More Than Moving Drawings
On the effects of early Disney.
Welcome! Thanks for joining us. It’s another Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and our topic this time is Disney.
Sometimes, a certain idea about older hand-drawn animation floats around. As the thinking goes: these films are about drawings that come to life.
The stars of Snow White, or even of anime from the ‘80s, were the key animators. Artists like the Nine Old Men put motion into pencil sketches, and it defined the films. It’s like magic — even CG animation just can’t compete.
That’s the idea, at least. Plenty of people feel this way, and it shows up in several guidebooks. The Animator’s Survival Kit is a default text for hand-drawn animation, and nearly all of its focus goes to the mechanics of character movement.1
When you look closer at the classics, though, a different theme emerges. Visually, many of them have other things happening on screen — beyond traditional character animation, or even backgrounds. And these other things often provide the magic of a scene, of a whole film.
Last week, we covered the aesthetics of Rintaro, the anime great. His movies lean on effects — colored lights, reflections, shadows, water ripples and the rest. This extra visual information tends to matter as much as the characters’ movement. Or take The Secret of NIMH and Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Running Man (1987), two films whose characters are at times overwhelmed by effects.
The effects in question went beyond pencil drawings. You can’t make NIMH or a Rintaro movie without multiple-exposure techniques like backlighting, for example — not to mention practical trickery like NIMH’s Xeroxed live footage.
The early Disney features are full of other things, too.2 Although there’s no taking away from the importance of their character animation, productions like Snow White and Pinocchio were also special-effects films. Their excitement and believability regularly came down to “secondary” visuals.
Key animators had clout at Disney back in the day. Secondary stuff was done by artists less known in the studio. The impact of their work was clear, though. Like Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wrote, “[E]veryone saw that amazing scenes were appearing on the screen.”3
Look past character animation, backgrounds, opaquing and even ink outlines, and you realize that they don’t create the feel of an early Disney feature by themselves. Reduced to the fundamentals, the films would be sort of barren. In The Illusion of Life, Thomas and Johnston discussed the strong bones of a Monstro scene in Pinocchio — but admitted that bones weren’t enough.
As they wrote:
… something more is needed. It does not have that rich look of a first-class illustration. Is there any way to get a watery effect here? After all, Pinocchio is way down there [in the ocean] and ought to look different. And what about Monstro? How can we make him look huge? … One continuous tone over his entire bulk will never give the illusion of volume. What will take it out of the thin, flat world of line drawing, and get it into the depth and dimension of the shaded drawing and the painting?
These were obsessions of Walt Disney’s on the features. Even the treatment of color had to evolve. During Snow White, he told his team, “We are not going after the comic supplements color. We have to strive for a certain depth and realism. … Inside the [dwarfs’] house I see a very rich effect gotten by throwing the distance in shadows and subduing a lot of the background colors.”4
Reaching that kind of depth wasn’t easy, and it always took more than one method. Here are Thomas and Johnston on the Monstro section:
To get the watery effect, a panel of glass was ground with the same type of ripple found in low-grade window glass. When this panel was placed over the cels under the camera and pulled slowly through the scene, the images wiggled just as objects do when reflected in a lake or especially when seen under water.
Meanwhile, the artwork for Monstro was done on “frosted cels,” akin to the ones Frédéric Back later used for Crac (1981). Typical cels, smooth and transparent, were harder to texture. The new material was rough enough to accept “pencil, pastel, chalk or crayon, with smear or smudge or careful shading,” wrote Thomas and Johnston. The result was “really more of a textured painting” than a drawing.
Monstro’s scenes demanded these effects and more — including the water, which old Disney films treated as an art in itself. Betty Kimball of the ink-and-paint division recalled creating “splashes by stippling on the top [of the cel] to get foam” in the early movies. And Pinocchio’s own water was almost like collage.
“Rather than painting in the blue of the ocean,” wrote historian Mindy Johnson, “the outlines of the waves were inked onto cels; then sheets of blue paper were cut out to match the shape of each wave. Ground and blended lead from blue and black mechanical pencils was painstakingly applied to the blue paper to give each wave the desired detail.”
