***subtitles by gnl***
We were on a TV show once,
and we were supposed to make a big entrance through some sliding doors.
And they had a huge stagehand back there who was gonna open the doors for us.
They got us in position. Somebody said, "break a leg", you know, and walked away.
This big stagehand turns to us and says,
"so you're the guys who killed Bambi's mother."
And we shrank away.
It seemed like you seldom heard Frank's name...
Without Ollie's along with it, or Ollie's without Frank's name.
It was "Frank and Ollie."
They really pioneered this type of animation.
They brought personality animation beyond, uh,
even where Walt thought it could go.
Oh! She couldn't be!
I've never gone any place on this earth...
That they didn't know and could talk about, specifically,
scenes that Frank and Ollie did.
How's that for touching, I mean, billions of people?
What are there, 4 1/2 billion on the planet?
I'd guess that half of 'em know some scene that Frank or Ollie did.
Hey. Good morning.
Oh, hi. Boy, you sure got a lot of trash.
Yeah, a lot of old manuscripts they didn't like.
Huh. Must've had a big party.
No. Yeah.
Don't know what happened this week.
We first met at Stanford.
We were in the art department, as I recall.
They didn't have much of an art department there really.
The reason was that Mrs. Stanford walked in on a class back in 1900,
and there was a nude model, and she said, "ah!
Never be another nude model or a draped model here at Stanford."
So, uh, we had to go on up the peninsula.
Up to, uh, where? San Mateo? San Mateo. Yeah.
- In order to get... - Two nights a week.
Our life drawing class in.
Then we'd get credit back down at Stanford for it.
And on the way back, why, I'd talk Frank into playing the piano...
At this little speakeasy up on the hill above the highway.
So we'd go in there, and they'd give us free drinks for him playing the piano.
Yeah, but we also had to leave one of the paintings we'd made that day...
In the landscape painting class.
Our Van Goghs or our Cezannes.
We felt like we were right in... Whatever we happened to be.
With those top painters of the day, you know?
So we'd go out and make a painting, come back in and trade it for dinner.
We were artists.
After college, we came down to Los Angeles...
To go to art school, and we moved into a boardinghouse.
Yeah, where this retired undertaker lived.
His wife was so mad that she now had to run this boardinghouse...
That she wouldn't even speak to him.
And their son practiced having funerals...
Out in the backyard under your window.
Yeah. He called 'em "grass funerals."
I'd always liked cartoons,
but I never found any that I really laughed too hard at.
Then one night I went to see this thing...
Where the dog got caught in the flypaper.
And it was just hilarious to me.
I rolled on the floor, and so did everybody who was with me.
At the time I didn't really understand why I thought it was so funny.
I just knew that there was something different about this picture...
And something different about this dog that I'd never seen happen on the screen before.
And I couldn't believe that anybody...
Could make a dog look like he was thinking.
The way he'd try to figure out, and his eyebrows would go down and up.
It was just unbelievable.
I'd never thought of going into the animation business...
Because animation was not considered a profession.
You know, it was something that...
Newspaper cartoonists did somehow.
Nobody was very interested in it, and there weren't any studios to go to.
? You're nothin' but a nothin'?
? a nothin' a nothin'?
? you're nothin' but a nothin'?
? a nothin' a nothin'?
Then in the spring of 1934,
I saw this new movie from the Disney studios called the flying mouse,
and it was a whole new dimension to me...
Because it had the feelings, the emotions of the characters,
and, uh, more pathos in the story,
and, uh, it really grabbed ya.
? You're nothin' but a nothin'?
? a nothin' a nothin'
Well, I thought, "gee, this flying mouse,
"if they're going to go that direction,
there might be something there that would interest me."
The idea of bringing a character to life really began to fascinate me.
So I took the tryout at Disney's and got hired.
17 dollars a week.
But this was the depression, '34.
Uh, weren't many jobs around.
As a matter of fact, the only jobs that I heard of...
Were with Disney's or with the W.P.A.
I've always used an electric razor.
For some reason I seem to get my best ideas while I'm shaving.
I don't know. Maybe it's because electrical current's so close to my brain.
Nah.
I remember one morning I was lying in bed in our boardinghouse.
Frank was shaving, and I was waiting 'til he finished with the razor.
We both used the same one.
And he turns around and he says,
"oh, by the way, they want you to take a tryout at Disney's."
And I thought, "gee whiz!
"Here I'm going to art school, and my dad just paid my tuition.
"Oh, well, I'll try it.
"I'll go out there and see if I can't make some money...
And pay my own way and go back to art school."
So I went out and took the tryout.
Somehow I made it.
After I'd been there, oh, say another two weeks after that,
I found out this is the only place I would ever want to be.
There were four animators that stood out above all the rest of them...
At the time we came.
There was norm Ferguson, who we called Fergy.
There was Ham Luske, and there was Freddy Moore and Bill Tytla.
Fergy had a way of drawing things...
So that you saw the outside of what the character was doing... Staging the action.
Ham drew a way that revealed what the character was thinking about,
what he was feeling.
Hello, Judgie. I'm Jenny wren.
I wanna see justice done.
Then there was Bill Tytla, who had this tremendous inner feeling.
He was able to get inside of everything he did.
You could just feel this as you opened the door to his room.
You'd feel, "whoops, I don't belong in here.
There's something going on that's very powerful."
But Freddy, uh, he was real happy.
We was balanced up on his chair here,
and he had to be well-balanced, like a diver, before he could draw.
Then he'd pull down the pieces of paper and...
Pull down another, and very fast.
And he had this tremendous appeal in his drawings.
He couldn't make a drawing that didn't have everything in the right place.
It might not be doing the right thing,
but all his drawings always had the arm...
So one arm related to another, so the head related to the shoulder.
Everything was in the right place.
Well, huh, so long.
I'll be seein' ya... I hope.
My first impression of Walt was that he wasn't a big shot.
He was just walking around the hall like any of the fellows.
And, uh, I didn't know what I had expected,
but, uh, I looked on him more as a teacher...
Because, remember, I wanted to work on characters that had personality...
Who you could bring to life in situations that called for emotions and feelings,
and he was the man who was looking for the same thing.
So that made a real nice relationship.
And the guy was into every phase of the thing.
He would criticize the drawings.
He would criticize the acting.
He'd criticize the sizes of the drawings, the perspective.
