858159

research-article2019
ANM0010.1177/1746847719858159AnimationTelotte

Article

animation:

Letting Go: Representation, an interdisciplinary journal

2019, Vol. 14(2) 132­–148
© The Author(s) 2019
Presentation, and Disney’s Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions

Art of Animation
https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847719858159
DOI: 10.1177/1746847719858159
journals.sagepub.com/home/anm

JP Telotte
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Abstract
This article considers two linked developments in Disney animation at a major point of change
for the studio. One is the effort to craft a new ‘logistics of perception’ or way of seeing and
appreciating Disney’s work in this period. Prompting that effort is the other, a shift from the
studio’s early emphasis on realistic representation, or an ‘illusion of life’, to what might be termed
a presentational approach that repackaged Disney animation and re-framed its experience. These
developments, observed in episodes of the Disneyland TV series of the 1950s–1960s dedicated
to ‘the art of animation’, anticipate the emergence of new styles in Disney animation and of a
new approach to animation that would eventually be reflected in the development of audio-
animatronics and theme parks.

Keywords
animation, art, audio-animatronics, cartoon, Disney, Disneyland, illusion of life, marketing,
representation, television

When Walt Disney agreed to start producing his weekly Disneyland anthology
show for the ABC network in 1954, he did so with the knowledge that he had a
wealth of material already available as quality programming. For while much of
his studio’s cartoons and feature films had, over the years, been distributed by
other companies – Universal, United Artists, RKO – Disney had presciently re-
tained the television rights to these works and planned to draw on them for many
of the episodes on his new show. He used that material in several ways: packaging
groups of old cartoons, many not previously seen by younger audiences; using file

Corresponding author:
JP Telotte, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0165,
USA.
Email: [email protected]
Telotte 133

material to help introduce new animated features slated for release or older films
for rerelease; and thematically linking sequences from older animation to create
new programming. However, all of these approaches required the studio to take
material out of context, edit it and repurpose it, and doing so typically resulted
in the sort of reflexive framing of the work that had rarely filtered into Disney’s
theatrical efforts, which largely imitated the style of Hollywood live-action films
with their conventionally realistic narrative worlds. This repurposing would, in
various ways, clash with what had come to be known as Disney’s ‘illusion of life’
approach, but it also lets us glimpse a telling conflict in the studio’s work at this
point, as it tries both to hold onto the past and, with apologies to the studio’s Fro-
zen, ‘let it go’ in favor of new approaches to its foundational art.
As I have argued elsewhere, both Walt Disney and the Disney studio – which
I shall refer to interchangeably here – have a lengthy history of embracing and
exploiting the latest technologies, including that of television.1 Symptomatic of
that exploitative approach is a type of programming with which most people are
very familiar today, thanks to the ubiquitous ‘extras’ packaged with seemingly all
DVDs. These shows are the various behind-the-scenes or making-of treatments
– as in the case of an episode like ‘A Story of Dogs’ (1 December 1954), about
making Lady and the Tramp (1954), or ‘Operation Undersea’ (8 December 1954),
a backstage look at filming 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Such programs
not only provided a new and entertaining product, but also profitably served as
previews or advertisements, helping to build an audience for the feature releases or
create enthusiasm for the re-release of older films. They also illustrate a significant
turn in Disney’s synergistic marketing strategy, using the new medium of televi-
sion to direct audiences to the older, cinematic form, although in the process – that
is, by lifting the curtain on the studio productions and accommodating the differ-
ent characteristics of TV production and consumption – they inevitably qualified
some of the ‘magic’ or representational nature of Disney’s earlier efforts, framing
that work differently and, in the process, signaling a shift in the studio’s aesthetic
trajectory.
I am interested in the shows that use this behind-the-scenes approach to di-
rectly comment on the nature of animation – its history, techniques, and appeals
– because they implicitly challenge some of the prevailing wisdom about Dis-
ney animation (sometimes referred to as ‘Classic Disney’), especially that which
frames this work as bound to a representational (or ‘illusion of life’) approach.
Esther Leslie (2002: 211), for example, has decried the ‘Disney trademark style’,
which she describes as ‘a real-looking world presented in ideal terms’, while she
dismisses some of the studio’s more experimental and subversive efforts of the
1940s as ‘simply trash because they have no uniting principle’ (p. 250). Yet the
various behind-the-scenes shows, which recall the studio’s various ‘package’ films
134 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

of previous years as well as the live-action/animation hybrid cartoons of early film

