Free The Animated Man by Michael Barrier Page B

detail”?—but his enthusiasm was genuine.
    In his addenda, Disney always adopted a positive, can-do tone. In August 1932, he touted the possibilities of
Mickey’s Good Deed
, a Christmas cartoon to be released at the end of 1932: “Here is a story that has everything necessary to make it a wow. A good plot—good atmosphere—personality—pathos—and plenty of opportunity for gags. There are seven major sequences to this story—each holds wonderful possibilities for good gags and bits of human action. I am expecting everyone to turn in at least one gag on each sequence.” 95 (Disney was correct when he said that the story had a “plot.” It does have one in the strict Aristotelian sense, with beginning, middle, and end—one of the first Disney cartoons of that kind.)
    In November 1932, at the end of the outline for a
Mickey Mouse
cartoon, a burlesque of costume dramas set in medieval England to be called
Ye Olden Days
, Disney dwelled at length on the musical and comic potential in the story, and on how different characters could be portrayed: “I see this story as a wonderful possibility for a burlesque on a comic opera . . . For a change I would like to see us make a Mickey built around good musical angles . . . This is our first costume Mickey—think of gag possibilities with the King in his royal robes—his funny looking attendants—the court jester and the court musicians with quaint ruffled costumes with balloon trunks, etc. . . . Possible chance for a Zasu Pitts type in Clarabelle Cow as the lady-in-waiting—shecould be the nervous type who doesn’t know what to do to help yet is a very sympathetic type—when Minnie cries, she cries too, and when Minnie is in love, she feels it too . . . The King could be the type that is very blustery and excited over the least thing. I have in mind Mary Pick-ford’s story
Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall
 . . . Chance for some funny characters in the King’s army. The soldiers could have guns of the blunderbuss type with forked stick to hold them up while they fire them—making noise like auto horns along with muffled explosions.” 96
    These distinctive notes vanish from the outlines starting early in 1933; the closing notes from then on have a more functional, workmanlike quality, less concerned than before with the feeling behind the gags. Disney, the ever more confident coordinator, was stepping back still further from a day-to-day role in work on the films.
    That work was becoming steadily more organized. Disney told Bob Thomas that Webb Smith devised what came to be called the
storyboard
, almost by accident: “We would sit in his office in the morning and think up gags. . . . After lunch I’d drop in Webb’s office and he’d have the sequence sketched out on sheets of paper. They’d be scattered all over the room, on desks, on the floor, every place. It got too tough to follow them; we decided to pin all the sketches on the wall in sequence. That was the first storyboard.” 97
    It probably did not happen quite that quickly and neatly. If, as seems likely, the first real storyboard was put up for a 1932 Technicolor
Silly Symphony
called
Babes in the Woods
, a retelling of “Hansel and Gretel,” other cartoons came after it without the help of fully developed storyboards. Wilfred Jackson remembered that the storyboard for the
Silly Symphony
called
Father Noah’s Ark
(1933) “was just a grouping of sketches here and there on the board with each group depicting a gag or a short continuity of business for an incident.” 98 It may have taken a year or two before the idea of telling a complete story through sketches pinned to a large piece of corkboard really took hold. But even in embryonic form, the storyboard’s efficiency must have appealed to Walt Disney himself, at a time