7. Disney's Rise

In the reading for Chapter 6 in Art In Motion by Maureen Furniss Disney’s rise to fame within the animation medium is attributed understanding of traditional storytelling, character development and other factors. Disney was first employed at Newman Laugh-O-Grams, a studio that made animated ads and shorts, with many other would-be-big names in animation, such as Ub Iwerks and Hugh Harman. One film that helped Disney rise was Alice’s Wonderland, which is a live-action and animation film. He signed with a big name, Margret Winkler, after the fact to make a series of Alice comedies, helping him financially. Winkler was not satisfied with many of Disney’s cuts of the comedies and asked him to send all of the raw footage to her, so she could recut it. Winkler was still focusing on a story line in terms of gags or jokes, but Disney wanted to move toward a more liner or plot driven story line.

The Alice comedies began to loose steam, in their later stages because the double exposure technique used to insert a live-action character into an animated scene was tricky and unreliable. This lead to Alice’s screen time being very much down-played and diminished. Disney came up with another character to replace Alice, and it was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This character was an overnight success and was also profitable for a lot of spin-off merchandise. Charles Mintz was Margaret Winkler’s husband who had taken over the business and started to edge Disney out of the studio and since Disney did not own the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit there was nothing he could do. After this Disney came up with his most famous character, Mickey Mouse. Disney had broken away from Mintz and moved toward liner storytelling with Mickey’s character.

Disney then came up with the idea of ‘Silly Symphonies’ or stories that were not recurring. They just used a set of characters for one Silly Symphony and then they were done with them. With his focus on short-format films, Disney later shifted his attention to possibly making a long format film or a feature film. He decided on Snow White as the story line, and soon thereafter Disney’s staff jumped from about a handful to 750. Many of these new animators did not know how to handle the emotion of a certain movement, so they had to study movements of actual things and try to match them on paper. Disney has received a lot of flack for being able to only make a realist female character, many saying his ‘Prince” was stiff and unrealistic. All together Snow White took about $1.5 million to make and garnered about $4.2 million in profit.

There are four types of traditional tales used when considering an audience of children: folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends. Fables are stories that teach a lesson. Fairy tales can involve humans and animals and be set in a nonspecific time and place. The function of the myths are to explain great mysteries of the world. Legends are based on actual historical events. Bruno Bettelheim suggest that fairy tales help children deal with growing up because they present solutions to situations. it provides children a model for coping with his or her fears. One of the most interesting parts of the chapter was when the book tells of how societal norms are reflected in mainstream media. There is a construction that most if not all of the films follow, that is white, heterosexual, and male dominated social order. I would like to see Disney, Pixar or some other big animation company step outside the box and portray another side of society. Let’s see two princes or two princesses fall in love.