And he had this wonderful knack of knowing what was universal in appeal,
what was universal in the understanding...
And what people would laugh at.
And he'd get you rolling on the floor you'd be laughing so hard.
I soon realized, "here's the guy that makes this studio go."
And, of course, I'd heard about him for years,
but never realized that he was that important.
Ralph Wright had never been in a meeting with Walt before,
and he was apprehensive about it.
He had these drawings of Pluto waking up in the morning,
and he was concerned whether Walt would like it or not.
And he was trying to tell the story, and he looked at Walt...
And Walt wasn't paying any attention to him.
Walt was doing all this stuff like Frank's doing.
And, "god," Ralph thought.
"My god, I'm working for a spastic.
What the hell is he doing? He's not paying any attention to my stuff."
And here he was acting out what he saw in Ralph's drawings.
He said, "couldn't we have...
"You know how it is when you wake up in the morning, you got this bad taste in your mouth?
Couldn't we have Pluto do a little more of that type of thing?"
Ralph thought he was like one of these British kings they never talked about.
I'm a kind of a sentimental guy, I guess.
The way I've saved this pencil that Fred Moore...
Drew mickeys and snow white dwarves with...
And Lampwick and Pinocchio.
Um, I keep it taped up to my window...
To remind me of how great the guy was...
And how much he meant to me.
More beautiful stuff came out of this pencil.
It just flowed out like... Like liquid.
Beautiful drawings of the dwarves...
Where he'd draw the cheeks on them,
where it was a slightly wider line at the bottom of the cheek or on the nose.
Anyway, there was a lot of talent in this pencil,
and I just discovered there's still a little bit of lead left in it.
I may save that for something special.
Well, I'm Mickey mouse.
Ya know? Mickey mouse?
I hope you've heard of me. I hope.
Well, I'm, uh, Mickey mouse.
Ya know? Mickey mouse?
I hope you've heard of me. I hope.
When I started at the studio, uh,
I'd hear people talking about the importance of pathos...
In, uh, comedy, and talk about Chaplin.
He always had this pathos in there.
And, uh, I'd say, "pathos? What do they mean by that?"
Pathos is something that makes you feel down...
Or it makes you cry maybe even, you feel so strongly about it.
I could never see that that was part of comedy.
To me, comedy was, "har har har har har." Wham! Bang!
You know, all this slapstick stuff.
But gradually, uh, I don't know who affected me,
whether it was Ollie or whether it was Walt...
Or the other fellows, the other animators at the studio,
but gradually this grew on me.
What greater gag could you ever have than that one in city lights...
Where he's sitting there close to the blind girl,
and she's washing out the can that she's had the flowers in...
And she throws it out and hits him right in the face!
And took him a long time to come up with this,
but if you were not feeling sorry for him...
And sorry for her for being blind,
the pathos in that whole meeting there was so strong...
That this gag just hits ya.
And it's still one of the classic, greatest things that's ever been done on the screen.
Well, whatever you do, don't stop this.
Mm. That feels wonderful.
Thank you. Mm-hmm.
Well, just yesterday morning...
He was getting dressed to come down here,
trying to put this belt on, not with the loop through but the little pin...
And he couldn't do it, and his face got redder...
And he just got furious and threw the thing off.
And I said, "honey, you're gonna have a heart attack."
Well, then he laughed at himself.
But he gets... Oh, it was just terrible.
And then he laughed, gave me a kiss and everything was all right.
But... He can get...
Not often, but...
Snow white was a bigger departure than most people realize.
When Walt started it, he thought that, uh, you just make the picture longer.
Make like a bunch of shorts constructed together, six or seven of them.
It didn't work that way. He'd never made a feature picture before.
He had no idea what the problems would be...
In putting the thing together, make it work as a story.
He wrote a letter to a fellow during that time and said,
"I got story problems draped around my neck like a bunch of spaghetti."
The seven little dwarfs.
But let Walt Disney tell you about them himself.
The dwarfs' names fit their personalities.
This pompous-looking individual is doc, the self-appointed leader of the group.
And this little fellow is bashful.
He's secretly in love with snow white.
It was called "Disney's folly" around town.
Nobody thought that it would go over.
And actually, they did run out of money.
And, uh, Roy says, "Walt, you gotta show this picture to the bank of America...
So they'll bring us in some more money."
And, uh, Walt said, "no, I can't show it. It's not in shape."
Roy said, "you got to."
So this fellow came in and looked at the picture. Didn't say a word about it.
And as he left to go back to his car,
Walt and Roy came running along behind him, you know, like a couple of kids, and said:
"Well, what'd you think?"
And the guy said... "Ah," he says, "you can have all you want."
"Finish it up." "It was great. Finish it up."
I think the first Disney film that I remember was snow white.
And, uh, I was impressed by the action sequences,
but I was also... I also remember the poignant sequences.
Uh, the sadness of it.
Uh, the dwarfs around snow white's bier,
and, uh, that they were crying.
Um, as a child, uh, you know, it was, uh...
It had a great impact because here were characters...
That had made me laugh and feel good throughout the film, and now they were...
Experiencing and expressing sorrow.
Of course, I didn't realize it at the time...
That this was an important breakthrough in personality animation.
And for the first time in the history of film,
moving drawings had become moving drawings.
What are you wearing on the plane?
I don't have room to take what I wanna wear on the plane.
I'll have to wear something else.
My suitcase is already full.
Then there's nothing to do, huh?
How many shoes shall I take?
Three. That's what I got. You're right.
Here's one. Word with "miss" or "beer."
Is this "myth" or "myths"?
M-i-s-s. Oh, yeah, "miss."
And the answer is "near."
"Near miss" and "near beer."
It's like you're near.
And I knew... I'm a near miss.
I nearly got it.
Puzzles. Gosh. Okay. Better luck...
Next time. Yeah.
I think Frank, uh, is one of the least...
Uh, mercurial artists that I've ever known.
He's a... he's a very even-tempered man.
It isn't that he doesn't feel things deeply,
but he has the, uh, sunny disposition...
That somehow doesn't have the flip side of being high.
He's not equally low, which happens to most of us.
And as a result, uh,
I've lived with someone with this relentless curiosity,
which makes living lots of fun.
And, uh... and he's always pleasant to be around,
which is more than I can say for myself.
