bambi’s first forest walkabout; alligators slithering down a distorted Ionic column are eye-opening.  The drawings are as much fun to see and learn about today as they were over 85 years ago.  Technologies change through the years, but basic principles of visual communication are constant.

WRITING THE BOOK

In May 1940, Robert and Helen Feild returned to Cambridge.  During Robert’s eleven months in Hollywood at Disney, he did more than basic research.  In between interviewing artists and artisans, he constantly wrote and re-wrote drafts of the manuscript, building and shaping it.  Fact checking, while he absorbed definitions and critiques, and seeking approvals and guidance from what he described as a “four-ring circus;” meaning Walt and his studio managers and the Whitman and Macmillan publishing teams.It was a steep, often confusing learning curve exacerbated by scant support offered from his Macmillan editor, Arthur James Putnam (1893-1966).60  

On December 31, Feild sent the following tense plea to the 47-year old Putnam in New York:

Dear Mr. Putnam:

I am still somewhat at sea over our relationship, and, if this is not exactly an SOS, it is the plaint of one badly in need of cooperation. Before attempting to finish “The Art of Walt Disney” I have decided to revise what I have already done in light of some of the more constructive criticisms I have received, and I hope it is shaping more in accord with what I originally had in mind, and what you may have anticipated.  I have cut out the first part considerably, and am in the process of re-organizing the second and third parts to make them run a little more smoothly, but how am I to know whether Messrs. Macmillan will approve the change? Please won’t one of your staff enter into a little closer collaboration and lend me the benefit of their counsel?  Now is the time, if ever, for if I am to have the necessary self-confidence to complete the book in the course of the next couple of months it is essential that I feel you approve of what I am doing.  Mr. [Georges] Duplaix seems to have ironed things out from the Whitman end, but, after all, it is upon your firm that I must reply for literary criticism and the kind of advice that will knock the book into shape.  It is, as you may have gathered, a pretty difficult undertaking, and I am eager to make as good a job of it as I know how. Should it be advisable, I will be glad to come to New York for a conference, but at least let us join forces by correspondence. 61

In addition to goading his editor into action, Feild sent parts of his work-in-progress to trusted friends for advice, among them Frederick R. McCreary (1893-1976), a former colleague in Harvard’s Creative Writing department.   McCreary was a published poet who “reached a certain level of fame during his lifetime, with critics comparing him to Robert Frost.”62 He was a close confidant willing to listen and offer sage advice about the work-in-progress and (what Feild called) the “publishing racket.”

More than a note of urgency is detected in Feild’s frustration.  This was because he and Helen were hastily preparing to move from Cambridge, Massachusetts to New Orleans, Louisiana.  Robert had accepted a full-time position as Professor of Art and Director of the School of Art at Newcomb College, Tulane University, commencing September 1940.

In the early 20^th century, Newcomb College, a coordinate women’s college, housed one of the largest collections of the Arts and Crafts style pottery in the American South.  Between 1890 and 1940, award-winning bowls, dishes, tiles, figurines, et cetera were made for sale by students and instructors in the Newcomb Art Department.  In 1939, Newcomb’s dean recommended the continuation of the “ceramic program only,” insisting that the “emphasis be on the instruction of students and not a commercial enterprise.”63

A search for a head of the revised Newcomb art program led to R. D. Feild, who quickly accepted the offer.  Here was a fulltime position of importance in academia, a world he knew well.  As opposed to freelance writing, it came with a steady income.  Equally important, it was an opportunity to expound to a young audience his progressive art theories regarding “new techniques for the communication of contemporary ideas.”64

Upon moving to Tulane’s campus, Feild immediately distanced himself from the former pottery enterprise and the ceramics classes.  He began creating a more diverse program, restructuring the undergraduate curriculum, and embracing the “breaking down wherever possible the artificial barriers . . . between the so-called arts and so-called sciences.”

Many of his ideas, as at Harvard, dealt with teaching photography and filmmaking, “studying the nature of materials, combining the actual experience of the basic dance forms with life drawing.”65

In the mid-1940s, Feild began corresponding with experimental filmmaker, poet, writer and dancer Maya Deren, a leading pioneer of avant-garde cinema.  He expressed his being “extremely sympathetic with what you are doing and have much admiration for your abilities and tenacity . . .”  At least twice he visited her Greenwich Village studio, while also attending conferences at MoMA in New York; on July 29, 1947, Deren visited his classroom when she stopped over in New Orleans on her way to make a film in Haiti.

As a teacher, Feild continued to be a positive influence on his students.  Mignon Faget, one of the most respected jewelry designers in the South, credits Feild’s “Design by Nature” class with inspiring her interest in environmentally-themed design.  Overall, Feild’s students were delighted with his diversification of Newcomb’s art curriculum toward experimentation in a creative cross-fertilization of arts forms.

The school’s Board of Administrators was not.  Almost immediately, there was pushback to balance Feild’s progressive efforts; in 1942 the Board approved a limited, commercially oriented craft program in the “spirit of original Newcomb Pottery.”

Also, a gimlet eye was cast upon Feild’s support of civil rights activities and academic freedom, which were not favorably looked upon by politically conservative, deep South academe.  Eventually, a tense situation developed that would become Harvard redux. 66

The students were delighted; school board administrators were not.  Also, Feild’s support of civil rights activities and academic freedom were not looked upon favorably by a politically conservative deep South academe. Eventually, the situation would become Harvard redux. 66

But all that was in the future.  Meantime, he had a book to write.  “Oh yes. I am still writing the book!”  Feild wrote to T. Hee, Disney director/caricaturist, in February 1941 “It may even be published,” he ruefully joked.

. . . it has already passed through many experimental phases, and been subjected to both violent and playful criticism, but somehow it has survived, and it seems at last to be taking shape . . . I haven’t bothered to mention life in New Orleans because I am still too busy with “The Art of Walt” to be conscious of my environment.67

“Things are beginning to move along pretty fast these days,” Feild wrote on March 1 to John Clarke Rose, the Disney Studio Story Research Department manager and editor.

The Disney manuscript is nearly finished, and I have today  sent all but the very last part to Macmillan for any further advice and suggestions they may have to offer.  I will send the whole thing on to you as soon as it is in final shape.

He asked Rose to check on the whereabouts of a promised color caricature of Walt Disney, promised by T. Hee, for the book’s frontispiece.   In the final book, a Walt caricature does not appear, perhaps deemed not as dignified as the black and white photograph that replaced it.

Caricatures of Walt Disney by his staff through the years:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Oddly enough,” Feild wrote in a cheery closing to Rose, “my devotion to the [Disney] Studios [sic] continues, and the urge to return to Hollywood still afflicts me strongly from time to time.  Remember me to those who care and be assured of my appreciation for all your help.”68

On April 15, Feild sent Rose a complete manuscript.  Rose read it and, true company man that he was, wrote the following non-committal response to Field on May 6:

As I have often said before, the thought of writing a book on this complex operation out here is staggering.  Because the book deals with our very life’s blood, it was only natural that I should read it with keen interest. For the same reason I hesitate to offer any editorial criticism whatsoever — living and breathing “Disney” as I do all my life, it is impossible to have a true understanding of Disney’s place in art . . . I am passing the manuscript along to some of the other boys and will send you their comments . . . it might be advisable to wait . . . to review studio staff comments and the publisher’s editorial suggestions before asking Walt to read the manuscript.  What do you think?69

Apparently, changes were ordered.  It wasn’t until the end of September that unbound preliminary galley proofs were sent to the author for his review.   Exasperated, Feild wrote his friend Frederick McCreary on September 23:

Freddie boy:  The spot of energy that you used to know as Rob Feild is rapidly disintegrating.  He who once endeavored to write a book is now just a drifting mass being flotsamed [sic] about on the shores of time . . . At this crisis in my life, when I am trying to direct Newcomb Art School towards the light, a cloud of galley proof has burst upon me and I am quivering under the shock.  It looks lovely, but as yet I haven’t dared to read it.  Which is more important, that a book should look pretty or make sense?

. . . Incidentally, Whitman’s did not send any copy to check the proofs with. Isn’t there something wrong about that?  And even more incidentally, they tell me that Macmillan’s like to have the book in completed form two months before they release it.  Ain’t that queer?  Or do you think the public has to be prepared for the “Art of Walt Disney” as gradually as for convoys? Please tell me you are proud of the part you are playing in elevating our cultural standards.70

McCreary said he would review the galleys, but Feild hesitated.  On October 3, he wrote:

Fred, the book has now become a nightmare. The galleys came without any copy to check them by . . . All I was supposed to do was to decide if I thought it read all right.  Frankly I don’t trust them in this matter . . .  Whatever group of circumstances may be responsible, I must confess much of the book reads to me like hell and I once again proceeded to tear it apart.

