Ub Iwerks

Ub Iwerks in the late 1920's, working on an early sketch of Mickey Mouse
The names 'Walt Disney' and 'Mickey Mouse' are practically synonymous, but what is often overlooked is the name that should be found in between the two - Ub Iwerks. Behind the cut is a look at the career of Iwerks - animator, inventor, engineer - the man responsible for one of the most important pop-culture icons of the 20th century, and much more.

Walt Disney, along with his brother Roy, and Ub Iwerks were partners in the teens and twenties, as they fought long and hard to establish themselves in the fledgling animation industry in Kansas City. Setback after setback, they finally had a hit with the Alice's Wonderland series*. After that series died down, they hit yet another stride with Oswald the Rabbit for Universal. Legal setbacks and bad contracts cost them their flagship character, so Disney had Iwerks come up with another creation. This time, it was Mickey Mouse. Plenty of animated characters had been around and had become immensely popular since the dawn of motion pictures, but what set Mickey aside from the rest was being at the right place at the right time. While there had been some synchronized sound cartoons before Disney had come along, Steamboat Willie premiered in 1928 and cemented their place at the forefront of the animation industry.


Posters for Steamboat Willie, and the first Flip The Frog cartoon, Fiddlesticks, which was not yet titled at the time of printing.
Within a year, Iwerks, the principal animator of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, was growing increasingly frustrated with the demands put upon him by Disney. Disney was becoming more aware of the assembly-line model of production used over at Ford, and was trying to incorporate this into his studio. Iwerks disliked the pressure of producing faster, more economical cartoons, having junior animators finish his sketches, which altogether killed the nuances that Iwerks added to the character. On one particular evening, a young boy asked Walt for a caricature of Mickey along with an autograph. Walt was pleased to do so, and said to Ub: "Why don't you draw it, and I'll sign it?" Ub replied by saying "Why don't you draw it - Mickey!" and stormed away. Having had enough, he was lured away to produce cartoons through a studio of his own and to oversee the entire creative process. The films were to be distributed by MGM. Iwerks' departure from Walt Disney Studios shattered Walt, who had relied heavily on Iwerks for his signature style of animation. It is said that never again would Disney put all his eggs in one basket, by relying so heavily on one person.


Mickey in the cartoons that made him a star: Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy
Once Iwerks had established his new studio, he recruited animators who'd left him and Disney a few years prior to continue working on the Oswald the Rabbit series. Ub now felt he had the freedom to work beyond the animation table and launch himself into full production. He experimented with color, creating new and exciting methods of photographing animation cels. His first creation for Iwerks Studios was Flip The Frog, an idea he'd toyed with for years before when creating characters at the Disney studios. Flip The Frog debuted in the color cartoon Fiddlesticks, which was nothing more than a gag-filled reel playing on the syncopation between image and sound - In 1930, sound was still a novelty. Flip first appeared as a guileless frog, and slowly took on more humanoid characteristics. He also didn't share Mickey's luck with the ladies. Flip would often get smacked around by whatever lady he's proposition - Mickey had it much easier. While not so obvious in his earlier work, save perhaps for the Skeleton Dance cartoon at Disney, Iwerks' fascination with the surreal and macabre came out when he was on his own. Stuff worthy of a Dali painting would end up in a Flip cartoon.

The thing that seperates Flip from his counterpart over at Disney, was that he just wouldn't take no shit. After Iwerks left Disney, Mickey became non-confrontational but pivotal in all the plots surrounding him. Everything was rather harmonious, relying on detailed storytelling rather than physical gags. Mickey's early viciousness is something Flip would sometimes inherit from his creator. Of particular note in the early Flip cartoons is the music of Carl Stalling, who had worked with Ub and Disney earlier on in some early Mickey shorts, and would again work for Disney on The Three Little Pigs. As we all know, Stalling would best be remembered for his Looney Toons scores over at Warner Bros. Stalling's music and Iwerks art direction worked so well together - In rhythm with the music, all objects, creatures, especially objects, retained a certain buoyancy which just made viewers bounce along to the music. An interesting side-note to the Iwerks Studios is that Chuck Jones, who would later make a name for himself over at Warner Bros., would get his start with Ub as a cel washer. He would be fired for showing an apparent lack of skill, but later rehired. "He must have had a short memory," Jones would later share in interview with Disney archivist and author Joe Adamson. Hey, John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy, was kicked out of art school for having a lack of imagination. People make mistakes.


