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MEETING THE PIONEERS (part II) |
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Last month Peter Adamakos wrote about his impressions
on meeting and talking with some of the pioneers of animation such as
Dave Fleischer, Paul Terry and others. In this issue he resumes his
memories of Walter Lantz and recalls some others. Cartoon history loomed larger than it should have I discovered. Once when at a morning meeting at Disney, I was asked to join them for lunch, but said I had a meeting with Walter Lantz after seeing them and we were going to do the lunch thing. Turning cold for a moment, one of the senior people said. “Okay. You know it was Lantz who stole Oswald from us.” This was almost 40 years later! And actually it wasn’t. It was Friz Freleng and his bunch that did. When they made a mess of it, Universal gave Oswald to Lantz, and Walt Disney once wrote he got a kick out of how they lost Oswald and it went to Lantz. Other times I’d bring up someone’s name at Disney and they would say that he did or didn’t go out on strike in the 1940s, again many years after the fact. Once I mentioned a young animator I admired to another, and the first comment was “Of course his father went out on strike.” We just read about animation history, but they live it still! Jay Ward (ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE) was the strangest of all. I wrote a Wardish-type letter in the mid-1970s that I was coming down and insisted on meeting him and wouldn’t take no for an answer or else, (or something like that.) He wrote back that he now feared for his life and would have to meet me on such and such a day and time. When I got to his studio, I found he was unable to meet, but Bill Hurtz, one of his key people, top animator, writer and creative touchstone would, and we had a fine time talking about everything from his old Disney days to the madcap ones at Ward’s. There was a Jay Ward shop in those days, and when I went over, Jay Ward’s wife was manning it and we started talking. She called out her assistant after a while, because he knew about the Jay Ward studio too. He was a fountain of information, and we had a fine, relaxed time. After my friend and I left, I told him that we had just met and talked to Jay Ward who I recognized from the few photos that had been printed of him in those early days. I hadn’t let on that I knew it was him, if that’s the way he wanted it. Perhaps the anonymity let the afternoon’s meeting happen after all. I since heard that he was an unassuming type of fellow, and while not a recluse, others have said that it didn’t surprise them that he would have been very outgoing during our talk, but secretive as to his identity. Some thought it was a way of being less vulnerable, but most thought he was probably just having fun, and enjoying meeting his fans without the fawning. A few weeks ago on a business trip to California, one of our younger animators and I spent a wonderful day with Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and their wives Jeanette and Marie, at a restaurant lunch then later in their home. Our too infrequent get-togethers started over 25 years ago, and began with a letter to ROBIN HOOD’s director Woolie Reitherman in which I praised the animation of Prince John as a breakthrough in character animation, the biggest breakthrough since Art Babbit’s work in THE COUNTRY COUSIN in my opinion. Prince John had moods and the resultant variations in the animation acting was masterful. Woolie replied that it was the work of Ollie Johnston and invited me to the studio for a lunch with the animators when I was in the neighborhood. That took another 18 months to accomplish, but it certainly was a memorable lunch, and it started a continuing communication with Frank and Ollie and their wives. The feature documentary FRANK AND OLLIE, the best ever done on animation, shows the two men who are even more friends than co-workers, discussing their work at the Disney studio. What you see on film is what you get in real life. We all spend as much time laughing as talking when we get together, as old stories and frank discussions abound. They seem to be as interested in today’s animation as its past. Our recent talks included both Snow White and Treasure Planet, and Ollie described their increasing participation with the internet and a new website. Ollie especially wanted all the details on a new project we would be doing with Disney. Now in their 90s, they are living proof of the adage that animation keeps you young. You can’t help getting older, but you never have to get old. Their first book, THE ILLUSION OF LIFE, is the Bible of quality animation. It was years in preparation, and I was just one of many people they approached to send them in writing what we would like to see in the book. It added to their work but showed the care they took in writing it. At our recent meeting Jeanette remembered one of our past meetings in Montreal where she thought they were going to have a heart attack. They were going through some old Disney artwork I had, signing those they had done, and coming to one of them they whooped and hollered, jumping up and down. There was a famous preproduction Snow White drawing they were looking for for years that they wanted to include in the book and never knew that I had bought it. They had never thought to ask if I had it. |