. . . I am treating the gallies like type-script and altering whole paragraphs freely where the emphasis I intended to make seems entirely to have been lost, or where the mode of expression is what shall I say? Alien to my philosophy?  I don’t think any of this is your fault.  The cutting on the whole seems to me to be excellent and very frequently the whole sentence structure improved immensely — but at times I suppose my mind just works differently from anybody else’s.  If Whitman’s object to resetting the type I’m going to hold them up and refuse to let them publish the book.  The worm has at last turned.  So help me God, in the end it is going to be my book and nobody else’s – though very much improved in places by Frederick Root McCreery. [sic]

I simply dare not send you the galleys.  At any moment now my relationship with Whitman’s may become so strained that one more suggestion or criticism may blow everything apart. Besides, you might want to correct what I have corrected of what you corrected of what they corrected of who corrected what — and the answer would be a mouseling. [sic] So hold your horses, Fred, and if you’re my friend never let me undertake to write a book again.  That’s all for now, thank you.71

Feild’s agitated mood was affected by the pressure he was under in heading the Newcomb art school, aggravated by New Orleans’ steamy fall weather.  On the first page of his October 3 letter to McCreary (“my gosling friend”) living in the cooler climes of Boston, Feild wrote:

You are finding life in the North complicated? You should try the South. . . something else happens in New Orleans in September.  The mind disintegrates or rather it becomes mushy — it sort of gets fouled up into something one might describe as cotton-wool with spots of glue in it, sprinkled freely with sawdust, just phlaaghmmx. (sic) But that’s not all. The furniture begins to fall apart, your clothes rot. your books just disintegrate and your whole physical environment is reduced to a clammy, heartbreaking world of solid sweat.

The Art School flourishes. You know what I mean.  It’s just a dank mess with little girls pushing their way through the exotic tangle like pathetic orchids.  It isn’t their fault.  As always, they’re swell. But God in an idle moment, a very idle moment, and in a perverse mood to boot, made New Orleans, and it’s nobody’s fault if they happen to be born here.  You might ask what am I doing here?  Ah, Fred, this is heaven to Harvard.  We only have to cope with the climate and you have to cope with the evil ways of man.  (I think my secretary is getting bewildered by the tenor of this letter.) Frankly I too have lost my way.  But even to exert my mind so far has made me sweat through all my attire and has reduced me to an unsavory puddle.72

The date of publication “has varied during the course of the years . . . October 13 and November 21 [1941],” wrote Feild to Macmillan publicist Cynthia Walsh in mid-November.    “I am now under the impression that it is expected to be on the market before January.”  He also would “be glad if you would give special attention to the spelling of my name.   So far in my life I’ve never known it to be spelled accurately twice in succession.”  Feild no doubt would have hated autocorrecting Spell-Check.73

BOOK REVIEWS

The Art of Walt Disney was finally published in spring 1942, an eight and a half by eleven inches, linen bound hard cover selling for $3.50.  The Macmillan Company announced its arrival to potential readers in adverts posing rhetorical questions the book would supposedly answer:

Is “Fantasia” art?

Has Walt Disney accomplished a modern miracle in wedding art to science?

Has he pointed the way to a permanent form of expression?

Whatever your personal opinion may be, you’ll want to read THE ART OF WALT DISNEY by Robert D. Feild – the first competent evaluation of Disney’s unique genius.

For some reviewers, the book’s information proved to be a revelation.  “We can never think again that Mickey and his friends merely happened,” observed The New York Times Book Review.

They were planned.  They are deliberate.  And what a lot of planning, what a number of deliberations, what a factory of ideas and talents they do demand! This is no mere tour of the Disney studios, designed to tell us in easy language how animated cartoons are made . . . it is more. It is a tour of the insides of the heads of the people who make animated cartoons . . . an intellectual attempt to grasp something that the audience isn’t asked or expected to grasp intellectually. . . This is group art, reminding Mr. Feild justly of the workshops of the early Renaissance and the old apprentice system  . . . Leonardo might enjoy working in the Disney studios were he alive today.74

The Macmillan Company touted the New York Times “front-page review” of “this illuminating book” in an ad focusing on the studio’s technological processes, promising readers:

You will learn how sound and music are incorporated, how the inking and coloring is done, and finally how the camera-workers get the story on the film strip. All the various complicated processes are simply and clearly explained by the author, who brings you a full realization of the importance of this new art form . . . You sit in conferences and see how a story idea is developed.  The direct transcriptions of discussions will delight you, as you listen to Walt and the artists working out those scenes which enchanted you . . . The illustrations show you sketches bringing ideas to life . . .

Jay Leyda, avant-garde filmmaker and historian, wrote enthusiastically in The Saturday Review of Literature:

Feild plunges us into the esthetic and emotional problems peculiar to cartoon-sound-pictures.  This is the most brilliant and satisfying analysis that any branch of the modern American film industry has enjoyed at the hands of its countrymen.

. . . The book piles up a structure of indisputable evidence that the Disney Studio is creating an art that we are obliged to understand and appreciate if we have any interest in the development of art in our own times.

. . . The book is a challenge to further investigation of an important art that we all take too much for granted.  It is not only Disney who deserves our gratitude for so much entertainment, but Feild as well, for offering such an imaginative recognition of the true nature of this entertainment . . . the abundant pictorial matter furnishes valuable illustrations, inseparable from the text. It has obviously been conceived as a serious book about an essentially visual art.  75

The Film Daily trade paper enthused:

Feild’s work is no stodgy, highbrow tome for the classroom, but rather an extremely readable, deeply intriguing and highly illuminating presentation of . . . ‘the art of Walt Disney as a growing force in our midst.’76

Time magazine offered a cooler assessment, recalling:

Three years ago, Professor Feild stuck his neck out for modern art, Disney’s in particular, and his appointment to Harvard University was ‘not renewed.’  Now he is at Tulane University. Professor Feild contends . . . that Walt Disney has made [animated movies] into ‘the great art form that it is today.’  His book tells the way the medium works, rather than why it is great . . . Professor Feild’s book will not convince standpatters that Disney’s art can compare with that of Ye Olde Tymers. [sic] High-brow pioneers will say, ‘We told you so.’  Fans know already that Disney is in a class by himself.77

Gilbert Seldes, “one of the earliest and most influential writers on the popular arts in America,” and a fervent appreciator of Disney films during the 1930s, wrote a qualified judgement of Feild’s book in the New York Herald Tribune:

This is a big, beautifully made, almost awe-struck tribute to the man whose art has been often called America’s greatest contribution to international friendship and international entertainment as well; not to mention international art.

. . . The information in the book is valuable; but the tone seems to me to be actually promotional; maybe because it is so big, and has so many color plates, it reminds me of elaborate souvenir programs at Aphrodite or the Russian Ballet.  The author’s purpose is ‘to present the art of Walt Disney as a growing force in our midst”; actually, he presents the technical devices, the commercial conditions, the physical arrangements; but the art seems to escape.

. . . The animated cartoon is one of the great powers of our time.  It has only begun to find its area of operations.  Disney’s immeasurable contribution lies in his quick capture of the public fancy and then in his serious effort to push the limitations of his medium further and further with every film.  He has made errors; but he has foretold the future of his art.

. . . [the animated cartoon] has not been used as a stimulus to serious emotions; but it is capable of everything.  And no one has proved it more than Disney. He needs no promotion; and he deserves more serious understanding than he has received.78

What did Walt Disney think of the final version of the book?   His opinion may be deciphered from the self-deprecating letter Feild wrote to Walt on May 12, 1942:

I know the book isn’t all you would have liked it to be. And I shall be the first to confess that it does not do justice to its subject. On the other hand, you of all others are aware, I know, of the innumerable problems that were entailed in amassing the material, writing the text and getting the book through the press.

My great consolation is that no one could have been fired with more enthusiasm for his quest, not retained a deeper admiration for the subject of his work.  Where the book falls short it can only be put down to my own inability to rise fully to the heights of the occasion.

In his letter, Feild describes the book as “a souvenir of what I still remember as the happiest and most profitable year of my life.”  He explains why he did not communicate with Walt for more than a year while writing the manuscript and grappling with the publishers:

In fact, I have tried to steer clear of all personal relations with the Studio until such a time as my work was brought to completion, lest I become confused over the developments within the Studio [emphasis added] since I left Hollywood.

I have hoped that you would understand my silence and will have taken for granted that nothing which deeply concerns you or the Studio can ever be immaterial to myself.  Anyway Walt, here’s the book for what it’s worth and I can only hope that this first effort to appraise your work will not be altogether without value.79

The “developments within the Studio” Feild refers to are dark events that occurred after he completed his research and left in May 1939.  Feild’s brief time at the studio was indeed golden — ripe with creative enterprise with seemingly bottomless positive energy emanating from a group effort dedicated to Walt’s continual advancement of the art of animation.

By the time Feild’s book was published, however, the Disney studio was deeply in debt and struggling to survive.  Portends of trouble occurred soon after Feild began researching at Disney’s.  Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 marks the beginning of World War II, which cut off Europe as a substantial income source for Disney films and merchandising.

Then, in 1940, both Pinocchio and Fantasia, two expensive film productions, did not appeal to a wide audience and failed at the box office.  Adding more strain on  Disney’s finances were high costs incurred in building and staffing the new Burbank studio.

In turn, planned films were curtailed, and promised pay raises and bonuses were denied to employees, who were not protected by a union contract.  Layoffs followed domino-style.  In May 1941, over 300 discontented, fearful employees, approximately half of the studio’s artists, participated in a bitter nine-week labor strike.