history, such as those of Winsor McCay and Max Fleischer, provide a somewhat
different perspective. As the title of one episode, ‘Tricks of Our Trade’ (13 Febru-
ary 1957), simply put it, these programs let audiences glimpse the various ‘tricks’
used to create some of the most popular animated films of all time, while point-
ing out that much of the viewers’ pleasure directly derives from such trickery. In
emphasizing this notion of ‘tricks’, these shows were in effect offering a different
way of seeing and appreciating Disney animation, what media critic Paul Virilio
(1994: 12) has termed a ‘logistics of perception’ for an audience fascinated by a
world – or at least a Disneyland – that was now being brought into their homes
and opened up for their inspection through the new technology of television. Vir-
ilio has described in detail this larger cultural project of guiding, or creating a
‘logistics’ for how people see their world, and thus how they should think about
what they see, and we might approach Disney’s use of television in this context, as
prompting viewers to see the history of Disney animation in a different light, even
as that work – like the broader field of animation in the 1950s – was in the midst
of key changes.
Actually, Disney had done this sort of reflexive work before in the hybrid film
The Reluctant Dragon (1941), which offered audiences a carefully cast and script-
ed ‘illusion of life’ at the studio. Going backstage, it followed the bumbling come-
dian Robert Benchley as he wandered around the Disney facility, experiencing its
animation off the cuff and in the process of its creation (and with other actors, in-
cluding Alan Ladd, playing the parts of animators). That was an unusual, carefully
staged, if not very successful effort that forecast the new regime of vision the stu-
dio would explore in some of its package films of the 1940s – films that were, as
animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1995: 511) have noted, approached
as a ‘showcase’ for ‘experimentation’. That exploratory impulse would also mark
the studio’s move into television in the 1950s, at a time when audiences began to
show a marked interest in the conventions of film and an increased desire to see
through those conventions, that is, to see and know more about what was being
presented to them through media, as well as about the media that, it was becoming
increasingly clear, wielded such power over their lives.2 And in this context we
might just recall the many theatrical films throughout this period that examined
the dark side of the film and other media industries – among them, such works as
Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950), In a Lonely Place (dir. Nicholas Ray,
1950), The Big Carnival (Ace in the Hole) (dir. Billy Wilder, 1951), The Bad and
the Beautiful (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1952), and the early noir-treatment of televi-
sion and its imperatives The Glass Web (dir. Jack Arnold, 1953).
Over the course of its more than 20-year run, the Disneyland television show
(under various titles) offered more than a dozen episodes in this art-of-animation
Telotte 135

vein, with each program typically re-run multiple times. Tellingly, most of these
programs (nine) clustered in the show’s earliest years, 1955–1958, when televi-
sion was coming into its own as a popular visual entertainment and when Disney
animation was in the midst of key changes: in type, in style and in purpose. This
period saw Disney discontinue the theatrical cartoon that had been the studio’s
starting point and mainstay. It also witnessed the appearance of various new sty-
listic forays, such as the ‘cartoon modern’ aesthetic of shorts like the Academy
Award-winning Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953) and Pigs Is Pigs (1954), the
stop-motion, found-object approach of Noah’s Ark (1959), which was itself a re-
make – and revisioning – of the classic Disney cartoon Father Noah’s Ark (1933),
and the ‘flat’ look of the feature films that ended this decade (Sleeping Beauty,
1959), and began the next (101 Dalmatians, 1961). At this time too, as work began
on its new theme park, the company – or at least Walt Disney – was starting to re-
think what constituted animation through its new ‘audio-animatronics’, a techno-
logical development that would effectively reshape the company’s future. In vari-
ous ways, all involved a compromise with Disney’s past, with the realist-styled
animation typical of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940)
and especially Bambi (1942), as its product increasingly turned from conventional
representation of a world towards what we might think of as a presentational
or show experience, wherein animation became part of a carefully orchestrated,
staged event, one whose influence we might even trace to the company’s Living
Character Initiative of today, the autonomous animatronics now being developed
for the Disney amusement parks and that take their appeal from the way they pres-
ent themselves to an audience and interact with that audience.3
Of course, this shift from the representational to the presentational is not meant
to describe all of Disney’s production, nor is it unique to Disney. The company
would continue to produce conventional animated films, mainly after Walt’s death.
And Virilio (2005) has described a similar change in emphasis across the postwar,
technologically-driven media landscape – a change seen in the press, radio, cin-
ema, and television – all of which seemed to be turning from the world of realistic
representation that resembled classical film narrative to a presentational process,
that is, to something that fragments and restages reality, challenging or shifting
our normal point of view, thereby framing the world in various new ways. Speak-
ing of the media and the way they have, as he puts it, ‘accidented’ contemporary
art by fragmenting and repurposing it, Virilio points to the underlying nature of
all machine-driven art: ‘What machines do is present, since they reconstruct
everything’ (p. 67, emphasis in original) – much as Disney was in this period in
the process of reshaping the animation experience. With television, the new and
soon-to-be-dominant ‘presentational’ form of the postwar era, marked by its own
formal imperatives, that effect was particularly overt, part of the appeal of this new
136 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