Their sense of humor remains as strong as ever, as does Frank’s mimicry of his contemporaries. He did a good Ward Kimball in one story. When we left the restaurant a stranger held the door open for Frank. He laughed heartily when I asked him if he thought the man would have done it if he knew that Frank was part of the team that killed Bambi’s mother. Glen Keane once said that early on he thought they were one person, Frankandolloe. I’ve come to think of them as Frankandollieandjeanetteandmarie. The twosome is really a foursome, and their wives are definitely equal partners with similar great stories and observations. It is always a joy to behold. By the way, their website isn’t frankandollie, but frankanollie, without the “D” in it, because, as Ollie says, he’s tired of being referred to as a dolly!We were also pleased to visit with Ron Clements who co-directed THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE, THE LITTLE MERMAID, ALADDIN and HERCULES. It was great to be able to tell him in person that I feel his recent TREASURE PLANET is, after ROBIN HOOD, the next leap forward in Disney personality animation. Glen Keane’s Long John Silver is the candidate. And it’s not about his being part computer-drawn and part 2D. The character is so subtle in his acting, so nuanced as his greed fights his growing affection for the teenage boy that it a masterful performance aided by superb voice talent. We enjoyed visiting his office, filled with mementoes as much as we did visiting him! On another day we also enjoyed going through the original TREASURE PLANET artwork in the studio’s animation morgue then going back in time to older treasures. On this visit we saw the incredible original multiplane backgrounds on glass from PINOCCHIO, BAMBI, SLEEPING BEAUTY etc. which I had not seen before. I first met Chuck Jones back in the early 1970s in his office in California and was in awe meeting animation’s best director. A couple of years later he decided to sell his original animation cels from his productions and called me to ask how he should proceed. There were only a handful of collectors back then and he knew my interest. It was successful, and he did follow my advice to sell through one gallery, in person and by mail, sign only very key items, not all of them as he had wanted, and give a certificate of authenticity. I started to sweat when he asked how much he should charge. Disney had just released ROBIN HOOD cels at $85-$100 each, I replied. There was a silence on the phone. I didn’t want to say if his were worth more or less than Disney ones! Finally he said that that gave him an idea, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A few years later when we were talking to ABC about doing a TV Special, Chuck offered to oversee the project if it would help get it off the ground. ABC would pay him, and he’d come up to Montreal now and then to see how we’re doing. “I won’t have to do much. You know what you’re doing, and I’ll get to go to your fine restaurants” is how he put it. Sadly, we never did do it. This was to be a holiday Special starring our characters Winnie Witch and the Giant Potato. He always asked about our plans for the characters, for launching them before the public and one time we met in the VIP lounge at the airport as he was passing through and I was able to report that we would soon launch the characters. He gave me a strange look as I explained: “We are going to have an ad featuring the characters in 25 newspapers every day for years to get them known.” He looked skeptical as if I had lost my mind. He said that would cost a fortune until I explained the newspapers would pay us. Then he REALLY gave me a look! “It’s called a comic strip”, I explained. We were going to launch the characters as a comic strip. His eyes widened, and he slapped his palm against his forehead. “A comic strip!” he said. He then got this faraway look in his eyes and I don’t think he heard anything else I said. Some weeks later I found out why, when he sent me copies of his new comic strip in which he launched a little boy character he wanted to do in animation. Most people don’t know he did a comic strip. I know it was syndicated by the New York Daily News, but it didn’t last very long, and as he never mentioned it again, I never did, so I don’t know what happened. My guess is that he learned, as we did, that a comic strip, even one that lasts for years as ours did, takes a lot of time, doesn’t earn much money, and is an art unto itself, that animators should not expect they can easily do because they are in animation. On a very busy day at the studio I took a phone call: “Peter Adamakakakas? This is Shamus Culhane.” “Yeah, and I’m Bugs Bunny. Who is this?” I replied. He laughed and explained that it really was he. He and some other old retired animation “graybeards” as he called themselves, were doing a TV Special in full animation, but were not as fast as in the old days and needed a studio to do about a quarter of the “NOAH’S ANIMALS” show. This we did, and learned a lot from working with Shamus. One scene was especially tough to do. It had all these animals, singing and walking up to the ark, to a song’s beat. Well, some of these animals had four feet, some two, and so on, but had to keep their place in line, keep the line moving along, and to that darn beat. Shamus said it was like his scene of the dwarfs marching home in SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS—how to keep dwarfs like the sprightly-walking Happy in step with Sleepy, who drags along? He gave us some pointers, and “I’m giving you six weeks to do the sequence. Walt gave me six months.” We went on to do another animated film, which we did in its entirety with him as director, a film for the USA bicentennial.
Peter Adamakos is an animation producer and director who founded an
animation company 31 years ago. He has also founded the Animation Museum
which has sent traveling exhibitions to museums in various countries for
many years.
Peter Adamakos |
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