It’s very difficult to imagine how drastically different Disney animation would have been without Marc Davis. As one of Walt Disney’s four surviving “Nine Old Men” responsible for carrying the artistic brunt of the animated feature films, Davis was shrouded by the studio’s policy of near (or total) anonymity for employees. But once Davis’ accomplishments are revealed, his contributions seem ubiquitous in both the films and the theme parks. As a trusted Disney lieutenant, Davis’ 34-year career provided the studio with three different sets of talents embodied in one man: his gifts as an animator and director; an expert story man; and his sense of character design.
Davis signed on at Disney in 1935 and was chosen to assist the already legendary Myron “Grim” Natwick (creator of Betty Boop) to animate the character of Snow White—a plum assignment for the novice Davis. Realistically drawn human characters were far from routine studio fare and were light-years beyond the capabilities of most of the era’s animators. “Marc was an expert animator even at that young age,” Natwick said to me during his last formal interview, conducted shortly before his death in 1992. “I think they had him pegged as an up-and-coming talent even then.” After the success of Snow White, Davis was given story and character-development work for Bambi and quickly become one of a very small group of exceptionally talented artists whom Disney trusted with the studio’s crown jewels: the feature films.
Though the Disney studio was rife with budding talent, it was impressed with Davis’ character work for Bambi, and Walt Disney brass handed down the edict that Davis was to receive intensive animation training under the tutelage of future fellow “Old Man” Frank Thomas—a rare case of an animator’s grooming coming at the bosses’ direct order. As a result, the Davis magic graced most of the feature films then (and now) hailed as classics, and Davis himself is personally responsible for some of the studio’s most recognizable characters and finest moments, including some that Walt Disney himself cited as personal favorites. Davis’ versatility in characterization seemed absent of limitations. Everything he did, he did well, from the cuddly Flower to the coolly patrician Maleficent, from the wild and angular Cruella De Vil to the shapely sprite Tinkerbell. These characters came to Davis’ animation table as flat sketches and left it as fully realized characters with distinct personalities that are today globally recognized. Indeed, Davis’ realization of Tinkerbell is Mickey Mouse’s rival as virtual symbol of the Disney empire.
Davis left Disney’s animation department after completing work on 101 Dalmatians, transferring to WED (an acronym that stands for Walter Elias Disney, and a division of the corporation devoted to developing attractions for the corporation’s theme parks), where his talents were used to further Disney’s interest in audioanimatronic attractions for the 1964 World’s Fair and later for the parks in Anaheim and Orlando. Once again, Davis’ mastery of characterization, staging and movement was harnessed to design and supervise the development of Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln, The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World, America Sings and the Country Bear Jamboree.
Davis retired in 1978 but continues well into his 80s to be the soft-spoken yet intensely driven artisan that made him such a valuable asset to the Disney organization for decades. His influence is still directly felt as he advises a new class of Disney artists, and his retirement has been far from idle. His studio in Los Angeles is awash with projects in development, including a fully illustrated instructional volume on animal anatomy and movement and an illustrated treatise on the tribal inhabitants and folklore of Papua-New Guinea, a longstanding interest of Davis’. Always the working teacher, Davis occasionally takes the podium to provide instruction, insight, advice and inspiration to students and fans at festivals in Paris, Tokyo, Philadelphia, London, New York and Los Angeles. Davis’ original production work continues to set new records when offered for sale. In 1996, a Davis-rendered cel of Cinderella receiving her gown from her fairy godmother fetched more than $36,000 at auction.
This interview is a marriage of two sessions from 1991 and 1992, the latter session conducted mere days after Davis’ return from another appearance on behalf of the Disney organization. While his wife (and former student), Alice, prepared a sumptuous lunch, we repaired to his downstairs studio to undertake the impossible task of capturing a life on tape. As the session unfolded, it became obvious to me that Davis’ Disney career is but one facet of this remarkable man—not merely a great animator, he is a fine artist, an authority on anatomy and movement, a world traveler, a gourmet, an opera buff and a teacher who uses animation as his instructional tool. No studio but Disney would have held Marc Davis or given him the broad parameters he required to use his restive talents. While most Disney retirees quickly attribute their careers to the good luck of working for Walt, I can’t help but wonder if—at least in this case—it was Walt who was.

John Province: Let’s start with your childhood interests—were you a comic strip or cartoon buff?
Marc Davis: When I was a kid, my family moved around a lot, and I lived and grew up in a lot of wild places. I lived in boom towns and oil fields and the like. My father was something of a rainbow-chaser. My schooling would be three months here and six months there. Before I got through high school I had attended 22 different schools. In the time before I was well acquainted with the latest school, I would amuse myself by drawing and found that I was pretty good at it. Then I found I could attract a lot of attention to myself by drawing [laughter]. Most of the schools I went to didn’t have a school newspaper or yearbook. When they did, however, I invariably wound up doing the drawing for it. I came from a family that had a lot of talent, so it wasn’t too difficult. That was the beginning, really.
Province: How about formal art training?
