June 10 - Becky Fallberg

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On this day, in 1923, Becky Dorner was born in Los Angeles, California. Her early years were spent in the Elysian Valley area, but in 1936, her parents moved the family into a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood at 3021 Angus Street. It was a move that shaped the rest of Becky’s life. Since the country was in the middle of the Great Depression, the Dorners rented out their extra rooms to artists who worked at the nearby Walt Disney Studio. Having spent her nights and weekends surrounded by talented animators (who were in the heady midst of creating their first animated feature no less), Becky naturally wanted to become part of the excitement of Disney herself. She graduated from John Marshall High School and immediately enrolled at Los Angeles City College as an art student. One year later, in 1942, she was hired as one of the studio’s telephone operators. Within months, she’d been moved into the Ink and Paint Department, where she toiled away on military training films and propaganda shorts like Victory Through Air Power for the war effort.

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Becky’s first stint with Ink and Paint lasted less than a year. By early 1943, she’d become part of the Animation Department as an assistant to animation supervisor Johnny Bond. Her main tasks were to copy drawings that needed to be sent to the Color Model department and help Jonny decide which animators were going to draw which scenes. It was during this period that the Dorner’s choice of boarders became even more personal for Becky. In 1945, she married one of them, Carl Fallberg, who was a story man with Disney. Carl would eventually leave the studio in the early Fifties to write Disney comics at Western Publishing and freelance for Hanna-Barbara and Warner Brothers, but Becky would remain with the company for the remainder of her professional career.

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In 1947, Becky transitioned into the Layout Department as a blue sketch artist. For the next three years, her job was to chart character movements across background art, assisting the layout artists in framing animated scenes. She returned to the Ink and Paint Department in 1950, as a paint matcher, ensuring each new batch of paint was properly mixed. From there she was promoted to the position of Final Checker, where it was her responsibility to make sure each animation cel was properly drawn and colored before sending it to the Camera Department. In the early Sixties, when Disney developed its Xerography process of photocopying animator’s drawings onto cels rather than hand inking them, Becky moved into the Xerox Camera Department.

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In the early Seventies, Becky became part of the Educational Films Department where she was one of two people who handled all of the Ink and Paint requirements for the unit. In 1975, having worked on every Disney feature since Saludos Amigos, Becky was put in charge of the entire Ink and Paint Department, a position she would hold until 1986, when the company began to transition to computer based coloring of its animation and she retired. For her nearly 45 year career, spanning 25 features and countless shorts, Becky was declared an official Disney Legend in 2000. Carl died in 1996 and Becky spent her remaining years supporting the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and volunteering as a docent at the historic Gamble House in Pasadena. On October 9, 2007, she passed away from complications due to lymphocytic leukemia. She was 84.

January 25 - 101 Dalmatians

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On this day, in 1961, Walt Disney Productions released its 17th animated feature, One Hundred and One Dalmatians. When Walt read the book of the same name by Dodie Smith in 1957, he immediately bought the rights to it. He turned the book over to Bill Peet, a prominent member of the Story Department, to turn it into a script. Dalmatians thus became the first Disney animated movie to be written entirely by one person. And, unlike Mary Poppins, released a few years later, when Bill showed Dodie the revisions he'd made to her story and the concept drawings for the characters, she loved them and was enthusiastic about seeing the finished product.

One of the main obstacles to making Dalmatians was the rising costs of producing animation in general. The studio's 16th film, Sleeping Beauty, was only moderately successful in financial terms and Walt had actually held discussions with his team during its production about closing down the Animation Department entirely, lamenting over the expense. Luckily, an old friend of the company stepped forward to save the day: Ub Iwerks. Ub had been toiling away since his return to Disney in 1940, working on all sorts of special effects projects. One of the processes he developed was a way to use Xerox's technology to transfer an animator's drawings onto the acetate cels actually used for filming, eliminating the need for hand inking. Xerography, as it is called, had first been used to create the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty. When Ken Anderson, Dalmatians' art director, asked Walt about more extensive use of the process, Walt reportedly said "you can fool around all you want." So he did.

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The problem with Xerography was not that it could basically only handle transferring black lines, but that those lines were kind of rough. The early version of the process just didn't have the smoothness of traditional hand inking. To combat this, Ken helped create an art style for the picture that resembled more of the funny pages in the newspaper than an oil painting. He even had the background artwork done using Xerography, so the style was consistent throughout the entire movie. Walt initially hated the look of the film, but eventually came around to it. Why? Perhaps because it's estimated that by using this process, Dalmatians would end up costing about half what it would have using hand inked cels. So while the Ink and Paint Department may have lost a significant amount of work, the Animation Department as a whole was saved from oblivion.

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One Hundred and One Dalmatians was well received when it was released. Several critics hailed it as the best feature since the original, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, although that, in my opinion, was going a bit too far. They might not have been so rapturous about it if they hadn't been turned off by the angular look of Sleeping Beauty two years earlier. Most modern critics tend to give it a rating somewhere in the B+ range, which is exactly where I would put it. I can't really say if I enjoyed the live action version in the Nineties more or not. They're both entertaining, mainly because of the unabashed evilness of Cruella de Ville. Your final tidbit of Dalmatian information: the television commercial for Kanine Krunchies that the young pups go gaga for is sung by Lucille Bliss, who also voiced Anastasia for Cinderella. Now you'll never be able to think of Dalmatian cereal again without also hearing Sing Sweet Nightingale sung really off key. You're welcome.