Who Cares About the Disney Method?
Plus: animation news.
Welcome! Glad you could join us. It’s a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this is the slate:
1) The fall and rise of Disney’s animation style.
2) The newsbits of the week.
Now, let’s get going!
1 – A living tradition
The world shifted with Snow White. It was 1937, almost nine decades ago. The Disney team had honed itself on short films — hundreds of them. That practice and experimentation finally led to this feature.
And it was a feature unlike any before. The studio crafted a storybook world full of living animated characters, each with their own identity. It was a spectacle, a special effects movie, a musical. It was funny, emotional — and frightening.
“Critics continue to bewail the scary atmosphere of parts of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the press reported soon after the premiere, “and today Walt Disney took time out to explain the picture is intended for adults, not for small children.”1
The film held up to adult eyes — even to the eyes of the modernists, in some cases.2 Reviews were glowing; the public loved it. Disney had a hit. Although it wasn’t the first animated classic, or even the first animated feature, it was something powerful. Animation had advanced.
No one element made Snow White: it was a team effort. Still, it’s hard to ignore the animation technique that lent believability to these characters and their feelings. Walt Disney and his team had developed this technique since the ‘20s — aiming to make drawings that weren’t drawings, but animated personalities.
It was a set of tools. Some later got famous as the “12 principles of animation,” but they weren’t all — there were a thousand little things involved. See the reference footage of live actors, at times traced outright. See the borrowings from vaudeville and stage musicals. See the focus on rounded edges (“balls, ovals, eggs and pear shapes,” per the book Cartoon Modern), and on realism and old-school cartooning over modernist approaches to figure.
Snow White showed how well this mix of ideas could work. Animators like Art Babbitt, Bill Tytla and Milt Kahl brought these characters to life. Yet it was an ultra-specific mix of ideas, and one somewhat resistant to change.
We wrote last year about the breakaway from Disney animation. It was an eruption in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Disney’s style had been the standard for animators around the world — but, now, many wanted something new.
A lot happened after Snow White. The studio’s golden age ended with the Disney strike of 1941, and it struggled to match Snow White or Pinocchio again. There was brain drain: Art Babbitt left, as did much of the young talent. And Walt Disney himself became a source of controversy: a patrician capitalist, a supporter of the Red Scare, a namer of names and a producer stuck in the rut of his ways.
In 1947, one paper noted Disney’s growing “reputation … as an arch-reactionary.”3
Meanwhile, ex-Disney rebels formed UPA and cut another path for cartoons. Audiences welcomed it, as did critics. In 1952, the New York Times Magazine stated that Disney “reproduce[d] nature in life-like figures, shadows, costuming and such, [but] the UPA people are unhampered by any urge toward the literal.”
Other writers praised UPA’s “unconstrained style, emphasizing the flatness and artificiality of the medium,” and its discovery that “the less realistic a movement is, the more creditable it becomes optically.” Unlike Disney, the studio embraced the fact that its characters were drawings, and moved them accordingly. It pulled from modernist art and drew shapes beyond the round ones.4
Disney’s style of animation still made money — see Cinderella (1950) or Peter Pan (1953) — but it’d become passé. That was especially true in Europe. A French critic, Chris Marker, published these vicious words in 1954:
It is entirely true that Disney represented technical perfection until recent years. And it would be absurd — in the name of his overwhelming bad taste, his megalomania or methods of production that have only distant ties to enlightened democracy — to deny the type of genius he put into his work. … Everything has a cost. This victory over technology has been bought by the deadlock of the cartoon, forcibly bound, in contempt of its roots, to childish imagery; by a “rounded” style of illustration that has imposed itself even on those who want to reject its spirit ([Paul] Grimault, alas); by the submission of this imagery to the short moral, to sadism with a clear conscience (the torture of the wolf by the pigs), to crude anthropomorphism; and, finally, by a sinking of all true fantasy and poetry into the limits of gravity and verisimilitude.5
To Marker, UPA represented the opposite. He treated these artists as revivers of the medium — “an avant-garde team, politically and artistically.” He was stunned by their Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) and Madeline (1952). “UPA now has all the powers: that of giving life and credibility, psychology and substance to a drawing, and that of taking a visual system and converting it into movement,” he wrote. There were no limits anymore.