Similar sleight of hand went into the characters. The rounded, solid look of Pinocchio’s cast came from airbrushing, drybrushing and grease pencils — the last one an invention by Mary Weiser of Disney’s paint lab.5 Artists in the ink-and-paint department applied these effects to the characters frame by frame.
The technique had already made Snow White. Back then, flat-painted characters on cels were “beginning to look like display cardboards,” wrote Thomas and Johnston. The women of the ink-and-paint crew used those extra tools to add definition to the characters — and, in the process, to animate a good deal of what hit the screen.
For example, Snow White’s red cheeks were achieved with a “transparent stain solution” devised by the paint team, according to Mindy Johnson. The artists put it on the cels — alongside several other effects. Thomas and Johnston again:
Looking at a cel of Snow White, some of the women felt that the black hair looked unnatural and harsh, so they tried adding a wisp of drybrush in a lighter gray to soften the edge of her hair. It helped immensely, so they proceeded to add it to every cel all through the picture, with no indications from the animators, and nothing to guide them but their own sense of what looked right. This had to be done on top of the cels, and the only way to be sure the effect was working from one to the next was by flipping the whole sheet of celluloid, heavy with paint. It was tiring and risked cracking the paint, but there was no other way.
With Fantasia (1940), Disney feature animation became painted almost as much as it was drawn. Thomas and Johnston cited the impossibly complex fish sequence, for instance, in which the ink-and-paint artists “put the transparent paint on the fins, the drybrush on the tips of the tails, the sparkles in the water, the highlights on the bubbles.”
Building Fantasia required that work and the ingenuity of the camera team. Overlapping exposures of the film stock were normal in the early features. A single frame might need 10 or more passes to combine layers or add light, or to soften edges. Some of the pastel-fairy shots in Fantasia were exposed 20 times.
Among Disney’s basic multiple-exposure effects were shadows. The painters worked in black, and the camera operator filmed the scene, rolled it back and shot the second layer. “The shadow would be light when it was shot at thirty percent exposure or very dark when shot at seventy percent,” noted Thomas and Johnston. It was a big deal for Snow White: the “shadows that the dwarfs cast on the walls contained rich, subtle colors that were not on anyone’s palette.”
For Fantasia, camera wizardry went way beyond simple shadows. It even went beyond the use of live footage of rain, which the studio had intermingled with its animated rain effects in Snow White. Walt Disney wanted to put images on screen that were unknown to film.
In the 2010s, with the publication of the lost notebook of Herman Schultheis, more of Fantasia’s processes were revealed. He was a special-effects ace at Disney — and he photographed and documented its secrets.
Among other things, Schultheis covered the use of endless tiny, reflective metal shavings to create points of light in Fantasia’s pastel-fairy sequence. These were combined with the artwork via double exposure.6 Even more complicated was the ice fairies’ dance. This is John Canemaker’s summary of the Schultheis notes:
… the fairies’ snowflake skirts presented problems for the animators. It would prove arduous (in terms of both time and money) to retain both the lacelike detail and the rigid shape of snowflakes moving in perspective. …
To create this scene, Leonard Pickley, an inventive fellow in the Special Effects Department, started by suggesting that the Ink and Paint Department trace scientific diagrams of real snowflakes onto a material slightly heavier than regular cels and paint them in translucent white. Once cut out, each of the dozen or so snowflakes was secured atop revolving spools attached to small steel rails, like those used for Lionel toy trains. Black velvet covered the mechanics of the setup, and the three-dimensional snowflake models were hand-animated as a camera recorded their frame-by-frame progress down the hidden tracks.
The team then transferred at least some of the stars to cels through a chemical process. And the scene’s pieces came together into a whole image through photography, including multiple exposures.
More impressive still were Fantasia’s ghosts in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence. Here, traditional character animation often gave way to unbridled movie magic.
Some of the ghosts appeared on “wash-off relief cels.” These were alchemical things that easily caught fire. Covered in a gelatin that (through an exposure process) hardened into the shape of an animator’s sketches, they allowed the team to transfer pencil and even charcoal artwork from paper to plastic.