Davis: The first professional training I received of any kind was when I was 14 years old and we were in Kansas City, Missouri. I attended the Kansas City Art Institute for one summer. There, I met others who were interested in art and cartooning. I took a very useful course they used to call “cast,” which is where they set up old plaster statues of Greek sculptures and you would then render them very carefully. In the early ’30s I attended the Otis Art Institute and the California Institute of Fine Art in San Francisco, and a while at Chouinard’s here in Los Angeles. Later I taught an advanced drawing class at Chouinard’s one night a week for 17 years.
Province: Do you recall your first contact with Disney animation?
Davis: My father had died, and I was thrown into cold reality and had to make a living. I was in Yuba City, California, making advertising posters, stationery and the like for a small firm. One day the owner of the local movie theater called me and said he had something he thought I should see. It was a Walt Disney cartoon called Who Killed Cock Robin?, and I remember being very impressed with it. Some time earlier in Sacramento, I recalled seeing The Three Little Pigs. My father was very impressed with it and wanted me to see it. Though we didn’t have much money, he found out when it would be playing and arranged for us to go in and just see that, which was a great extravagance at the time. I recently saw the man I worked for before I came to the studio. He was in the theatrical poster business and became very successful. Occasionally, he comes down or sends me some great thing and thinks I’m the greatest genius who ever was [laughter]. He is a very, very kind guy.
Province: Was it seeing these shorts that made you decide to apply at the studio?
Davis: I would see the Disney cartoons whenever I went to the theater because they were just program fillers at the time. I decided to take a chance and come down to Los Angeles. I had a few contacts in the Los Angeles area and a sort of a half-promise of a job at the Hollywood Citizen, which no longer exists. I hadn’t been here too long when someone said, “You know, Walt Disney is hiring artists—why don’t you go see them?” So I did and was accepted immediately.
Province: Did you take the usual entry route as an inbetweener?
Davis: The way you began was through a life class the studio had taught by a man named Don Graham, a marvelous instructor from Chouinard’s. For the first two weeks, you were on trial. At the end of that time, if you could draw to Don Graham’s satisfaction, you were enrolled in an inbetweening program. You would draw for half a day and then attend art classes and lectures as a way of paying your way, so to speak. There was an entire building devoted to that kind of thing, and people were in and out of there like a revolving door. They would look over your work and someone would say, “Mr. Jones, Mr. Drake wants to see you,” then he’d pick up his coat and leave. Everybody knows what they meant. We would never see “Jones” again.
Province: Did you go from inbetweening directly into working on Snow White?
Davis: Yes, the first job I had at the studio was Snow White. I don’t like the term particularly, but I got stuck with the human characters. They just didn’t have that many people who could draw humans. It wasn’t a problem for me drawing humans although I had originally come to the studio with the idea that what I had to offer them was my knowledge in the drawing of animals. When I was in San Francisco and had run out of money for art school, I used to get up early and take the trolley out to Fleishhacker’s Zoo. I’d met the man who was the superintendent, and they let me in early so I could follow the keepers. They would take these monsters out of their cages so I could see them well enough to draw them. I had a lot of very interesting experiences with that [laughter]. One of the things Milt Kahl and I suffered from was that we could both draw so much better than some of the others. We both had a better understanding of the human figure, and there simply weren’t that many people who could handle them. After a while these things just became automatic: “OK, Milt does the Godmother and Marc does the Princess.” We both really wanted the opportunity to do some of the things we would have loved to have done and were quite capable of doing.
Province: You worked and trained on Snow White under Grim Natwick ?
Davis: Yes, I worked with Grim as his assistant on Snow White. He was a wonderful guy and a very generous man and a very unique talent. He had studied in Europe with several top artists. He was very excited about anyone he thought was good, such as Bill Tytla and Freddie Moore. Grim thought their stuff very exciting. We used to go through their trash at night after work and I still have a lot of those old rough drawings [laughter]. I talked to him about a month ago. He’s 99 years old and he’ll be 100 in August, and he’s witty, he’s entertaining and bright and just one marvelous human being.
Province: Do you recall the scenes you worked on in Snow White?
Davis: I worked on all of Grim’s scenes, all of his animation. They threw the assistants kind of a crumb. I do have a dance scene with my name on it. John Culhane, the animation historian, looked it up on the old exposure sheets. I’ve forgotten even now what it was. I did the model sheets for Snow White in her ragged costume wearing Dutch wooden shoes. I suppose that would really be the first thing I can take any credit for.
Province: You still have a small clay bust you sculpted of Snow White while you were working on the film. Was this something you did on your own or as part of a course of study?
Davis: I did it on my own. I wanted to get a conception of how this character looked in three dimensions. There is something I feel when I animate something; you can never really understand the character you’re animating unless you’ve had the opportunity to turn it around. Once you’ve done that, you know it is a three-dimensional object. A lot of the Saturday morning cartoons are like that today, just flat little cut-outs. They’re really just designs and not characters at all. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but a little different than the problems we were faced with. At the old studio, which we are not very far from, every day someone did something that had never been done before. For me, one of the exciting things was being able to listen to the music for the films being played on a moviola, which is a terrible way to listen to music! I kept thinking how wonderful it was and that no one outside of those walls had ever heard it before. I was very impressed with that.
Province: I ask everybody this because it’s something I wish I could have done. Did you attend the premiere of Snow White?