Not everyone was as harsh as Marker, but a lot of critics and artists shared his feelings. Modernist animation spread worldwide in the mid-century, much as Disney’s once had. It swept America, Britain, France, Japan, Cuba, Canada, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia. Disney itself adapted, in fits and starts.
Even so, the studio never fully dropped the technique of classic character animation — the one descended from Snow White. It was old-fashioned, but so were most of the animators. The modern way spoke only to a few of them. To the rest, the Disney method was real animation, the medium’s true “language,” and rival styles were ultimately hollow.
“It may be that certain designs simply should be left in their static form ... Animation has its own language,” argued Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston of the Nine Old Men, “and it is preferable to develop its own elements rather than try to force it to duplicate or augment another art form.”6
By the end of the ‘60s, Walt Disney was dead, and his studio was smaller than it used to be. Many Snow White veterans had gone elsewhere (Art Babbitt) or passed away (Bill Tytla). Survivors at the company like Milt Kahl were aging.
And the old animation technique was at risk of vanishing.
By then, UPA’s revolution was an establishment. It was normalized, even co-opted. Tons of animators still believed in its dream of free creativity — especially in countries like the USSR, where the new way bloomed late. Another sign of life was Yellow Submarine (1968), directed by an ex-UPA artist. But there were the endless TV cartoons, too, that bent UPA’s ideas more toward cost-saving than artistry.
The problems with the old approach were clear, but the new one had its own. It could be rote as well — one commentator noticed “a ‘phoney’ tinge” creeping into this stuff by the late ‘50s. John Hubley, a leading UPA artist, said this around 1958:
There is a tendency toward cliches of design ... even in the so-called modern style. (The large profile nose, hair line, arms and legs, black dot eyes, etc.) But more disturbing are the cliches of action (stylized flutter-lip action — sandpiper-like leg motion for the walks and runs, multiple image jitters for fright, and many others.) The trend toward more rapid timing of actions and reactions is reducing the human characteristics portrayed in the animated image.7
UPA had buried the Disney technique. The modern style, flaws and all, was the new default. And it seemed more and more that Disney’s ideas might not just be replaced, but lost. They were out of favor, barely formalized, impractical and mastered by few.
It took a while for the Disney vets to realize it. “We didn’t get frightened about the future until around 1970,” said Eric Larson, one of the Nine Old Men. “Even after Walt died (in 1966), it didn’t seem to dawn on us that the same people couldn’t keep working forever.”8
So, they began to train replacements. One was Don Bluth, who joined in the early ‘70s. The teaching of Disney’s methods was still rough back then, as he remembered:
When I went to work at Disney, the training program was simply this: they put you into a room, they gave you paper and pencils and they said, “Okay, do a personal test; we’ll come back and talk to you in two weeks.” And if later you didn’t ask any questions, you got no instructions.
My friends at Disney and I figured that at some point Ron Miller [president of Walt Disney Productions] was going to come to the young animators and say, “There are no more Disney veteran animators here, so take it, guys; the studio is yours, run with the ball,” and we wouldn’t know what to do.9
For the old Disney talent, and a select group of young learners, the ‘70s were a race to save what could be saved. A degree of existential panic was in the air.
As one of those learners said in 1973:
Many of the old great animators from the marvelous Disney development fear that they and their highly developed artistry and craft are in danger of dying out, never to be replaced by the younger “stylists,” who tend, in their view, to go for “impact” while losing the traditional knowledge and skills of the Golden Age of animation.10
The speaker there was Richard Williams, long before Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). As a boy, he’d been wowed by Snow White — but, in the ‘50s, he’d joined UPA and become one of the “rebels against the traditional approach.”
Yet something snapped in Williams during the ‘60s. It affected the studio he ran in London, and the whole animation world. “Yellow Submarine convinced us that we wanted to be finished with the kind of animation based on graphic tricks,” he said. “The Jungle Book … was a revelation. … [W]e wanted to go back to school, to Grade One, to learn how to make a character live and walk and talk convincingly.”
