Cinema: Mouse & Man

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The animation cels are assembled, together with backgrounds and other eels of intermediate background, and taken to the camera. In Snow White, the $75,000 multiplane camera is the one chiefly used—it is much like any other movie camera, except that its action can be governed to expose one frame of film and then stop. Regular cinema cameras run at the rate of anywhere from eight to 64 frames per second. What makes the Disney camera unique is its towering, 14-ft. framework. The camera peers vertically down from the top of this iron structure through several levels, set below it like the grooved shelves in a baker's pie-wagon. On the lower levels, various elements of back ground drawn in relative perspective may be superimposed, one over the other, imparting an illusion of depth in the finished print. Above these backgrounds the animation cels are grouped. In this process an average 750-foot Disney short takes two weeks to be photographed. After that it is taken to the Technicolor plant for processing, and made ready for final re lease.

Disney, Inc. "It was always my ambition to own a swell camera," says Walt Disney, "and now, godammit, I got one. I get a kick just watching the boys operate it, and remembering how I used to have to make 'em out of baling wire." The baling wire period in Walt Disney's life lasted from 1901 to 1930. In 1901 Walt was born in Chicago. His father, Elias, was a contractor, who now lives quietly with Walt's mother in Oregon and hears from his famous son about twice a year. The family moved to a farm near Marceline, Mo. in time for Walt to start school there. The first art work he got paid for was a series of impressions of the town barber shop. The pay: free haircuts.

Back in Chicago at 16 he studied cartooning in night courses at the Academy of Fine Arts. Walt drifted to Kansas after the War. He sketched cows and plows for farm journals, then set up for himself as a commercial artist. In 1920 he was working for a film slide company, and his ani mated cartoon career was launched with a series based on Kansas City topicalities. The film cost him 30¢ a foot, sold to three theatres. The average Mickey Mouse or Silly Symphony costs somewhere between $50 and $75 a foot; Snow White, over $200. Walt and a group of local cartoonists organized a $15,000 corporation in 1922, after spending six months making their first feature, Little Red Riding Hood. A New York distributor was found and out came Jack the Giant Killer, Town Musicians of Bremen, Goldilocks and three others, among them Alice in Cartoonland, which was a sort of embryonic Snow White. But the distributor collapsed. So did Walt's corporation. In return for movies of their children, Kansas City mothers paid him enough money to get him to Hollywood, where there were the twin attractions of a booming film industry and a Brother Roy with a steady job.