July 7 - Ub Iwerks

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On this day, in 1971, Ubbe Ert Iwerks passed away in Burbank, California. Ub, as he usually went by, was born on March 24, 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of German immigrants. When he was eighteen, Ub went to work for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City. He met another young artist working there, Walt Disney, and the two became friends. When one of them began working for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company as an illustrator, the other soon followed (it’s unclear who went first). When Walt decided that he wanted to start his own animation company, Ub said Sign me up! And that’s how the Laugh-O-Gram Studio of Kansas City began. Two friends trying to make their way in the cutthroat film industry. It didn't work out. Neither of the talented young men were business minded and Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt. But our story doesn't end there.

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The only thing Walt was left with after the bankruptcy of his first studio was a short film that was a hybrid of live action and animation. He took that film with him out to California and convinced his brother, a financial wizard, to start a new studio. The Walt Disney Studio got a contract to produce more films like the one he had. They became known as the Alice Comedies and they were chiefly animated by Walt's old friend, Ub.

Ub followed Walt out to California and became one of the driving forces behind the success of the Walt Disney Studio. He was basically an animating machine, able to churn out quality work at incredible rates. The look and feel of early Disney animation should actually be referred to as the look and feel of Iwerks animation. As the Alice Comedies were winding down in 1927, Walt asked Ub to create a new character. He came up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and supposedly completely animated the first short, Poor Papa, himself. If you look at the bottom of most of the Oswald posters, you can see Ub's signature, which means he created the artwork for those as well. When the studio lost the rights to Oswald in 1928 to Universal, Ub was right in the mix helping to design the studio's next character, Mickey Mouse (who is admittedly just Oswald with round ears instead of long ones and a different tail).

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Ub was responsible for animating most of the first Mickey Mouse shorts as a lot of the Disney staff had been hired away by Universal. Steamboat Willie is almost entirely his work. The same can be said of the early Silly Symphony series as well. Ub did the animation, backgrounds and layouts for The Skeleton Dance. Ub was pouring his heart and soul into incredible characters and animated series, but wasn't feeling the love from the man who was getting all the credit, Walt Disney. By 1930, the relationship between the two friends had become completely broken and Ub walked away from the Disney Studio to start his own.

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The Iwerks Studio received financial backing from investors who had a suspicion that all of Disney's success was due to the work of one guy, Ub. Disney animation did suffer briefly after Ub's departure, but only briefly. Walt hired new, talented people, recovered from the loss of his friend and carried on to bigger and better things. The Iwerks Studio had a contract with MGM and introduced new characters to the genre like Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, but it never quite attained commercial success. The are two claims to fame the studio could make. First, Ub invented a version of a multiplane camera in 1933, famously using parts from an old Chevrolet to do it. This camera shouldn't be confused with the better version that was invented a couple of years later at the Disney studio, but it was definitely an inspiration for that one.  Secondly, the Iwerks Studio was the first place to hire a young man named Chuck Jones, but it had folded long before that claim would mean anything. By 1936, Ub's investors had pulled out of the studio and it faded into history.

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Following the collapse of his studio, Ub was contracted by Leon Schlesinger to animate four Looney Tunes shorts, two of which he also directed. He then spent a few years under contract with Columbia Pictures' animation unit, Screen Gems, directing several of their Color Rhapsodies series. By 1940, Ub and Walt had repaired their friendship enough that Ub would return to work full time at the Walt Disney Studio.

Ub's second career with Disney was mostly involved with the technical side of things. He was kind of put into a department by himself where he worked on creating new visual effects for animation. Ub is credited with coming up with a new process, called the multi-head optical printer, for combining live action with animation that was used in Song of the South. He would win an Academy Award for later improving that process and nab another one for perfecting color traveling matte technology. He also created the xerography process of transferring animator's drawings onto acetate cels that was first used on One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961. That process is basically what brought production costs on animation down enough that Disney continued producing it. As the Sixties progressed, Ub moved into doing effects work with WED Enterprises, the precursor to Walt Disney Imagineering, putting his influence on many of the theme park attractions created during that decade including it's a small world and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

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While Ub remains a name that the average citizen might not recognize, he has become revered by those who know and was given several accolades within the entertainment industry. In 1963, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his effects work on a non-Disney project, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. When the Annie Awards were created in 1972, the balloted award for Technical Achievement was named after him. He was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees in 1989 (he was the only honoree that year who hadn't been one of Walt's Nine Old Men). And in 1999, there was a documentary and accompanying book released about his life and work, The Hand Behind the Mouse. 

For the last few years of his life, Ub was involved with the development of shows and attractions for the Florida Project like The Hall of Presidents. He wouldn't live to see Walt Disney World open however. On July 17, 1971, he suffered a fatal heart attack in Burbank, California. He was 70.