“When Warners shut down the [animation studio], I went to work at Disney’s for a while. I couldn’t stand it. [Walt Disney]asked me what kind of job I wanted and the kind of job I wanted was his. But I got to know him and like him,” animator and director Chuck Jones told well-respected and well-liked animation historian Joe Adamson in a 1980 published interview. “Walt called me in when he was going to underwrite the Chouinard Art Institute and the all-new California Institute of the Arts. I got very close to him in his later years. He kept doing things nobody else believed in. As far as general-audience entertainment is concerned, Disney probably had the best touch of anybody in the whole world. Walt was a strange kind of guy, but he’s still by all odds the most important person that animation has ever known. Anybody who knows anything about animation knows that the things that happened at the Disney Studio were the backbone that upheld everything else. Disney created a climate that enabled all of us to exist.”
On his 85th birthday celebration on Sunday, September 21, 1997, the legendary Chuck Jones spoke to a group of 500 of his friends, family, fans,and colleagues. He recalled the many letters he had sent to Walt Disney in his early years, and how Walt personally replied to each one. Later, when he met Walt, Jones thanked him for those letters and Walt replied, “Well, of course, you’re the only animator that ever wrote to me!”
It was a story that Jones told many times over the decades.
When I first started interviewing animators a couple of decades ago as a cocky young man, I was still very respectful not only of their knowledge and memories of animation but also the wisdom that they had gained over the years. One of them told me that when I got older, I would discover that “you don’t regret the things you did as much as you regret the things you didn’t do.”
Now that I have stumbled through more than two decades of life since that interview, I know exactly what he meant. I had the pleasure of interviewing and exchanging correspondence with the amazing Jones in the years before his passing. We talked about many things but his life was filled with so many interesting moments that I never thought to explore the four months he worked at Disney Studios during the mid-1950s.
To make matters even worse when it comes to regrets, during that time at Disney, Jones was teamed up in a room with Disney genius and innovator Ward Kimball and, even though I spent time with Kimball and also did an extensive interview with him, I never asked about his time with Jones because there was so much else to discuss.
Jones worked briefly at the Disney Studios from July 13, 1953, to November 13, 1953.
Fortunately, the respected and pioneering animation historian Michael Barrier (and make sure you visit his always interesting web site for outstanding insights into Disney history), interviewed Jones in 1969 and got this great quote from him about his Disney experience:
“When 3-D came in, we [Warners] made a 3-D cartoon with Bugs Bunny, called Lumberjack Rabbit. That was when Jack Warner made The Wax Museum, and he decided, I guess, that the entire world was going to wind up wearing Polaroid glasses. He decided that the animated-cartoon business was through, since it was too expensive to make three-dimensional animated cartoons, so he laid off everybody. He couldn’t lay off a few of us, because we were under contract, but I didn’t want to work there if none of my people were there.
“I called up Walt Disney and asked him if I could come over there for a while. He said, ‘Sure, come on over.’ I was there for four months. I worked on Sleeping Beauty and the beginning of the television show. But I couldn’t adjust to waiting for Walt … the Disney people were raised that way, and used to it. You’d finish a sequence, and then you’d wait, maybe for weeks. Five or six men, just sitting around waiting for Walt to come around. When he did come around, he’d already been there the night before when the plant was dark and looked at the boards, and everybody knew he’d seen the sequence, but they still had to show it to him as though he hadn’t.
“Eventually, I felt I just couldn’t take it any more, so I went in and talked with Walt. He said, ‘Well, what do you want to do? We can work out something for you.’ I said, ‘Well, you have one job here that I want, and that’s yours,’ because he was the only one there who could make a decision. He said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s filled.’ So we shook hands and I left. By that time, Warner’s had decided to start up again, because 3-D hadn’t completely revolutionized the world. That was the only time I left Warner’s until they closed it down again in 1962.”
However, I know there is always more to any story and I have been fortunate to find some first person memories of what happened during those four months from others who were at the Disney Studio.
The artistic designer for Sleeping Beauty was painter Eyvind Earle and what he recalled about those months was “Way back when we did Melody [Time] and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, Walt had let Ward Kimball sort of take over and strive for a new look at Disney. He was put on Sleeping Beauty at the same time I was. I remember he had a special room up on the third floor, and with a newcomer to Disney’s—the famous Chuck Jones, animator, director from some other studio—the two of them [Ward and Chuck] sat upstairs in their private room, and talked and talked and talked, and for many months did absolutely nothing at all. I have never been able to figure it out. I asked Ward Kimball once, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything?’ And Ward Kimball answered me, ‘You don’t know Walt Disney’, whatever that was supposed to mean.”
When these comments were shared years later with Kimball, he responded, “I was just filling in between animation assignments.
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