America finally entered the war after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By that time, the Disney Studio was a union shop with a reduced staff surviving mainly by producing war propaganda and training films, and omnibus features touting US/Latin American “Good Neighbor” policies, SALUDOS AMIGOS (1942) and THE THREE CABALLEROS (1945). 80

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feild’s The Art of Walt Disney book does not discuss, let alone infer, any of those events.  It wasn’t meant to.  Whether Walt, a perfectionist, liked the final publication or not, the book reflects what he wanted:  a deep focus on his studio’s filmmaking art and technical processes, circa 1940.

The book depicts a well-oiled, modern corporation-as- Hollywood-dream-factory under Walt’s leadership and creativity.  But unfortunately, it contains no personalizing of the numerous, necessary creative individuals who turned out Disney’s magical films like Geppetto’s toys.  Except for Walt and his brother Roy, specific artists are anonymous in the book, identified by only an initial allegedly representing their names.

Some reviewers noticed. Film critic R.L. Duffus, in his admiring New York Times review, wrote:

Twelve hundred people would be lost without [Walt] . . .  This is group art . . . This is a factory in which the very machines think . . . the group mind growing from the accretions of individual minds;

a kind of forecast of the future, maybe, after wars are over and men escape from the nightmare of violence and hate into the realities of a gayly imagined world of phantasy.81

Jay Leyda, in his positive assessment of Feild’s book, wrote:

Completed before Pearl Harbor was bombed, the book lacks only one feature that recalls the element of timeliness.  How the Disney studio is tackling the urgent new problems of direct propaganda and direct instruction . . .  [and] how this complicated organization for expressiveness engages in the art of instruction, would make a useful chapter, even within the esthetic boundaries that Feild has set himself.  82

The “esthetic boundaries” in Feild’s The Art of Walt Disney, were determined by Walt and the publishers.  It chose to cast a blind eye on world and local events, primarily the Disney employee strike that profoundly affected the animation industry itself.

“As far as it goes,” Feild wrote in a candid November 19, 1941 letter regarding the book’s content, “it is an honest effort to describe the way things were run in the Disney Studios during the time I was out there.”

Feild’s letter was, in fact, an apologia to his friend, Art Babbitt, master animator and the main firebrand leader of the Disney strike.

Feild continues to Babbitt:

The whole Disney business bewilders me.  You are so obviously right and what you have played so prominent a part in getting done had to be done sooner or later.  But how terribly unpleasant it must have been and must still be.  Had the whole matter come to a head while I was out in Hollywood, I can’t imagine my ever having finished the book.  Even now I question very greatly if the book ever should have been written at all – at least in the spirit in which I wrote it.  In its present form it is, I hope, a harmless sort of effort and may possibly justify itself in a purely objective way -– but the guts of the whole thing has been left out, since I don’t even touch upon the labor conditions within the studio . . . And even as I look back upon it, I don’t remember any real conflict was impending or even presaged.  Perhaps I was all sweet innocence, but even in my talks with you and Bill (Vladimir Tytla, the only other master animator to join Babbitt on the picket line) I never felt the undercurrent of strife that even then must have been brewing.  There is a certain naivete about my book which suggests almost an ideal setup – the kind of setup that I think Walt had in mind (if he may be said to have thought about it at all), or perhaps the kind of setup that may develop in the future once he realizes what is meant by Cooperation.

It’s all a queer sort of business, since you know how dedicated Helen and I are to the social revolution, and yet we somehow have no alternative but to remember our year in Hollywood as one of the happiest of our lives . . . You were greatly responsible for the positive goodness of the experience, and yet you, bless you, have been responsible for putting me on the defensive about the whole of my approach to the study of “The Art of Walt”!  I would feel embarrassed but for the fact that I was trying to be honest when I wrote the book.  If I were to begin again it can be safely said that no publisher on earth, at least outside Russia, would consider it for publication!

Even so the book has gone through a God-awful series of vicissitudes. The publishing racket is like any other exploitation-for-profit-concern.  The text has been so bullied and bashed about that I sometimes wonder if I had any hand in what now appears on the printed page.  Organized labor resistance by all means, Art, but never, never write a book (unless of course you someday write an animated treatise on the mishandling of a mouse! 83 

Taking the chill off frosty book critiques, a warm congratulatory letter arrived in June 1942 from Janet Martin Lansburg, Disney studio publicist and wife of assistant film director Larry Lansburgh.

Feild replied claiming to have seen only “a few” periodical reviews of his book because “New Orleans got left out in the scheme of things and is only just beginning to realize itself as part of the Union.”  But also, he lamented, because “I wasn’t sufficiently imaginative to subscribe to a clipping service.  Needless to say, the publishers have not as yet condescended to contact me.  So, your letter did my heart good and made me glow with self-esteem!” 84

 

Feild vented his feelings about his publishing ordeal to Ms. Martin’s sympathetic ear:

You, perhaps more than anybody else alive, can imagine what was involved in getting “The Art of Walt Disney” published.  There was something more to it than writing a book!! There was more to it than art or Walt Disney – there was so much mess from time to time that it’s a wonder that the book ever got itself between covers.  In fact, I’m amazed the darned words didn’t eventually come out backwards, and the plates get smooched with blood and sweat and tears!

But it’s past history now and I’m overjoyed that I didn’t let you down too badly.  Both you and Larry know how much you contributed. I might mention here I included Larry’s name and Tee Hee’s unit for special consideration in the Foreword, in company with a number of other friends whom I relied upon for help, but in the course of time their names were eliminated – and  I thought it just as well if A) the book was ever to get published, B) I was to avoid causing more ill feeling than satisfaction by mentioning  more names than the few that were finally included (This is very much off the record.)85

Had Feild been aware, while researching his book of the destabilizing undercurrents at Disney, might his observations have been wielded as sharply as Janet Martin often dared to do.

Here, for example, is an except she wrote on “Disney Character” for “Your Charm” magazine in August 1941.  It was the month Martin was working with Walt and his artists in South America, and, back home, the studio’s acrimonious strike was finally settled.

The Disney studio is “. . . a place where everybody’s business is everybody’s business . . . it comes about because everybody feels he has strong proprietary rights in the place. By this same token you probably find more crabbing there than in any other business in town.

. . . And maybe you don’t think it keeps Walt busy putting straight all the amazing rumors that travel around the studio, for the place has a faster grapevine than the one at Alcatraz!

. . . You can’t work at Disney’s without eventually knowing all about your own weaknesses. Everyone’s little foibles and vanities and bad personality points are ruthlessly probed by is fellow workers and exploited in off-the record sketches, caricatures and gags. It’s sometimes tough to take, but if you can take it, it’s a self-improvement course you couldn’t find in any school!

And don’t let the informality of the studio fool you.   For it has its insidious side, as some employees have found out.  Walt is informal because he happens to be the type of man who can work better that way, and he believes that his creative staff can, too. But if anybody mistakes this informality as a signal to play instead of work, he finds himself out on the highest limb he was ever on!

It’s an easy place to hang oneself.

In December, Feild wrote a livid letter to Mr. Putnam, his Macmillan editor, demanding that he “Please tell me why my book isn’t in greater demand?”  Christmas catalogues from national bookstores, he said, “seem to be forcing down the public’s throat all sorts of books, from utter trash to best sellers and some really good books.” Feild questioned why The Art of Walt Disney is “completely ignored” and “seemed to be no follow-up advertising after the book had been so well received by the critics.”86

Two weeks later, Putnam replied, defensively blaming

the “pre-Christmas rush” for his delay in responding.  He averred that bookstore catalogues are “one of those things which cannot always be controlled by a publisher” and advertising is “a perennial misunderstanding between the publisher and author.”  He complimented The Art of Walt Disney as “an excellent book,” it “has been a satisfactory but not spectacular one, and, unfortunately, reviews are not always an indication of the ultimate sale of a book.  Our own feeling is that your book is one of prominent value and the fact that we have placed a re-order for a second edition with Whitman is certainly warrant enough of our desire to keep on selling it.”87 Feild’s book eventually was published by Collins London and Glasgow in 1944 and reprinted in 1947.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Walt Disney and his studio survived the war years producing propaganda and armed forces training films with a reduced staff.  Postwar “omnibus features” combined strings of short cartoons of pop songs, often referred to as “the poor man’s Fantasia.”  Then, Walt began diversifying into documentaries and live-action feature films.  The first full-length all-animation feature would not appear again until Cinderella in 1950, eight years after Bambi (1942).

In January 1946, Feild wrote in response to a complimentary letter from Dr. David S. Ruhe, a surgeon and filmmaker based in Atlanta: “I have more or less lost touch with the Disney Studios during the war years, and have very little idea of how this interlude (World War II) will have affected the studio’s outlook.”

Feild, in his letter to Dr. Ruhe, said he was “a little skeptical about the results.  It seems unlikely that anyone will ever get together such an extraordinary group of people, culled from all four corners of the earth, as were employed in the Disney studios during the two years when I was writing my book.”

Thinking further about Disney’s status in the animation industry, Feild continued to ruminate: “And then, too, I think it rather dangerous that the Disney Studios should have a virtual monopoly over the animation field.  What I was primarily interested in was the art form itself as a new means of communication — but it can only be of social significance if we have something worthwhile to say!  Alas it is possible that Walt’s ‘first fine careless rapture’ is over and the medium may be exploited along the same lines as the rest of Hollywood.