media experience, and one that we might see forecast in the titles of some popular
live-action television shows of this period, such as Your Show of Shows, You Are
There, You Asked for It, or This Is Your Life. In that shift, and as these titles with
their direct address and overt restaging of experience more than hint, we also see
glimpses of something that has been formalized more recently, the ‘reality show’,
a type of program that does not actually represent reality, as traditional documen-
tary films do, but rather re-packages it, alters our point of view on it, or to recall
Virilio’s characterization, ‘accidents’ it (we might even say, ‘Kardashians’ it) for
entertainment purposes.
While this development of the presentational – of a fragmented, reframed, or
what some would term ‘sampled’ world – is easily seen in the many Disneyland
shows focused on the mechanics or technology of animation, its implications for
the trajectory of Disney’s animation product have generally gone unremarked,
particularly as many commentators continue to focus on the studio’s early work
and its emphasis on that illusion of life approach, as if it were the essence of
Disney art, as when Leslie (2002) criticizes Disney’s reliance on such illusion of
life hallmarks as ‘perspective and gravity’, three-dimensionality, and ‘traditional
dramaturgical characters’ (p. 121) because of the way these components enthrone
‘a coy bourgeois “realism”’ (p. vi). But in crafting a new ‘logistics of perception’,
Disney was not just ‘letting go’ of this ‘coy’ approach; and indeed it lingered to
some extent in the features of the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, in intuiting the chang-
ing media environment, he seemed to reach for a kind of compromise, linking art
history, pioneer animation’s hybrid cartoons, the studio’s own earlier efforts, and
the presentational attitude that was coming to mark its new work. Such a compro-
mise, though, would allow the studio not only to embrace its earlier achievements,
but also to strategically situate itself as part of that world of changing forms and
practices.
Admittedly, the Disney art programs are conventional in many ways, since they
repeatedly mined the Disney archive for old, attractive material and presented it in
various historical contexts – by pointing to the history of art, of the Disney studio,
and of animation, including that produced by other studios. However, they present
this material in television’s typically fragmentary manner, as examples of various
styles, techniques, or even art theory that audiences are asked to reconsider and
appreciate, and as experiences designed to evoke a different sort of response from
audiences – in fact, something like the response Disney would try to elicit with the
fake yet illusionistic audio-animatronic theme park rides on which the company
was already starting to work. While Walt Disney, when asked about such new ef-
forts, disarmingly described works such as Disneyland’s ‘Jungle Cruise’ or, later,
‘The Enchanted Tiki Room’ – both of which would feature in their own ‘behind-
the-scenes’ television shows – as ‘just another dimension in the animation we have
Telotte 137

been doing all our life’ (Markle, 2006: 98), these works were not about pulling au-
diences into a realistic narrative. Rather, such attractions provide a manifestly fake
experience, typically accompanied by comic dialogue, narration, or physical exag-
gerations that encouraged audiences, in what might loosely be termed postmodern
fashion, to enjoy the attraction’s fakery and the way it self-consciously presents
or winks at that fakery. Similarly, the TV animation shows put expertise, technical
and technological proficiency, and even fakery or staging all on display, usually
providing a comic twist, and for multiple reasons: to offer them as entertainment,
to reaffirm Disney’s stature in the field – and history – of animation, but also to
exploit a new relationship between the material of animation and its audience, as
Disney’s illusion of life becomes basically a most enjoyable illusion, animation as
sleight of hand.
To illustrate this presentational impulse as part of Disney’s process of ‘letting
go’ of the past, and help us to consider its implications, we might examine four
episodes from this early Disneyland period: ‘The Story of the Animated Drawing’
(30 November 1955), ‘The Plausible Impossible’ (31 October 1956), ‘Tricks of
Our Trade’ (13 February 1957), and ‘An Adventure in Art’ (30 April 1958). These
shows from four of the series’ first five years do not, like some other episodes,
focus on particular cartoon groups or story types. Rather, they repackage and re-
frame animation specifically to talk about its nature and appeal – its ‘tricks’ and its
function as ‘art’. As such, they are the most reflexive of the series’ episodes and
most revealing of the pattern emerging in the studio’s treatment of its foundational
art in this period of change. In them we see the creation of a logistics of percep-
tion for a new generation, encouraging audiences not to immerse themselves in
the world of the animation but to enjoy a kind of detached appreciation of what
Michael O’Pray (1997: 200) has termed one of animation’s key appeals, the ‘skill
and virtuosity’ that it puts on display – a shift particularly important in light of Dis-
ney’s move into the new exhibition realms of television, theme parks, and world’s
fairs, all with their different relationships to audiences.
Famed Warner Bros. cartoonist Chuck Jones has often noted the importance of
having very specific ‘disciplines’ – or a formula – for doing animation. A formula,
he says, not only provides animators with essential guidelines, but also sets up au-
dience expectations, providing for anticipated pleasures, like his Coyote’s inevi-
table encounters with technology’s failings or with the force of gravity (Furniss,
2005: 34–35). And as quickly becomes apparent, the Disneyland animation shows
too have a formula. It was a helpful and economical way of dealing with the new
medium, particularly given Disney’s lack of experience with series production4
and a need to create shows quickly, regularly, and relatively cheaply. Such econo-
mies were also important because Disney resources were spread thin thanks to
an ongoing schedule of feature production, work on the Disneyland theme park,
138 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