Never mind all that! Get to the part where I lose my temper!
teasing, tormenting and otherwise annoying our beloved...
Never mind all that! Get to the part where I lose my temper!
Uh, Frank and Ollie are two of the greatest character animators ever...
Because they're two of the greatest screen actors ever.
I mean, they have such a...
They're like a repertory company within themselves.
Uh, they've played heroes and heroines,
villains and buffoons.
Uh, they've even played inanimate objects.
I don't think Laurence Olivier ever played a doorknob.
The worst thing about starting a new scene...
Is that you have to start with a blank piece of paper,
and there's nothing anybody else can do to help you.
You have to start it yourself.
You can't go and say, "hey, make a drawing for me and then I'll work over that."
No. It's the reverse. You have to make that drawing first.
It's not like live action, for instance,
where you have, oh, Robert Redford and Meryl Streep or something.
You've got something that's a known quantity.
We start with nothing.
That's a pretty girl. Oh.
Such pretty, soft hairs. Pretty head.
You're the prettiest dog on Flintridge Avenue. Did you know that?
Yeah. Yeah.
See, you got this line here, Teddy.
It's very unusual for a dog. It's a smile line, like people have.
You know this line that comes down here?
Makes you look like you're thinking and gives you good expressions.
Most dogs don't have that. That makes you a very special type dog.
Makes you look like you're intelligent.
And I don't think that's really too truthful a view of things.
Ollie and I have a different approach...
To actual drawing... Animating.
He is very intuitive and has to feel from the inside.
He had a sign up on his desk that said:
"What is the character thinking and why does he feel that way?"
Which is very perceptive.
You know, if you can answer those two questions,
you're way down the road towards getting a scene out of it.
Frank is very analytical.
He figures everything out, makes notes about everything.
I finally learned to do that a little myself.
Everything. Figures it all out completely.
He went to more trouble in planning a scene...
Than anybody in the studio ever did.
When I looked at Ollie's drawings,
Ollie had this way of almost kissing the paper with his pencil.
It was just, just softly brushing it...
And finding the simplest forms.
His thinking seemed to always be...
In zeroing in on what is the simplest way...
Of making a statement in this drawing.
He didn't subject scenes to the same, uh, rigorous analysis...
That Frank subjected it to.
He always had a much more gut, animal way of dealing with things.
He could take a scene...
And he would be able to feel it strongly from the very beginning,
and I suspect his first reactions to it were always accurate.
Frank's way of drawing,
to me, always seemed to have...
There was a thousand lines trying to find the perfect way of saying what he wanted to say.
And he was searching. You could see it in his drawing.
It was almost like it was an invisible thing he was sculpting...
With the edge of the tiny little tip of his pencil.
A very thin line, nervously searching...
And finding out that form and that expression.
Once you see the film of your drawings,
then you're hooked on animation.
Nothing can take that... Can give you the same feeling.
Sculpture, painting, uh, drawing, etchings... anything.
None of it can give you that same feeling of life...
That you get out of seeing this doggone little character...
Working around on the Moviola...
Or on the projection... Projected up on the screen.
And, uh, you feel like...
A parent who has just sent his kid away to school.
You don't really own this guy up on the screen anymore.
You did for awhile. You were very close to him for awhile.
But now, all of a sudden, here he is apparently making decisions on his own,
doing quite well without you, thank you.
I'll tell my father!
Jiminy! Oh, jiminy!
Oh, jiminy, where are you?
Jiminy cricket!
We knew we were doing a different kind of animation...
Than had ever been done before.
Some of the old-timers that were working at the studio would even tell us,
"you know, when I was doing it, it wasn't like this.
We didn't have these stories like this."
We knew after snow white that we had something...
That was entirely different than anybody had ever attempted.
I was going to school. Then I met somebody.
Pinocchio, why didn't you go to school?
- School? Well, I, um... - Go ahead. Tell her.
I was going to school 'til I met somebody.
Met somebody? Yeah. Two big monsters.
With big green eyes.
This was one of the first cases, uh, one on Pinocchio,
where, uh, we were actually animating... Right through a sequence.
'Cause we both had long noses to draw on him.
We had to check with each other.
You got the shorter noses. You got him playing it like a fife or something.
I had to make sure I hadn't drawn it too long for the next scene.
I had this nose that's way out here,
and every place he turned...
The nose was going way beyond anything you could draw.
And where was sir jiminy?
Oh. Jiminy? Uh... Hey! Psst! Leave me out of this!
They put him in a little sack.
No! Yes!
How did you escape? I didn't.
They chopped me into firewood!
There was a feeling that as you started to work on a scene,
that you'd sort of encase your...
You had a contact with the magic that was behind the drawing.
Not the drawing itself as much, but this whole feeling of...
This is a room, this is a forest glade,
this is a rock, this is a castle...
Whatever it is that you're drawing.
Here's your character in it, and you had to be able to see your character...
Working in three dimensions going in there...
And living in there, and you wanted to live in there.
If the phone rang, you... It was like a real dream.
It's hard to come out of this concept to pick up the phone and think,
"where am I? What's going on here today? Hello? Who's this?"
Ahem. Come to... Ahem. Come to think of it,
if I was a pirate, i-i-i wouldn't hide anything back there.
Ahem. C-come to think of it,
if I was a pirate, I wou... I wouldn't hide anything back there.
Another hiss out of you...
Uh, uh, uh, uh, hiss... and you are walking to Nottingham.
One more... One more hiss out of you...
Uh, uh, uh, uh, hiss...
And you are walking to Nottingham.
You know, my best ideas come to me while I'm walking.
Sometimes I don't think I can do it. I'm too tired.
But once I get down here and start walking,
why, the juices start flowing and then I really feel much better and I'm glad I did it.
And I always did like to do athletics,
and I used to get all kinds of caricatures.
Everything I did, somebody drew a caricature of.
You couldn't say anything to anybody...
Without getting a caricature made of it.
If you were trying to be serious about something and express your philosophy,
gee, they'd draw you like Lincoln or somebody like that.
You just never knew what was gonna come out.
You made one comment, and you'd get 50 drawings coming under your door or onto your desk.
They'd slide in under the door.
I was losing my hair at one point, really?
And Frank made a drawing of me with all the different ways my hair would come back.
I was having hair treatments over in Hollywood.
There were a bunch of nice-looking girls giving these treatments.