“But let us hope for the best.”88

* * *

Robert D. Feild died Sept. 16, 1979, just turned 86, Cambridge, MA.  His wife Helen died Apr 10, 1992, age 95, Northampton, MA. 

-John Canemaker

IN SEARCH OF ROBERT DURANT FEILD – FOOTNOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. CRC Press, A Focal Press Book revised edition 2018
2. https://ghostarmy.org/roster/arthur-r-abrams/
3. “In Search of Nat Falk: How to Make Animated Cartoons.” John Canemaker’sAnimated Eye blog: https://tinyurl.com/5t4ftjes
4. Russell Merritt, J.B. Kaufman. Walt in Wonderland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 28, 81.
5. The Art of Walt Disney by Robert D. Feild. The Macmillan Company, 1942, p. 53.
6. ibid, p.62.
7. Robert D. Feild to Janet Martin Lansburg, June 17, 1942.

MAIN TEXT FOOTNOTES

1. R.D. Feild letter and c.v. to Kenneth Macgowan, 03 January 1947. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from correspondences are from Robert Durant Feild papers,Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
2. Ibid; Daily State Chronicle, 11 February 1891, Raleigh, North Carolina. Bureau of Naturalization form, Robert Durant Feild papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

3. Daily State Chronicle, 11 February 1891.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Armistead Littlejohn Feild (1892-1937) Ancestry. com, NYPL.
7. 1901 London Census. NYPL.
8. Feild to Macgowan.
9. https://theworldsartist.com/artist/jean-paul-laurens
10. The Art of Walt Disney by Robert D. Feild. The Macmillan Company, 1942. p. 9.
11. Feild to Macgowan.
12. “Robert Durant Feild 1893-1979. The Newcomb Guild – Facing the Future 1940-1952” by Dr. Susan House Wade. Newcomb Institute, Tulane University.

13. Feild to Macgowan; “Robert Durant Feild” by Gwen Kinkead, Harvard Crimson November 13, 1971.<www.thecrimson.com>; Jean Charlot, Art From The Mayans to Disney. Sheed and Ward, New York & London, 1939, pp. 277 – 278.

14. Feild to Macgowan.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid. Macgowan; https://www.signetsociety.org/
17. The Art of Walt Disney, p. 9.
18. Wade, “The Newcomb Guild – Facing the Future 1940-1952.”
19. New York Times, “Field’s Dismissal Arouses Harvard,” 12 February 1939;Ibid, Kinkead The Harvard Crimson.

20. Feild to MacGowan. 
21. The Art of Walt Disney, p. 2.

22. Christian Science Monitor, “Walt Disney Praises Dr. Field,” 10 February 1939.
23. Harvard Crimson, February 17, 1939 editorial; New York Times, 12 February 1939;  “Hockney’s iPad Impressionism,” by Karen Fang. https://engines.egr.uh.edu/episode/3264  The Engines of our Ingenuity.  University of Houston.
24. The Nation, 18 February 1938, #148.8, p. 191.
25. The Art of Walt Disney, p. 50; “Walt’s Adventures in the Ivy League” by MichaelBarrier. <MichaelBarrier.com> 22 May 2009.http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/WaltAtHarvard/ WaltAtHarvard.html

26. The Art of Walt Disney, p. xi.
27. Michael Barrier. The Animated Man – A Life of Walt Disney. University of California Press, 2007, pp. 26 & 33.

28. The Art of Walt Disney, p. xiii.
29. An except of Feild’s August 9, 1938 lecture at the Hollywood Las Palmas Theatre is published in Before Ever After – The Lost Lectures of Walt Disney’s Animation Studio by Don Hahn and Tracey Miller-Zarneke. Disney Editions, 2015, pp. 298-302. I am grateful to Don Hahn for providing me with a full transcript of Feild’s entire lecture.30. Alfred Barr (1902-1981), first director of New York’s MoMA, 06 September 1938 letter to Feild.

31. Allen Porter, assistant to the MoMA director, 07 September 1938 letter to Feild.
32. New York Times obit, 22 September 1992; Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Oral History interview with Edward M.M. Warburg, 13 May 1971.

33. John Abbott letter to R.D. Field, 26 January 1939.
34. “Feild’s Dismissal Arouses Harvard” by F. Lauriston Bullard. The New York Times, 12 February 1939.

35. “Harvard’s Dr. Robert Durant Feild dropped after giving M.A. to Walt Disney.” The Nation, #148.8, 18 February 1939; Harvard Crimson, February 17, 1939 (editorial).

36. “Deplore Dismissal of Harvard’s Feild.” The Boston Globe, 8 February 1939.
37. Finders Guide, Robert Durant Feild papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; New York Times, 12 February 1939.

38. “Feild is out; Harvard Stirred.” The New York Times. 7 February 1939; “Silent Over Alarums,” The New York Times, 12 February 1939.

39. The Christian Science Monitor, “Walt Disney Praises Dr. Feild.” 10 February 1939.
40. “Crowd at Feild’s Lecture on Disney,” The Boston Globe, 17 February 1939.
41. The Nation, 18 February 1939.
42. Richard J. Eaton letter to Feild, March 15, 1939.
43. Walt Disney letter to R.D. Feild, 17 May 1939.
44. Richard J. Eaton letter to Feild, June 5, 1939.
45. Draft of contract between Field and Whitman Publishing Company, 24 March 1941.
46. The Art of Walt Disney, p. xvii.

46. New York Times, 12 February 1939.
47. Feild letter to Art Babbitt, 19 November 1941.
48. Other Disney artists Feild befriended include animators Art Babbitt and Bill Tytla; director/caricaturist T. Hee; director Norman Ferguson; assistant director Larry Lansburgh and his wife, Disney publicist Janet Martin; The Art of Walt Disney, p. xvi; Phil Dike letter to Feild, 5 June 1939.

50. 1940 Census of the United States.
51. Walt Disney, “Growing Pains,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (January 1941), pp. 38-39.

52. R. D. Feild’s August 9, 1938 lecture.
53. 53. The Art of Walt Disney, p. 189-191.
54. Ibid. P. 19-20.
55. RDF letter to T. Hee; February 3, 1941; RDF letter to Janet Martin Lansburgh, June 17, 1942.

56. RDF to Art Babbitt, November 19, 1941.
57. Ibid, p. 40.
58. Ibid, pp. 255-259.
59. R.D. Field to Cynthia S. Walsh, Macmillan publicist, 01 November, 1941.
60. In the late 1940s, Arthur J. Putnam would accept for publication ImmanuelVelikovsky’s controversial Worlds in Collision (1950), which became a best seller.  Nevertheless, the severe criticism of the scientikic community forced Macmillan to stop publishing it within two months and Putnam was subsequently fired
61. .61. Feild to James Putnam, 31 December 1940; in 1940, Georges Duplaix was head of Artists and Writers Guild Inc., a division of Western Publishing, and the creator of Little Golden Books.

62. https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/ wyliehouse/exhibits/show/louise-bradley/writing

63. https://newcombartmuseum.tulane.edu/timeline/
64. RDF to Kenneth Macgowan, 03 January 1947.
65. RDF to Kenneth Macgowan, December 19, 1946.
66. https://newcombartmuseum.tulane.edu/timeline/; Tulane – The Emergence of a Modern University, 1945-1980. Clarence L. Mohr and Joseph E. Gordon, Louisiana State University Press, 2001, pp. 102 – 104.

67. RDF to T . Hee, February 3, 1941.
68. RDF to John C. Rose, March 1, 1941.
69. John C. Rose to RDF, May 6, 1941.
70. RDF to Frederick R. McCreary on September 23, 1941.
71. RDF to Frederick R. McCreary on October 3, 1941.
72. Ibid.
73. RDF to Cynthia S. Walsh. November 11, 1941.
74. The New York Times “The Magic of the Disney Films,” by R.L. Duffus, June 7, 1942.
75. The Saturday Review of Literature, “The Dimensions of Disney” by Jay Leyda, June 6, 1942.

76. The Film Daily “Book Reviews” by CBB. June 30, 1942.
77. Time, June 8, 1942.
78. New York Times obit of Gilbert Seldes, September 30, 1970; New York Herald Tribune, “The Man and Methods Behind Mickey Mouse” by Gilbert Seldes, June 7, 1942.

79. RDF to Walt Disney, May 12, 1942.
80. The Disney Revolt by Jake S. Friedman. Chicago Review Press, 2022, p. 183 – 198.
81. Duffus.
82. Leyda.
83. RDF to Art Babbitt, November 19, 1941. Art Babbitt, Robert and Helen Feild continued to correspond in affectionate, newsy letters through the years until Robert’s death in 1979.

84. RDF to Janet Martin Lansburg, June 17, 1942.
85. Studio personnel who are thanked by name in the book’s Foreword include Walt Disney, Roy Disney, Phil Dyke, Don Graham, Paul Hopkins, Perce Pearce and John Rose.