and the development of other television series, such as The Mickey Mouse Club
and Zorro. But beyond a matter of studio economies, that formula speaks to Dis-
ney’s own understanding of both the material and the audience, a way in which
he wanted to frame animation for the television viewers – and the new medium’s
different emphases: on narrative segmentation, a ‘glance’ type of experience, and
a domestic viewing context, all of which, as John Ellis has shown, are at odds with
the audience immersion of classical cinema’s reality illusion.5
A key part of that formula is the work of a congenial host, directly addressing
the audience, smoothing over those segmented experiences, and telling viewers
why they should see that experience in a certain way. Recalling Winsor McCay’s
Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), Max Fleischer’s early ‘Out of the Inkwell’ efforts and
even Disney’s first Alice comedy of 1923, all of which similarly deploy a ‘host’
artist demonstrating the mechanism behind his ‘art’, each of these episodes be-
gins with Walt Disney greeting his audience as he introduces the show’s subject,
emphasizing how that subject relates to an assumed curiosity about animation.
He then introduces an authority, typically a book that establishes a context for
what follows, motivates a specific sort of subject fragmentation or provides a key
framing definition. That source then allows him to offer several linked exhibits:
examples drawn from history or theory and from the Disney archives, both of
which, it is implied, will coincide to produce an important vantage on the art of
animation. Yet those parallel examples and the movement from historical seg-
ments to instances of Disney animation never provide the sort of payoff that seems
to be promised – such as a formula for good animation or a satisfying definition
of art itself, particularly since the animation styles used tend to be quite different.
And each show simply ends with an impressionistic presentation, a brief scene or
sequence from a Disney work that Walt invites viewers to enjoy not as part of the
original narrative, but as a display of ‘skill and virtuosity’, as the animation effec-
tively presents itself, as if it were beyond any definition and that demonstration of
expertise was the real point.
Of course, as host for most of the series up to the time of his death, Walt Disney
brought his own sense of authority to these shows. As all accounts indicate, in dis-
cussing who should host the show, Disney initially resisted the role but allowed,
‘If it’s right for me to be talking about it, if it’s my business I can talk about it; if
it’s what we do here at the studio’; and eventually he recognized that ‘I have got to
do it until we’ve established other personalities that mean something to the audi-
ence’ (Cotter, 1997: 60). However, on the subject of animation, arguably no one
could ‘mean’ more to the audience than Disney. While he freely acknowledged the
work of his predecessors – and ‘The Story of the Animated Drawing’ credits ‘some
of the pioneers who led the way’, including J Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay,
Raoul Barre, Pat Sullivan, and even long-time competitor Max Fleischer, among
Telotte 139

others – Disney’s name had, since the late 1920s, become synonymous with the
top work in animation. And as Neal Gabler (2006: 512) observes, just as Disney’s
‘creations conveyed reassurance, so did the man’ in his public – and now televi-
sion – persona, as he carefully laid out his logistics: explaining how the audience
should look at and best appreciate animation, in effect, how it might function as
‘home entertainment’.
Moreover, Disney’s pleasant, folksy, even domestic manner was always sup-
ported by other sorts of authority, as if multiple voices were instructing the audi-
ence and helping to craft this logistics of perception. For example, three of these
episodes have him begin by prominently displaying and quoting from a large vol-
ume titled The Art of Animation, with its authorship designated on the cover as
‘The Staff of the Walt Disney Studio’. However, no such book actually existed;
it was just a prop creation, like the library of other books surrounding him as
he spoke. It was a bit of stagecraft, part of the logistics Walt could deploy as he
discussed elements of animation, and every bit as much a staged show as the ani-
mated segments that followed. It is worth noting, though, that in response to the
appeal of these shows, Disney would eventually commission a short, heavily illus-
trated volume, published by Golden Press, with the same title, The Art of Anima-
tion, but with authoring credit to Disney biographer Bob Thomas, along ‘with the
staff of the Walt Disney Studio’ (Thomas, 1958). Giving yet another – and indeed
postmodern – turn to Disney’s synergistic marketing practice, the faux book would
sire a real book to promote the ‘tricks’ of Disney animation.
In ‘An Adventure in Art’, Disney would rely upon a quite real book, The Art
Spirit (2019[1923]) by Robert Henri, the American painter and teacher, usually
associated with the Ashcan School of art. This volume provided more theoretical
pronouncements about the nature of art and art practice as another way of fram-
ing the studio’s work. Along with The Art of Animation, this book armed Disney
with two primary sorts of commentary – a broad history of art and animation,
and some generally modern theoretical assertions about art’s purpose – both of
which he would loosely use to link his own ‘trade’, that is, his studio’s work, with
various art traditions and to validate that work (as well as his audience’s interest
in it), while emphasizing particular aspects of it, some consonant with Disney
animation’s realistic past, others with its more fantastic, impressionistic and even
experimental reaches.
Early, and often in all of these episodes, Disney evokes the authority of history to
suggest a link between past and present. In ‘The Story of the Animated Drawing’, for
example, he points to a chapter in his faux-book The Art of Animation that suggests a
specific sort of linkage, one between the cave paintings at Lascaux, Egyptian sequen-
tial wall drawings, Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of human motion, the creation of
visual toys like the thaumatrope and phenakistoscope, and the invention of the motion
140 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

