Walt Disney was a multi-faceted entrepreneur. This was something that became very clear to me after reading the interviews with Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Marc Davis from the Working with Disney (2011) book by Don Peri. Multi-faceted in a sense that he appeared to have had different personalities and a specific way to deal with each one of his hundreds of employees in the studio, as an attempt to bring out the best in them. Although the interviews were very different, personalized for each of the interviewees, they painted a very distinctive picture of Disney and his peculiar but sometimes controversial ways.
Frank, Ollie and Marc all started working at Disney’s Studios at around the same time, a little before the start of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) production, and didn’t really know Walt before then. “We were all pretty much in awe of him”, Marc said. They all started as assistant animators, and worked their way up the ranks and closer to Walt as he saw the talent in them, something he really had a great intuition for. Frank would even have said “he seemed to like what I was doing and believed in what I was saying, which is more than I did”. But Walt would have been really rigorous; “he’d pick on every little thing” as Ollie said. That was his way of making sure the final product was what he imagined it could be, “and certainly Walt Disney was the only man in the world who could put that many people together and have them turn out a feature film as consistent as it was and still have it work and be believable”, as Marc would put it.
But Davis would also have his disagreements with Walt’s ways: “He liked to put people together in conflict. He felt that he got a better job out of them. I never particularly agreed with him on that”. Frank, one the other hand, was really fond of Disney and seemed to understand his controversial ways of running the studio: “He wanted the best for his guys”. Walt would have his way to make sure everyone was taken care of, but also making sure that the product was coming out the way he intended. To some people in the studio, that would have seemed paternalistic. Combined with the staff cuts and differences in salaries — something Walt was working on to fix according to Frank — , that would have culminated into the studio strike in 1941. “At the time, I was very emotionally involved, as all of us were”, Frank said.
But often times Walt would also show his dreamer side and his belief in the ability of his animators, specially in the early days, before the war. And this would have culminated with Fantasia (1940), because it “was such a giant step in an entirely new direction and really so entertaining in its own way”, described Ollie; “I’m flabbergasted when I look at it”. But the film didn’t do so well at the time and Frank said “had Fantasia gone over, I think we would have found ourselves in another field”, meaning they would’ve continued to experiment with different mediums and techniques as they did in it’s production. “But if the war hadn’t cut off the funds, it’s possible that Walt would have tried and experimented more”, Ollie would add, being somewhat closer to Walt as he was because of their shared interest in miniature locomotives. Walt would come up to him when they met outside the office and talk about the problems the studio was facing during those hard times.
After that Walt started to lose his interest in the films they were producing: “he was all wrapped up in the Disneyland project and the TV shows” Ollie would put it. And it was understandable, as times were hard for studio and he had to think about what would be best for the company, financially speaking, leaving most of the animation work in the hands of his most trustworthy animators. He would have also be brought down to earth at that time after Fantasia: “Why don’t you go with that? That’s a good product”, Walt himself would say to one of his animators, or “let’s have a script and stick to it”, as an attempt to keep things simpler and cheaper than what they had been doing.
And even though the magic started to fade away from Walt — and probably into his amazing team of animators who carried on his legacy after his death — , to be able to start from scratch into a practically non existent industry and build what he has is truly remarkable. To put it in Marc Davis’ own words: “no one else could have done it”.
