PRESERVING ANIMATION HISTORY
By Peter Adamakos

Our 32-year old animation company is currently doing a project with Disney Feature Animation in California, and two recent visits there let me and one of our young animation talents fulfill a longtime dream—to see up close how Disney preserves its animation legacy.

 I had not visited the animation “morgue” where all the artwork is stored, for many years.   The artwork (as well as everything else like publications and merchandising) used to be managed by Disney’s Archives. Preserving things has become more specialized and the preservation of items more intensive than ever. Where there was a handful of staff preserving the company’s treasures, there are now many dozens, in different locations in the Burbank area.

The Archives still exist, in the new Frank Wells building on the old studio lot. It is still a fantastic place to visit, and see things like Walt Disney’s teenage drawings, props from MARY POPPINS and hundreds of thousands of other artifacts. David R. Smith, who approached Disney over 30 years ago to start an archives to save the history of the company whose work he loved, is still its head, still enthusiastic and a visit and lunch with him is still an awesome event. (And also apparently worth $2,500, according to a recent winning ebay bid for a tour and a lunch with him, he told us, shaking his head in disbelief.)

We also visited the Photo Library, in a third location, where hundreds of thousands of Disney photos, from the films and behind the scenes photos, from the company’s silent era to today. There are so many wonderful old photos there, it made me wonder why most publications still publish the same old ones. Spending more time there would yield “new” ones to authors and editors.

 The Animation Research Library has taken the artwork from the Archives into a new facility in Burbank that is temperature-controlled and has amazing safety and security features to avoid everything from fire to theft. Here are the original drawings from the silent days, with Alice and Oswald, through Mickey and the great shorts, to Snow White and the other features up through Treasure Planet.

Everything is here, and catalogued: conception drawings, sketches, inspirationals, backgrounds, layouts, storyboards, and of course scenes of animation roughs and clean-ups. We felt ourselves lucky to spend a week there, actually going into the vaults which outsiders rarely do. The vaults are cold, and staff have to wear jackets to work in there for more than a few minutes. We got to see the vast collection as it is stored. At one end are hundreds of maquettes of the cartoon characters, 3D models that the animators used to stay on model and in proper perspective in their drawings. At the opposite end of that  vault was perhaps the most amazing sight of all: very long drawers in which were many small shelves, each holding an original multiplane background. Here were the actual glass paintings from PINOCCHIO, BAMBI, FANTASIA and so on—backgrounds we’ve zoomed into on film and tape countless times such as Evynd Earle’s SLEEPING BEAUTY 70mm intricately detailed forest paintings, all on glass.

The heart of animation is of course, the animation drawings themselves, and we studied and flipped hundreds of scenes of animation during the week, from SNOW WHITE to TREASURE PLANET.  Here was Snow White, beautifully rendered with her delicate features. That the inkers were able to trace these features intact raised my admiration for their talents. Here was Glen Keane’s Long John Silver from TREASURE PLANET, one of the all-time great animated characters. Silver was impressive enough onscreen, but seeing in person the subtlety of the drawing confirmed that acting with a pencil recently   reached new heights in animation.

I can happily report that the library is in safe hands. From the director to the general staff, each person was thoroughly knowledgeable about Disney and animation, and totally dedicated to preserving and promoting these treasures and the art of animation. I cannot praise these people enough after seeing them at work over a six day period.

We had a profound appreciation for how young this art form is when we met our old friends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and their wives for lunch and a visit to their homes. They are in their early 90s. We also met Joe Grant, at the studio, who is now 95. He started with Disney in 1933! Here was the man who designed the witch in SNOW WHITE, wrote DUMBO and did so much more and still makes an active contribution to everything done today. It is obvious that today’s people there appreciate him, though we were a bit apprehensive when he reviewed our work! (He liked it, but asked pointed questions about it.) We met other, younger talents there as well, saw new projects in development, and saw Michael Eisner too, who had come for a meeting.

After seeing Frank Thomas again, back at the library I had to ask for his spaghetti-eating masterpiece scene where Lady and Tramp chew on the same strand, part, and Tramp nudges a meatball over to her side of the plate. To study and flip this touchstone scene was a moving experience. We looked at the drawings one at a time, and marveled at the tiny yet actual changes there were between drawings. Often the only change was minute—Tramp is more warm in this drawing—you could often see it in the tiny, tiny changes in the eyes, especially in the tiny white spot within the pupil of the eye. The quality of the line work, pencil lines that felt like fur and the like just added to the sincerity of the scene.

All it was, after all, were a few hundred drawings, in a folder, the same as thousands upon thousands of other folders containing other drawings done over the decades. Yet these relatively small pieces of paper, filled with notes, and erasures, and sometimes worn by constant flipping during their making, were the repository of the art of animation’s accomplishments, hopes, and aspirations, and quite simply the best animation ever done. Here was a challenge to all who enter the field, to equal, and to eventually surpass the promise of these pieces of paper,  a challenge to not only animators, but especially to producers to try to create similarly engaging animation rather than the lowest common denominator type of animation most often seen today. From these sheets of paper to billions of people around the world, their ability to enchant people, to move people, to create a moment most of us share in our common humanity, this was a reminder of how fortunate we who work in animation are.

 Everyone who loves animation should applaud Disney for spending the time and resources to preserve its past in these ways. Other animation companies should do the same.