Davis: Things were a lot different in those days. We couldn’t afford tickets and they sure weren’t free! It was very cold and we didn’t have very warm clothes. We went down to the Cathay Circle Theatre and watched Walt and a few of the top people and some of the movie stars go in . . . then we left!
[laughter]
Province: The people responsible for this beautiful film didn’t get to see it?
Davis: I think that was along the same lines as not giving artists screen credit. I don’t think Walt ever wanted that. His feeling was the name Walt Disney represented all of us. Walt was hanging by his teeth financially and really I think he was for most of his career. Not at all like today. The interest in these things is incredible. The Bambi videocassette sold 10 million copies, breaking all previous records!
Province: After Snow White, did you work with Grim on other projects?
Davis: After Snow White, Grim worked on a couple of shorts and I assisted him on them. Ferdinand the Bull was one. I worked on the scene where the women are coming in. We also worked on Mother Goose Goes Hollywood using caricatures by T. Hee. Grim and I did Three Men In a Tub, who were Charles Laughton, Freddie Bartholomew and Spencer Tracy. We also did W. C. Fields and Charlie McCarthy.
Province: Was it after finishing these that you began work on Bambi?
Davis: Yes, Walt wanted to do another picture. Pinocchio and Fantasia were being made at the same time. There were groups working on Fantasia. Top animators, such as Milt Kahl, were working on Pinocchio along with Frank Thomas, Woolie Reitherman and Bill Tytla.
Province: Who were the animators you worked with on Bambi?
Davis: Milt Kahl, Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and myself did most of the animation on Bambi; a rather small group that helped, I think, to maintain its consistency. There was no hurry in getting something for the top animators to do, as opposed to, say, The Little Mermaid. I’m not saying it isn’t a fine feature, because it is, but I can see that each scene was done by someone else because of the drawing inconsistencies. It’s just a little different than I would conceive a character, and it certainly meets with the public’s appreciation. Bambi required a whole new look with highly specialized people who could draw animals. These were not the guys who were working on the Donald and Mickey cartoons. I worked for three years in story for Bambi, and it was one of the few times I was able to use my knowledge of animal anatomy. Walt saw my drawings I had done and said he wanted to see my work on the screen. He put me in with his top animators and told them to teach me how to animate. Once again, this was with a very small staff, and this, as with Snow White, presented a terrible drawing problem. I spent six years of my life on Bambi.
Province: Bambi was an unusual project from what the studio had previously been involved with: a pastoral wildlife story.
Davis: Yes, and to do it so it could be believed. The thing is, if these true-to-life characters don’t look believable, then the whole thing falls apart; it doesn’t matter how funny the stuff is. If you look at the model sheets on Snow White as compared to the ones for Bambi, the jump is enormous; getting the plasticity into the characters and making them personalities. None of the wildlife characters in Snow White were characters, they just filled an important part of the picture. There was a group of us who used to go to zoos together. On the weekends we’d go down to the San Diego Zoo or to a place out in the valley called “Goebel’s Lion Farm.” The Griffith Park Zoo was very minimal at the time, but still—it was animals. When we were working on Bambi, we had two fawns brought in from New England, even though the original story was in Germany. I don’t know why it was changed. They used a white-tailed deer, which is very beautiful, and we had our “deodorized” skunk and rabbits, all of these animals to study. Eventually the deer were given to the Griffith Park Zoo.
Province: As well as working on the story, you designed most of the Bambi characters.
Davis: Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on. I did the designs for the young Bambi and both Flower the Skunk and Thumper the Rabbit, though they were further developed by other people. For example, the final Bambi model sheet was very much Milt Kahl’s work, and I think for Thumper, also. The skunk was mine from beginning to end, and I animated a lot of him.
Province: Besides the manpower shortages, do you recall any other problems with making the film?
Davis: I don’t recall that there was. As I say, George Stallings and I had worked in story. We did thelove sequence with Thumper and Flower. I think that was the sequence that convinced Walt to make an animator out of me. I also did the sequence of the skunk hibernating. I did some Thumper scenes and of Bambi and Faline as well. I developed what I thought was a sexy walk for Faline which was perhaps like a high-fashion model might have walked. It was very hard work, but it paid off.
Province: Do you have a favorite sequence in Bambi?
Davis: Not really. When you’ve done these things, there’s really nothing like getting them on to the big screen and seeing an audience’s reaction for the first time, especially with humor. Grauman’s Chinese premiere of Bambi would certainly be up there. We came to the part of the film I had worked on where the two skunks fall in love. You see the two tails walk off together through the flowers and then Flower stands up, and my God—the laugh it got! I’m crying and everyone in the place is laughing! One of the fellows summed it up perfectly when he said, “We’ll never experience anything like this again as long as we live.”
Province: Making it ironic is that this beautiful film was financially disappointing, as were Pinocchio and Fantasia.