picture camera – all, he submits, in a direct line of artistic evolution with his studio’s
animation. Referring to the same source book in ‘The Plausible Impossible’, he
explains how animation has always drawn much of its power and appeal from certain
types of blended images, metaphoric or fantastic ones, which he illustrates with figures
from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Chinese mythology, some briefly brought to life in
cartoon modern style by the Disney artists. And in ‘Tricks of Our Trade’ he again ties
animation to various other art forms – in fact, terming it ‘the last of the graphic arts’
(emphasis in original) – as he demonstrates how many of its basic principles carry over
from older traditions and examples, such as a Degas painting – a framed print to which
he gestures. Henri’s The Art Spirit (2019[1923]) similarly provides ‘An Adventure in
Art’ with an occasion for surveying some of ‘the very oldest of man’s artistic endeav-
ors’, the traces of which, Disney says, can still be seen in various modern schools of
art. And, in every instance, that presentation of history serves multiple purposes: lend-
ing further authority to Disney’s comments, framing his studio’s work, as he turns to
brief scenes from early efforts – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Fantasia
(1940), Bambi (1942) and various Silly Symphony cartoons – to help illustrate these
links to art history, while also foreshadowing modern developments or changes.
Commenting on those elements of art history and constant change are vari-
ous principles that Disney emphasizes throughout these episodes to show how
we might best appreciate animation. In ‘The Story of the Animated Drawing’, for
example, he tellingly describes the history of animation as a story of ‘progress …
waiting on invention’ – in fact, a series of technological developments, such as the
movie camera and projector, sound, the airbrush, and his studio’s multiplane ani-
mation camera, all of which had helped to construct ever more complex visual rep-
resentations. But rather than wrestling, Walter Benjamin like, with the knotty issue
of how mechanical reproduction might create art, Disney shifts focus to explain
that the basic ‘premise of animation as a new art’ (emphasis in original), that is, its
‘purpose’, is not to craft a precise representation, but, as in ‘any of the fine arts’,
to find ways ‘to arouse a purely emotional reaction in the beholder’. The result is a
curious effort at blending elements, as the episode tries to bring together its highly
technological, even scientific emphasis on representationalism – marked by the
demonstration of several of those ‘inventions’ – with an affective point, the expla-
nation that all of the technology marshaled to produce contemporary animation
is to abet its ultimate purpose: evoking ‘an emotional response in the audience’.
In effect, he tries to lay claim not to a particular style but to the experience of art.
And as if to demonstrate that implied point, the show concludes with a portion of
Fantasia’s ‘Nutcracker Suite’, an impressionistic piece that Disney lets speak for
itself, to produce such an ‘emotional response’ in his TV viewers.
‘The Plausible Impossible’ episode more directly addresses the issue of real-
ism in animation. It too describes a history of fantastic images, such as dragons,
Telotte 141

centaurs and unicorns, and their typical sources: as supernatural interpretations,

misperceptions of the real or even confusion of the fossil record. It then uses those
hybrid images to show how animation too is always a kind of hybrid, both depend-
ing on and also often violating ‘the laws of nature’, thereby playing at the border
between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the fantastic. In this case, Disney
allows that all animated action must have ‘some factual basis’; that it must project
‘a correctness of sensation’, even when ‘giving life to inanimate objects’, as he
illustrates with a brief clip from the dream-like cartoon Thru the Mirror (1936),
a Mickey Mouse-driven version of Alice in Wonderland, wherein every object
Mickey encounters can suddenly come to life. And Disney notes that such charac-
ters should act in a believable fashion, a point demonstrated by his own live-action
encounter with an animated Donald Duck. But here too Disney turns away from
these representational concerns to discuss how other factors can alter the anima-
tion experience. For illustration he turns to what he terms ‘program music’, which,
as he says, when added to a piece of animation can reframe the visual, give it a
different sort of life and, in the process, help to suture the ‘Impossible’ and the
‘Plausible’. Here he even deconstructs some of his studio’s prior constructs, dem-
onstrating how the same piece of music, a selection from Mussorgsky’s ‘Night on
Bald Mountain’, can evoke different audience responses from different pieces of
animation – Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia, the forest fire from
Bambi, the fight between a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops in Fantasia’s ‘Rite
of Spring’ sequence. And then the episode concludes with that music’s ‘correct’
placement in Fantasia’s Witches’ Sabbath, which depicts the metamorphosis of a
dark mountaintop into the devil incarnate, its effect standing as proof of music’s
powerful emotional ability both to support and to mask animation’s compromises
between the real and the fantastic.
The more prosaically titled ‘Tricks of Our Trade’ repeats the previous episode’s
initial focus on realism and animation’s grounding in the ‘laws of nature’, but
as a springboard to comically examine some of the techniques used by Disney’s
effects animators. The program underscores this realistic context in two ways:
first, by pointing to the behavior of the animated figure – as Disney notes, ‘the
cartoon character must seem to have a [human] brain’; and second, by stressing
the amount of attention given to even the smallest details – the ‘extremely realistic
animation of the incidental action’, which lends believability to larger and more
fantastic actions. In typical segmented fashion, these points are awkwardly joined
to a discussion of ‘effects animation’, where we witness various animators ‘at their
study’, as he puts it – breaking glass, blowing bubbles, splashing water, playing
with mud. Yet all of these carefully constructed effects and staged scenes, illus-
trated with images from Disney’s most naturalistic feature, Bambi, lead to a scene
that again comically qualifies that apparently carefully studied and applied sense
142 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

