Dreams of Sugar-Plums Danced In Their Heads -- In Fact, They Were Animated!

CHRISTMAS CARDS OF ANIMATORS AND THEIR STUDIOS

by Rick Marschall

In the worlds of comic strips and other branches of cartooning, through the years the artists have created personal cards for family, friends, and fans. More occasionally did syndicates and publishers send out greetings featuring their casts. Of course it happened, and we will share some in the next posting.

But here are cards that were designed by animators and animation studios. Although none of these were marketed in stores, they did serve as promotions for the characters and their studios.

Enjoy early Disney Studio cards; Otto Messmer (when he was doing the newspaper-strip Felix); a cast of stars from Paramount / Famous Studios; and a card inscribed to Seymour Kneitel from Max and Dave Fleischer.

The last example is a Christmas drawing probably by the great Hank Porter. The woodland Christmas image features all the Disney characters and superb penwork and shading. It has got to be one of the finest Disney pieces, or any cartoon by any cartoonist. I first saw the original art more than 50 years ago, framed on the wall of the great collector Howard Bayliss in his apartment in Queens, New York City.

HAVE A

MERRY

AND ANIMATED

CHRISTMAS! 

The Great Debate –

Nassua, NY Newsday, 1971: At the station, (radio DJ Al) Doud goes into a studio to tape a segment of his show. His guest is Richard Schickel, movie critic for Life magazine, who wrote a book on Walt Disney a couple of years ago. His other guest is a cartoonist named Al Kilgore (Bullwinkle) who hates the book Schickel wrote on Walt Disney a couple of years ago. Kilgore has a copy of the book with about 800 markers in it noting the parts he wants to argue about. “It’s well-written,” says Kilgore as the taping gets under way, “but it’s the most vicious character assassination I’ve ever seen.”

“That’s hyperbole,” says Schickel. “Look, why are you making this semi-hysterical attack?”

Kilgore calls Schickel “Mr. Snide.” Schickel says, “This is preposterous.” The debate is not on the highest level. Schickel gets quite upset. Finally he stands up. “I’m not gonna take this,” he says. “Take your show and stuff it.” He walks out of the studio.

Doud turns to the microphone. “I’d like to say a word about Shop-Rite Supermarkets,” he says...

– Freak, By Lewis Grossberger

📽

A Crowded Life in Comics –

It All Started with Alice –

My Friendship with Virginia Davis

by Rick Marschall

Brochure cover page of the original Alice cartoons of Walt Disney

“It All Started with a Mouse” is a legend, logo, saying that is marketed at Disney theme parks and elsewhere – this colossal enterprise all around you, all around the world, really the Disney behemoth, all commenced with a simple cartoon mouse. 

Presenting Ginni Davis with a directors’ jacket embroidered with image

 of the original Alice in Cartoonland promotional image

In fact it really began before that, and there might not have been a “Disney” empire, nor a Mickey Mouse himself, if it had not been for a little girl from Kansas named Virginia Davis. I was blessed, during my Crowded Life in Comics, to know Ginnie, and even to introduce her to cartoon fans in Rome and in San Diego, and play a little role in shining the spotlight on her career in her last years.

She was not in complete obscurity when my old friend John Province made contact with her. Her Disney years were long in the rear-view mirror, and she lived in semi-retirement as a real-estate agent in Boise, Idaho. She was a footnote in some studies; mentioned at festivals; and received attention in the book Walt in Wonderland, published in Italy and co-published by an academic press in the US. But unjustly, not a household name.

 Virginia Davis, Rick Marschall, Jassanne Wallace 

of the Circle Gallery

John tracked Ginni down and I immediately assigned him to interview her for an early issue of Hogan’s Alley.

For those of you who don’t know the name Virginia Davis, I shall not get further ahead of myself. She was born in 1918 in Kansas City, and her family were neighbors of Walt Disney. He was a struggling cartoonist and aspiring animator, producing primitive Laugh-O-Gram commercials for merchants advertising in local motion-picture theaters. He aspired to make cartoon shorts for a national audience and conceived the novelty idea of having a live-action character cavort in an animated world – the opposite, really, of the popular Out Of the Inkwell series of the Bray Studio and managed thereafter by the Fleischer Brothers.

