July 30 - Flowers and Trees

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On this day, in 1932, the Walt Disney Studio released its 29^th short in the Silly Symphonies series, Flowers and Trees, and the first film to be released in glorious three-color Technicolor. When moving pictures began flitting across screens in 1895, they lacked two things that we take for granted today: color and sound. A lot of hoopla surrounded the first time synchronized sound complimented  the images of The Jazz Singer in 1927, but most people would be hard pressed to tell you that the first movie in color debuted a decade earlier (or that the company that developed it was French).

In 1917, the Thomson Multimedia company developed a camera that could film in color. A prism was used to split the image onto two strips of simultaneously recording film, one image that passed through a red filter and the other through a green filter. During playback, both film strips would be projected onto the screen at the same time, from two different openings in the projector, using more filters and prisms to combine the image. The main problem with this method is that the guy running the projector had to be constantly adjusting the focus of not one but two films to keep the whole thing from looking like a blurry mess. Needless to say, there was only ever one movie produced with this color technique, The Gulf Between, and it was basically used to see if theaters would be interested in the new technology called Technicolor. Since it required highly skilled projectionists, the answer was no.

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Five years later, Thomson unveiled an improved technique. Again a prism split the image onto two strips of film through red and green filters but now the film was treated during the printing process, putting the color actually into the print itself. The filters and prism could be removed from the projector and no one needed a PhD to run the thing. Major problems still existed though. The red and green prints, instead of running on separate reels like before, were glued together and ran on one reel. The heat from the light in the projector caused the film to warp and new prints had to be constantly made to compensate. Only a handful of movies in the early to mid-Twenties were produced using technique number two.

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In 1928, Thompson finally got most of Technicolor’s problems fixed by introducing a third technique. Filming stuff stayed the same with the prisms and filters and two strips of film. But now the prints went through a dying process that put all the colors onto one strip of film, eliminating the need to glue two strips together. Starting with 1928’s The Viking (which was released over year after The Jazz Singer, making it seem like sound came first) Hollywood began to get into the color groove, releasing two dozen color movies over the next two years. The trend would probably have completely taken over at that point except for the one thing that could stop it dead in its tracks: the Great Depression. As money began to get tight everywhere in America, including Tinsel Town, color, which cost a lot more than plain old black and white, became a luxury studios could no longer afford.

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None of which stopped Thompson from tinkering with Technicolor. Just a few years after perfecting their two strip process, they developed a three strip process. in addition to the red and green filters, they added another strip of film that was recorded through a blue filter. The eye-popping color that the new technique produced was more saturated, more vibrant and just more of everything compared to what had come before. Unfortunately, because of everyone's money woes, Thompson couldn't get anyone to give it a whirl. Until, that is, one of their salesmen caught Walt Disney on a good day.

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Walt decided to give Technicolor 4.0 a try for two reasons. First, he was always interested in new technology and eager to see how it could be used to make better quality product. From sound to television, he didn't have to suffer too much convincing before giving in. The biggest reason this time around, though, was that he needed something to boost the Silly Symphonies. They simply weren't as popular as Mickey Mouse cartoons even though they were a fertile place to incubate new kinds of animation and storytelling. Maybe, just maybe, color would be the thing to push them over the edge. And Flowers and Trees seemed to be a perfect vehicle to test that theory.

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Work had already begun on Flowers and Trees in black and white. All of that was scrapped and the process began again in Technicolor. Because it was inherently more expensive to have color than not, and because of all the previous work that ended up on the trash heap, the short ran wildly over budget, threatening to ruin to studio (a refrain that was heard quite often when Walt was involved in something). But in the end, it was all worth it (as it usually was when Walt was involved in something). Flowers and Trees was both a commercial and critical success. The beautiful colors combined with the whimsical yet dramatic plot continued to wow audiences until the studio had made its money back plus a generous amount more. When Oscar time rolled around, Flowers and Trees would be honored with the very first Academy Award for Best Animated Short (and the first competitive Oscar for the studio). 

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The Technicolor experiment worked so well that every Silly Symphony from that point on was produced in color (Mickey cartoons were popular enough they didn't warrant color until 1935's The Band Concert). One aspect of the experiment that showed Walt was becoming a better businessman (entirely due to the fact that Roy handled the business end of everything, of course) is that when Disney agreed to use three-strip Technicolor, they sign an exclusive contract for its use for three years. When Flowers and Trees made every other color animation look dull by comparison, the other studios really didn't have any way to fix that until the end of 1935. They all had to make do with two-strip Technicolor or other, even more inferior processes. And having that competitive edge for three years is what gave the Walt Disney Studio the financial stability to try other experiments later on, like feature length animation.

July 8 - Ward Kimball

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On this day, in 2002, Ward Walrath Kimball passed away in Los Angeles, California. Born on March 4, 1914 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Ward was the son of a travelling salesman, which meant he spent a good deal of his childhood living with his grandparents. His first recognizable drawing as a child was a sketch of a steam locomotive, revealing that his love of trains was indeed a lifelong passion. After graduating from Covina High School in Covina, California, Ward enrolled at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts with the intention of becoming a magazine illustrator. Around the same time Ward saw one of the Walt Disney Studio’s shorts, The Three Little Pigs, in the theater (which awed him with its artistry) one of his teachers suggested he submit his work to Disney and become an animator. In March 1934, he applied for a job at the Burbank studio and a month later he was hired as an inbetweener.