of realistic detail – from his animation’s apparent roots in the illusion of life – as
we watch another staged and highly artificial sequence. In it, four Disney anima-
tors observe, sketch, and comment (woodenly) on the movements of dance model
Helene Stanley, supposedly as they are working out some of the most extravagant
characters and actions in the Disney cannon, Fantasia’s ‘Dance of the Hours’,
with its unlikely balletic interactions of ostriches, alligators, and hippopotami.
In fact, the point of this fictional scene seems to be the ironic distance between
the animators’ comic remarks about the exaggerated figures they are drawing and
Stanley’s upset response as she overhears, misunderstands, and assumes they are
talking about her. Fantasia, of course, dates from 1940, so this 1957 staging of the
supposed inspiration for one of its more famous sequences,6 including the impli-
cation that the hat Stanley wore to the studio inspired the headgear for the film’s
alligators, has a contrived sense to it, another sort of ‘trick’ but this time on the
television audience, as if the show’s focus on animation techniques and on the real
might have been too dry, too detached from the humorous appeal of the animation,
which then forms the end of the episode.
In the later ‘An Adventure in Art’, aired while the studio was filming one of its
most stylized efforts, Sleeping Beauty (released in January 1959), Disney again
describes a trajectory from the realistic to the affective. Responding to a letter that
asks ‘Are silhouettes art?’ Disney recalls examples cited in ‘The Story of the Ani-
mated Drawing’ and ‘The Plausible Impossible’, ‘the very oldest of man’s artistic
endeavors’, the cave paintings of France and Spain, which he likens to silhouette
art. And he notes that the silhouette, with its reliance on the real, ‘tracing the hu-
man figure’, is an art that is still practiced – and also a commodity that is sold
every day in one of Disneyland’s Mainstreet shops, as we see a craftsman making
silhouettes as souvenirs. It is also, he adds, the subject of much animation, as an
abstract dance scene from the studio’s Make Mine Music (1946) illustrates. But the
rest of the episode pursues the core of that viewer’s question, that is, what actually
constitutes art, as we watch four Disney animators – Marc Davis, Joshua Meador,
Walt Peregoy, and Eyvind Earle (the lead stylist for Sleeping Beauty) – paint an
old oak tree and, at various points in their compositions, comment on their starkly
different interpretations of the tree. Assessing their impressionistic results, Disney
observes that each embodies the artist’s ‘own personal response to what the tree
represents’, and suggests that we should think of all art in this way, as simply a
personal ‘expression of ideas in permanent form’, that is, as something that speaks
of itself. In support of this notion, the episode concludes with the entire ‘Toccata
and Fugue in D Minor’ from Fantasia, a sequence that begins with images of an
orchestra that, in keeping with the show’s opening question, become silhouettes as
the lighting changes, and then, as the music effectively takes over, shift from such
vaguely representational images into a variety of abstract ones – soaring pillars of
Telotte 143

light, ripples of color, starry clusters, presenting, we can assume, the emotional
impact of the music. This choice is particularly important because the Fantasia
sequence, as Neal Gabler (2006: 316) argues, was a milestone for Disney anima-
tion, the first point in the studio’s history when Disney seemed to ‘let go of rep-
resentation’ in favor of ‘abstraction’, that is, in favor of an art that presented itself
instead of another reality. Those abstract pulses of light and color are meant to be
appreciated in themselves, rather like animated fireworks or visualized emotions.
However, they also point down the path of abstraction, to the studio’s television
efforts at pulling its animation out of any narrative context, and offering it instead
as a reflexive show of technique and expertise that is entertaining in itself.
That final shift, here and in the other episodes, seems especially telling for
the changing trajectory of Disney animation. For, as we have seen, each of these
shows carefully, and certainly entertainingly, lifts the curtain on the techniques of
and mechanisms employed in the studio’s animation, the ‘tricks’ that support its
illusion of life. Moreover, they insistently paint animation, and particularly the
Disney version of it, as part of a long historical tradition steeped in representa-
tionalism, as if Disney were indeed reluctant to ‘let go’ of that connection. Yet,
as used here, Disney animation also repeatedly opens onto something else, other
paths for the art of animation – as emotional impulse, as abstract expression, even
as a theme park commodity – all possibilities that already had a role in the Disney
project and that would soon result in a variety of new efforts, such as the found-
object animation of Noah’s Ark or the cut-out/collage animation that would form
the title sequences for such Disney features as The Parent Trap (1961) and The
Mis-Adventures of Merlin Jones (1964) – instances of that ‘letting go’ already un-
derway at the studio, while also hints of what was to come in terms of both artistic
and commercial diversification at the studio.
As part of that letting go, each of these television episodes ultimately pulls back
from the various technical tricks and guiding principles that have been illustrated,
that is, from showing how animation is done to emphasizing its purpose or effect.
Thus, while we see Walt Disney clearly delighting in those historical and techni-
cal explanations, and especially in contextualizing his studio’s work as a kind of
apex of various artistic traditions, we also see him repeatedly reaching for some-
thing more, an aesthetic notion or guiding impulse, such as the not-very-satisfying
‘expression of an idea in permanent form’ or ‘doing things … well’, that might
give reason or value to what his studio does, even as he reaches back to what his
studio did 15 or 20 years before. Never quite able to provide a satisfying principle,
rule, or definition, as if recognizing that the relationship between animation and
art was something slippery and changing that neither he nor his show’s writers
had quite worked out, or as if a tension had been revealed between the representa-
tional character that had earlier driven his studio’s animation and what it was now
144 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