Flip meets with a familiar-looking mouse, driven to tears by the sound of his own violin, in Fiddlesticks (1930)



Stills from the Flip The Frog shorts Office Boy, Funny Face, and The Milkman.
Despite the madcap zaniness found in the Flip The Frog shorts, the Iwerks Studios filled the cartoons with a heightened sense of social awareness and relevance to the times. Flip, like Chaplin's Little Tramp, was a survivalist, staying afloat in the early stages of the Great Depression. In The Office Boy, we see him breaking ahead of the line in order to secure the only entry-level job, skipping out on his rent in Room Runners (while playing peeping tom through keyholes to check out some racy stripteases), and then doing anything at all possible to retrieve a quarter swallowed by a baby in The Nurse Maid. Even inanimate objects felt the brunt of the country as a cash register beats a deadbeat patient of Flip's in Laughing Gas.

Similar to The Simpsons and Family Guy cartoons lampooning current-day pop culture with references and guest appearances, Flip's capers sometimes included some celebrity-gazing of its own day, as in Soda Squirt, where Flip tends bar to a cast of Hollywood Luminaries (not unlike his half-brother Mickey's later star-studded Mickey's Gala Premiere in 1933). Appearing in the soda shop are the Four Marx Bros. (They were still at Paramount at the time), Mae West, Laurel & Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Buster Keaton, Joe E. Brown, and a rather effeminate character, used for comedic relief who then turns into Mr. Hyde after drinking a nail-filled milkshake. Stereotypical homosexual characters were as common in early animation as Japanese characters were during World War II. One of my favorite cartoons is Movie Mad, produced in 1931, which had Flip, down on his luck, wanting to sneak into a film studio to see how it's all done. He briefly disguises himself as Chaplin**, and manages to get on the lot after a few failed attempts. The security guard chases him around, which sets the pace for the whole cartoon - it's one chase scene after another, and we we see anthropomorphic takes on Laurel & Hardy, Pola Negri, Rudolph Valentino, and a few others.


Flip, der frausch.
As Chaplin had played with the comedic opportunities of drug use in the Mutual short Easy Street in 1917, Flip found himself smoking in an opium den in the wonderful, but offensive Chinaman's Dance in 1933. The cartoon is important in it's use of the foggy image used during Flip's swim in the sewers, and the hallucinagenic camera tricks from Flip's 'naive' experimentation with opiates. By year's end, demand for more Flip cartoons had died down, and the series had ended. The Flip The Frog serials would only last three years, and despite the great work put into them, the character would be doomed to become a barely recognizeable footnote in animation history. The Iwerks studios came up with a few more ideas throughout the years, notably the Whillie Whopper and Comicolor series (featuring the spooky Headless Horseman cartoon, which was the first film to use his multiplane camera, a tool that gave the illusion of greater depth in cartoons). The Comicolor series was nothing but a template for experimentation in photography and colour. Throughout the years, Ub would branch out into every facet of production, even innovating the camera and photo development processes which would later become standard in the industry.


A poster for the 1936 Iwerks Studios Comicolor short, Little Boy Blue
By the late thirties, Iwerks was forced to close his studio. It seems inventiveness and good gags just wasn't strong enough competition for the story-telling castle that was Walt Disney and the other studios in the industry. While he did re-open for work-for-hire contracts for Columbia, he found his way back at Disney in 1940. Walt, never one to forget betrayal, was also aware that the man was a genius, and he could definitely use his help, because he saw the big picture that lay ahead. While he worked in the Production Control and checking department, Iwerks quickly found himself as a kind of 'jack-of-all-trades, master-of-most' kind of role. While Ub is not credited for any animation work after his return to the Disney studios, it is speculated that his hand did grace the drawing board quite a few times, as some roundness and edges in 1941's Dumbo seem to hold that recognizeable Iwerks touch. Over the next thirty years, Iwerks' innovation and dedication to the art form would propel the studio to new heights, from the use of rain and water in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, to the interaction of animated and live-action characters in Mary Poppins, to his modification of the editing process for the Davy Crockett and Mickey Mouse Club TV series. Iwerks also made it possible for Hayley Mills to interact with herself in The Parents Trap and although there are plenty other examples, he also engineered and troubleshot most of the rides found at the Disneyland and later Walt Disney World theme parks (Pirates of the Carribean and Haunted Mansion in particular). Ub was also mostly responsible for the optical effects used in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (for which he received an Oscar nomination). Ever wonder why those birds look so awesome? That's Ub's doing.

