Free The Animated Man by Michael Barrier

Disney wanted, and the animators who indulged in them felt his wrath whenever he learned what they were doing.
    Since the construction of the 1931 additions to the studio, Disney had been watching pencil tests in a small windowless room that quickly came to be called the
sweatbox
. Before that, Disney had looked at pencil tests on a Moviola. According to Wilfred Jackson, Disney switched from Moviolas to the sweatbox in part for his own convenience—so he would not have to “respond to requests all through the day,” from one animator after another, to look at tests on the Moviolas—but in large part so that the animators could keep in touch with what their colleagues at the rapidly growing studio were doing.Once the sweatbox had been set up, Ben Sharpsteen said, “Walt devoted considerable time to sitting in” on pencil tests “with most of the animators concerned on the picture.” Here again was the newly confident artist, or coordinator, at work, enlisting his animators in sustained scrutiny of their colleagues’ work as well as their own.
    The negotiations with Powers had left the Disneys cool to their new distributor, Columbia, and they wasted no time in signing with United Artists (UA) less than eight months later, in December 1930. That agreement was a striking advance over the Columbia deal, since it provided for an advance on each cartoon of fifteen thousand dollars. It took a year and half for the Disneys to work off their obligations to Columbia, however, and the first cartoons under the new agreement with UA did not appear until mid-1932. Early that year, the Disneys and UA began gingerly to explore the idea of making one or more of the
Silly Symphonies
in Technicolor. The idea originated with Walt Disney, but it was Roy Disney who exchanged letters with Al Lichtman, UA’s vice president and general manager for distribution, at its New York headquarters. Moving to Technicolor was not to be undertaken lightly; earlier color films had neither looked good nor been accepted by audiences, and the additional cost for prints (twelve thousand dollars for two hundred prints, Lichtman said) would be substantial. Success might even be a bigger headache than failure, Lichtman suggested: if the exhibitors wanted color in all future
Silly Symphonies
, “could we get enough additional money [from the exhibitors] to pay for the extra cost of colored prints?” 84
    The Technicolor company itself was behind him, Walt Disney said in 1956, because “they were not quite far enough along with the color process to go into heavy production with any big live-action theatrical feature. A cartoon was ideal for their experimentation.” The cartoon Disney had in mind for Technicolor treatment was called
Flowers and Trees
. He had completed it in black and white by early June 1932, when Lichtman told Roy that it was “one of the nicest Symphonies I have ever seen,” so nice that UA was going to release it as its first
Silly Symphony
. 85 Roy asked him to hold off until the color version was completed—a version no doubt made with the same inked cels, but with the black-and-white paint washed off their backs.
    The color version of
Flowers and Trees
—a fantasy in which two young trees are lovers menaced by a jealous stump—premiered on July 18, 1932, at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, accompanying MGM’s pretentious feature
Strange Interlude
. It was a huge success, and when Lichtman wrote to Roy a few days later he joined in the applause but worried aloud about whether the Disneys should be sinking their money into such expensive films in themidst of a depression. Roy was clearly elated by the cartoon’s reception, and he wrote in reply: “I realize that Walt and I do not run our business on a strictly ‘business basis,’ but honestly we have more concern over re-intrenching
[sic]
ourselves during these difficult times by making our