86. RDF to James Putnam, December 4, 1942.
87. James Putnam to RDF.
88. RDF to Dr. David S. Ruhe.

Text copyright © John Canemaker.  All rights reserved.
Disney artwork copyright © Walt Disney Studios.

Views: 53

When I began researching the history of animation in 1973, I was lucky to meet, interview, and in some cases, befriend several artists and artisans from the silent film era.  The original pioneers, such as James Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl, and Winsor McCay, were long dead.  But good fortune smiled early on, when I found John Aloysius Fitzsimmons (1893 -1984), who, as a young man, assisted McCay, the great comic strip and film animation innovator, on two of his most important films, Gertie [the Trained Dinosaur] (1914) and The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

Fitzsimmons was a spry 81-year old when I met him, an articulate, informative eyewitness to the technical processes of frame-by-frame, hand-drawn animation filmmaking.  He also recalled with great clarity, admiration and warmth, working with McCay who died forty years earlier.  You can see Fitzsimmons on-camera speaking about his work with McCay in my 1976 documentary, Remembering Winsor McCay and read more details in my 1987 biography, Winsor McCay – His Life and Art. (CRC Press, 2018 edition).

Here are links to two pdf documents:  unpublished personal remembrances written in March 1974 by John A. Fitzsimmons titled “My Days with Winsor McCay,” and an unedited transcript of my first interview with Fitsimmons on Sept. 22, 1974 at his home in Rockville Centre, N.Y.  Typos and other errors abound, but were corrected in subsequent publications.

 

Views: 198

Russell Merritt (1941-2023) was a brilliant man of parts, a knowledgeable, articulate scholar whose lasting accomplishments in film history research, writing and teaching originated in his insatiable appetite for lifelong learning.  He inspired students and readers internationally with his intelligent, witty lectures, films, books and periodicals, all delivered with a signature brio.  We, who were lucky enough to enjoy a personal friendship with Russell and his wife Karen, were shocked and deeply saddened by his untimely death in March 2023.

Russell Merritt was born in 1941 and grew up in New Jersey and Connecticut.  In a bow toward self-education, he often skipped school to join his young friends in attending Broadway shows and movies (both contemporary and historic films) in New York City.  Other of his early interests was a passion for Sherlock Holmes mystery stories.   At age 16, precocious Russell became the youngest member of the ultimate Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars.

His formal higher education was equally impressive, including attendances at Boston University and Northwestern University, and Harvard, where he received a Ph.D in English in 1970 with a dissertation on D.W. Griffith’s films.  Years later, he became a senior adviser to Kevin Brownlow and David Gill on the American Masters three-part Emmy-Award nominated television series, D.W. Griffith: Father of Film.

In 1968, Russell began his pedagogical career at University of Wisconsin, where he started a film studies program and directed the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theatre Research, which attracted numerous film and television collections.  He soon rose to full professor status with an ever-widening resume of lectures on film and related topics.

In 1970, he and his beloved Karen Maxwell began their 52-years of married life.  They were well-matched:  she is also a prolific writer, lecturer and teacher, on topics including Women’s Studies, Higher Education, as well as cinema. 1   She has also held academic administrative and consultancy positions in Wisconsin and California, and, until her retirement in 2006, was Director of Academic Planning at UC Merced.

When the couple moved to Northern California in 1986, Russell taught film courses at UC Berkeley, Stanford University and San Francisco State, while adding to his research publications; for example, his impressive essay, “Recharging Alexander Nevsky: Tracking the Eisenstein-Prokofiev War Horse” (Film Quarterly, Winter, 1994-1995. Vol. 48, No. 2, pp. 34-47).  Russell’s detailed explanation of how Eisenstein and Prokofiev studied Disney’s Snow White and the recording techniques of Fantasia when creating Alexander Nevsky is a high achievement of deeply researched, cogent writing about the making of Eisenstein’s 1938 historical drama film.

Russell also enjoyed contributing valuable programming and lectures to UC Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive, and was active in the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).  He was especially proud of his close affiliation with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (he became a member of the Festival board in 2014) and Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy.

The latter festival, in 1992, published the first of two scholarly, entertaining, beautifully illustrated animation history books, co-authored by Russell Merritt and his friend, the esteemed Disney animation/American silent film scholar J.B. Kaufman.  Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney — a bilingual edition that was revised in 1993, which I reviewed for the New York Times Book Review.  2

The second book, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies – A Companion to the Classic Cartoon Series, was published in 2006, revised in 2016. In an article (“Lost on Pleasure Island”) in the fall 2005 issue of Film Quarterly, Russell Merritt previewed the Silly Symphonies book in a detailed essay about the film series’ powerful storytelling techniques.  The article again showcases Russell’s value as a critical analyzer who digs deep for “another look” at film classics; in this case, “the psychological underpinning of . . . Disney’s unsettling power [which] comes from his ability to explore the inner life of the child.”

Russell received two lifetime achievement awards in 2018: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto’s Jean Mitry Award for his work in restoring and celebrating silent film history;  and a special recognition from the Denver Silent Film Festival, when Russell became the first David Shepard Career Achievement recipient for his collaboration in several silent film restorations, such as the 1916 William Gillette film Sherlock Holmes and the Polish Film Archive and San Francisco Silent Film Festival restoration of Der Hund von Baskerville.

On a personal level, I and my husband Joseph Kennedy enjoyed the great pleasure of many happy times in various locales spent in the delightful company of Russell and Karen Merritt.

One time, after attending the Cinema Muto festival in Podernone, we four traveled to the Merritts’ favorite city, Venice, where they gave Joe and me a personal tour of the city’s grandest sights and delicious restaurants.  For, among their many talents, Russ and Karen were connoisseurs of fine food who shared gourmet feasts with us during their annual Manhattan visit (at, for example, Le Bernardin), or when we were in San Francisco (the legendary La Folie).  Through the years, he and Karen often attended my lectures and exhibitions at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco and the Pacific Film Archive.

In his spare time, Russell was an eager volunteer in the San Francisco City Guides, often leading tourist walking tours through the historic Castro district and the famed Castro Theatre.  When Russ and Karen came east, Joe often reciprocated by offering a knowledgeable tour of Manhattan’s historic parts; such as the Five Points, the infamous 19^th century slum, now part of Chinatown, showcased in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film, Gangs of New York.

Through the years, Russell and I enjoyed lively email and telephone conversations.  In our last communication online, we discussed his thoughts about two museum exhibitions Joe and I encouraged them to see during their brief New York visit in early January of this year.

Russell was enthusiastic about the puppet production art and props displayed at MoMA’s Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio.   It inspired him, upon return to California, to study the stop motion film in detail on Netflix.  “I had a fine time the other day watching [del Toro’s] Pinocchio without sound,” he wrote.  “The great surprise:  how important lighting was to creating atmosphere.”

The other highlight during their last visit, was the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s two exhibitions of Mayan and Tudor Art [Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art; and The Tudors:  Art and Majesty in Renaissance England].  Russell reported:

I kept flinching at the complexity of the Mayan treatment of animals and gods — how can I live long enough to explore all this adequately?

     The Tudors, on the other hand, brought me back home.  The tapestries in particular were a call to my grad student days as an English major. More wallowing: this time in all those historical and mythological allusions and all that opulence.  We usually skip over Henry VII to study his kids.  But dad knew       a good Flemish tapestry when he saw one, and was a trend  setter in finding those Dutch painters to paint his phiz [physiognomy].  3

In these two brief observations by Russell Merritt, one can see the joy he always took in learning, analyzing, and making his discoveries interesting to his audience, even if it was one person.  He was a master communicator.  Particularly enjoyable is the direct way he made his views and connections so personal and such fun to hear – especially his freewheeling humorous word usage.  No wonder his students loved him.  He shared so much knowledge and positive energy with them.

“Hearing your voice over the phone made me so happy,” said one of Russell’s former students, now teaching middle school in Brooklyn, in a February 22, 2023 note he proudly shared with me.  “Inspired by your positive experience with MoMA’s Pinocchio exhibit, I went there yesterday and enjoyed every minute of it . . . This exhibit has motivated me to sign up for a stop motion animation course this fall,” the better to help prepare to bring animation into her classes.  Russell told me the note “shows the far-reaching effects of our get together in New York . . . I begin to understand how midwives feel.”4

I phoned him on February 28 and we had a wonderful laughter-filled one-hour talk.  He emailed me on March 1: “Here’s hoping this was the first of catch-up calls. It was a lovely treat.” He signed off with “How are you enjoying retirement? I’m still adapting. Love to you both, Russell.” 5

His passing two days later at age 81 was a great shock.

It is a heartbreaking loss to his devoted wife Karen, and his sister, Carole Merritt Nichols; also, to the world of cinema scholarship and education, and his many students and legions of friends around the world.   Joe and I are not alone in missing him greatly.

Notes

1. “The Little Girl/Little Mother Transformation: The American Evolution of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” by Karen Merritt. Storytelling in Animation, ed. John Canemaker (Hollywood: American Film Institute, 1988). (Published in Italian as “Da bambina a piccola madre: la trasformazione americana di Biancaneve e i sette nani,” Griffithiana, n. 31, December, 1987.)

