Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

5. Ub Iwerks's (Multi)Plain Cinema

113 5 UB IWERKS’S (MULTI)PLAIN CINEMA This had always been the objective of modernism: to flatten out, to bring to the surface in order to make the base show itself for what it is. —Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, 297 In his history of the American cartoon, Leonard Maltin assesses as mediocre the contributions of Ub Iwerks, a figure who has become almost legendary in the field. He describes Iwerks as “a secondechelon cartoon producer” and the products of his own studio, the various Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper, and ComiColor fairy-tale films, as “basically unmemorable cartoons” (Of Mice 185, 192). Similarly, Michael Barrier describes Iwerks as an animator of “narrow technical skills” whose cartoons lacked “a distinct comic or narrative shape” (168, 166). Though both assessments certainly have much truth to them, they also suggest a kind of corrective response to a legend that has grown up around Iwerks in light of his early fame among fellow cartoonists, his signal contributions to the creation of Disney’s iconic Mickey Mouse, his near single-handed animation of the first Mickey cartoons, and his involvement in the spectacularly successful Silly Symphony cartoons, with their early and innovative use of synchronized sound. Because of these connections it was often suggested that Iwerks was really the genius behind the mouse, or as Russell Merritt and J. B. Kaufman put it, “the strong foundation on which the [Disney] studio depended” in its early years (64). Of course, these views are not necessarily contradictory , but the relative neglect of Iwerks’s independent efforts has raised the questions of where his own cartoons went wrong, and of how some- Animating Space 114 one of near-legendary status could, in many cases, simply be relegated to the footnotes of animation history. Because of his reputation for his drawing speed and seemingly innate understanding of the basic principles of the animated cartoon (squash and stretch, recoil, follow-through, etc.), Iwerks has been described as essentially a master technician—a view only reinforced by his professed interest in various mechanisms that would support the animation process , and his development, after returning to Disney in 1940, of such devices as the Xerographic Fusing Apparatus for inking cells and the Triple Head Optical Printer, and his perfection of a sodium traveling matte process for combining live action with animation.1 Even when he was running his own studio between 1930 and 1936, Iwerks was rumored to have, after the first few years, relegated much of the daily supervision of the animation process to subordinates. In fact, Michael Barrier claims that a Fleischer alumnus, Grim Natwick, “eventually wound up running the studio day-to-day, while Iwerks worked on mechanical improvements in the studio’s basement” (167).2 Yet one of those technical developments would have a marked effect on the reputation of the Iwerks cartoons and would parallel similar developments at other animation studios in the period, most notably at the Fleischer brothers’ studio, as we have already seen, and later at Disney. This same technical interest might aid us in better situating his works in terms of American animation’s shifting aesthetic in the 1930s, particularly by helping us see his studio’s cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde and an emerging realist aesthetic that was closely aligned with the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema—a mode that would increasingly implicate a new sense of animating space. That key development, of course, was the multiplane camera, a device designed to overcome the essential flatness of the animated image by creating a three-dimensional space in which to photograph the animation cels. Yet it was a development that ultimately brought little success to Iwerks’s films, winning them neither great critical accolades nor the embrace of a popular audience. Part of the problem, as the epigraph to this chapter implies and as I sketch out in the introduction, is that the critical community never agreed on the importance of the depth illusion for furthering animation’s development, so the value of a device for pro- Ub Iwerks’s (Multi)Plain Cinema 115 ducing this effect remained an open question. In fact, as we have already seen, many commentators insisted that the real strength of the animated cartoon as it had developed up to this time lay precisely in the stylistic trait that so distinguished it from conventional...