becoming as both style and function were in the midst of change – on television
and elsewhere – he concludes each show with an appeal to experience itself, as
extended animation sequences demonstrate their own effectiveness, appeal and
artistic value – as Disney animation simply presents itself not as part of a life-like
narrative but as emblematic of an evolving art form.
In his study Animation and America (2002), Paul Wells notes how often ‘the art
of the form’ was ‘explained by Disney and through Disney’ over the years, and
he too cites television’s ‘The Art of the Animated Drawing’ show as an example
(p. 53). But rather than consider why there were these repeated tries at explaining,
he sees them, through a basic economic lens, as consistent efforts at ‘branding’
meant to reaffirm Disney’s place at the center of animation. They were, in effect,
assertions of that animation’s importance, designed to help it ‘sell’, especially
when the studio re-released its features to a new generation of viewers. Moreover,
Wells also sees an aesthetic fault in that branding, since it seems to argue for ‘a ho-
mogeneity’ to animation (p. 53), as if the form’s proper – and historical – goal was
always just to be as lifelike or representational as possible, to follow the path of
lifelike illusion that had brought Disney early fame. Like Esther Leslie, Wells feels
that emphasizing this line of development did the art of animation a disservice by
disguising its ‘inherent capacity … to enunciate its own “difference” and “other-
ness”’ (p. 58) from other film forms and to work in an effectively subversive way.
While Wells’s ‘branding’ explanation is certainly partly true – and as contempo-
rary Disney readily suggests, branding remains a central part of company strategy
– these and other television shows should prompt a more complex response to
the argument about a realistic ‘homogeneity’. What we have repeatedly seen is a
tension at work in the Disney studio during the late postwar period, one pointedly
acknowledged in the ‘Adventures in Art’ episode where the four Disney animators
paint the same tree in four very different ways. It is a sequence that, we should
note, even opens a door onto the fact that there was a very real fight over style that
was going on in the studio at this time in arguments surrounding the visual design
of Sleeping Beauty,7 arguments that would lead to multiple demotions and Eyvind
Earle leaving the studio prior to the film’s completion. By the time of these shows,
Disney was no longer really competing with a variety of equal or lesser products
from other film studios, as had been very much the case when he made films like
Pinocchio and Bambi and loudly trumpeted the pains he took to make them in what
Chris Pallant (2011: 70) terms a ‘hyperrealist’ mode, that is, to make them look
different from his competition. Nor did he have to demonstrate that all animation
should be essentially the same, and that his studio’s work capped – or perfected –
the art’s history. After all, Disney was already practically synonymous with qual-
ity animation and with animated feature production, regardless of style. However,
at this point his studio was competing with something that was clearly dissimilar
Telotte 145

and self-evidently not part of any homogeneous representational pattern: the very
differently styled and cheaply produced animation that was already highly popu-
lar on American television – shows like Crusader Rabbit (1950–1959), Terry-
toon’s Tom Terrific (1957–1959), Hanna and Barbera’s The Ruff and Ready Show
(1957–1960), etc. These and similar efforts used limited animation, offered little
sense of depth or dimensionality, had static characters and were largely dialogue-
driven, prompting Chuck Jones’ mocking description of them as ‘illustrated radio’
(Furniss, 2005: 64). The very diverse nature of animation, at least in the new arena
of television, was obvious to anyone who looked, and in that highly varied context
it would be practically impossible to stake any claim for the art’s homogeneity,
although Disney could claim something else – a difference based on links to the
history of art, on quality of design, on audience impact or effect – a point under-
scored in each of the shows discussed – even as the studio was engaged in its own
forays into various new styles and approaches.
This may be why the Disney shows all seem somewhat conflicted, for they all
partly tell the story of a representational animation and illustrate it with dated ex-
amples of the studio’s own productions – all prior to 1942 and rooted in what had
been a general house style, that ‘illusion of life’ – even as they also stage events,
fake authorities, and demonstrate other styles Disney was itself exploring. And
these shows all stand outside of that ‘classic’ context. There is no narrative, just
the sort of segmented, loosely connected points that typified the television experi-
ence of the day, with the animation itself addressing that audience ‘glance’ in a
presentational way to emphasize the very variety of techniques involved and the
many ways in which the art of animation might function. Seen within that large
framework, these shows are themselves subversive, at least of a dominant vision
of animation that we see Disney deconstructing, as he suggests the equal value
of different ‘schools’ of art, showcases the relative interpretations of an oak tree,
explains how the ‘plausible’ and the ‘impossible’ can, paradoxically, abet each
other, or simply puts forward very different, and very slippery, definitions of art
itself. But this view of animation, this particular framing, was useful for address-
ing the new world of television animation, as well as the new array of material the
Disney studio was producing, which little resembled any of the classic examples
being offered: works like Pigs Is Pigs (1954) with its UPA styling and manic
pacing; Sleeping Beauty with its dark angularity and stylized landscapes, spread
over a Cinemascope canvas; or 101 Dalmatians with its rough lines, overlapping
shadings and caricatured bodies that suggest a kind of impressionistic vision – or
a Chuck Jones-like treatment of an urban rather than desert landscape.
What those works point up is the ongoing fragmentation of any real Disney
style, a note made explicit in ‘An Adventure in Art’ when those four Disney anima-
tors offer their ‘personal response’ to a tree. None of those visions looks like any
146 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(2)