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A brilliant draftsman, it didn’t take long for Ward to be promoted to assistant animator, working under the Legendary Ham Luske. He lent his talents to Silly Symphonies for the most part, earning credits on such classics as 1934’s The Wise Little Hen and 1935’s The Tortoise and the Hare. He did get to spend a little time working with the studio’s main breadwinner, though, as part of the team that produced the Mickey Mouse short Orphan’s Benefit. By 1936, Ward had more than proven his talent and was allowed to be called the prestigious title of Animator.

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As with all of the animators the studio employed in 1936, Ward was put to work on Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As someone who preferred to work on comedic characters rather than the more realistic portrayals of people, he worked for several months on a sequence involving the dwarfs eating (or trying to eat) soup. Don't remember that part from the movie? Maybe because it was supposed to come right after the hand washing bit, but was deemed to slow things down and got cut. It worked out for Ward anyways. His work was recognized for its brilliance and following Snow White he became a supervising animator, the position he would hold for the next 37 years as part of the elite group known as Walt's Nine Old Men.

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The list of characters Ward brought to life is impressive (as are the lists of all the Old Men). It started with Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio (he also designed the little conscience). He was then in charge of the Crows who sing When I See an Elephant Fly to Dumbo. He did the Bacchus sequences of Fantasia, Faline in Bambi and the sequence with the title song in it from The Three Caballeros. Next was most of the characters in Peter and the Wolf and Willy the Whale (who wanted to sing at the Met) in Make Mine Music. Melody Time brought Pecos Bill and the three birds (Donald, Jose, and the Aracuan) in Blame It on the Samba. Ward animated Ichabod Crane in his movie, all the mice plus Bruno and Lucifer for Cinderella, and a whole slew of characters for Alice in Wonderland: The White Rabbit, the Tweedles, Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Walrus and the Carpenter. His last feature film was Peter Pan where you can see his work in the Lost Boys, the Indian Chief and all three Darling Children (Wendy, John and Michael).

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After Peter Pan, Ward stopped doing feature work almost entirely and focused on award winning shorts. He was the co-director for Melody (the studio's first 3D animated film) and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (a 1954 Oscar winner).  He wrote the script for Eyes in Outer Space, a 1959 featurette that explained how weather predictions were made. Continuing in the space theme, he wrote and directed three episodes of the Disneyland television series on space exploration. Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond, all produced in the late Fifties, long before Kennedy's promise to get to the moon, were praised for both their scientific grounding (Wernher von Braun was a consultant) and the interest they generated in humans actually going to space. The Man and the Moon episode is also a rare opportunity to see Ward himself as served as its host.

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Ward continued working on various projects throughout the Sixties. He was one of the screenwriters for Babes in Toyland. He was in charge of animating the Pearly Band for Mary Poppins. He directed the short It's Tough to Be a Bird, winning another Academy Award in 1970. As the Seventies came around, he directed the animated parts of Bedknobs and Broomsticks and ended his career creating the series and directing 43 episodes of the syndicated television show The Mouse Factory. He officially retired from The Walt Disney Company in 1974, although he stuck around for a while to consult on various things. His last actual contribution to Disneyana was designing the World of Motion attraction for the opening of EPCOT Center.

As much as Ward was an incredible animator, writer and director, there are two other aspects of his life that must be mentioned. The first was alluded to earlier, his love of trains. This was a trait he shared with the boss, Walt, and the two of them cemented their friendship over greasy engines on shiny rails. Not only did Ward help Walt destroy his wife's flower beds building a miniature railroad in the backyard, the two would go on trips together to train exhibitions and conventions as far away as Chicago. His train mania led to a hosting gig for the 1992 season of the PBS show Tracks Ahead. The second is that Ward was an accomplished jazz trombonist. He formed a dixieland jazz group, The Firehouse Five Plus Two, and released 13 albums, toured the country for three decades and even appeared in a movie, Hit Parade of 1951. Ward remarked once that Walt didn't care about his second career as long as it didn't interfere with his animation work. One final note about Ward's accomplishments is that he is the only one of the Nine Old Men who produced a piece of animation outside of Disney. In 1968, he directed a two minute short criticizing Lyndon B. Johnson and America's involvement in the Vietnam War called Escalation.

In 1989, Ward was lauded along with the rest of the Nine Old Men when he was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees. Ward and his wife of 66 years, Betty, continued to live life and make occasional public appearances until the summer of 2002 when he contracted pneumonia and passed away at the age of 88. Three years later, he was honored again when Disneyland acquired a fifth engine for its railroad, an attraction Ward was instrumental in designing and implementing, and named it the Ward Kimball. 

