My Gleanings

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Walt Disney as auteur

In his biography Walt Disney : the triumph of the American imagination, Neal Gabler explains how in Disney's first feature length animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the animators were shuttled where they were needed while in the next feature Pinocchio teams of animators concentrated on one character or aspect to the exclusion of the rest of the film. On page 315, Gabler writes this about the result of this:

He admitted that because some animators could draw only Pinocchio and others only the cricket, certain scenes didn't "jell so well." Worse, because directors and animators were working exclusively on their own sequences without much coordination among them, they were blind to the rest of the film, especially since Walt, who had provided this coordination on Snow White, was preoccupied at the time with The Concert Feature.