Every time you'd come in, they'd say, "oh! Your hair's really coming back great."
Look at this fuzz. Beat you do death, scrubbing your head or something.
Walt wasn't bothered by all these jokes...
And things like that... With the caricatures that went on...
Because he knew that it was sharpening our skills of communication.
None of these gags would have paid off if you didn't communicate properly...
So that the guys knew what you were doing, who the joke was on and what the joke was.
Strange coincidence that I didn't find out...
Until, actually, a dozen years ago or so, I guess,
was that Frank's mother...
Was born in Tuscola, Illinois,
the same town that my mother was born in.
Little dinky place not far from campaign-urbana.
And, uh, that was an unbelievable coincidence among all the others.
That we both had educators for fathers.
It was really... weird.
We both liked the same kind of books.
We grew up on the Robin hood, Ivanhoe, Scottish chiefs.
All those great, romantic historical novels.
I was Robin hood,
and I formed a band around me of guys.
Some of them didn't want to be in it,
but they didn't know anything else to do for the summer.
And we lived out on the edge of town in Fresno,
and there weren't any other kids to play with,
so I never had the advantage of being Robin hood...
And having a whole gang of kids around me.
Say, "you be will Scarlett and you be little John" and so on.
So I had to do all that in my imagination.
Uh, he rode a motorcycle for awhile. I never did. I rode a bicycle.
I had a dog. I don't remember whether he had a dog or not.
Hi, honey. Hi.
I'm on my way down to Frank's. Okay.
Will you be home for lunch? Of course.
Hi there, Teddy. You didn't disappoint me.
Hi. Hi. Whatcha got?
We had some special problems with Bambi.
We'd had problems all the way through...
Trying to figure out a way to make deer interesting enough...
That they could sustain a whole feature.
After Bambi's birth at the start of the thing,
Bambi's mother took him around to introduce him to all the people in the neighborhood.
Dull, dull, dull.
No matter what you did, you couldn't put any life into the thing.
Well, one day when we were trying to get voices for all the little bunnies,
"did the young prince fall down?"
And the animators said, "there's our voice!"
And the casting director said, "get that kid outta here. He can't act."
But we brought him back, and he could act...
And had this wonderful voice.
So he was the one who took Bambi around,
and all of a sudden, it was a whole different picture.
It was a picture about kids in the neighborhood.
Good morning, young prince.
Hello. Whatcha eatin'?
Clover. Clover. It's awfully good.
It's delicious!
Why don't ya try some?
No, no! Not that green stuff.
Just eat the blossoms. That's the good stuff.
Seems like thumper was always popping off,
trying to tell his ideas.
And in that particular case of the section I did...
Where thumper says, "eating Greens is a special treat,"
he had said to begin with, to Bambi,
"don't eat that green stuff. Just eat the blossoms."
- And his mother says... - "Thumper, what did your father tell you this morning?"
We never saw the father, but you knew that he'd say, "now, son, I want you to remember..."
So when Ollie got the scene of "eating Greens is a special treat.
It makes long, big feet, big ears"...
Uh, he realized that thumper had probably been hearing this said at home...
Over and over and over and was pretty bored with it.
And so I had him just looking at the ground after that.
And he says, "about what?" Without even looking up.
And she says, "you know, about eating the Greens."
"Oh, that one."
Clears his throat, turns around...
And starts in reciting his "eating Greens is a special treat."
Thumper?
Yes, mama.
What did your father tell you?
'Bout what?
About eating the blossoms and leaving the Greens.
Oh, that one.
Ahem! Eating Greens is a special treat.
It makes long ears and great big feet.
But it sure is awful stuff to eat.
I made that last part up myself.
Hiya, Bambi!
Watch what I can do!
Whee!
Come on! It's all right. Look.
The water is stiff.
Yippee!
Some fun, huh, Bambi?
I think you'd have to say that the biggest laugh in Bambi...
Is Frank's section, Bambi and thumper on the ice.
And at one time, the director and the story people...
Were talking about cutting that down to something much less than that.
Word came down to me, and I'd been preparing to animate that, and I said,
"oh, golly, they can't do that!"
So I said, "can I have three days to try to show you what will happen in there?"
So I made pose tests and things where you just made a few drawings...
And held them for a longer time, but still gave the feeling...
Of what would be in that sequence.
Because of my own difficulties with ice-skating, I was very sympathetic to Bambi.
And, uh, of course, thumper was the little smart-alecky kids...
That came skating around me, you know, backwards and forwards and then swirling all around.
Kinda wobbly, aren't ya?
Ahem!
Ya gotta watch both ends at the same time.
Guess you better unwind it.
Wow!
We think that Bambi was Walt's favorite picture.
All our features were different,
but this one was the most different.
The death of the mother.
It's the one picture where somebody is really killed,
and there's no fairy dust or lover's kiss to bring her back to life.
She's dead, and, uh,
I think that's the big thing that made this so different.
Well, the fact that you had animals trying to carry a whole picture.
We'd never done that, and Walt wasn't sure that we could do it,
and a lot of us weren't sure that we could make the picture.
Seven years of work, up and down, up and down, finally ended with the war.
We just barely got the thing finished after cutting it all up,
but it still had that different spark to it.
We'll try to catch her before she goes out to lunch.
Okay. I'll go get the other phone.
You call me when it... Let me know when it rings.
All right.
It's ringing.
The idea of Frank and Ollie...
I mean, it's a term that is thrown around so often...
That I think that there are those who are there who don't know...
Frank and Ollie is not one person.
I mean, they are two separate individuals.
'Cause it just flows. One... Frank and Ollie.
Hello? Hello.
Frank and Ollie calling from Los Angeles.
As far as Frank and Ollie goes,
the more I found out about their past history together,
it becomes more and more extraordinary.
And I guess it's kind of an enigma to me...
Because I'm not that close to somebody... I mean to a male friend...
And it's an enigma to me.
I can't figure out what it is that fuels it.
What is it that gives it life?
Uh, that's the mystery of love, I suppose.
I mean, there's never any... Never any explanation for it.
Oh, that's villain stuff. I don't want that.
This is too. Donald stuff. Yeah! This is... no, that's not...
Gotta be in here.
Doggone it.
That's not what I want.
What'd I do with it?
Marie? What?
I can't find that damn drawing. That's par for the course.
- You want me to help you? - Yes.