Other ghosts, like the ones that rise from the earth, involved trick photography. Canemaker again:
… some of the drawings of the rising images were attached to a large circular drum and revolved as a camera shot a tin mirror reflection of their distorted likenesses. But some of the flying images were drawn on a single horizontal sheet of black paper and moved incrementally as a frame-by-frame movie camera captured their images in a distorted tin mirror.
For technical reasons, the camera crew had to expose each frame of the tin-mirror ghosts for three minutes. Finally, the images were brought together with the rest of the artwork — possibly through multiple exposures, wash-off relief cels or both — and a haunting scene came to life.
Back then, the Disney team didn’t do traditional animation for purists. It was never the idea. These weren’t just special-effects films in the vein of Karel Zeman, but that was a key element.
Although the animators provided a skeleton, it wasn’t enough for Walt Disney. His aim from Snow White through Bambi was a sort of illustrative realism. It took an army, and a huge amount of money, to make that happen.
By the early ‘70s, though, much of this stuff was fading. The key animators had control, and their movies preferenced key animation. Films from the era can have a certain barrenness; even the double-exposed shadows vanished. Thomas and Johnston admitted, for one, that the switch to Xerography and its “heavy, black line put us right back into the 1920s, before the refinements of inking had begun.”
The team and its budgets were shrinking. Old gadgets were tossed out, discoveries forgotten. Don Bluth, a trainee in the ‘70s, witnessed the disappearance of knowledge firsthand. He once said:
I remember asking Frank Thomas how they made the water in Fantasia so clear and real. He rolled his eyes and said, “You know, no one ever wrote that down. I don’t remember. I think it had something to do with lacquer we used to make the cel paint transparent.” I was just astounded. I assumed that because Disney had been pioneering animation for almost half a century that someone was keeping track. And so there were many other questions that I asked and no one remembered.7
It led to Bluth’s garage experiments, and eventually to NIMH, itself a kind of special-effects film. He was desperate to save what was being lost.
Fortunately, he wasn’t the only one. In the late years of the Nine Old Men, Thomas and Johnston managed to research and catalog lots of the classic techniques in The Illusion of Life, published in 1981. More recently, The Lost Notebook and Ink & Paint have added to the canon. (In fact, those three books were our main sources today.)
Together, they show that Disney’s early classics were much stranger than we tend to think — and that far more artists mattered to them than tend to get credit.
The books also show that “traditional” animation is a slippery concept. You can’t create a Snow White, a NIMH or something like a Rintaro film only with drawings. These teams were essentially hacking images into existence, however they could, with whatever means were available. Much of what we see was makeshift. That’s traditional animation, too.
Writing about the dedicated special-effects division inside early Disney, Thomas and Johnston explained that the artists “never knew what they would be doing next or how it might relate either to their training or the last job they had just completed.” The authors continued:
They might be asked to find a way to photograph an amoeba, or build a whole new camera, or a piece of furniture, design a building, or string beads on black threads to represent stars in the firmament. … As one employee said [about the resulting scenes], “You can’t believe how many people it takes to do something like this.”
Until next time!
Michael Barrier wrote about the focus of The Animator’s Survival Kit, and the era when the Nine Old Men dominated, in this archived review.
Shout out to researcher Daniel Aguirre Hansell for emailing us about The Lost Notebook a few years ago, and starting the series of events that ultimately led to this piece.
From The Illusion of Life, cited throughout.
From Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation, also used a lot.
For details on Weiser and these techniques, see this archived post by Hans Perk, The Queens of Animation and the foregoing sources.
Details from The Lost Notebook: Herman Schultheis & the Secrets of Walt Disney’s Movie Magic, heavily cited in the last leg of the article. As a note, this book was a reference for that recent Gorillaz video.
From On Animation: The Director’s Perspective (Volume 2).
Craft! My favorite for story and heart is Pinocchio. The Monstro rescue and subsequent race to the shore is one of the most exciting animated scenes, coupled with its score, that I have ever seen.
The ingenuity, the genius - and no one cares!! *THIS* is the kind of stuff that needs to be preserved, this knowledge that they used steel rails for snow flakes and tin-mirror imagery for ghosts...incredible, simply incredible!