Exhibitors Trade Review, Mar-May 1924

Disney asked the Davises if their five-year-old daughter Virginia would play Alice in the Alice in Cartoonland series he envisioned. The first, Alice’s Wonderland, became his sample, sent to distributor Margaret J Winkler in New York. She and her husband Charles Mintz had success with Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat cartoons. 

At ExpoCartoon, Rome, Italy: Rick Marschall; Virginia Davis; Andrea Felice, 

for whose definitive history of Disney’s Silly Symphonies I had written a chapter.

In short order, Winkler ordered a series of Alice cartoons; Disney moved to Hollywood (invited by his convalescing brother Roy, and enticed by their uncle’s offer of his garage that could serve as their studio); and Walt asked if the Davises would move to California on the promise of multiple films in which Ginnie would star… 

At Comicon: Mike Peters (political cartoons, Mother Goose and Grimm); 

Rick Marschall; Virginia Davis 

The Davis family indeed moved West. Little Virginia starred in 14 Alice comedies (Disney produced 57 in all) and through the years remained close to the movie industry, if not swimming in the middle of that stream. She auditioned for the voice of Snow White; Walt himself had the studio train her for the ink-and-paint department, and she appeared in a few movies, like The Harvey Girls and Three On a Match. 

John Province and Virginia Davis

Oh, and another of myriad footnotes to her fascinating story: when the Davis parents needed their final household items and their Cadillac brought to Hollywood, they asked another Kansas City friend, who agreed for the task… and he never really left Hollywood afterward. That friend was Ub Iwerks. After chicanery and other factors caused Walt to move from Alice to Oswald the Rabbit to… Steamboat Willie, it was Iwerks whose conceptualization of Mickey Mouse and, later, technical and thematic innovations, made him an animation pioneer in Disney’s echelon.

Virginia was in her spry eighties when I met her. She was grateful for the Hogan’s Alley interview; I invited her as a special guest to ExpoCartoon in Rome, the breakaway festival of Lucca. The director Rinaldo Traini usually issued two invitations to America guests, and Ginnie brought her teenage granddaughter. Virginia Davis was feted grandly and received a special Yellow Kid award.

Ginni Davis at the Hogan’s Alley table signing autographs, 

Comicon 1995

When Hogan’s Alley was new I invited special guests to appear at our Comicon table and in special programs. One year it was Ginnie; and the magazine arranged a special evening in her honor at the Old Town Circle Gallery in San Diego. I had several directors’ jackets embroidered with an image from an Alice cartoon, the early Disney logo, and the legend “It All Started With a Mouse” crossed out to read, “It All Started with the Alice Comedies.”

 At venues in America and Italy I hosted Ginni in interview 

sessions and walking fans through her cartoons

It is a treat, a rare privilege, to know someone who embodies a rich heritage. Virginia Davis was the last surviving link with the seminal days of Walt Disney; she was “walking history,” in a literal sense. Humble, giggly… not too far, I often thought when with her, from the little girl in pigtails who was a star before anyone ever heard of Mickey Mouse.

🐭

34

Christmas With The Cartoonists

Three animators' cards

a. Walt Disney 1930

b. Max and Dave Fleischer

c. Otto Messmer

a.

b.

c.

🕭

Sunday With Bugs Bunny

Al Stoffell and Ralph Heimdahl

The MEN BEHIND THE COMICS

In my childhood I used to follow the daily comic strip adventures of Bugs Bunny in my hometown newspaper the Trail (BC) Daily Times. Finding information about Al Stoffell (writer) and Ralph Heimdahl (cartoonist) has always been a near futile chore, perhaps they were unjustly ignored because they were producing a cartoon “property” rather than illuminating original characters. I did, however, find a short article that shed some light on their lives. In the creators’  own words:

Al Stoffell – “Away back thar in 1947, after I had been a freelance writer, hotel publicity man, newpaper reporter and a lieutenant in the Navy, I turned up as a handy man in the editorial department of Western Publishing Co., which had an agreement with Warner Brothers and Newspaper Enterprise Association to produce a Bugs Bunny Sunday page. One day somebody gave me a pat on the back and told me I was going to write the Bugs Bunny Sunday page. My Norwegian friend (Ralph Heimdahl) and I have been at it ever since.”