Disney, who passed away in 1966, was survived by Iwerks for a few years. Working until the very end, Ub died in 1971 after a short bout with arteriosclerosis. In a career spanning over five decades, Ub created some legendary characters and probably changed the way film processing and colour is used in filmmaking. The only sad thing about his legacy is that he rarely gets any credit. While he did win two Academy Awards in the 60's for his special effects work on some Disney films, Ub was not one to brag about his achievements. He didn't focus much on the past but rather on what lies ahead, which is an admirable trait. While the first Mickey serials did have the credit of "by Ub Iwerks" on the title card, Disney's revisonism of their own history would practically erase Iwerks from the history books, even while he was still creating magic for the studios after he returned in the 40's. In "The Hand Behind The Mouse", written by Ub's granddaughter Leslie Iwerks, Ub claimed that while he did create the drawings for the mouse, it was Walt who took him forward, marketing him and giving him the career he achieved. He wasn't interested in praise. In the mid-60's, when an animation fan working an entry-level position, shared an elevator with Ub and Roy Disney, he asked him about Flip The Frog. Ub put his finger up to his mouth and said "Shhh. We don't talk about that around here." How modest.


Willie Whopper - Iwerks Studios follow-up to Flip The Frog
Despite plenty of Disney biographies published throughout the years that don't even mention Iwerks in the hundreds of pages contained therein, in 1989, the Disney family finally admitted that Iwerks was in fact the rightful creator of Mickey Mouse, acknowledging that without him things may have been a little different for Walt Disney Studios. They posthumously bestowed upon him the first "Disney Legends Award". I guess that's the problem with work-to-hire: many cartoonists, both in animation and in print would receive little or no recognition for their creations over the years, while others would take full responsibility and credit***. But that's the nature of the beast, right?

However, over the years, with the help of laserdisc and later DVD, the Iwerks Studios' work has been more readily available. Disney has also started being a little more lenient with access to its' vaults, and over the past few years, has released limited-edition tins containing some well-restored animation. Most interesting was last year's release of On The Front Lines, featuring all the wartime animation produced by Disney for the U.S. Army (and even the NFB in Canada), for which Iwerks served as Senior Technical Producer, including the shorts Der Fuehrer's Face, Education for Death, and the feature-length Victory Through Air Power, a military propaganda piece if there ever was one. On the Iwerks Studios front, Image Studios released a three-volume set on DVD called Cartoons that Time Forgot. The first two volumes are dedicated to The Ub Iwerks Collection in their entirety, while the third volume focuses on work by the Van Beuren Studios. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in classic animation.


Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, circa 1928
"According to aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot possibly fly." -Ub Iwerks
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*The Alice's Wonderland cartoons will soon be available on DVD for the first time in the latest wave of Walt Disney Treasures in the set called Rarities - Celebrated Shorts 1920s-1960s, out December 6, 2005.

**In the late 20's, early 30's, Chaplin was still without a doubt the most famous face in the world, so he frequently appeared in cartoons, and plenty of products appeared featuring his caricature. It is said that Felix The Cat is himself a caricature of Chaplin, using his tail the same way Chaplin used his cane (Many Felix cartoons ran alongside Chaplin's films, shown here in this ad for Pay Day. (Incidentally, check out this set of Chaplin cards from the early 20's.) Chaplin's appearance in Movie Mad would probably explain why the first Flip The Frog cartoon I ever saw was following Mack Sennett's Tillie's Punctured Romance. It was a Goodtimes VHS Cassette I got for my birthday in 1986 which featured the 1940's cut of Tillie's..., with an intro title claiming it to be "the oldest living motion picture...". I watched Movie Mad over and over again for years until I finally got hold of Kino's Down And Out With Flip The Frog: Ten Depression-Era Cartoons VHS tape.

***A few years after Ub's departure, Walt Disney himself would win a special Oscar in 1932 for 'creating' Mickey Mouse.

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Sources
Iwerks, Leslie. The Hand Behind The Mouse. New York, 2001
Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic. New York, 1980
Mitchell, Glenn. A-Z of Silent Film Comedy. London, 1998