August 7 - Wilfred Jackson

Image courtesy waltdisney.org

On this day, in 1988, Wilfred Emmons Jackson passed away in Newport Beach, California. Born in Chicago, Illinois on January 24, 1906, Jaxon, as he came to be commonly referred to, had made his way to Los Angeles, California and the Otis Art Institute by 1925. As his artistic talents blossomed from a few years of instruction, he began hanging around a little studio on Hyperion Avenue. It wasn’t a good time to be trying to get a job with the Disney brothers. They’d just lost the rights to their popular rabbit character, half their staff and were struggling to keep their heads above all the red ink. Jaxon was willing to do the most menial of tasks for free, however, and stuck around. He would later quip that at some point someone just stuck a paycheck in his hand, making him the only Disney employee that was never actually hired. One of the first things he ever did with the company, however, would cement his place in Disney history forever.

Image courtesy findagrave.com

Hollywood was a quickly changing place in 1928. The Jazz Singer had hit people’s eyes and ears just a few months before and rung the requiem bell for silent pictures. Walt knew that animation wasn’t going to be any different. The problem was how to get the soundtrack to synch up with action happening on screen, something that is crucial to expressing emotions and invoking laughter in an animated film. The new kid on the block, Jaxon, came up with the solution. He devised a system where the ticks of a metronome could be notated on a musical score and the cel count sheet for a film, causing the drawings and the sound effects and score to be nearly perfectly synchronized. Think of it like a precursor to the modern click track. Disney began utilizing Jaxon’s system immediately, starting with Steamboat Willie. The studio was also able to keep their new secret weapon pretty much under wraps. Competing animation studios spent over a year trying to figure out how Disney was so much better at getting all the elements of their movies to line up that well. Once they did, Jaxon’s notation system swept through the entire industry, revolutionizing entertainment as it went.

Image copyright Disney

Jaxon’s innovation, along with his meticulous attention to detail, quickly propelled him into the role of Director at the studio. Over the next several years, he would direct more than 35 shorts. Some of them would star Mickey Mouse, like the first time Mickey appeared in color, 1935’s The Band Concert. A lot of them were entries in the Silly Symphony series, three of which won Academy Awards. Jaxon put a little gold statue on the studio’s mantle for The Tortoise and the Hare in 1934, The Country Cousin in 1936 and The Old Mill in 1937. That’s right. He won three times in a four year stretch. Something no other Disney director could match.

Image copyright Disney

With his successes in the Shorts Department piling up, it was natural that Jaxon would become a sequence director when the studio expanded into feature length films. Starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and ending with Lady and the Tramp in 1955, Jaxon directed parts of eleven classic Disney animated features. Some consider his direction of the Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria segment of 1940’s Fantasia to be his crowning achievement, but he was also responsible for all the animated (albeit seldom seen) parts of Song of the South. His amiable but stubborn adherence to doing things right also elevated Cinderella, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

Image courtesy flickr.com

In the mid Fifties, as the studio was getting heavily into television, Walt asked Jaxon to be one of his main go-to directors, especially of animated episodes, for Disneyland and Walt Disney Presents. He spent the remainder of the decade directing and producing (and once even appearing in) several episodes of the anthology show, as well as a one-off special in 1955 called Dateline: Disneyland.

Unfortunately, during this later period in his career, Jaxon’s health went began to decline and by 1961, after 33 years of inspiring everyone around to produce some of the best films in the industry, he was forced to retire. Retirement seemed to suit him, though, as he would live another 27 years, passing away in 1988. Eleven years later, in 1999, for all his lasting contributions to not only the company but the industry as a whole, Jaxon was officially declared a Disney Legend.