Davis: Yes, because of the war. Disney had made such a great deal of money on Snow White that the banks gave him the go-ahead on the next three films. But he was heavily dependent on the foreign market. He even made a point to record soundtracks in several languages. We also had to be careful of physical gestures that could be interpreted as offensive in another country. In Cinderella, Kimball had one of the mice give the “OK” sign with his fingers. It turns out that in Brazil that means something . . . not very nice, so we had to change it. We always had to watch for those kinds of things. When the war came in 1941, Disney lost the entire foreign market, and the foreign market was so important to Disney. Would the studio be able to survive? I don’t know how many years it took just to pay back the cost of having the Philadelphia Symphony record the Fantasia soundtrack and for the prints and so forth! Now of course, it’s accepted as being one of Walt’s greatest, which of course I think it is.
Province: Speaking of soundtracks, you’re aware that Peggy Lee’s suing Disney for royalties on Lady and the Tramp?
Davis: So is Mary Costa. I guess they feel that because of the release of the videocassettes they want a piece of it, but the poor artists who worked on the films get nothing.
Province: There was talk of a sequel to Fantasia. What do you know of that?
Davis: I had heard that and ran into Walt while going into the studio one day. I told him I had an idea for another Fantasia. I wanted to do a thing out of Scheherazade, Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and those wonderful romantic stories. Walt said, “My God, Marc, I don’t dare go to the stockholders with that. They’re still skinning me alive for the first one!” So I never had a chance to.
Province: During World War II, the studio turned its attention from feature animation to primarily training and propaganda films made for the government. What was the studio like during that period?
Davis: The studio actually became something of a military reserve unit. Many of us went into the service. I was supposed to go into the Marine Corps. They had offered me a sergeanty, but I would be doing the same thing for them as I was doing for Disney. Anyway, it was decided that we should stay with the studio. The films we worked on were things we did for the Navy on the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway. The fighter pilots who had fought and won these battles, in really inferior planes, came to the studio and worked with us. We put all of their experience and theories into animation so that others could understand them. They were distributed to the Army Air Corps and others. We made Rules of the Nautical Road and films used to train sea captains who commanded the Liberty Ships. These were being made out of concrete and being sunk as fast as they could be built. We made films about mosquito abatement for areas prone to malaria, yellow fever and so on. We did pictures about growing food in what would be referred to today as Third World countries. We really had an amazing group of people there; about half college professors and half military brass. They had Walt very disenchanted most of the time [laughter].
Province: There were actually armed soldiers on the lot?
Davis: Oh yes, you needed a pass to go from one building to another! We had the Norden Bomb Site, which was the best bomb site in the world at that time. I was brought in and was under armed guard from morning until evening. We all had to go through FBI and military checks.
Province: Your most well known film from the war years is, of course, Victory Through Air Power.
Davis: When I saw Victory Through Air Power at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, there were these people sitting in front of me who turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock and his wife and daughter. I admired his work so very much that seeing him so effusive about our film was very nice.
Province: Did you go on the South American tour with Walt in 1942? The Good Will shorts were a result of those.
Davis: No, I didn’t go on that, but I knew everybody that did, and I would have loved to have gone. They made Saludos Amigos, and with the little bit that was left over came The Three Caballeros. They came back with a lot of top Latin musicians and they worked with us and were here for quite a while. They worked on a good many other things besides.
Province: There were no features made during the war, but the studio did manage to produce a few things for commercial release.
Davis: During the war they made several pictures that were made up of short subjects—Make Mine Music and so on. They tied together a bunch of them and made a full program. But to tell a story from beginning to end, it was Song of the South, which is basically a live-action film with little Uncle Remus stories told through animation.
Province: With Song of the South, Walt started venturing into live-action films. Do you think perhaps he was hesitant about another animated feature after three financial failures?
Davis: I think live action was something Walt always wanted to do and it took a long time for people to come around to letting him do that. We kind of had to take the back door in for a while. With Song of the South we began branching out slowly into live action. We were a little disappointed in the live-action sequences, which were just not up to par for a number of reasons. The cinematographer on that was Greg Toland, who had worked with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane and whose work on the picture I thought was just great. We also did So Dear To My Heart with Bobby Driscoll and Burl Ives, but as usual people would say, “But Mr. Disney, you’re known for your animation.” We never really had the opportunity until we found we had something in Great Britain called “blocked money;” that is, money that cannot leave the British Isles. So they sent Bobby Driscoll and the writer, producer and director and made some pretty good films over there, mostly British themes such as Treasure Island with an all-British cast. This was the beginning of Walt Disney getting into live-action films. I went over and visited a few times. It was interesting to see how other people worked. I still think it’s a great picture.
Province: What sequences did you animate on Song of the South?
Davis: I worked on some of the little stories, and I animated what I think is the first sequence in the picture where the bear and fox are down in the cave making the Tar Baby. The buttons are pulled off the bear’s coat for eyes, then you hear a cry offstage, and the bear has no hair on his fanny, and that becomes the Tar Baby’s hair. That got a hell of a big laugh. These were great characters to work with, and it was interesting since it was the first feature film we’d done in a while.
Province: I know a former Disney staffer who recalls helping to develop the Uncle Remus characters as early as 1939. I also believe work on Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland commenced around then also, yet these films were not made until many years later.
