[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. A good story should contain a lesson or have a moralor it should definitely tell something interesting which leads up to a climaxthat will have a punch and impress an audience.Your story should dealmostly with personalities. He oªered Three Little Pigs as the prime exampleof what he was after: The biggest hit to date in cartoon form and yet so sim-ple that it only contains four characters, with no large objects that is, bigmachines like trains or boats to detract or take away from the personali-ties of these characters. 19By the time he wrote that memo, Disney had good reason to know howdifficult it would be to adhere to its precepts.Toward the end of 1933, he haddictated a three-page outline for A Silly Symphony Idea, Based on the Livesof the Little Penguins in the Far-Oª Artic [sic] Land. That idea, as rewrit-ten three times by Bill Cottrell, eventually resulted in Peculiar Penguins, aSilly Symphony released in September 1934.The film itself is an insipid ro-mance, nothing but a more elaborate version of such very early Silly Sym-phonies as Monkey Melodies (1930) boy and girl characters cuddle and dancein the first half of the cartoon and dispatch a menace of some kind in thesecond half but Disney s outline was even worse, loading up the story witha rival to its hero, Peter Penguin, and concluding with a wedding.201 06 thi s character was a li ve pers on There is no record of who worked with Disney on the story for TheGolden Touch in the spring of 1934, but he clearly was deeply involved (hiscomments in distinctive hand-blocked characters show up on a heavilyreworked treatment or preliminary script).21 He began handing out anima-tion for The Golden Touch in June 1934, and it was more than six months be-fore Moore and Ferguson delivered their last scenes.The film itself reachedtheaters in March 1935.Surprisingly, considering Disney s plans, the completed Golden Touch sig-nals immediately that its director is recycling old ideas more than testing newones.King Midas and his cat are indistinguishable from characters Fergusonanimated in earlier films.The king tips his crown and winks at the camerabefore breaking into a very deliberately articulated song (this was one of thefirst Silly Symphonies with a lot of dialogue recorded in advance), accompa-nied by very broad, shallow, stagey gestures.Midas is an unattractive char-acter because he is so greedy, but to make things worse, he performs in a highlyartificial manner sharply at odds with the more realistic acting style that wasemerging in live-action films.Whatever sympathy or interest an audiencemight want to feel is put to the test right away.Neither is it easy to like Goldie, the elf who bestows the golden touch.Moore animated all of his scenes, just as Ferguson animated almost all of Mi-das s, but there is in the animation of Goldie none of Moore s vaunted charm.Goldie s gestures, like a waggling index finger, are as hackneyed as Midas s,and he responds to the distraught Midas s plea for a hamburger by asking, ina nasty tone of voice, With or without onions? Disney struggled with his film.The animation of The Golden Touchbumped along slowly, with pauses and delays, and it stopped completely latein the summer while Disney reworked the middle of the story.It was ap-parently not until October 1934 that The Golden Touch was sufficiently un-der control that Disney could begin leading meetings devoted to Snow Whiteand the Seven Dwarfs.Notes survive from four meetings held that month.One artist, Albert Hurter, took part in at least one of the October meet-ings, but Disney was working mostly with writers who did not draw.Just aswith the silent Alices and Oswalds, there is nothing to indicate that sketchesplayed a very important part in early story work.Most of the Disney car-toons made in 1934 still had very little dialogue, but Snow White in its earlystages threatened to become a dialogue-heavy film, as if Disney and his writ-ers could not help but measure themselves against live-action features.DickCreedon in particular dictated many pages of dialogue in the days just afterhe circulated an eighteen-page outline dated October 22.22 What Creedonthe leap to feature fi lms , 1 93 4 1 93 8 1 07 wrote betrayed his origins as a radio writer, telling too much as if the ac-tion the dialogue accompanied would not be visible and revealing too lit-tle.Creedon s dialogue for a lodge meeting of the dwarfs even resembledan episode of Amos n Andy, complete with such ludicrous lodge titles as the Much Most Exalted Mastodonic and Majestic Mammoth. The dwarfs, readily imaginable as cartoon characters, were at the centerof this early eªort.Everyone had trouble getting a grip on the other charac-ters, the queen in particular, and on the story as a whole.It demanded a se-rious approach that was alien to writers and artists who had always been con-cerned with gags and whose first impulse was to find ways to give Snow Whitea pervasive comic tone
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]