Don Graham, who would go on to teach the philosophy of drawing and movement at Disney when the features were in production, had only two basic appraisals of a student’s work. “Having problems?” he would ask, or “Looks like you’re having fun.” The second was the supreme apothegm, the supreme tribute, the ne plus ultra, because having fun with drawing meant that something was sinking in; the lessons were bearing fruit. I would rather hear Don Graham say, “Having fun?” than win an academic award. Years after his death, indeed to this day, when a drawing seems to be going right, I can hear his kindly voice: “Having fun?” Yes. Yes, indeed. If sainthood can be bestowed on a great teacher—and it should be—then the mantle should fall first on Don Graham, patron saint of animation.
No one at Chouinard was studying to be an animator, or a dress designer, or a motion-picture director, a watercolorist or an industrial designer. Yet out of the same courses in the same years at Chouinard came fashion and costume designers, industrial engineers, live-action directors and actors, book illustrators, and several of the most noted animators of all time. I think none of these students had any idea how they were to apply their knowledge in the practical world beyond art school, but—to this day—what basic schooling is appropriate for a budding animator is exactly the same as for those other crafts. We can teach an artist to animate; we cannot take the time or expend the effort to teach him to be an artist.
An animator’s best friends are his doodles
So I came out of art school during the Depression, dreaming the dreams that all worthy art students dream: that I would become an easel painter, consumptive and unrecognized, dying picturesquely at some incredible old age like thirty-seven, in a wonderfully shabby Paris garret with my painfully completed masterpiece on the easel beside me, a sort of male Camille.
The starving part was partially accurate. For a while I lived near the school in a rooming house. And one day, in a weak and hungry moment, my roommate and I succumbed to a bit of larceny. A greengrocer’s truck had parked down the street and was left untended. We grabbed the first crate we could off the back. It turned out to be celery. For two days we ate nothing but celery and used up more calories chewing than we realized in energy. “Damn it,” I said to my roommate. “What’re we going to do? We can’t starve!” “That’s funny,” he replied. “I thought we could.”
Tedd Pierce and Mike Maltese were caricatured for castaways and supplied the voices, too (1943)
Upon being thrust rudely into a rude world, I found that it takes money to die poor, so my ambitions went necessarily from the impracticably sublime to the practically realistic. I couldn’t even afford to be ridiculous: I had to get a job.
I had no technical skills; I could not letter or write billboards. After all, Chouinard Art Institute was a fine-arts academy, not a trade school. We were all contemptuous of trade schools—good God, they taught you a trade! I had no physical skills—Chouinard had no teams, no physical education. We were all contemptuous of the physical. This was not, thank God, we said, USC! The heaviest thing I had ever lifted was a 2B pencil; even a 3B seemed an imposition.
There was one self-skill I had reasonable confidence in. In my first year at Chouinard, before I faked my way into a scholarship, I worked as a janitor in some office buildings. In those quaint days an office was considered incomplete without a cuspidor—or spittoon, if you wish to be delicate—and I had weathered that year with the unpleasant job, among others, of emptying these untidy containers. I even earned the sobriquet “Admiral” from a jolly real-estate agent who chewed cigars (he didn’t smoke them, he chewed them, and wetly deposited their flaky remains into the waiting cuspidor). “Admiral” was so uproariously funny to him that he so dubbed me not once but 825 times, by actual count, in front of his slimy peers. “Because,” he said, “he handles the vessels.”
So I had some experience in this exacting trade and hope ran high in the Jones family that the expense of three years in art school might not have been in vain if it prepared me for a job as a janitorial assistant.
Janitors in those days were not yet known as sanitary engineers. Few of them read Proust or played the blockflöte, and, if anything, they were downwardly mobile rather than upwardly so.
The important and vital factor here was that janitors were actually paid for janiting and therefore, since I was, as Daffy Duck would later say, “dethtitute,” I was ready—no, I was eager—to become once again an admiral, even a vice admiral—a more accurate term, anyway.
So I seemed destined once again to join the bucket brigade, when the hand of my Guardian Angel in the form of an old Chouinard schoolmate (Fred Kopietz, later a fine animator at Disney) tapped me in a way that led to a life I could not have envisaged in my wildest dreams (and I had some wild ones). I couldn’t believe it then and I have difficulty believing it now: someone was willing to pay me to do what I most wanted to do. Imagine that!
The stimulus of the war