2. John Canemaker, “Walt in Wonderland,” New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1994.

3. Email to JC & JK from RM, 12 Jan 2023.

4. Email to JC & JK from RM, 28 Feb 2023.

5. Email to JC from RM, 1 Mar 2023.

Views: 405

 

“The Mayan artist was most interested in abstractions. The use of line, volume, and color for non-descriptive, highly intellectualized purpose, was as natural with him as an objective fidelity is to the camera. As a result, this art stands as one of the wealthiest mines of theological motives and plastic abstractions the world has ever known.”

–Art From the Mayans to Disney by Jean Charlot.   Sheed and Ward, NY & London, 1939. *See note below

 

Roaming this large, immersive exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, my Animated Eye marvels at the variety of graphic styles, materials, and visual storytelling techniques displayed in 120 rarely seen masterworks of the Mayan Classic period (A.D. 250-900).    Abstraction is but one graphic means employed by highly accomplished (mostly anonymous) artists who visually communicated the power of Mayan deities, and their close links with royal leaders of the Maya court, who interacted with the supernatural world.  Towering limestone carvings and small sculptures, line drawings on cylinder vessels and pottery, decorative ornaments, figurines, wall murals, and masks offer both realistic draftsmanship and sophisticated caricatures that often mingle with intricate, grotesque phantasmagoric designs.

Beginning 4,000 years ago in Mesoamerican rain forests, the ancient Maya built a sophisticated, complex society populated by artists and scribes, astronomers, mathematicians. They were also brutal, vengeful warriors. Bloodletting, of oneself or a prisoner of war, was based on widespread Mesoamerican religious beliefs.

The Maya ruler’s role on earth was as the embodiment of, and chief communicator with, dozens of gods, who could appear old or young in human and animal form.  The rulers of the city-state often included women as warrior-queens and powerful priestesses.  The numerous deities of the supernatural world profoundly influenced every aspect of the natural everyday world of the ancient Mayans. The visualizations of 9th Century Mayan art — fearsome, fanciful and  sensual – still evoke emotions of awe, humor and horror in 21st Century viewers.

Recent discoveries have made new inroads into deciphering Mayan glyphs, phonograms, and visualizations; but much more information needs to be discovered.  However, universal communication principles, actions and emotions can be ascertained through these silent artworks in their presentation of basic body language, design, composition and symbolism. As an animator and archaeology fan, I’m intrigued by the mystery, beauty, imagination and humor found in Mayan artworks. Here are random thoughts about a selection of artworks in the Met exhibition that particularly caught my eye.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who cannot see the exhibition Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art in person at the Met in New York (it closes April 2), here’s a link to an excellent 28-min video tour with two curators of the exhibition.

 

It is an informative virtual exploration of an exhibition of rarely seen masterpieces and recent discoveries tracing the life cycle of the gods, from the moment of their creation in a sacred mountain to their dazzling transformations as blossoming flowers or fearsome creatures of the night.

Enjoy!

*Note: The Jean Charlot Foundation has published Art from the Mayas to Disney online:

https://vault.jeancharlot.org/book/jean-charlot_text-ae.pdf

Views: 156

In 1959, I was sixteen and already deeply interested in animation.   In Elmira, New York, my hometown, I scrambled for information on the history of the art form and how to make my own cartoon films.  Initially, my curiosity was sparked by two television series:  Disneyland (1954) and The Woody Woodpecker Show (1957), where, respectively, “Uncle” Walt Disney and “Uncle” Walter Lantz would occasionally demonstrate their animation “secrets.”  In fact, the 1955 Disneyland program “The Story of the Animated Drawing,” introduced me to the earliest film animators, including the genius comic strip cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay, whose biography I would write three decades later.

At the time, books on animation history and/or the medium’s techniques were few.

But, like water on a desert, they were life savers:  informative, profusely illustrated and inspiring.

Bob Thomas’ The Art of Animation (1958), for example, a lavishly illustrated tome promoting the making of Disney’s 1959 feature Sleeping Beauty, also included a small section on pre-Disney animation.  There was also Preston Blair’s Advanced Animation, an iteration of his enduring 1947 how-to manual on Hollywood cartoon principles.  And Britain’s John Halas & Roger Manvell’s The Technique of Film Animation (1959) offered tantalizing glimpses of international/avant-garde animation.

I devoured each book, and searched for more information in local libraries and, primarily, at The Art Shop, a small Elmira store that sold artists materials, painting restorations and framing.  Arthur Rosskam Abrams (1909-1981), the kind-hearted owner, was an exhibited abstract painter and lecturer who encouraged my flipbook experiments, sequential drawings and my many annoying questions.  He and his wife Sally also allowed me to study and draw an original ­­­Disney cel and background setup they owned from the Courvoisier Gallery in San Francisco of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia (1940).

A picture framer at The Art Shop, Delos Smith, was also supportive and generous.  He gave me two older books on animation that he owned: The Art of Walt Disney (1942) by Harvard professor Robert D. Feild, the first serious analysis of Disney’s contributions to the development of character animation.  The other book was a paperback edition of How to Make Animated Cartoons, published in 1941 by Foundation Books, New York, written by an illustrator named Nat Falk.

 Below, four pages from Nat Falk’s How to Make Animated Cartoons:       

I found both books illuminating.  The Falk book was particularly revelatory in its detailed information about “early attempts to obtain motion in drawings.”  Its 80-pages include a concise history of motion in a larger pictorial art tradition — e.g., the prehistoric “wild boar of Altamira,” Temple of Isis, and Leonardo, among others, through 19^th century pre-cinema mechanical toys (Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope, “Flipper Books,” etc.), and a section on early “contributions of the early 20^th century” silent film animators (McCay, Bray, Hurd, Messmer and others).

There is also a showcase of seven contemporary (circa 1941) American cartoon studios, including Fleischer Studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Cartoon Division (Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising); Walter Lantz Productions, Leon Schlesinger Productions, Screen Gems, Inc., and mostly on Terry-Toons Inc.  Paul Terry, a friend of the author, wrote the book’s foreword and provided most of the illustrations of animation production processes.

The Disney studio refused Falk permission to use Disney artwork and photos, possibly due to the pending publication of Field’s Art of Walt Disney book.  I speculate that fourteen years later, researchers for the Disneyland TV show on “The Animated Drawing” referred to the Falk book as an informational source on early animation.

Falk’s How To book influenced a generation of World War II babies and Boomers who became animation artists and film historians.  In the first paragraph of his 2009 instructional book, The Animator’s Survival Kit, Richard Williams writes about discovering Falk’s book in 1943, when he was ten years old.  “The book was clear and straight-forward,” Williams relates, “the basic information of how animated films are made registered on my tiny ten-year-old brain and, when I took the medium up seriously at twenty-two, the basic information was still lurking there.”  He also “used it as a handy reference guide for 1940s Hollywood cartoon styles when I designed the characters and directed the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”

When I wrote my first book, The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy – An Intimate Look at the Art of Animation Its History, Techniques and Artist (1977,) I often thought about Nat Falk’s sincere, direct writing style, and how he managed to organize and share so much information succinctly about various areas of animation.   I have long wanted to know more about him and his background.

 In August 2022, nearly sixty-three years after first receiving Falk’s book, I had the good fortune to meet and talk with his son and his granddaughter.  Karen Falk is a historian who serves as the head archivist for The Jim Henson Company.  She authored Imagination Illustrated: The Jim Henson Journal and has contributed to numerous non-fiction books, and collaborated on many Henson exhibits, including the spectacular, permanent The Jim Henson Exhibition at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image.  Stanley L. Falk is former chief historian of the Air Force and a military historian specializing in World War II in the Pacific, the author of five books on the war in the Pacific arena, several textbooks on national security affairs, and numerous essays, articles, and reviews. 1

With their generous participation and help, I offer you the following appreciation of Nat Falk, multi-talented illustrator, researcher and author;  a polymath interested in traditional and modern arts, including film animation; a man who took joy in word play and playful imagery (he loved reciting for his children the 1895 poem “The Purple Cow” and teaching them lyrics to the 1918 pop song “Can You Tame Wild Wimmen?” 2  A warm, gregarious soul interested in people and learning about their lives.  As his granddaughter recalls, “Grandpa collected people.”

Nathan Isaac Falk (1898-1989) was born in Baltimore, Maryland to Lithuanian Jewish parents, Alexander Aaron Falk and Sarah Naomi Block.  Nat had nine siblings – four brothers and five sisters, all living comfortably in a large house.  His father, Alexander Falk, made men’s trousers, cutting the fabric on-site, having them manufactured and then selling wholesale up and down the easter seaboard.  It was called Stylecraft Trousers.  Nat’s sisters worked in the office. Nat, when he was a teen, made advertisements.  “It was a good business,” Stan Falk states.3

As a child, Nat drew constantly and created “chalk talks” to entertain his family and neighbors, inspired by performances he saw in Baltimore’s vaudeville theatres.   Falk would draw an image, quickly erase it, then add new chalk strokes, an “act” accompanied by slight-of-hand magic tricks and a glib patter of jokes.

Before America entered World War I, young Falk entertained troops at a Maryland military camp.  His quick-sketch/magic performance impressed Emerson Harrington, the Maryland governor, who offered him a scholarship to the Maryland Institute of Art in 1916.