Williams rebelled against the rebellion. Some of his peers were appalled, but the old animators loved it — including the Snow White people. Even the harsh and uncompromising Milt Kahl was a fan.11
The Williams studio doubled as a school for its team in the ‘70s. Disney animators came through regularly — giving talks, animation reviews. Among them were people like Art Babbitt, who’d long since left Disney and adapted to the UPA era. His lectures for the Williams crew were unbeatable.
Animator Tony White was at the studio then, and he told us last year about the experience. It shaped even Williams’ book The Animator’s Survival Kit. “That is, I would say, 85% his notes taken from the Art Babbitt lectures,” White said. “And then Dick picked up things from the other Disney animators when he traveled over there.”
The passing-down of knowledge continued in America, too. Disney’s training program was joined by the opening of CalArts in 1970. Old Disney animators taught there, even as they worked with their new, younger team back at the studio.
That process wasn’t smooth. Don Bluth and his friends had to compensate for the gaps in their education — making a film in his garage as a learning project on their own time. Meanwhile, as CalArts graduates filtered into Disney, they battled with Bluth and the studio’s conservatism.
The CalArts group included people like Brad Bird, who had a close relationship with Milt Kahl. Others were John Musker (The Little Mermaid), Glen Keane and Tim Burton — and John Lasseter, who was described by one Disney legend as “a good example of the talent we’re looking for ... [who] shows every indication of blossoming here at our studios.”12
Before long, the tensions inside Disney ripped it apart. Bluth and his garage team quit in 1979 and went independent. Many of the CalArts people, among them Bird and Lasseter, were gone by the early ‘80s. As Bird said:
I was fired around halfway through The Fox and the Hound, because I was very vocal about the lack of quality. In code, they sort of said to me “you either shut up or you leave,” and I said, “OK, I’m going, because I’m not going to shut up about the fact that the very stuff that your guys trained me to look for is completely missing from these films.”
Bird kept the lessons, though. Everyone did, whether they left Disney or stayed. Those lessons helped to shape the next 40-plus years of American animation — The Secret of NIMH (1982), The Iron Giant (1999) and the Disney renaissance.
And the rise of CG films in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Lasseter, decades before he fell into disgrace, was one of the main artists who fought for classic character animation in CGI. Realism and technology weren’t enough, he argued. You need more than “an object [that] looks like a character” — it has to move like one, and feel believable.
“The tools needed for creating successful character animation with a computer are not just software tools but an understanding of the fundamental principles of animation,” he wrote in 1994, “such as timing, staging, anticipation, follow-through, squash and stretch, overlapping action, slow in and slow out and so forth.”13
None of those concepts were unique to him. They came from the 12 principles of animation, which had been formalized by then. In fact, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston had published them in The Illusion of Life (1981), one of the two most influential tomes of the old method — the other being Richard Williams’ book.
All of this is a condensed account of history. The spread of Disney animation and the mid-century rebellion is a topic for a book. Both schools sparred and influenced each other around the world — and they weren’t the only schools in the mix. Even the Disney renaissance films involved more than the lineage of Snow White.
That said, the lineage was important. Disney’s animators had found something real in the early years — not the only method, but a valid one. It showed that drawn characters could live. It showed that animation could make viewers feel. And it gave wings to Don Bluth’s movies, and The Incredibles and Toy Story, and Lilo & Stitch and Zootopia, and European films like Klaus and The Triplets of Belleville.
The method became unfashionable once — and it was almost lost, and it evolved by borrowing from UPA — but it survived. It speaks to people even now.
This weekend, Disney’s Snow White remake is underperforming. Reviews are poor; the box office isn’t great. And a key sticking point is its animation. Its CG characters — the dwarfs, animals and more — don’t live up to Disney’s own technique. They’re both too realistic and too unbelievable: they aren’t credible characters.
The good news is that a solution to these problems lies in Disney’s own history — in the film it just tried to remake.
The Disney method isn’t always cool, and it definitely isn’t the sole correct approach. But, for around a hundred years, it’s worked. Done well, it still grabs people and gets them involved. The original Snow White held up under scrutiny in 1937 — and it does now.
2 – Newsbits
We lost David Steven Cohen (66), head writer of Courage the Cowardly Dog.