All right. Just a minute.
Siege heil! Siege heil! (Win It)
Because of the war, Pinocchio had not made money.
Didn't even pay for itself.
Fantasia did not make money, and Bambi the king of them all,
failed to make money.
And it was a very sad time, to me, for Walt,
as well as the rest of us,
because Walt was cut off at the height of his powers.
He was at his most creative.
There's just no telling where he would have gone...
With that wonderful imagination that he had...
What he couldn't do.
Everything he'd done had been a step forward...
And more creative and more imaginative.
And here, all of a sudden, that's brought to an end.
Walt had been very disappointed that fantasia did not go over...
Because he felt that was a new frontier for animation.
It opened up whole new areas that we could play with.
But the audience didn't go for that.
He lost money, lost money.
Finally he realized, "well, the audience wants another snow white.
They want a girl in trouble, beset by evil and somebody saves her."
So he made Cinderella.
Cinderella made an extra million dollars.
Alice in wonderland lost a million dollars.
So the studio really wasn't in the black until after we got the parks going...
And TV came in and all these other interests of Walt's...
Started to bring in money from several different enterprises and not just the pictures.
Well, in the meantime, he'd been going this way,
and we started going this way, trying to keep the pictures going...
With less and less help from Walt.
We decided the best thing for us to do was to work on the personalities,
the acting, the entertainment as best we could...
And try to cover what Walt had given us before.
He was still around, but he wasn't exercising the control over the films...
That he had originally.
Eventually, uh, Disney had a favorite phalanx of animators...
That he called "the nine old men,"
and, uh, each of them had certain strengths...
And complemented the other.
Uh, some of them were wonderful draftsmen.
Some were good with zany sequences and characters.
Others were female character specialists.
Frank and Ollie, of course, were the best with Sincere, emotional animation.
And what Walt saw was that Frank and Ollie...
Were able to suspend disbelief picture after picture...
And go into whatever the character was...
And say, "no, no, no. You don't understand. It's a child.
It's a father, a mother, a son, a daughter."
Uh, they kept telling me,
"your work has to be Sincere."
And... how do you draw Sincere?
I mean, do you press harder on the pencil?
Ehhh! You know, to really get to the heart of it?
It's only in retrospect that I realize the things they were telling us were...
Truly true secrets of magic, as it were.
This is Frank Thomas, one of our key animators.
He's making the drawings that will animate part of the dialogue scene...
We have just heard recorded.
He's not just making faces in the mirror for fun.
He's mouthing the words as he hears them.
Then he sketches the position of his mouth...
So that the character he's drawing will appear to be saying the words.
Well, let's see what we've got here now.
By flipping these drawings at the same time as we play the record on the playback machine,
we get a pretty fair idea of what we're going to see on the screen.
I'll show ya.
Uh, what's a baby?
When I was four years old, I saw lady and the tramp,
and... My recollection of it...
Is just kind of a hodgepodge of images,
but one image or sequence that really vividly stands out in my mind...
Is the spaghetti sequence.
In the hands of a lesser animator,
it would have been a horrible scene,
but what Frank did was nothing short of miraculous.
I love the little personality touches that he gets into it.
Um, uh, tramp, being a dog of the streets,
is not used to eating such a wonderful meal,
and so he eats twice as much as lady does in the sequence.
And lady, who is a pampered upper-middle-class dog...
And gets her, at least, two square meals a day plus snacks,
is more interested in the improvisational serenade that's being performed for them.
Um, inadvertently, they chew on a single strand of spaghetti,
and then their muzzles meet and they kiss.
It's a wonderful moment...
Because, uh, Frank has lady reacting just as she should,
demurely pulling away.
And then tramp... There's a wonderful drawing at the end of the sequence...
In which he nuzzles over a meatball to her, the last one.
It's his gift to her.
And I could see that he's falling in love with this dog.
He's, uh... It seems he's reflecting on what the chef told him earlier.
He says, "this is the one you should settle down with."
You can see it in the drawings.
You can see he's realizing she's wonderful.
with your loved one
? you'll find enchantment here?
? the night will weave its magic spell
- ? when the one you love... - - Do you consider yourself a romantic?
Yes. Don't you?
Aren't we all?
You think Ollie's a romantic too?
Oh, very much so.
Yeah. Yeah, I'd...
You'd have trouble defining what a romantic is,
but I think it has to do a lot, to me, with living with your dreams,
and, uh, dreaming quite a bit about, uh,
oh, connections between things...
The trees, the sky, the grasses, the birds, the animals...
And you being part of the whole thing.
Uh, a realist would have trouble with some of those concepts,
but if you're going to go into an imaginary field like animation,
uh, you'd better come equipped with that kind of nonsense.
Right here.
Now let's see.
Put it down here.
And this one...
It was a whole approach toward life, and Walt used to say,
"our work is a caricature of life."
But the life that they were caricaturing, they felt in very much the same way.
You can see it when he was telling me about them, and I had never met them at this time.
He described Ollie as "the guy who had the train."
And, of course, it was Ollie's passion for trains...
That got Walt excited about trains.
Millions of people enjoy various hobbies,
and among the largest of these groups are the model railroad enthusiasts.
In the United States alone,
there are about six million people who build and operate these scale model railroads.
And here at the studio, there are several of us who haven't escaped the bug.
One of our key animators, Ollie Johnston,
is one of these backyard hobbyists.
After sitting at the drawing board all day,
Ollie finds great relaxation on weekends gathering the fellow hobbyists...
In the backyard of his Flintridge home.
Ollie estimates that it took over 4,000 hours to build his model steam engine,
patterned after the Baltimore and Ohio.
All aboard!
Well, I tell you, the one thing that saved my life... and saved his...
Was his interest in trains...
Because you don't leave a job like that at 5:00 and close the door and that's it.
You bring all these thoughts home with you. You can't turn it off.
I always loved to hear Frank play the piano myself,
but I had no idea it would have such an impact on my wife.
You know, the first time she ever heard him play,
she was up in about two seconds doing the Charleston, you know.
She can't resist it.
That's all, folks.
And the same thing with Frank and the music.
He told me about Frank as "the man who plays the piano in the firehouse five 2."
By day, they're artists, but at night, they become the most famous new band in the country.
Firehouse five 2.
I've danced to their music at night, and now I'm curious:
Can the magic mirror show them at their daytime job?
