Evaluating Disney: 1956

1955 had seemed a triumph. Lady and the Tramp was a success with audiences. Millions of kids were wearing mouse-ears or coonskin caps. Walt himself was a household icon. And, at long last, Disneyland was open to the public and making money hand over fist, much of which Walt reinvested straight back into the park.

But what of the animation itself? Once the only concern of the studio, it was now one of many, and as a result it was suffering. Walt's interest in animation simply didn't exist; as animator Frank Thomas put it, "I think he had really spent himself on what he wanted to do in animation." The animation studio continued along now out of tradition and habit. As far back as 1953, with the twin failures of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan under his belt, Walt had admitted to Bill Anderson that he wasn't interested in animation, but that he felt the studio couldn't give it up completely. By 1956, Walt dreaded the studio and spent as little time there as possible; the animators had to beg him to attend story meetings and even needed to prod him to put any animated shorts into production at all.

Much of the studio's animated output in 1956 went to the long, long production of Sleeping Beauty--in development since 1952, and which would not be released until 1959--and into the TV shows, Disneyland and The Mickey Mouse Club. The TV animation tended to be of such poor quality--simplified in order to save money on the production of the show--that there was talk of farming it out to other studios to get better quality.

Walt knew the quality was bad. He just didn't care. For him, it was all a part of raising more money to keep building Disneyland. With the park open for less than a year, he was already happily tinkering away, closing some attractions to focus on others and sketching out ideas for a skyway, a monorail, a submarine ride, and a mountain sled ride. Whatever the studio produced was, it seemed, merely a fund for Disneyland.

2/15: Sardinia
People and Places. These still aren't available on DVD, so I still haven't seen many of them.

2/24: Chips Ahoy
Donald Duck. Sadly, Chip 'n' Dale make their last film appearance until 1983 in this hilarious short. Actually inspired by the Little Golden Book Donald's Sailboat, this Cinemascope cartoon has the two chipmunks stealing Donald's model ship from a bottle (great sight gag) to get to an acorn tree in the middle of the pond. Jack Kinney directed, and the pacing is great. The gags are all good, and the Cinemascope adds depth without calling attention to itself. A solid cartoon, and a real highlight in the waning days of the shorts.

4/27: Hooked Bear
Special cartoon. The first of, alas, only two solo cartoons for Humphrey the Bear. All of the Humphrey cartoons are wonderful, but it's interesting here to see him without Donald Duck as a foil. Instead, he's foiled by his constant stupidity, spending so much of his time trying to get fish the "easy" way that he completely misses out on fishing season. There are some great sight gags with Ranger J. Audubon Woodlore seeding the lake with new fish (I especially loved the hatchery that looked like a garden). The animation of Humphrey himself is superb; he's such a well-realized pantomime slapstick character. (I think I noticed some reused animation from "Rugged Bear." Par for the course by this time.)

6/8: THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE
Great film based on the true story of a Union attempt in 1862 to steal a Confederate train and cut off valuable supply and communication lines. It's easy to imagine this project catching Walt's interest because of the trains (though he was very hands-off on this production, which was mostly overseen by Lawrence E. Watkin), and he was quick to cast Fess Parker in the lead role as James Andrews, the Union spy and the leader of the raid. Parker was quite the commodity because of Davy Crockett, and he was under contract to Disney. There are several factors that make this one of, in my opinion, Disney's best films: chief among them is the authentic feel of the chase itself. Disney may have taken some liberties with facts, as movies will, but the train engine used (the "William Mason") was built in 1856, and the entire sequence with the actual train chase (about a third of the movie) is the best part. Jeffrey Hunter is very good as William A. Fuller, the Southern conductor whose train is stolen and who goes to great lengths to track it down. Hunter and Parker have quite the battle of wills when you consider that they barely have any screen time together. And the Cinemascope looks great. It's just a completely enjoyable film, one that doesn't get talked up as much as some of the other live action films, but I loved it.

7/8: How to Have an Accident in the Home
Donald Duck. A fun Cinemascope short that seeks to educate about all the ways people can have accidents in their homes through carelessness. It's surprisingly modern for Disney; it pokes fun at modern conveniences and electronics. Some great sight gags in this one, especially Donald's system of plugs. Great backgrounds, too.

7/18: Jack and Old Mac
Special cartoon. Bill Justice directed this cartoon, which attempts to ape the UPA style of limited animation. It's really a double bill, with music by George Bruns. The first part, "The House That Jack Built," is great. It has jazzy music and a nice abstract look, with animals and buildings taking shapes from the words themselves. It's short, even slight, but very creative. Unfortunately, most of the cartoon is taken up with the inferior "Old MacDonald Had a Band," a jazz take on the schoolyard staple, which goes on and on forever. Even for this period of Disney, the animation is terrible (except for some of the Fred Moore animation, recycled from "All the Cats Join In"), and the song is repetitive. The color styling, by Eyvind Earle, is a high point.