The next year, when he was 19, he became art editor of The Club magazine of the Alliance Athletic and Literary Club of the Jewish Educational Alliance in Baltimore.4  During this period he was also commuting from Baltimore to Washington delivering ads he drew for Hecht’s department store.

At age 21, Falk attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, America’s first museum and art school founded in 1805.  His classes, during the school seasons of 1919-1920 and 1920-1921, included classical life drawing and commercial training.  The latter class “prepared students for careers as book and magazine illustrators,” a path Falk soon followed.

His teacher, Henry Bainbridge McCarter (1846-1942], promoted modernist art movements to his students.5  Before McCarter became the first teacher of illustration at PAFA, remaining there for forty years until his death, he was a PAFA student of Thomas Eakins.  In the late 1880s, he studied in France at Beaux-Art de Paris and was an apprentice in lithography to Toulouse Lautrec.  Upon returning to America, McCarter drew illustrations in New York for magazines (e.g., Harpers, Scribners. McClure’s, Colliers) before focusing on prize-winning ethereal landscapes in oil and watercolor.

McCarter surely encouraged his students, including Falk, to learn the craft of art-making, and appreciate modernist art as an enrichment of their lives.  In the spring of 1920, 25,000 visitors viewed PAFA’s “Representative Modern Masters,” the first of three landmark exhibitions in the history of American modernism that included works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse).   Philadelphia Orchestra director Leopold Stokowski wrote the catalog’s introduction, encouraging acceptance of modern artists by comparing them to Debussy and Stravinsky.  In 1921, PAFA presented “Later Tendencies in Art” featuring nearly 100 modernists (Stella, Hartley, Marin and others).6

Falk’s progressive art education at PAFA was important but brief, as he needed to help with his family’s finances.  He worked as an art director for Gimbels in Philadelphia, but also freelanced drawing illustrations, advertisements and book covers.  At the end of two years in Philly, Nat decided he’d “had enough and went back to Baltimore.”

“He got very sick,” Karen Falk said. “I remember Grandma telling me he was working all hours.”  Grandma was Katherine Sagal (1901-1993), who was born in Kharkov, Russia.  In the 1920s, she worked in the personnel department at the Baltimore Gas & Electric Company.  Nat moved to New York in about 1923, and Katherine joined him when they got married in 1925.  The couple had two children:  Stanley L. Falk (b.1927), who became a military historian/author and David S. Falk (1932-2020), who became a physicist/author.

Shortly before their second child was born in 1932, they moved from the Bronx to a small two-story row house in Sunnyside Gardens on 46^th Street in Long Island City.  “It was one of these special places they started up, with a big garden area out in back,” recalled their son Stan.  “There was plenty of room then, and we played in the streets because there wasn’t much traffic, if at all.  That was good.  And we could get the subway and get to town in 32 minutes. Two blocks from the subway.  We lived on the second floor, and there was a finished attic, and that was his studio.  Dad worked there.”

Dad was a busy freelance artist, seeking and juggling illustration and advertisement jobs, writing assignments, making contacts and becoming friends with many of them, keeping up with what was happening in the popular and fine arts, and managing to keep his family afloat.  “I always admired how he kept us reasonably well-fed,” his son noted.  “We always thought he was a slow man with the buck, but he had reason to be.  How he did it with freelancing.  When you freelance you never turn down a job!  He’d be working all the time at home.”

Occasionally, Nat took his family to Broadway shows.  “He wanted to show off what a fine actor Paul Muni was,” Stan recalled. “He would take me to see a magician, such as Blackstone.  Or Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson doing his famous tap dance.  My father was a link to theatre, my mother was my link to opera.”8  

In the 1930s, Falk illustrated a steady stream of book covers (click link to view selection) and interior illustration jobs, including two popular long-running juvenile hardback series:  Tom Swift, and Don Sturdy.  (The wild mechanical inventions of the Swift books, such as Tom Swift and the Electric Magnet (1932), had a wide audience, attracting even the admiration of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp.)7

In a 1932 exhibition at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Falk’s art was shown alongside book jackets by Rockwell Kent, Wanda Gag, and Diego Rivera, among others.  “The museum had hundreds of jackets submitted to it,” reported the San Francisco News, “and picked the most unusual.”9  Click here to view news story. 

Falk’s book covers display great versatility and imagination in the styles he conjures in layout compositions, typography, unusual color choices and draftsmanship.  The subject matter ran the gamut from crime biographies (Red Hell, 1934) to western novels (Tenderfoot Trail, 1936); racy pulp novels (Twilight Men, 1931), Lady Chatterley’s Husbands (1931) to how-to manuals (Taking Trout with the Dry Fly, 1930), Charles’ Book of Punches and Cocktails, 1934).

In 1933, Falk charmingly illustrated Magic Mother Goose; in 1934 he used a woodblock style for Russian Folk Tales, written by his friend Yock Schwab.  In 1938, he drew a syndicated informational strip, “What Do You Know About Health?”10

At one point he took on advertising jobs for MGM Studios and the Roxy Theatre, where he sometimes worked in a small downstairs office.  “I’d go down to see him,” said Stan, “and get to see free movies.”

How he came to write a book on animation history and production processes is not known.  He wasn’t an animator nor a storyboard artist, though his draftsmanship and writing skills indicate he could have succeeded in both of those paths.  Family members suggest that his openness toward meeting and becoming interested in people, particularly artists and their work, explains his friendship with early animation producer Paul Terry: “My grandpa said he used to go up to Terry’s studio in New Rochelle and hang out,” Karen Falk said.

Two years after How To Make Animated Cartoons was published, Falk compiled and wrote an animation section for a “companion” booklet by Alan Dale Bogorad:

Jr’s Fun to Draw – The Boys and Girls Book of Drawing Fun and Magic With a Pencil (1943).

Again, Falk obtained permission to use famed cartoon characters for illustrations from Terry, Leon Schlesinger and Paramount Studios.   In 2009, Jerry Beck, the estimable animation/comics historian, posted the Falk section of this rare paperback on CartoonBrew.com 11

Falk continued freelancing as an illustrator, and then, as publishing work dried up, he moved into art direction at ad agencies.  Came a day in 1953, however, when he found himself out of work at age 55.   Katherine, his wife, quickly took up the financial slack by getting a job in an employment agency.  “Pretty soon,” Stan said, “she figured out the way to make money was not to work for somebody else, but to set up your own.  So, she started her own business, Falk Personnel.  Became a management consultant in the temp employment area and did very well.  A lot of big companies used her services.”

Karen Falk remembers it became a family business: “Grandpa would do all the layouts for the job advertisements. He would work them up and she’d submit them to the newspapers for the jobs.  So, he supported her business when it started.”  Katherine, who loved working, finally sold the business and retired twenty-five years later (“kicking and screaming,” her son Stan recalled) when she was 77 and Nat was 80.

By that time, Nat and Katherine were living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, doting on their grandchildren, Karen, her sister Lisa, and their cousins Birgit and Sam.  In retirement, Nat Falk continued his keen interest in all areas of art and passed it on to his granddaughters and their children, clipping Lord and Taylor ads and Al Hirschfeld caricatures to interest them in graphic design.

An avid museum-goer, Falk became fascinated by a 1982 exhibition of Nam June Paik’s video art at the Whitney Museum.  At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, admiring a painting by Robert Henri, author of The Art Spirit, Nat casually referred to the artist as “old Bob Henri,” one of his lecturers at PAFA.

Nat Falk was the epitome of a freelancer who survived by never turning down a job, a situation that many artists and animators today can relate to.  Though his primary goal was to support his family, Nat Falk inadvertently became an educator as well.  He “taught” a variety of topics through many of his commercial art jobs, and with How to Make Animated Cartoons, he found at least one avid student in me.

NOTES

1. Karen Falk and Stanley (Stan) Falk. Zoom interview with John Canemaker, 01 Sept. 2022.  Quotes are from this interview unless otherwise noted.
2. 1918 pop song “Can You Tame Wild Women?” by Andrew B. Sterling, music: Harry Von Tilzer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuHloG8xx_w
3. Karen Falk and Stan Falk email to author, 11 September 2022.
4. The American Jewish Chronicle, Aug. 24, 1917, p. 437.
5. PAFA archivist Hoang Tran to Karen Falk, eMail to author, 29 August 22; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bainbridge_McCarter

6. https://pafaarchives.org/page/timeline?utm_source=PAFA&utm_medium=referral
7. Marcel Duchamp interest in TOM SWIFT books. https://www.toutfait.com/a-very-normal-guy-an-interview-with-robert-barnes-on-marcel-duchamp-and-atant-donnas/’
8. Paul Muni appeared often on Broadway, e.g., in 1940 he starred in Key Largo; in 1939, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson appeared in The Hot Mikado on Broadway briefly and then for two years at the New York World’s Fair.
9. “The Jacket Makes the Book.” The San Francisco News (April 16, 1932)
10. 4, 1938 Andover News (NY), p. 7: What Do You Know About Health? by Fisher Brown and Nat Falk.
11. Jr’s How to Draw – The Boys and Girls Book of Drawing Fun and Magic With a Pencil by Alan Dale Bogorad. <https://www.cartoonbrew.com/books/jrs-fun-to-draw-11257.html>

Copyright © John Canemaker, 2022. All rights reserved.

