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.You can t turn back. Hesummed up his problem this way, years later: The picture was filled withweird characters. 124During work on Alice, Frank Thomas said, Disney had trouble commu-nicating to almost anybody what he really saw in the material.You couldsense what it was, but every time you thought you had it, he would say, No,es capi ng from ani mati on, 1 947 1 953 229 no, you don t want stuª like that in there, or You re missing the boat, or That s not what we want to do. 125In an interview with Christian Renaut, Thomas cited his difficult en-counters with Disney over his animation of the Queen of Hearts: He said, Try some stuª.What is she doing in the picture? So I was supposed to takeup a funny character and do some stuª that I needed to be kind of strong.He looked at it and said, You ve lost your comedy. So I tried it funny. You velost your menace, and I asked, Now what is she doing in the picture? Giveme some business and I ll give you a character, and he said, No, you giveme a character and I ll give you some business. 126Such difficulties were reflected in the film s cost, which rose to more thanthree million dollars almost a million more than Cinderella s before Al-ice was released in the summer of 1951.The film s box-office performance wasdisappointing, and the studio wrote oª a million-dollar loss.In the fall of 1951, shortly after Alice was released, Disney s writers finallynailed down an acceptable continuity for Peter Pan, another story that hadbeen a nagging headache since before World War II.Disney had bought Para-mount s rights to the James Barrie story in October 1938 and had signed acontract with the copyright owner, the Hospital for Sick Children in London,in January 1939.127 Disney did not mean to dawdle; as early as May 1939,with story work in the most preliminary stages, he already had in mind an-imators for the pirates (Bill Tytla), the dog, Nana (Norm Ferguson, the an-imator of Pluto), and Tinker Bell, the fairy (Fred Moore).128For more than a decade, though, Disney s writers generated huge quantitiesof paper treatments and outlines, as well as storyboards until the storywas finally in a form that he could accept.Even then, Captain Hook, moreso than the Queen of Hearts in Alice, was an unsettled character alternatelycomedian and menace, his inconsistencies bridged only by Hans Conried shighly colored vocal performance but in 1952, when animation was underway, Disney was content to leave the resolution of such issues to his anima-tors.Making animated features was by now a reflex activity for him; his realinterests were elsewhere.By 1952, Disney was absorbed by a new passion for miniatures, a passiongenerated by his success in building a miniature train, especially the minia-ture caboose that he made himself in 1950.Said Roger Broggie: We startedto build what was to be an exhibit of Americana in the same scale [as the ca-boose], an inch and a half to the foot, or one-eighth the full size.That meansthe figure would be nine inches tall. 12923 0 capri ces and s purts of chi ldi s hnes s Somewhere toward the end of 1950 probably after he finished hiscaboose Disney had applied his new skills as a maker of miniatures to adiorama called Granny s Cabin ; it reproduced a set from So Dear to MyHeart.When Disney exhibited Granny s Cabin at the Festival of CaliforniaLiving at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles two years later, in No-vember and December 1952, the Los Angeles Times described it as an eight-foot-long replica of a Midwest pioneer farm home, handicrafted [sic] by Dis-ney in every minute detail of structure and the furniture supplemented byobjects from historical collections. 130Granny herself was not represented in Granny s Cabin.At the festival,Beulah Bondi, who played Granny in the film, talked about pioneer life ina recording.Disney posed with Bondi and Kathryn Beaumont (who was thevoice of Wendy in Peter Pan as well as the voice of Alice) in front of Granny sCabin, which was recessed into a wall at eye level.By then, Disney had been collecting miniatures for several years.His col-lection of miniatures had grown so large by early in 1951 that he was seriouslyconsidering sending it on tour.131 It would go out as what Roger Broggie called an exhibit of Americana that is, a set of dioramas, each furnished withDisney s miniatures.The Times described Granny s Cabin as the first unitin [Disney s] miniature Americana. Disney s ambitions increased with each succeeding diorama.For an operahouse miniature, Disney wanted a tiny vaudevillian to perform on stage,and so in February 1951, the actor and dancer Buddy Ebsen was filmed per-forming in front of a grid that Roger Broggie and Wathel Rogers used as aguide in reproducing his movements through a system of cams and cables.132Although Disney himself built Granny s Cabin, his direct involvement seemsto have diminished as each diorama became more mechanically elaborate.The initial sketches for the dioramas were made by Ken Anderson, whomDisney borrowed from the studio s staª for the purpose.Work began on a third, still more ambitious diorama a barbershopquartet in June 1951.Actors were filmed in front of a grid, as Ebsen hadbeen.After Harper Goª joined the Disney staª in October, he designed atableau with five characters, a quartet whose mouths would be synchronizedwith their singing voices, and a fifth man who was getting a shave. My wifeFlossie made the clothes out of a very fine silk, Goª said in an interviewwith The E Ticket, a magazine devoted to the history of Disneyland, and Iapplied a varnish to the moving areas so the material wouldn t wear out tooquickly.I made a little model of the scene.it wasn t a very carefules capi ng from ani mati on, 1 947 1 953 23 1 model, but it was sized right.The guys would sing, Down by the old millstream. Their mouths didn t move in that first model I made.What Idid was the setting.what the barber shop would look like, so you couldvisualize it.Walt then took it and had other people work on it. 133When Popular Science published photos of Granny s Cabin in its February1953 issue, it described the diorama as part of Disneyland, a miniature his-toric America that is to cover a 50-acre tract in Los Angeles.Its purposeis to entertain people of all ages and also to teach them by means of tiny butexact models how life in the U.S.developed to its present level. The maga-zine reported that Disney had collected miniature copies of antique fur-nishings from all over the country and built others in his studio workshops
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