7/18: DAVY CROCKETT AND THE RIVER PIRATES
Davy had been killed at the Alamo, of course, but the series (and the feature film edited together from the three episodes) had been such a runaway success that it was inevitable that he couldn't stay dead for long. This film is cut together from two more episodes which are meant to take place, I believe, somewhere between the first and second episodes. Although it's obvious this production has been lavished with more money than the first, it didn't quite grip me the way the other film did. Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen are still amiable and extremely likable in their roles, of course, but there's a kind of pall over this one that's perhaps a result of not really having strong historical points to play off of. The first Davy Crockett was, in some way, an idealized Americana in response to the social upheaval of the 1950s. This film, however enjoyable, is merely another adventure featuring some of the same characters. The boat race is the best part of the film, I think, and Jeff York as Mike Fink, king of the river, is an excellent blowhard.

7/27: In the Bag
Special cartoon. Humphrey's final appearance on film is one of the most popular and most enduring Disney shorts. It doesn't get mentioned in the same breath as earlier luminaries like The Band Concert, but this is one of Disney's most memorable shorts and gets brought up again and again by people who watched it when they were kids and have never forgotten "The Humphrey Hop," the wonderful song introduced in this cartoon. In another of Disney's cartoons with an anti-pollution message (and a cameo by Smoky the Bear), Ranger J. Audubon Woodlore tricks Humphrey and the other bears into cleaning up tons of garbage left behind by campers. One of the last great Disney shorts, one of the best ever, and one of the most fun.

11/6: Cow Dog
A live action short I've been unable to find. I remember seeing it, as so many others, on a filmstrip when I was in (I think) junior high school, but I haven't seen it in the decades since.

11/6: A Cowboy Needs a Horse
Special cartoon. Imaginative, dreamy cartoon about a boy who dreams he's a cowboy. It's very much like Jack and Old Mac, modern and music-oriented, only it's not boring. It's not necessarily compelling, either, but the flat animation style is nice and colorful. This is the final animated short of 1956; all of them were in Cinemascope this year.

11/6: SECRETS OF LIFE
The fourth True-Life Adventures feature is another winner. After The African Lion had shed all of the critically-derided (and distractingly stupid) cartoon affectations and anthropomorphized silliness of The Living Desert, this continues with a film in the vein of the earlier short subject Nature's Half-Acre. It doesn't have one single subject, but takes a look at many different aspects of life on Earth--from bees and ants to flowers to underwater creatures to volcanoes--but ties them together thematically. It's an excellent documentary, well-photographed (especially the underwater footage and the time-lapse film of flowers blooming) and informative, simply fascinating and a joy to watch.

12/20: Disneyland, USA
A People and Places short which I don't have, either.

12/20: WESTWARD HO, THE WAGONS!
A feature film that I have just not been able to find at all. Disney's third Western feature this year starring Fess Parker, who was starting to get tired of playing the same role over and over again. When I am finally able to see it, I'll talk about it in this space.

12/20: Samoa
Another People and Places I have yet to see as an adult.

For as much as the studio was active this year, you can see where very little of it involved theatrical animation. Only six animated shorts were released this year, augmented by re-releases of Fantasia, Song of the South, and Bambi. Resources not directed to the television series (and to be fair, not all of it was bad--The Great Cat Family, from the Disneyland episode of the same name, is a gem of a cartoon) went also to a series of 16mm filmstrips for Disney's educational films division. These were produced for schools. You may have seen some of them as a student if you're the right age (I know I saw many of them, both in schools and on Disney Channel). The different series--The Nature of Things, You And..., and I'm No Fool (with it's wonderful theme song)--were all hosted by Jiminy Cricket, with Cliff Edwards reprising his role.

But nothing, it seemed, could stop the death knell for theatrical animation. In 1957, Walt Disney began closing the shorts units entirely, and many found themselves out of work as a result--he was unsympathetic to their offers to move to the live action units, feeling it would be too hard to "retrain" them. How ironic that, this year, he was given an award by the Guild of Variety Artists for his "increasing efforts to discover new ways to keep the greatest number of people in the field of show business gainfully employed."

The same was true of animation all over Hollywood. Paul Terry sold his studio to CBS and retired. MGM, on discovering that a reissue made 90% of what a new cartoon made, shut down their animation arm completely; Hanna and Barbera made the transition to TV as a result. Warner Bros. had shut down its animation studio briefly in 1953; once it re-opened, it limped along without its former zest and vigor to an inevitable death in the early sixties.

Walt's ineffectual attitude towards animation was only added to by the slow pace of work on Sleeping Beauty, a pace he was only making worse with indecision and disinterest. The shorts program would never see the same output again. And Walt Disney simply didn't care.