 

 

Views: 1054

Charles R. (Charley) Bowers (1889-1946) was a brilliantly talented editorial cartoonist and early film animator who, around 1912, began animating shorts featuring comic strip characters created by other artists, such as Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammer Kids, Bring Up Father, among others.  In 1916, he produced the successful Mutt and Jeff animated cartoon series in association with newspaper cartoonist Bud Fisher and pioneer animator/studio owner Raoul Barre.

Energetic, flamboyant, and a bold self-promotor, Bowers was dodgy in his business dealings.  Barre was “squeezed out “of the studio he founded, according to historian Donald Crafton.  Dick Huemer (1898-1979), who worked at the Barre-Bowers studio as a teenager and years later joined the Disney studio, recalled Bowers “cheated” Barre “and bled the company.”[i]

Huemer also noted, “I don’t think anyone ever abhorred the truth as much as [Bowers] did.”[ii]    However, he praised him as “colorful” and “one of the cleverest cartoonists that ever stooped to enter our then rather looked-down-upon animation profession,” an artist whose contribution to the animation scene of the period was “outstanding.”

By the mid-1920s, restless, ambitious, multi-talented Bowers was the director and star of short live-action films.  His comedic persona was Keaton-esque, often miming a zany amateur inventor of outlandish contraptions and mechanical objects.  He incorporated live-action with stop-motion/puppet animation techniques.  His character’s movements are exquisitely subtle, his special effects astonishing and weird.  It’s a Bird (1930), Bowers’ only sound film, stars a metal-munching sorta-pterosaur, and was surreal enough to have impressed André Breton.

“In these surrealistic Bowers Comedies,” writes Anthony Scibelli, “eggs hatch Ford automobiles, a Christmas tree grows out of a farmer, a mouse shoots a cat with a revolver, Charley grows a bush which in turn sprouts cats. . . ‘Bowers can conceive the most glorious idiocy,” noted a contemporary review.  ‘He is a master of camera wizardry. Every short feature bearing his name proves the camera is a monumental liar.’”

A marginal figure at the end of the silent era, Bowers and his films were forgotten for decades.  But they continue to be rediscovered every few years.  In the late 1960s, archivist Raymond Borde of the Toulouse Cinémathèque in France found many of Bowers’ “lost films;” additional materials were located by The Library of Congress, Národní filmový archiv, EYE Film Institute, Cinémathèque française, MoMA, and many other archives and collectors throughout the world, including Louise Beaudet, film curator and head of the Animation Department at the Cinematheque Quebecoise.  On Nov, 22, 1983, she discussed the odd life and career of this “notorious figure of animation’s early days, considered one of the cleverest cartoonists and animators of his time,” and presented six rare Bowers films at BAMPFA (U of C, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive).

One of the most passionate and intrepid archivists of Charley Bowers films and their preservation is historian Serge Bromberg. Through his company Lobster Films/Blackhawk Films, he has many times, over the years, literally rescued Bowers films from being destroyed.

The superb results of his efforts can be seen in Bromberg’s Blu-ray/DVD compilation and scholarly accompanying booklet, THE EXTRAORDINARY WORLD OF CHARLEY BOWERS, as written about in a July 22, 2019 blog posting by Leonard Maltin (“The Amazing Charley Bowers is Discovered – Again!”).

Click image for Leonard’s review:

A showcase of Bowers’ draftsmanship and animation prowess is a 1923 book he wrote and illustrated:   Charles Bowers Movie Book, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company.  “Mother Goose” was the first of a proposed series of four so-called “Toy-Flip” books.

Alongside the chatty text and profuse illustrations of familiar “Mother Goose” stories are nine folding, colored plates, each containing two sequential drawings.  When flipped back and forth quickly, an optical illusion of moving images occurs.  For example, the eponymous storybook old lady rides a large white gander with wings down in the top picture; and wings up in the bottom picture.

A simple change, but the imagery works.  Bowers’ draftsmanship and animation skills, apparent in his character’s strong poses, are excellent examples of visual storytelling.  His inventive artistry is also showcased in detailed, highly amusing line drawings of the nursery rhymes.

A second book “Aesop’s Fables,” is apparently the only other one of the proposed series to be published.  Here is an image of the cover:

For more eyewitness information on Charles Bowers, see below a three-part essay by I. Klein (1897- 1986), former Disney animator and New Yorker magazine cartoonist, who at age 21, animated at the Barre-Bowers studio.

 

 

[i]  Before Mickey, The Animated Film 1898-1928, p.199.

[ii]  AFI Report, Summer 1974, p.17

Views: 372

From 1933 to 1988, the noted Italian publishing house of Arnoldo Mondadori (1889-1971) published a children’s book series based on Walt Disney cartoon characters and films.

Below please find a complete version of a 1949 book based on the 1933 Silly Symphony short, Lullaby Land (Il Paese Della Ninna-Nanna).

I bought the book in an outdoor booksellers market in Lucca, Italy, during a 1986 comic book/animation conference I was invited to participate in.

A dreaming infant and his toy dog enter a surreal world of quilted landscapes and dangerous anthropomorphic objects babies mustn’t touch, such as scissors and knives, pins and needles and burning matches.

The fraught narrative recalls Little Nemo’s scariest Slumberland adventures; the wildly imaginative Disney character designs anticipate and rival the cast of incidental oddities — pencil and umbrella birds, playing cards, Momeraths, et al. — in Disney’s 1953 feature, Alice in Wonderland.

Click on the book cover to open the full .pdf file.

 

 

 

 

 

Views: 63

John Parr Miller (1913-2004) was an extraordinary artist — a master of eye-appealing fluid lines and designs.  Witty, subtle pastel or pencil drawings tumbled forth, suffused with an ineffable charm.

Miller’s early mark was made at the Walt Disney Studio, as a stand-out character designer in the influential Character Model Department.  He was one of the artists in “El Grupo,” the creative team that accompanied Walt Disney on his 1941 goodwill tour of South America.

Films such as Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), The Reluctant Dragon (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943), The Three Caballeros (1945) benefitted greatly from his graphic abilities.  Starting in 1948, his talents were showcased in a new career as a beloved illustrator of many children’s books.

Here are two consecutive articles I wrote on the life and career of John Parr Miller for Cartoons, the International Journal of Animation, Volume 2, issue 2, Winter 2006 and Volume 3, issue 1, Spring 2007.

To whet your appetite, here is a selection of J.P. Miller’s Disney drawings

For Saludos Amigos:

and Fantasia:

Here Miller is seen with James Bodrero, a colleague in Disney’s Character Model Dept., examining a ceramic figure on the South American tour.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

Views: 208

In 1979 I made a research trip to the UK at the invitation of Halas and Batchelor, to learn more about the British animation scene.

John Halas (1912-1995) and Joy Batchelor (1914-1991) were a remarkable husband and wife team who, for more than 40 years, produced more than 2000 films at their prestigious London studio, including Britain’s first animated feature film, Animal Farm (1954), a decidedly adult-oriented cartoon based on George Orwell’s dark allegory.

I first “met” John and Joy, and their films, in Halas’ 1959 informative book, The Technique of Film Animation, a showcase of international animation, with styles and content different from American cartoons of the period. The book opened a new world to me, a 16-year old who basically knew only Disney and Warner Bros. cartoon fare.

Exactly twenty years later, John and Joy invited me to London to research and write about British animation, past and present. And again, they introduced to me a new world of animation, this time in person. I also gained a close and valued friendship with the two artist/producers, whose passion for the art of animation inspired generations of animation filmmakers, many of whom found their first animated film employment at H&B’s large and busy studio.

My research trip generated three magazine articles in the years that followed.  Michael Barrier’s sorely-missed cartoon journal Funnyworld (#23, Spring 1983), published my  profile of Joy and John:

Click on image for link to article.

Some years later I wrote a second article related to Halas and Batchelor, “Farm Subsidy” which appeared in the May/June 2005 of Print, the graphic design magazine. It describes the CIA’s involvement, at the height of the Cold War, in the production of H&B’s Animal Farm:

Click on image for link to article.

And for the September 1980 issue of Print, I wrote a survey of independent animation in Britain:

Click on image for link to article.

I hope you’ll enjoy these.

 

 

Views: 183

1994 Exhibition Catalog
Katonah Museum of Art

In 1994, I curated an exhibition of original animation art and other works by Vladimir Tytla (1904-1968), one of the greatest of character animators. During his tenure at the Walt Disney Studio from 1934 to 1943, his animated characters display an extraordinary emotional range in classic Disney films, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940) and Dumbo (1941).

The exhibition, which ran from September 18 – December 31, 1994, consisted of drawings, photos and film clips from a number of lenders, including the Tytla family, Ollie Johnston, and the Walt Disney Archives and Animation Research Library.

The Museum created a handsome illustrated catalogue for the exhibition that has, over the years, become a collectible.  I still get inquiries about it, so I have uploaded a .pdf copy  of the complete catalogue, to make it available to everyone.

Click HERE to open it, and enjoy!

Views: 566