Davis: Many of these things were worked on over long periods of time and then set aside. This happened all the time. Walt would say, “Why don’t we work on this for a while?” or he’d see it just wasn’t right for the moment. He had an apartment at the studio where he could stay overnight. He used to go around the rooms and look over the story work. If it was coming along he’d leave you alone. Sometimes you wouldn’t see him for months, then his secretary would call and tell you that you had a meeting with him that afternoon to show him what you were working on. If he liked what you did and really got hot on it he’d be in your office morning, noon and night. He wanted to stay right on top of the story because that was his great strength, his story work. He was a great storyteller and could act out what the characters were doing very well. Sometimes you wondered if you could animate them as well as he could act them out [laughter]. This was a genuine talent that he had. He had little interest in stylized things, and he enjoyed things that you did and brought to life. He considered himself basically a storyman, not an animator.
Province: Besides the Fantasia sequence, can you recall other shelved projects of yours that you would have liked to have seen go into production?
Davis: Oh yes—a number of them. We did a thing right after the war about man going into space. Life had done a series of articles on the subject, which I thought was just marvelous. I thought it would have adapted to animation very easily where we could show things being shot into space and getting to the point where there is no gravity. I clipped a lot of articles about it from the newspaper, and I remember one in particular where someone wanted to patent the idea of letting sheep and cows graze on the moon! I collected all this material together and one morning I ran into Walt while walking into the studio, and I said, “Hey, Walt—I’ve got a great idea for a film!”, and I explained it to him. He was so fed up with the people who had been quartered there during the war—the generals and colonels and professors who had taken over his office—that he said, “I never want to make another educational film as long as I live!” [laughter] I slowly learned that it was a mistake to talk to Walt about making a film. You had to show him. Not much later, George Pal made a film about a trip to the moon, and later Kimball made a kind of crazy one about a moon flight. By that time, the excitement was gone. If we had done it earlier we would have been the first.
Province: Can we talk a bit about the first big success of the post war years, Cinderella? You were very heavily involved in the production of that film.
Davis:I worked on that from beginning to end. I did story work on it and I set the style for Cinderella herself. I worked on the scene where the mice make her dress and I animated the sequence where she runs down to show it to her stepsisters and they tear it off her. I did the stepsisters as well as the segment where Cinderella runs out into the garden and drops onto the stone bench. I came up with the idea that when the Fairy Godmother appeared, Cinderella’s head would be in her lap. I thought that would be a good way to bring her into the scene. I did that sequence all the way through except for Milt Kahl, who did the Fairy Godmother. John Lounsbery did the transformation of the animals, and I did up to where she got her gown from the Fairy Godmother. Someone told me once they had eaten lunch with Walt and a lady asked him what his favorite piece of animation was. Walt replied, “When Cinderella got her gown.” I think this is a nice story, not only because I animated that scene, but it really shows a lot about Walt Disney himself: magic, wishes coming true and that kind of thing. Cinderella had a real strength of character throughout that film. They weren’t going to beat her no matter what. She was a tough little dame! [laughter]
Province: You also worked on one of my favorites, Alice in Wonderland. What did you do on Alice?
Davis: I did a kind of crazy sequence with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. I also did the scene in the wood and all these strange creatures that look like spectacles are landing on her head.
Province: When you’re adapting a story for animation that is very well known such as Alice or Peter Pan, how much liberty do you feel you may take with the story and characters?
Davis: Well, with something like Alice in Wonderland, there is an entire cult out there who thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world and that John Tenniel’s drawings are the only ones for Alice, and I kind of go along with them. The Duchess and the other characters were marvelous, and I don’t think we even came close to that in the film. I think it’s a good film and I enjoy it now more than I did then. None of us liked it when it first came out, and we thought it was a pretty poorly done film—and from a purist point of view, it is. It was a situation where you take this little girl and throw her into a madhouse. There’s no opportunity for her to be warm; perhaps if she had her cat with her. The entire cast is made up of these entirely unsympathetic characters who don’t understand her and she certainly doesn’t understand them. It was very difficult to do. I have a tape of the picture and when I look at it, it doesn’t bother me as much now as it did then. But at the time an awful lot of us had the feeling that we were disappointed in it. We always expected more of ourselves. We always expected everything to come off better than it did. I think part of that attitude came from Walt himself, which was, “Oh well, the next one will be better.”
Province: For Peter Pan you designed Tinker Bell, who almost rivals Mickey himself as the symbol of Disney animation. She has been called a tiny Marilyn Monroe. Did you set out to make her a sexy character?
Davis: In the script they asked for certain business to be done, and one of them was that she lands on a mirror and sees that her hips are a little broad. So you don’t have a choice—you’ve got to show her hips, it’s written in the script [laughter]. They also made a point of showing that Tinker Bell is very jealous of Wendy. Actually, I enjoyed doing her. Some people may ask, “Just what does a directing animator do?” He sets the characters of the film but will also animate critical personality scenes. I did the scenes of Tinker Bell where she had close contact with Peter Pan or the kids. I did the drawer scene and the sequence in Captain Hook’s cabin where she’s sitting on a bottle telling him where Peter’s hideout is. When I got to that scene sitting on the bottle, I was able to slim her down a bit. Sometimes you get locked into things like this early in the picture and it gets inked and painted. I’m not unhappy with it, but those are just the type of things that happen when you’re in production.
Province: Before talking about Sleeping Beauty, could you give us a brief description of your usual production methods on the features?
