Michael Barrier,
The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 520 24117 6
US$29.95 (hb)
393pp
(Review copy supplied by the University of California Press)

Tom Sito,
Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
ISBN: 978 0 8131 2407 0
US$32.00 (hb)
425pp
(Review copy supplied by The University Press of Kentucky)

The wave of good animation books continues with these two. Michael Barrier will be known to area specialists as the long-time publisher of Funnyworld and the author of the best history of US studio animation we are likely to have, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age (Oxford, 1999). Barrier is aware of the challenge facing anyone who undertakes to write another biography/study/analysis of Walt Disney, undoubtedly the most written about figure in the world of animation (I’ve been reading Disney biographies of one sort or another – usually carefully stage-managed by the Disney interests – since the late 1950s). Barrier explains his project very well:

Most Disney biographies have portrayed either a man who fell short of perfection only in a few venial ways (he smoked too much and used a great deal of profanity), or one who was personally odious (anti-Semitism being the sin of choice) and the products of whose labors are a stain on American culture.

I have found few signs of either Disney in my own research into his life…[he was] a stunted but fascinating artist, and a generally admirable but less interesting entrepreneur.

I have concentrated my attention on his work, his animated films in particular, because that is where I have found his life story most compelling…Thomas Edison and Henry Ford may have transformed their country, but Walt Disney only helped to shape economic and demographic changes that would have occurred without him. It is his animated films of the 1930s and early 1940s that make him uniquely interesting.

Quite.

This succinct and balanced focus relieves Barrier of the hagiography and the demonizing which have skewed so much writing about Disney, whether as artist, businessman, industry heavyweight, cultural phenomenon, Horatio Alger story, blacklister, genius, or all of the above. In Hollywood Cartoons, Barrier laid out in great detail the Disney studio’s remarkable decade of technical/aesthetic innovation from the late 1920s to the end of the 1930s, and some of that is inevitably reprised in The Animated Man. Barrier has spent the last 40 years researching US studio animation. A researcher and historian himself, not an animator, since 1969 he has enlisted the aid of animators such as Milt Gray and Mark Kausler in a monumental series of interviews with veteran animators, most of them now dead. It is his deployment of this body of witnesses that makes The Animated Man so useful, unique, and multifaceted.

There are, perhaps, four key moments in Disney’s story: developing the first US feature-length animated film,Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937); the animators’ union strike against Disney in 1941; the move into television in the 1950s; and, simultaneously, the development of the Disneyland theme park(s). Barrier’s “life” of Disney proceeds chronologically except for its first chapter which vividly privileges Disney’s actions and reactions during his confrontation with union organization and activity in his studio, a flashpoint Barrier writes about very well, and which the body of the book draws on, detailing his conflict between the artist (and he was, in his ways), and the boss, the autocratic businessowner, who – as time went by – lost contact with what it meant for his remarkably talented workforce to also be artists in addition to being employees.

Tom Sito’s Drawing the Line intersects Barrier’s book at this key point: the Disney strike (and when I was talking to animators in Los Angeles in the 1970s, they all mentioned this as a defining moment). Sito’s book is an animator unionist’s history of the unionisation of that craft, which began (as did most unionisation of Hollywood film workers) in the 1930s. Sito has held various positions in animator’s unions and animated onBeauty and the Beast (USA 1991), Shrek (USA 2001), and The Lion King (USA, 1994). The book is valuable and useful for providing a chronology of the unionising activities in this particular sector of American filmmaking (in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York); for its wealth of anecdotal accounts from those involved in the events described; for its appendices (1. Animation Union Leaders; 2. Dramatis Personae; 3. Glossary); for its bibiographic references to other work on the under-researched area of union issues in the film industry; and for its particularly detailed description of the changes – and difficulties – digitization brought to animation unionising.

It is in this last area that the book digs in. In about 1916, J. R. Bray set up the first fully industrialized animation studio a la Henry Ford’s production line. Bray defined each labor specialized job in animation, and those categories continued for 70-some years – until computers became animation staples. At that point, all the job descriptions animators had been used to went out the window. Sito is at his best sorting through the issues arising from this – given that in a sense all cinema is animation, the demarcation and jurisdictional lines between special effects, digital artists (no more inkers and painters), various managers and supervisors became very complex indeed. Sito is not the writer Barrier is, and has not been well served by his editors: too much repetition, too many block lists of names, too many misspelled names, and too many flippant asides. But these caveats aside, a great entry point for learning about this particular area of labor organization. And it contains a few more bits and pieces about Willie Bioff, the gangster Al Capone sent west to shake down the major studios – successfully, for quite awhile – through his control of the national theatre projectionists’ union (‘You don’t pay, I shut down everything theatre in this country.’) It worked. The federal witness protection program didn’t: after doing time in a federal penitentiary, Willie testified against his crooked mates. Under a much less interesting surname – Nelson – he left home in Arizona one morning, turned the key in his ute’s ignition, and was rendered into separate parts explosively. His wife, sentimental as all gangsters’ wives seem to be, was climbing a tree on the property when police arrived. She was sure she’d seen one of his hands blown into the tree, and knowing that he had a huge diamond ring on one hand, was playing the 50/50 chance that that was the one in the tree.

Rick Thompson,
La Trobe University.