Sure. But, Edgar, I'd like to say this about the boys:
They never let their music interfere with their work.
You watch.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, show the hardest workers here of all.
Yes, master.
Monty. Hey, Monty. See if Walt's around.
All clear.
He's a ham. That's why he's a good animator.
That's why his playing with the firehouse five was so important,
because it was an ego booster.
It gave him the release that he needed...
To put up with the frustration that he had to keep bottled up during the week.
Oh, I don't think there was a day went by...
That I didn't figure I was in the wrong profession...
And that I should get out of animation.
I'd get so mad at something that was going on.
Part of the time, it was my own inability to draw what I wanted,
which all of us had.
I guess every artist has that kind of problem.
Yes, and in my book, that's bad!
Well, who's that?
Thanks for barking. You're so fierce. They been waitin' for you.
You're so fierce. They couldn't wait 'til you got here.
One of the most important parts of animation is observing...
Seeing things around you, see what people do and learn the little traits that they have,
the way they look, the timing on them.
You have to observe all of those things.
Yeah, my son... I kept watching him when he was a kid,
sucking his thumb and holding onto his ear while he did it,
and I used that on prince John.
Dear mother.
Mother always did like Richard best.
Which ear did he hold? I can't remember.
He... my son would go from ear to ear this way.
Prince John's arms weren't long enough to reach around to do that.
You did it on... One of my boys had a way when he was sleeping and he was nervous,
he'd rub his feet together this way as if there was some tension in there.
I used that on prince John while Robin hood was stealing the gold.
They were rooming there in the same rooming house...
And then eventually had an apartment together,
and then, when Ollie and Marie married,
Frank moved across the hall to a bachelor's apartment.
And I guess it was about three years later...
That he finally talked Jeanette, his wife, into getting married.
So next thing I knew, Marie was house-hunting with me,
and we found a duplex, which we bought.
Before that, even, Ollie and Marie and Frank...
Had bought the property in Flintridge.
And so we were both planning houses at the same time.
I think we, uh, moved in a little before Frank and Jeannette did.
Our house was finished a little sooner.
I was pregnant.
That August, we both had babies within a week of each other...
Our first sons.
We had Rick on the 1st of August,
and six days later, they had their son, Gregg.
Ollie and Frank continued to drive to work and back to work...
And drive to work and back to work.
This went on... And on.
Yeah, this one here, I feel...
I don't know how you feel, bub, but I feel it ought to be used...
Even though we've already got a color one of it.
Oh, this is of chernabog from fantasia.
Don't decide anything yet.
I feel like this one...
Not just because it's a bigger transparency...
But I feel like it shows the guy up on the mountain better.
Yeah. There's another one here that has to be considered too.
A good fold-out thing. Yeah.
It would make a great fold-out.
I'd buy that. Wonder if they will.
I was in a regular car pool,
but when we had a date, I'd ride home with Frank and Ollie.
And they did let me sit in the middle. They didn't push me to the backseat.
But I soon found out that I wasn't to talk...
Until we got to a certain street.
I've forgotten the name of the street now. It's been 50 years.
Frank and I started riding together back in art school,
and that continued on after we both got into Disney's,
so over the years, we had a lot of time to talk to each other.
And we learned how each of us thought...
And how we approached our problems...
And what we're weak in or strong in.
Where other fellows would stop at 5:00...
And just go home and do something else,
we still had 20 minutes to a half hour to 45 minutes at one time...
To talk about the picture and what was wrong with it and what it needed...
And the scenes that we had coming up.
So in the morning, you'd start out with all these hot ideas, talk them over.
Coming home, you'd be talking about, "gee, I don't know. This sure didn't work out well."
When you got to work the next morning, you had a pretty clear idea what you wanted to do.
So I'd make a lot of little thumbnails... you know, little bitty drawings...
Working out the continuity and the expressions and the things I thought you'd get on there.
I'd take them into Ollie and say, "is this what you expected to see?
Is this what we talked about?"
He'd say, "well, yeah, uh... Weren't you going to do something here?
I thought you said you were going to do something with the arm."
"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." "And then down here..."
"Yeah, I know, I know." I'd try to get it away from him.
He'd say, "no, no, you gotta do this."
He'd call out the changes he saw. Then I'd take it back to the room...
And I'd work on my scene on that basis.
So I'd take a drawing in to him,
and he'd make some little scribbles over it.
He wouldn't try to make a real fancy drawing.
He'd just point out what he thought maybe I was missing...
Or maybe he'd point out what he liked about my drawing, which I didn't see.
And in the end, I'd end up with a much better drawing.
I couldn't have done it by myself.
One good turn deserves another. What can I do for you?
Well, I'm looking for a white rabbit, so, um, if you don't mind...
Eh? Oh!
There he is! I simply must get through!
Sorry. You're much too big. Simply impassable.
- You mean impossible. - No, impassable. Nothing's impossible.
We worked together on Alice in wonderland too.
I had the doorknob. I had Alice.
Yeah, lucky you. Yeah. Tough one.
We had the two characters playing against each other,
and we ran into an interesting problem...
Because I needed certain lines of dialogue...
Where I could get the doorknob to work properly.
You know, working his mouth. He always wanted the stuff...
I wanted the stuff where I could have Alice not saying anything. It would be much simpler.
I didn't want those lines. He had to animate...
There's nothing worse than having a doorknob when he doesn't have anything to do.
But look! I'm just the right size!
Oh. No use.
I forgot to tell you. I'm locked!
- Oh, no! - But of course, you've got the key, so...
- What key? - Now don't tell me you've left it up there.
I forgot to tell you. I'm locked. Oh, no!
You know, when Walt was looking at this stuff,
he said, "did you do all these Alices?"
And I said, "yeah." He says, "we'll have to put you on Wendy in Peter Pan."
I said to Walt, "that'll kill him." So he put me on Mr. Smee.
Even there, we had arguments about which character was gonna get the lines he wants.
I had captain hook, and it was very important that he have certain lines...
Where he could gesture and be the grand fellow that he thought he was.
Lots of times I wanted that part on Mr. Smee so I could show him reacting.
I had a scene with captain hook playing the piano in Peter Pan.
And I wondered, "how can he play the piano with a hook?"
So I asked Ollie Wallace, who is a very good pianist and organist.
Had a great sense of humor. And I said, "Ollie, what can we do here?