March 4 - Zootopia

On this day, in 2016, Walt Disney Pictures released its 55th animated feature, Zootopia, to theaters. Zootopia started life as a Sixties themed spy film but with animals. And not just animals living in the wild or a cityscape, but animals who existed in an environment that they’d designed and built for themselves. Anthropomorphication (to coin a word) taken to the next level. As the story was developed, the writers discovered that the part that took place in the city was the most interesting, so the spy theme was dropped, the Sixties were changed to modern day and Zootopia became a police procedural, starring a fox and his bunny sidekick.  Things progressed until someone suggested it might be better to tell the whole thing from the bunny’s point of view. Everyone agreed (pretty much), scrapped most of what they had and forged ahead again, eventually landing on the blockbuster film that hit theaters.

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What emerged from all the changes was a highly entertaining (if thinly veiled, well, maybe not for a cartoon) allegory about modern life. Yes, Zootopia is a who-dunnit in the classic style (complete with one spy movie holdover: an unlikely supervillain manipulating everyone behind the scenes), but it’s also a tale about how we’re all different and how that can make the world a better place, if we can each get over our fears. One of my favorite parts of the film is the city itself, with all the different ecosystems representing the different neighborhoods that make up any city but ultimately combining into one big whole. I mean sure, you could remove the small rodent part of Zootopia (or the Little Italy part of New York or the Gold Coast in Chicago) but would it still be Zootopia then? The correct answer is: no. No it would not.

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Producing the movie also pushed the limits of animation technology way beyond anything Disney had done before. Take the example of hair. For Frozen, Elsa was animated with a few hundred thousand individual hairs on her head. Because of all the fur in Zootopia, that number had to be raised a little bit. Even though both Nick and Judy, our two brilliant protagonists, are wearing clothes (even when they visit the nudist colony, weirdos) they were animated with over 2.5 million individual hairs. Each. And that's only two of the cast of literally thousands (Oh, and if you're impressed with that many hairs, just know that one of the giraffes had over 9 million) . An entirely knew program was developed just to handle all the fur called iGroom. There are clearly a few movies since then that have declined to use that innovation, but I digress.

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Needless to say, the world went gaga for Zootopia. It grossed over a billion dollars worldwide (and was still only number four in box office for 2016). When the awards season came around it won the Golden Globe, the Critic's Choice Award, the Annie Award and the Oscar for Best Animated Movie beating out Moana and Finding Dory. Audiences and award voters weren't they only ones who found something to like about Zootopia: it has a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes with 294 reviews.

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If you haven't seen this now classic tale I suggest you (Judy) hopps to it, there are reportedly not one but two sequels under serious consideration. If both of those actually get produced, it could constitute the first theatrically released animated trilogy ever done by Walt Disney Pictures. A very specific first, but an important first none the less. One last bit of trivia I enjoyed while researching this post: Zootopia's title in China translates as Crazy Animal City. So in other words, it's no different from any other one.

February 26 - The Academy Awards

On this day, in 1942, Walt Disney received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the 14th Academy Awards ceremony. First presented in 1938, the Thalberg award is an honorary Oscar (even though it's not the traditional statue but instead a bust of its namesake) given to "creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production" (to be official about it). It's not awarded every year. Walt was only the fourth person to be honored with one but it wasn't, of course, the first time he'd left the ceremony with a statue.

The Walt Disney studio has a long history of impressing Academy voters with the films they've produced over the last 90+ years. Which, in my opinion, is how we get into a bit of a grey area when it comes to those golden statuettes. The answer to the trivia question "Who has received the most Academy Awards?" is, hands down, Walt Disney. His 26 wins in 59 nominations dwarfs anyone else's total by more than triple. But while he was the guy signing everyone's paychecks, how much of his work is represented in those statistics versus the work of the people cashing those paychecks? Would the studio have done such stellar pictures if Walt hadn't been cheerleading everyone on with a meticulous eye for detail and a bankroll to match? Most probably not. Could Walt have made such stellar pictures on his own? Definitely not. But it's a debate that's gone on as long as collaborative art has been made and will go on until the last director on earth says "That's a wrap": how much belongs to the ones who made it and how much to the one who paid it.

The first time the Walt Disney Studio earned itself an Oscar was for the Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees in 1932, which was also the first time that one was given for Best Animated Short. In fact, Disney went on to win Best Animated Short the first eight times it was given out. The last of the dozen times Walt won in that category happen posthumously in 1968 for Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. His other wins came as producer on Best Documentary (2 wins), Best Documentary Short (2 wins), and Best Short Subject (5 wins). He was also presented with 3 honorary Oscars for the creation of Mickey Mouse, Fantasia, and his most famous win, one big statue and seven little statues for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Eventually, Walt wasn't the only one in the studio winning awards. At first, it was just for music, like when Leigh Harline, Paul Smith and Ned Washington won Best Score and for Pinocchio and Best Song for "When You Wish Upon a Star" in 1940. Then, as Disney started making live action pictures (and was newly eligible for the whole gamut of categories), the wealth was really spread around (for instance, when Mary Poppins won five, Walt didn't get any of them). And the flow continues right up to today, with films produced by Disney garnering over a dozen nominations and bringing home four wins at the 91st ceremony just a couple days ago. It was a showing I'm sure would have put a sparkle in Walt's eye and had him saying "Not bad. Not quite up to me yet, but you'll get there."