Davis: It would really depend on what you happened to be working on. Generally you would have one top assistant and he would have two or three assistants under him who most of the time were inbetweeners. Never a large operation, really. Since I was involved with the animation of so many humans there was generally some live-action footage to work from or some sort of footage you look over. Someone asked me just the other day, “Didn’t you fellows just rotoscope everything?” and that’s a term I dislike immensely. When you just trace over film footage everything has a tendency to become very broad. Every woman you drew would turn out looking like this Roseanne character on television. I see quite a lot of this thing on Saturday-morning cartoons where they’ve worked from live footage and it has a very traced look about it and it looks dead. Live action shows people doing things and it’s right on the nose. However, in animation, I try to stay two or three frames ahead of everything; action, then reaction. You’re talking about 24 frames per second that are going through the projector, so it’s a minute thing that you really can’t see. It’s highly synchronized. Action that is difficult to do, such as a dancer, I would want to see a performer do it and then look at the film, not trace it. This is very true with my Cruella de Vil for 101 Dalmatians. We had a wonderful actress, Mary Wickes, who did some great live action. I used her suggestions and made them moreso. If you looked at the footage of Mary and then the character, you would have a difficult time seeing the resemblance. It’s suggestion you need, and that’s why I dislike the term “rotoscope.” Live action may be used as a blueprint, as a reference, but never traced. I see some of our films now and it’s easy to spot who was doing that sort of thing.
Province: Earlier you commented that Walt had no interest in highly stylized things, but yet I wouldcall Sleeping Beauty highly stylized with a very non-Disney look to it.
Davis: It’s stylized but in a different way. The characters come to life even though they are drawn a little differently and are three-dimensional. They don’t live in a flat world. The style we came up with for that was predicated a lot by the fact that the man doing the background, Eyvind Earle, had a strong style that Walt liked. Of course Sleeping Beauty was the first wide-screen feature we ever did. Walt told us, “You don’t have to cut all of the time. Think of the film as a moving illustration.” We were very concerned about how to “cut” on the wide screen. We soon discovered that it was just the same as you would on anything else. So we didn’t cut . . . and we didn’t cut . . . and finally Walt said, “For God’s sake, Marc, why didn’t you cut?!” [laughter]. After that, we didn’t worry about the wide screen any more. It looked to me like looking through a mail box. The main thing was keeping your action within the confines of regular proportion. A lot of that film has been consequently cut down for videocassettes. I think the artists make a terrible mistake when they put a lot of action on the ends of the screen. When it gets cut down there won’t be anything left but the background.
Province: For Sleeping Beauty you designed the most chilling villainess of them all, Maleficent the Sorceress. How did you create her unique appearance?
Davis: I sat down and went through a lot of material I had, including a book of Czechoslovakian religious paintings. There was this figure with the red and black drapery in the back that looked like flames that I thought would be great to use. I took the idea of the collar partly from a bat, and the horns looked like a devil. I received a card recently from Eleanor Audley, who did the voice of Maleficent. She’s 84 years old and I guess quite ill. She was a very fine actress and not at all dependent on what we were doing [laughter].
Province: The last animated feature you worked on was 101 Dalmatians in 1961.
Davis: Yes, that was my last, and I think I enjoyed working on Cruella more than any of the others. The broadest thing I ever had a chance to do was Cruella, and I enjoyed that aspect of her. She also operated without magic unlike characters in Sleeping Beauty, Alice or Cinderella. She was just a nutty woman who probably went to the bathroom just like the rest of us. No magic there! [laughter] She had no realization whatsoever that she was cruel. That’s just the way she was. She had no idea that the killing and butchering of these little puppies for a coat involved pain and suffering. She’s pure evil, and that’s what makes her interesting.
Province: Dalmatians was also the debut film for Ub Iwerks’ cel-photocopying technique.
Davis: Yes, and if I had it to do it over again, I think I would work a little cleaner than I did. I did all of Cruella de Vil, every scene of her. I had assistants at the time who were more inclined to just touch up my drawings, which were frequently a little rough. There is some roughness on the screen in some of my stuff that I don’t like and that I regret. There was something used on this film that the artists liked but Walt didn’t, which was using lines for backgrounds. I thought it was very good because for the first time the drawings in the front matched the drawings in the back. There had always been these super-delicate tones in the backgrounds, and then a hard cartoon line around the characters. To me they never seemed consistent. With Bambi I think we did quite well because we used a colored line.
Province: Let’s talk about some of your studio colleagues. Why don’t we start with Walt Kelly? Did you know him?
Davis: I knew Walt Kelly very well. We both came to the studio at around the same time and were great friends in the early days. We both had the same story aspirations, and we did some stories together and presented them, not too successfully [laughter]. We did some things that were akin to his later work on Pogo, sort of a hound-dog thing in the South. I don’t remember too much about the story except there was a fire engine in it and something else. I can’t remember exactly. I still slap myself. Walt came back from the East and was working on something for Chuck Jones. He sent the word around that he sure would like to see Marc Davis. I would have loved to have seen him, but I didn’t do it and not too long after that he died. I’m still sore at myself for that. The studio was a funny place to work because you would be close to someone you were working with. Then if you were put into something else, you wouldn’t see them anymore because now you were working with these other people. They wouldn’t see you because they were now seeing the people around them.