Ralph Heimdahl – “I had been teaching for seven years in Minnesota, six years in a school for the deaf, when I read about a national competition that Walt Disney was holding to find artists to work for him in California. I drew up some Mickey Mouses and some Donald Ducks and sent them in. I was accepted along with eleven other guys in 1937 and we went through the Disney training.

There was a big strike and I wound up on a farm in Vermont. While on the farm I created a comic strip called Minnie Sue and Little Haha which I finally sold to an outfit in New York after my return to California. It wasn’t real successful but it was a nice little Indian story.”

[1] November 22, 1958

[2] September 1, 1959

[3] May 14, 1960

The Men Behind The Comics: Heimdahl, Stoffell: 

Batty About Bugs, R. Terrance Roskin, 

Desert Sun, July 12 1976

HERE

❦

Before Ever After – the Disney Lectures

 1   The Lost Lectures. Now in print. 

NEARLY half a century has gone by since the passing of Walter Elias Disney (1901-66). The latest Disney blockbuster at the time was the live-action song and dance film Mary Poppins from 1964. Generations that followed probably associate the name “Walt Disney” with a massive faceless corporation rather than the beloved uncle figure who so intimately affected the lives of millions of children and parents.

US NEWSPAPERS. Young Disney learned his reading and drawing and coloring and clowning in the early 1900s from the great comics in the US newspapers — especially the weekly supplements in color. Early on his aunt Maggie presented him with a Big Chief drawing tablet and pencils. Then, as a nine-year old schoolboy he was forced to work for his father’s newspaper delivery service. The Kansas City Star had to be folded first and then delivered to the homes of roughly 650 customers in Kansas City, seven days a week — with a double load on Sundays: 

“Walt and his older brother Roy had to get up every morning at three thirty in order to begin the delivery. Late in life Disney recalled: ‘The papers had to be stuck behind the storm doors. You couldn’t just toss them on the porch. And in the winters there’d be as much as three feet of snow. I was a little guy and I’d be up to my nose in snow. I still have nightmares about it.’” — Leonard Maltin, 1973

CARTOONS & COMICS. For six years Walt Disney was on his father’s paper route, on a bicycle from year two. He also started selling papers at a Kansas City trolley because his dad kept all the money. “The upshot of it I was working all the time. I mean, I never had any real play time.” But Walt surely had his eyes on all of the national papers and newspapers with cartoons and comics. And without a doubt loved The Intellectual Pup in the Kansas City Star on Sunday by Harry Wood (1871-1943) — the cartoon adventures of a scruffy terrier and other funny dogs, in his paper since late 1907.

 2   A scruffy dog. The Intellectual Pup; Extracts From His Diary by Harry Wood. In books from G.W. Dillingham Co. and the Kansas City Star since 1908.

The Kansas City Star itself had a “restrained appearance” and featured practically no comic strips until the 20s.

★ ★ ★

FIRST SYMPHONY. Professionally, Walt Disney began doing cartoons and animation in the early 1920s, working together with Ub Iwerks. In 1928-29, a year after the launch of Mickey Mouse, they produced a new series of animated films with sound, musical shorts under the title Silly Symphonies, beginning with The Skeleton Dance.

LECTURES. At the time Disney was dreaming of making a feature-lenght animated film and his Silly Symphonies became the petri dish fueled by innovations in technique and new technology. In November 1930 Canadian born Don Graham began teaching life-drawing classes on Disney’s sound stage; soon Disney artists were attending classes at the Chouinard Art Institute. In order to train the large number of recruits Disney required to make the feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — first shown just before Christmas 1937 — Disney partnered with Chouinard and set up his own in-house art school. Notes were taken of the lectures organized by Don Graham in 1935-39. These notes have now been made available, their full texts nicely facsimiled as photographic reproductions of the original typewritten sheets.