of the others – or much like the original oak we are shown. Moreover, none recalls
the animation stylings of just 15 or 20 years before, seen in the animation samples.
But in a world where, as Virilio (2005) puts it, art itself seems to have been acci-
dented, that is, broken off from the older sense of a conventional and predictable
reality, perhaps the best Disney could hope for was to use the new technology of
television, with more than a hint of nostalgia and in a kind of postmodern turn, to
fashion a new way of seeing – and selling – his product. While probably reluctant
to fully ‘let go’ of that past, he could still make animation itself into the show, as
presentation, even if he had to re-invent or, in the case of the Helene Stanley–
Fantasia sequence, restage its earlier representational impulse through a process
of comic fictionalization. He did so, at least in part, because American animation –
including that of his own studio – was striking out in various new directions, ones
that he could not control but for which he could, as a kind of founding father, claim
to have provided a foundation, while also demonstrating his participation in those
new moves – moves also tangentially connected to other new ideas about anima-
tion he was at this time working on – such as those audio-animatronics that would
become the focus of his theme park. While that next step would not escape from
the sort of technological determinacy that has always inflected Disney’s work –
and that I have chronicled elsewhere (Telotte, 2008) – it would eventually forge a
new relationship with an increasingly, and inescapable, technological world.
In this contemporary regime, and as Walt Disney himself was seemingly losing
interest in animated films, audio-animatronics would start to claim a place as a key
part of the studio’s new – and today most profitable – presentational art, the art
writ large on the canvas of the theme park. Here the Disney company could easily
re-stage the past for a modern audience, by sampling carefully chosen elements
of the past, as when animatronic images drawn from the notorious Song of the
South (1946), shorn of their racial and ideological baggage, are installed as tuneful
components of the thrill ride ‘Splash Mountain’. It could mingle, without ques-
tion, very different styles and eras by placing an attraction from one period along-
side another, as when the windows of Pinocchio’s old-world tavern in the Magic
Kingdom ironically look directly into ‘It’s a Small World’ with its cartoon modern
styling. And in a whole new take on three-dimensionality, it could allow audi-
ences not simply to watch a show but to become immersed in it, moving together
with laser-projected, animated characters, as in the new ‘Mickey and Minnie’s
Runaway Railway’ experience situated in the most reflexive of Disney’s theme
parks, Hollywood Studios. But then, we know Walt Disney was already looking
toward such a presentational future when he first conflated theme park and televi-
sion show, giving both the same name, as the show itself became the show, as the
ability to construct fantasies – in whatever fashion – became the most fantastic of
attractions and his new art of animation.
Telotte 147

Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to the faculty and students in the Art Department at Columbus State
University where this material was first presented as a public lecture to help inaugurate the unit’s new
Animation program.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article and
there is no conflict of interest.

Notes
1. For discussion of the various forms that technological embrace has taken, see my The Mouse Machine:
Disney and Technology (2008), while my Disney TV (2004) offers a more extended treatment of Disney’s
move into television.
2. This argument about the perceived failure of the classical narrative film tradition has been made by a
number of film historians. In my study of the film noir, for example, I suggest that we read that form
symptomatically, that is, as one whose very violations of classical form speak about its incommensurate-
ness for the changed cultural circumstances of the postwar world (Telotte, 1989: 1-14).
3. Disney’s Living Character Initiative involves a number of seemingly independent robotic characters,
including the Muppet Mobile Lab, Lucky the Dinosaur, and the Amazing Destini. Early versions of
these first two audio-animatronic figures were basically robotic puppets that roamed the company’s
theme parks, while electronically controlled from a distance by an unseen operator or puppeteer. As
developed in the Amazing Destini, though, the software-driven character can function independently,
using sensors and artificial intelligence to react to guests and even respond to them ‘in character’
(Leibacher, 2012).
4. Disney’s only prior experience with television production was with two Christmas specials, ‘One Hour
in Wonderland’, created for NBC and broadcast 25 December 1950, and ‘The Walt Disney Christmas
Show’, aired on CBS on 25 December 1951. Both were essentially advertising efforts for Disney’s
upcoming theatrical releases.
5. The notion of the ‘glance’, as articulated by John Ellis (1992: 111–112, denotes the sort of dislocated,
shifting viewer gaze that, he suggests, typifies the television audience, while also distinguishing that
approach from the typical moviegoer’s more focused viewing practice or ‘gaze’.
6. Stanley did a good deal of modeling work for Disney in this period, serving as a visual reference for
the artists animating the characters of Cinderella and Aurora of Sleeping Beauty, while also acting in
Disney’s Davy Crockett miniseries.
7. This discrepancy between artistic styles apparently reflected much of what was actually going on in
the creation of Sleeping Beauty on which all four of the artists involved in the ‘Adventure in Art’ epi-
sode were then working. As Michael Barrier (1999: 557) chronicles, Eyvind Earle’s ‘very rigid design’
scheme for the film did not sit well with the others and had an ‘inhibiting effect on the animators’, espe-
cially as Earle’s backgrounds often did not work well for the characters. As a result, Earle admits, there
were ‘some real battles among the film’s various animators’ (p. 558) – battles that would eventually lead
to Earle leaving the studio before Sleeping Beauty was released.

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Author biography
JP Telotte is a Professor of Film and Media Studies in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and
Communication where he teaches courses in film history, science fiction, and animation. He has published
widely on Disney and animation, including his books Disney TV (Wayne State University Press, 2004), The
Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Animating Space: From
Mickey to WALL-E (University Press of Kentucky, 2010). His most recent work is Movies, Modernism, and the
Science Fiction Pulps forthcoming from Oxford University Press.