Province: One of my old idols, Virgil Partch, also got his start at Disney.
Davis: Virgil came from Los Angeles and studied at Chouinard’s. He had become sort of famous for swallowing the goldfish in the pond there [laughter]. He was a wonderful guy and an assistant to Ollie Johnston. He used to do these crazy little drawings. I still have a number of them around somewhere.
Province: Did you team up on any projects like you did with Kelly?
Davis: No, we were just good friends. I was looking at one of his old drawings just the other day. When he went into the Army we gave him a big going-away party. Frank and Ollie were there, and it was at the Cock and Bull Restaurant down on the end of the Sunset Strip. When he came back after the war he really took off on the cartooning thing. I did do the animation for a story of his called Duck Pimples. It wasn’t a great effort [laughter], and it was certainly very different!
Province: While making Bambi, you worked with one of the very few female animators, Retta Scott.
Davis: Yes, they were rare. Retta had been a student at Chouinard’s and she used to go with us on our drawing trips. She could draw as well as any man. One of the things she did on Bambi was a bunch of hound dogs which was very powerful and frightening. I believe she’s still in the business and lives up in the Bay area.
Province: Did you know another female Disney artist, Mary Blair?
Davis: I knew Mary very well. She was an extraordinary artist, and Walt thought very highly of her. She was the most amazing colorist of all time. I don’t think even Matisse could hold a candle to her—and I mean that very sincerely. She could put colors together and they would just sing. Her work was generally quite stylized. A lot of people with limited backgrounds never really knew how to interpret things she did and how to get the most out of them. Her images tended to be flat. She did a lot of sketches where her images are still superb. I think things had to be planned a little differently in order to take advantage of that. She did an awful lot of the South American things and went on that trip [to South America] with some of the other artists and story men. Province: A much lesser known artist, Jesse Marsh, also worked at Disney for a while.
Davis: He worked in the animation department with Ward Kimball for a long time. Ward knew him very well. After he left the studio he worked on the Tarzan comic books for many years. He was a very talented draftsman and used to decorate the doors of our studios with huge color nudes drawn on wrapping paper. He was very good! [laughter]
Province: Marsh died fairly young before he could be recognized at all. He has a small but devout following of his minimalist style.
Davis: The longevity of these people, so many of them came to tragic endings—Freddie Moore, Woolie Reitherman, Virg Partch . . . all tragedies. Walt Kelly wasn’t that old.
Province: Do you have a favorite piece of animation by one of your colleagues?
Davis: I have a print of Saludos Amigos. There’s a sequence Milt Kahl worked on with Donald Duck crossing a chasm on the back of a llama. It’s the funniest piece of animation I think I’ve ever seen. Just wonderful. Milt was a fantastic animator and perhaps my closest friend at the studio.
Province: Was there competition among the Disney artists?
Davis: There was competition, but it was an odd kind of competition. I’ve said before in a joking manner that Walt Disney’s greatest achievement was in getting us all to work together without killing one another! The biggest problem with animation is getting a group of people who can work together. There is something about being an artist . . . you have to believe in yourself and believe in what you are doing. If it isn’t there, you won’t try to do anything. Taking people from all over the world and getting them to come here and work together and make a picture at the end was a very remarkable thing! Walt had a smart idea that everybody should call each other by their first names, including him. He felt the terms “Mister” and “Miss” put up an immediate barrier and that it’s pretty hard to get angry with someone when you’re calling them by their first names. Making an animated film is almost like crocheting; it’s all done by hand. Also various talents will take you in different directions. It isn’t like an actor who can say, “I can do this part 10 different ways.” You have to figure out one way to do it and stick with it.
Province: Years ago you said, “Animation is anachronism. A hand-made commodity in a mechanized world.” With the creation of computerized animation is the craft merely catching up with the times?
Davis: If we were doing something today such as Victory Through Air Power, we would no doubt have a lot of the chart work done by computers, which I don’t particularly like, since a computer can’t know what I think. I don’t think you’re going to be able to sit down at a computer and turn out a Mona Lisa or a piece of Milt Kahl animation. You have to have a heart in there somewhere.
Province: Hasn’t the success of The Simpsons and similar programs proven that drawing isn’t important anymore?
Davis: I feel pretty much the same way about that as I do about this Garfield thing that Jim Davis does. It’s just not my cup of tea. Also, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? does not reflect my point of view on animation. I go along with what Walt Disney wanted to do, which was bring things to life, anything, to make it live. I feel that as an artist I have a knowledge of how things move and work. I have the ability to draw anything. I can go away from that and become as zany as you like, but I always have that center to come back to. I feel strongly about that, but I’m of a different generation. The films we worked on, now referred to as classic Disney animation, hold up very well. Walt had a clever idea, and that was to never allow any current slang in the films. I heard an expression on the radio the other day: “Get a life.” This is exactly the type of thing we would have never used in our pictures. This is the kind of thing that will date the film.
Province: After you completed your work on 101 Dalmatians, your career at Disney took a different turn. How did that come about?