"Can you... somethin' he could do with the hook?
He could sort of rattle it here between a couple of notes?"
? de-da de-day-da de-day-da
He couldn't do that, but he could do a thing where he goes:
? Rrump, derump derump, derump, bing
Somehow they're able to use their imaginations...
To fit into all sorts of relationships.
And the incredible thing is, you then have...
More of a feeling of reality...
Because it isn't just a good cartoon character.
It's a group of people thinking and feeling and bouncing off of each other.
Yes, miss bell. Captain hook admits defeat.
Tomorrow I leave the island, never to return.
I'm glad to hear that, cap'n.
I'll tell the crew and...
And that's why I asked you over, me dear:
To tell Peter I bear him no ill will.
One of my favorite sequences that Frank animated...
Was the squirrel sequence from sword and the stone.
Merlin and wart are temporarily squirrels and traveling through the woods,
and a young girl squirrel happens to fall in love with Arthur.
Look, I'm not a boy. I mean...
- I'm not a squirrel. - I'm a boy.
A human boy, not a... not a real sq...
Oh... leave me alone!
Shoo-woo!
It's such a vivid description of falling in love.
But a very poignant kind of love...
The kind of love where you fall madly in love with somebody...
And then after you're in love, you discover they're nothing like you thought they were.
In this case, literally, a different species.
And, uh, we've all had relationships like that, haven't we?
Merlin! Oh.
So here we are.
Quick, Merlin, the magic. Snick, snack, snorum!
There. Now you see?
I'm not a squirrel. I'm a boy.
I tried to tell you. I-I'm a boy.
A human boy.
Oh. If you could only understand.
You know, lad,
that love business is a powerful thing.
Greater than gravity?
Well, yes, boy, in its way.
I'd, uh... Yes, I'd say...
It's the greatest force on earth.
Let's not be silly.
Too late.
Of all the great laughing scenes in Disney animation,
I think my favorite is Ollie Johnston's in the sword and the stone...
When you have Archimedes laughing so hard at Merlin's idea...
That man someday is gonna fly...
That he can't get his breath.
There she goes.
No, no, no!
Ho, ho, ho! Man'll fly, all right.
Ho, ho, ho, ho! Just like a rock.
It would have worked if-if-if-if it weren't for this infernal beard.
I never...
Never in my whol...
You know, an animated character never does anything on its own.
If it makes too big a move somewhere, it's your fault, not the character's fault.
And that's true. You have to be very careful...
Because sometimes you think you want to do something...
Have a hand do something or move their head in a certain way.
Sometimes it's better to see the expression...
Or linger on the body attitude or something that's...
Whether it's sad or whether it's happy... Whatever it is...
So that you communicate that without complicating it.
Uh, penny... A scene that Ollie did...
Penny's sitting on the bed in the orphanage,
and she says something like, "well, they had adoption day at the orphanage,
"and a man and a woman came and looked at me,
"but they chose the little redheaded girl instead...
Because she was prettier."
That wasn't a child that was playing that scene. It was a drawing.
She looked awful sad...
And so I asked her:
What's wrong, penny, honey?
Nothing.
Oh, come on now. Come on. No secrets.
You tell old Rufus, huh?
Well, it was adoption day at the orphanage.
What... what happened?
A man and a lady came and looked at me,
but they chose the little redheaded girl.
She was prettier than me. Oh!
She couldn't be! You... now, you listen to me, darlin'.
You're something extra special.
No, I'm not. Why, someday...
A mama and a papa will come to the orphanage...
A-lookin' for a pretty little girl just like you.
Honest?
Have to run captions. This should be at...
We have Walt's actual words from the story meeting notes.
Do they say enough or should we add somethin'?
Mmm, I'd have to see it...
With the drawing? Yeah, I'd have to see it with the drawings,
but we got a whole series there that are really good...
Where he first starts changing and Pinocchio starts laughing at him...
And then he goes over and grabs hold of Pinocchio.
I think the reason that Ollie and I have gotten along...
As well as we have over the years...
Is because we speak the same language,
and for many years, we spoke the same language as Walt.
There's a truth and an honesty there...
That you don't always find in fairly close friends.
Somebody always wants to do a little one-upmanship or something like that.
But there's never any of that with us.
It isn't the type of thing you go around thinking, "gee, I got a good friend," or something.
I got to thinking about it, and, by golly,
we had a way of working together...
That really benefited both of us.
We each lifted the other up to something he couldn't do by himself.
Not that they don't disagree.
They do. But they have a way of saying,
"well, uh, Ollie,
"I don't think that would work.
I'm not sure that's..."
"Oh." and Ollie would listen, and they'd talk it out.
They may not have arrived at Frank's solution, but they've come somewhere in between.
I've been amazed at the way they... they never lose their temper.
? Look for the bare necessities?
? the simple bare necessities
? forget about your worries and your strife?
? I mean the bare necessities
? are mother nature's recipes
? that bring the bare necessities of life
Jungle book, uh, of course, was a very important and pivotal picture,
not just in the careers of Frank and Ollie but, I think,
for the history and future of Disney animation.
Walt Disney died during the making of it,
so the nine old men were on their own,
and, uh, had that film failed,
I think that Disney animation might very well have gone down the tubes.
It's also impressive to me that Frank and Ollie...
Animated more than half of the picture themselves.
Practically all of the scenes and sequences of Baloo and Mowgli...
That wonderful relationship that develops and changes throughout the picture...
Was Frank and Ollie's work.
Frank and I had these two back-to-back sequences...
That were really important to the picture.
Without these coming off properly,
all this character work we had done wouldn't pay off.
The section that I had certainly tested me,
and I think it tested our friendship because I had to rely so much on Frank for help,
and I think he relied on me in his sequence.
And it was terribly important that we make these come off.
This was the type of thing Walt talked about when he said:
"You guys get that personality. I'll take care of the story."
Yeah, but this is a tough part of the story because, uh,
the story wouldn't hold up without these two sequences in them.
It was testing the friendship of Baloo and Mowgli,
and it was also testing our abilities as animators.
That's right, and also, the tough thing was that...
Baloo was put on the spot in this.
Bagheera tells him he has to take the kid back to the man-village.
And he says, "why me?" Baloo had never done anything like this before.
He was the physical type.
He didn't understand how to do anything where you had to figure out a problem in your mind.