If you’ve never seen the Japanese film Princess Arete, you might be in luck. It’s currently free on YouTube (officially) in many countries.
Speaking of which: the director of Princess Arete, Sunao Katabuchi, dropped a stunning pilot trailer for his next film in Japan.
A sad saga in American animation, the inexplicable shelving of Coyote vs. Acme by Warner, might have a happy ending. Ketchup Entertainment is trying to secure a deal to distribute it.
Check out Stolen Melody (2022), recently uploaded to YouTube. It’s a stop-motion short from Russia about gangsters, jazz, opera and resisting authority. Not easy to define, but director Yura Boguslavsky and his team did great work here.
Also in Russia, Suzdalfest is underway. A special prize went to Bulgakov, the latest from Stanislav Sokolov (Hoffmaniada). Some parts of the event have been contentious: the firebrand Konstantin Bronzit gave a scathing on-stage review of a few projects, and viewers weren’t pleased with the propaganda bent of the opening short.
In Japan, Mamoru Oshii has an idea for a third Ghost in the Shell movie. The problem: the second one, Innocence, is apparently still in the red after 21 years. Production I.G is open to a sequel, but only once Innocence makes its money back.
The Latvian film Flow has earned more than $36 million at the box office.
In Spain, the Quirino Awards nominees were revealed. Included are two of our favorite films from 2024: Adiós (with one nomination) and The Girl with the Occupied Eyes (with three).
Last of all: a book about the Zagreb School of Animation.
Until next time!
See the Omaha World-Herald (December 31, 1937).
Sergei Eisenstein, for example, was a tremendous fan of Snow White. Writing about it in 1940, he described it (and Disney’s art generally) as a “drop of comfort, an instant of relief, a fleeting touch of lips in the hell of social burdens, injustices and torments, in which the circle of his American viewers is forever trapped.” See Eisenstein on Disney.
From the B’nai B’rith Messenger (January 3, 1947).
These critics and more are quoted in The Development of the Satire of Mr. Magoo (1961) by Howard Edward Rieder.
Marker’s quotes come from his essay about UPA in Cinéma 53 à travers le monde (1954).
Thomas and Johnston wrote this in The Illusion of Life.
Hubley seems to have said this in Telefilm Magazine during the late ‘50s, but it’s reprinted in The Technique of Film Animation. The point about phoniness is from Sponsor (May 25, 1957).
See the Los Angeles Times (October 25, 1981).
From the Chicago Tribune (July 11, 1982).
Williams said this in Sight and Sound (Summer 1973), our source for his quotes today. The details about his reaction to Snow White, and his joining of UPA London, come from the Boston Globe and the book When Magoo Flew: The Rise and Fall of Animation Studio UPA.
Williams idolized Kahl, and once spoke about the praise Kahl gave him for A Christmas Carol (1971).
For details about the early CalArts upstarts, see Vanity Fair’s article “The Class That Roared” from March 2014. Brad Bird’s ties to Kahl, and his block quote, come from a 1999 interview with the Chicago Tribune. And the quote about Lasseter is Mel Shaw in the Los Angeles Times (October 21, 1979).
All of these quotes come from Animation Magazine (March/April 1994).
Incredible read on my morning commute, captivating from start to finish
This is my main source for animation and look forward to it .
Disney animation broke and still does break art techniques .
A critic think they have to be so sophisticated and above others when in fact ; being a an obnoxious critic myself , are all full of it.
Most have no idea what goes in ; or not , in a project .
That’s true in animation , live action and let’s face it everything in life.
Between Pixar and Disney some the best animated movies are still being made and as much as I am traditional hand drawn animation lover their computer art is still the standard bearer.
Yes of course there are more companies out there ; many as good and at times better , but in a world where with so many creative options each project deserves the correct art treatment to be told faithfully .
I just watched the polish hand drawn animated film “ The Peasants “ and like its previous “ Living Vincent was Mind blowing .
I still remember a Russian glass drawn animated short @ The Cow “ and I can recall its impact on me and my animation studio co owner partner and that’s over 30 years ago .
I have been in the creative field for over 50 + years and I have heard the same Disney is dead / terrible stories for every one of those years .
How about a little perspective on what reality is.