Davis: There was a thought among the business people at the studio that perhaps Walt should discontinue doing feature animation. As I mentioned before, I would usually finish work on one film and then start work on another, but after Dalmatians, Walt told me to go down to Disneyland and look over the “Nature’s Wonderland” attraction. I did and came back with a bunch of drawings on it. It turned out he just wanted me to look it over and tell him how great it was. Anyway I looked at it quite critically and came up with a lot of opinions. I started going down the list of what was wrong with the attraction. The first thing on the list was the mining car. The seats have you sitting face-to-face with total strangers, and you have to crane your neck to see the attraction, and you can’t physically turn around to see what’s behind you. I told Walt seeing ahead of you is a natural instinct of self-preservation, which it is. He bought that. There were two kit foxes about a hundred feet apart. One would move his head from side to side and the other moved his head up and down. I put them together and this immediately creates a little tableau with one saying “yes” and the other saying “no.” I went through the whole attraction and did little things like that, and Walt thought it was great. After that he became very interested in staging things from the point of view from which you were looking at it. That was the beginning. We worked on all four attractions at the New York World’s Fair at the same time.
Province: One of your most popular efforts was Great Moments With Mr. Lincoln. How did that come about?
Davis: Because of my knowledge as an animator, I was teaching a very advanced course on movement one night a week at Chouinard’s when Walt announced he wanted to construct a Lincoln figure. He asked me to give it some thought and I did a folder full of drawings on how to articulate a mechanical man. It turns out I was totally wrong. We weren’t building a mechanical man. We weren’t doing a Metropolis; we were creating an illusion of Abraham Lincoln. We managed to get this things worked out and ready for the World’s Fair. At the premiere the figure stood up, took a step forward and delivered his speech in a very lifelike manner. A reviewer for The New York Times wrote that the figure was so good that he believed it walked forward on the stage and it came off very well.
Province: I was at Disneyland recently. On the Mr. Lincoln attraction they went to great lengths to explain how the new figure is an improvement over the original. I didn’t like it as well as the original, and I believe they changed the dialogue, which had been very inspiring.
Davis: I don’t go down there any more. It upsets me. The beauty of our Mr. Lincoln was in its subtlety of movement. I laid this thing out like a scene of animation on paper; every word he said and how he should move. The fellows who programmed it followed my layouts just like an animator would follow an exposure sheet or a musician would follow a sheet of music.
Province: You developed another popular attraction as well, The Pirates of the Caribbean.
Davis: Walt asked me to begin work on a walk-through attraction based on the Pirates of the Caribbean. While I was working on it he would come into my office and had to force himself not to look at the boards; he wasn’t ready to see them yet. Unfortunately, Walt never lived to see that attraction completed. I did a walk-through with him before any of the figures or backgrounds were in place. The auction scene was partially assembled over at WED and he saw that. Then unfortunately he died, and that was the end of his participation.
Province: Do you recall how you heard of Walt’s passing?
Davis: I was in my office at the studio. One of the men whose sister was nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital across the street from the studio called to say that Walt Disney had just died. It was a shocker. What now? That was in 1966 and I left in 1978, but before I left I worked on the It’s A Small World attraction, as well as the America Sings, and the Country Bear Jamboree, which was designed strictly for the Florida park. Of course you’ve heard the story about Walt being frozen and kept down there [laughter].
Province: Considering all the films that have been made since 1940, I think it’s ironic that as we sit here today 50 years later, those rumors about a Fantasia sequel are still with us.
Davis: I heard the rumors, and I think current management would do anything if they thought they could make it go. At least they’re keeping animation on the market, which is good. It disappoints me a lot in a lot of ways because I think they’re trying to rush them into doing a feature a year. You can do a feature a year if you have the amount of people and talent to do that. But right now, a lot of those people are either being trained or are training themselves in animation. I don’t think there are people there who can help them. Eric Larson, who passed away not too long ago, stayed on for quite a long time helping the young people. When they moved the animation from the studio and over to Glendale into the Walt Disney Imagineering area, it hurt him a great deal and he decided to retire. Not long after that he became ill and died, unfortunately.
Province: Precisely how would you characterize your association with the studio these days?
Davis: I think they consider me a consultant, though I am doing a lot less of that sort of thing now. Joe Grant gives them story help when they ask for it. I went out a couple of months ago, and Joe and I critiqued a film they were working on. We gave them our ideas and we enjoyed ourselves. They need guidance that they just haven’t had. There is no one that can give it to them except a few and they’re not going to sit there and do that. There are a lot of things here I want to work on on my own, including some painting. That’s why I have so many things lying around as you can see. I want to look them over and see how I want to approach them. I think I’m finally getting to the point where I’m starting to get them right! Province: Not long ago you were honored at a special ceremony at the studio that paid tribute to the Nine Old Men as well as Ub Iwerks. How does it feel to be a historic figure?
Davis: It makes you feel old! [laughter] It’s nice that people recognize our work. It was a very strange business in that we were kept anonymous throughout our entire careers. This wasn’t too happy for artists who would have liked that have signed their work and see their names on the screen just like anyone else. To find that we’re getting credit for what we did is a far cry from the old days, when everybody thought Walt Disney did all the drawing!