It was all completely impossible to him.
And most of my sequence...
Went on with just talking, no real movement.
They're just standing... Bagheera and Baloo... Talking.
Well... well, what are we gonna do?
We'll do what's best for the boy.
You better believe it. You name it and I'll do it. Good.
Then make Mowgli go to the man-village.
Are you out of your mind? I promised him he could stay here in the jungle with me.
That's just the point. As long as he remains with you, he's in danger.
So it's up to you. Why me?
B-because he won't listen to me.
But I love that kid.
I love him like he was my own cub.
Then think of what's best for Mowgli and not yourself!
But... well, can't... Well, can't I wait until morning?
It's morning now.
Go on, Baloo.
Uh...
And now the situation changes when the bear has to talk to the boy...
And tell him that they're gonna go back to the man-village.
He knows this is gonna be a terrible betrayal on his part.
He doesn't know how to tell the boy. He doesn't know what he's gonna say to him...
'Cause they built everything on their trust and their friendship.
And Mowgli’s so happy at the idea of having this wonderful day with Baloo.
He's running all around, pulling Baloo's hand,
kicking him in the pants, climbing up on things, chasing butterflies.
He's just in ecstasy.
This is really the payoff sequence right here.
This is... because the betrayal comes here.
You had to feel and understand what Baloo was saying and feeling.
Yeah, we had to do an awful lot of work together...
Trying to work out how the bear would act, what gestures he would use,
what type of acting, what expressions he would use.
How's he going to play this? And how's the boy going to play it too?
First we thought of things like a hand on the face...
You know, rubbing the chin.
"Gee, what can I say to this guy?"
Or... Things like that.
Wallace beery used to do that, and it was pretty effective.
Ollie suggested that the hand should be back here, rubbing the back of his neck.
We'd already used this rubbing-the-arm thing.
How about... pounding? That's pretty good.
I don't know. The best, though, the one that communicated the best to the audience, to me,
was one that started here and then pulled off and came around to the face...
But didn't stay on the face; It came down here to the chest.
I knew a guy in the army who used to scratch his chest all the time when he was thinking.
This way. And I... "Oh, maybe that's the best thing to do."
Where we goin', Baloo? Well, uh,
it's, uh, um...
Well, it's sort of new and, uh...
Oh, I don't care, as long as I'm with you.
Mowgli, uh, look, buddy, uh,
there's somethin' I gotta tell ya.
Tell me what, Baloo?
Gee whiz.
Now how did old baggie put it?
Um, uh, Mowgli?
Ha! You wouldn't marry a panther, would you?
Gee, I don't even know what you're talkin' about.
Mowgli, don't you realize that you're a human?
I'm not anymore, Baloo. I'm a bear, like you.
Little buddy, look. Listen to me. Come on, Baloo!
Now, Mowgli, stop it now. Now hold still.
I wanna tell you something. Now listen to me!
What's the matter, old papa bear?
Look, Mowgli, I been tryin' to tell you. I been tryin' all morning to tell you.
I've got to take you back to the man-village.
- The man-village! - Now look, kid. I can explain...
- But you said we were partners. - Now believe me, kid, I...
- You're just like old bagheera. - Now just a minute!
That's goin' too far!
There's always a problem. Now how we gonna get the boy back into the man-village...
Without Baloo and bagheera pushing him in?
Well, Walt had an idea to add a girl...
That came out of the man-village, a little girl about Mowgli’s age.
And Mowgli’s never seen a girl like this before.
He says, "wait a minute. I want a better look."
Forget about those. They ain't nothin' but trouble.
Just a minute. I've never seen one before.
I thought that was a terrible idea when I first heard it.
Here's this tacked-on ending. What can you do with it?
That's why we gave it to you to animate. I know, I know.
And I wrestled with it, and the more I wrestled with it,
the better I liked it.
And so finally, I managed to help this little girl...
Kind of innocently seduce Mowgli going back into the man-village.
I would have said "lure" him.
Mowgli. Come back. Come back!
Go on! Go on!
As it turned out, that meeting we had on Ollie's little girl...
Was the last meeting we ever had with Walt.
We didn't know how ill he was.
Two months later he was gone,
and he never did get to see the final picture.
When Walt died,
it left a big hole in all of our lives.
Uh,
he was a friend... A close friend in many ways,
and yet he always distanced himself from everybody else.
He was a genius. He lived his whole life...
In his own mind, in his own heart.
But he couldn't help but affect all the rest of us very deeply.
And even though he'd not been working with us closely...
For, oh, five, six, seven years,
it was still a devastating moment,
and, uh, the whole world changed as far as we were concerned.
We kept thinking back over those days when you'd work so hard...
All of us, Walt included...
Trying to capture something rare,
something new, something unique in the entertainment business.
Isn't it terrible to think that if jungle book had not been a success,
there would be no more Disney animation?
Executives were talking about phasing it out.
"Costs too much money. Anyway, there's nobody to take over.
You'd have to rebuild the whole team."
And then people went into the theaters to see jungle book.
They looked up on the screen, and they saw a bear named Baloo and a boy named Mowgli,
and they came to life, crowds flocked in,
and the whole cycle started over again.
? Look for the bare necessities? ooh!
? The simple bare necessities?
? forget about your worries and your strife?
? I mean the bare necessities
? are mother nature's recipes
? that bring the bare necessities of life
The unique friendship that Frank and Ollie had...
There'll never be another like that.
That was unique. The art that they came out with was unique and will never be repeated.
I don't think we'll ever see finer personality animation...
Than was done by Frank and Ollie.
But I think it's not a closed door. I think it's an open door to the future.
There's a verse that means a lot to me in proverbs.
It says, "as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."
And through this process of them constantly working with one another,
constantly rubbing against one another through the different films that they'd work on,
different problems,
I could still see that that was a process...
That was still going on when I was there with them.
When I first got there, they were still arguing about the way they would see something.
They were working on it. You could see them in the hallway.
They were constantly rubbing these ideas across one another's surface...
'Cause they knew that that was as a team of people.
shots of Cruella and the Baduns.
There was Ken Anderson's good experimental drawings. Oh, yeah.
Those are great. We'll xerox the...
Hold on a minute. I'll change the sprinkler here.
There. You got it. Don't trip over it.
I won't.
That was really funny.
***subtitles by gnl***