“I really don’t know where the hell to start…’” — Bill Tytla’s first lecture opening line, 1936

 3   An inspirational drawing. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Albert Hurter, mid-1930s.

The 448-page Before Ever After book shows the following texts and miscellanea:

★ Art Babbitt, Character Analysis of the Goof, and another by Ted Sears ★ Art Babbitt, Interview with Babbitt, conducted by Dr. Morkovin, Notes on a Gag Manual Project ★ Walt Disney, Inter-Office Communication to Don Graham, concerning  proposed “systemic training course for young animators” and a “plan of approach for our older animators.” December 15, 1935 ★ Don Graham, Action Analysis, February 22, 1937 ★ Don Graham, Action Analysis, March 1, 1937 ★ George Drake, Notes and Suggestions for Animators and Assistants, April 22, 1935 ★ George Drake, Notes on Disney-Chouinard Series, May 26, 1937 ★ Les Clark, Training Course Lecture, Discussion of Mickey, August 17, 1936 ★ Phil Dike, Class for Layout Men ★ Bill Tytla, Action Analysis Class, conducted by Don Graham, December 10, 1936 ★ Bill Tytla, Action Analysis Class, conducted by Don Graham, June 28, 1937 ★ Ham Luske, Character Handling, October 6, 1938 ★ Wilfred Jackson, Jaxon’s Lecture on “Musical Stories”, January 12, 1939 ★ Ted Sears, Mickey, introducing the next lecture by Fred Moore: ★ Fred Moore, Analysis of Mickey Mouse, illustrated ★ Dave Hand, Action Analysis, February 27, 1936 ★ Dave Hand, “Staging” As Applied to Presentation of Story and Gag Ideas, October 13, 1938 ★ Dick Huemer, “Timing”, February 20, 1936 ★ Tom Codrick, Layout Training Course, November 19, 1936 ★ Boris Morkovin, Technique and Psychology of the Animated Cartoon, November 14, 1935 ★ Faber Birren, Color Preferences, April 20, 1939 ★ Robert Feild, Lecture, Hollywood Las Palmas theatre, August 9, 1938 ★ Ted Cook, Guest Talk, November 11, 1938 ★ Jean Charlot, Pictures and Picture Making, A series of lectures, April 12, 1938 ★ Ferdinand Horvath, Surprise in Gags, February 22, 1937 ★ Frank Lloyd Wright, Lecture, February 25, 1939 ★ Alexander Woollcott, Lecture, March 28, 1939 ★ Roland Young, Interview, April 11, 1939 ★ Mary Weiser, Bible Reading, an addition to the printed Painter’s Bible ★ Samuel Armstrong, Multiplane Technique and Color Reproduction, November 25, 1938 ★ Sam Blyfield, “Sound Recording”

★ ★ ★

RADICAL SCHOOLING. At the time the idea of a school for animators was so radical that Bill Tytla, who offers the two most incisive lectures in the book, began his 1936 speech with “I really don’t know where the hell to start.” Alexander Woollcott and Frank Lloyd Wright seemed bewildered by the subject of animation but managed entertaining and informative lectures. The student animators in turn were bewildered by the pompous labored musing of film scholar Boris Morkovin.

 4   Animators on strike. One of the strike actions of Disney animators, united in the American Federation of Labor Screen Cartoon Guild, between late-May and Fall 1941.

THE END OF TIME. The animator’s strike of 1941 and World War II put an end to the “wonderful time” restored to memory by Before Ever After. Many of the techniques birthed during this period are probably redundant in the 21st century. Even so, in this digital age there is much to be learned from these historical lectures — about painting, timing, drawing and action, acting and gag-writing. The lost lectures, illustrated by powerful archival photographs and artwork, preserve for posterity a very personal, often humorous, fly-on-the-wall viewpoint of a revolutionary period in the history of animation.

★ Before Ever After, The Lost Lectures of Walt Disney’s Animation Studio by Don Hahn & Tracey Miller-Zarneke, Disney Editions, Los Angeles/New York, 2015, 448 pages in hardback binding

★ ★ ★

Pictures [2] to [4] are not in the book. Photo [4] courtesy of Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, UCLA.