Pinoke's 70th

On February 7th, 1940, Disney's second animated feature (and the third 3-strip Technicolor animated feature) was released.

Above, the 1940 trailer. Below, part of my article from Film Comment:

A Star Is Drawn.

... Seventy years after its premiere, Pinocchio remains the most lavish hand-drawn animated film ever made. In its attention to detail and the scope of its art direction, it has never been equaled. Yet at the time of its production, Pinocchio seemed a natural progressiom from Snow White, which came about because Walt Disney increasingly found the traditional cartoon short economically and artistically constricting.

But Disney knew Snow White's shortcomings better than anybody. "We've learned a lot since we started this thing," he told a reporter. "and I'm conscious only of the places it could be improved. I wish I could yank it back and do it all over again."

Ken Anderson, a long-time Disney art director and story artist, believed that Disney was aiming in a very specific direction: "I think that Walt was impatient with the restriction of a cartoon. He strived for more and more realism, more naturalism in his features. I kept a notebook at that time of camera angles and moves from live-action pictures like Anthony Adverse. Walt took a look at the notebook and liked it. He had others start keeping notes too. He was always aiming at exceeding the limitation of the medium, though we never heard it expressed in so many words."

From the start of his career, Disney borrowed from live-action. As there was Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (1927), so there was Mickey Mouse in Gallopin' Gaucho. There was Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr., and then Mickey's Steamboat Willie, the first sound cartoon.

But as the year's passed, Disney drew more on live action's visual techniques and less on its subject matter. His small Hyperion Studio grew as rapidly as its products' fame and technical sophistication. Young, new animators were hired. Watercolorists like Philip Dyke found their way into a growing background department. New development and story artists were brought in.

Designer and animator Albert Hurter had come to the studio after a career in animation dating back to World War I. Disney quickly saw that Hurter's talents could be better used rendering preliminary "idea" sketches, and his drawings of characters and strangely humanized inanimate objects influenced the look of numerous Disney shorts.

On the first Disney feature, Snow White, Hurter daily produced fifty to a hundred sketches covering all areas of the production. The dwarfs' cottage, the wicked queen's castle, and the nightmare forest through shich Snow White escapes all bear his creative stamp.

Even before Snow White was completed, Disney set newer employee Gustaff Tenggren (who was also an award-winning children's book illustrator), to work creating Pinocchio's European storybook flavor. While Hurter designed chairs, table legs, clocks and music boxes inside Gepetto's workshop, Tenggren rendered the town streets and undersea landscapes where Pinocchio had his adventures.

Claude Coats, then a Disney background artists, remembered Tenggren's "crisp, pen-and-ink watercolor style": "He painted terrific views of the houses in the little, Swiss-looking village. They had an interesting proportion to them that influenced the scale of our work at Disneyland later on." Tenggren, more than any other individual, was responsible for the overall look of Pinocchio, but he left the studio before the feature was done, and received no screen credit.

"We did an immense amount of research on Pinocchio," said layout artist Ken O'Connor, "studying houses and carvings and everything else. We'd come in and look at the storyboards and do thumbnails of camera pans and angles and pin them up underneath, working out lighting and mood.

"I remember working on a scene of Gideon and J. Worthington Foulfellow in the village streets. Tenggren had sketched this down view through rooftops of them and Pinocchio marching off along the cobblestones and I had to make it work for animation. I did the rough layouts, then moved to a live-action stage where I set up angles and props and directed the actors through stacked boxes like they were moving through the streets. They mouthed the dialogue and did the gestures, and we used the film as a guild for the animators. Then I went back and did the cleaned-up layouts.

"For another sequence, Tenggren had some great drawings of the waterfront and the Red Lobster Inn, where Gideon and Foulfellow meet the evil coachman. I tried hard to keep the feeling of his drawing in my layouts, and I had this complex camera move where the camera would go down an alley, around a corner and down to the inn. But I was getting too expensive in my thinking, and I had to condense it. I never did feel I caught as much of the flavor of Tenggren's sketches and I wanted to.

The biggest problem I always saw with getting together a long, animated feature with different art directors working on different sequences was the difficulty in making the whole thing hang together. You had people trying to outdo each other and you had to keep in mind the section of the film that came after yours. And it was a good idea to know what came before. I always found it remarkable that the features hung together as well as they did."

What held Pinocchio together was the critical sense of Walt Disney. No detail escaped his notice. He conducted story meetings, reviewed animation, watched test reels of color footage. He changed backgrounds, altered animated air-brush effects, and even made the decision on which highlights were to be sprayed or brushed on characters.

"We all had egos," said veteran animator Eric Larson, "but Walt had a way of taking those egos and making them work together as a team. This guy had the ability to take your into a story meeting and tear a sequence or reel of animation apart and rebuild it so you had something solid and concrete. He never forgot anything. If he said something to you it was a good idea to write it down, because he'd remember it even if you didn't. His enthusiasm, his effort for perfection, came off strongly on Pinocchio." ...

Long ago, when I interviewed some of the veteran artists who worked on Pinocchio, they said it was the most complicated feature they ever did. Complicated or not, Pinocchio is the most expensive of the Disney pre-World War II features, costing more, minute-to-minute, than Gone With the Wind. But because of an unfortunate dust-up then going on in Europe (one of Disney's major markets) Pinoke made less than half what Snow White did during its initial release. Happily, it's done quite nicely since.

So birthday salutations, little wooden boy. You definitely helped make the company what it is today.

(Ward Kimball offers his memories of Pinocchio here.)

Add On: And this date is 57 years and two days after the release of Peter Pan, which (unlike Pinocchio) has had sequels and spinoffs and teevee shows spinning along in its wake.

(Side point apropo of nothing: Years ago I watched Pinocchio and Peter Pan back to back in some screening room or other. What jumped out at me was how much faster the cutting was in Pan, with the length of individual scenes way shorter.)