Father insisted that we each wear a strong piece of twine around our neck, weighted with a metal amulet. The practical reasoning for this was that if you got caught in a big breaking wave you might, indeed you almost certainly would, find yourself in a great churning snarl of sand and tumbling water, in a vortex not of your own choosing. There is no way of knowing which direction the surface lies; many people in the grip of hysteria and panic have swum down to their deaths. “If,” Father pointed out, “your amulet is hanging in front of your nose, you will, if you have ordinary intelligence, know that it is pointing down. Gravity,” he said, “doesn’t lie. If, however, the amulet rested against your chest, you were obviously going up, and this,” he said, “just might be where the surface lies, and more important, where air can be found.”
Dorothy, Margaret, Richard, and Charles (broken wing) Jones, Balboa, California, 1917
I was never afraid of sharks. Sea monsters were my dish; I’m still one of the Loch Ness monster’s staunchest supporters. In those simple days, the idea of being bitten or devoured by a shark was as remote a possibility as being struck by a bolt of lightning. In fact, people had been struck by lightning on a wet beach in the South Bay—but never then or in the seventy ensuing years has anyone on that thirty-mile stretch ever been touched by a shark. Wait—I stepped on a leopard shark once. Eleven inches long, he was chewing on a piece of seaweed, a vegetarian perhaps, certainly not a clear and present danger.
Yes, we all learned to swim—everything from the classic dogpaddle to the Australian crawl, the stroke that revolutionized swimming. And it got me interested not only in how to swim but in how everybody else swims, culminating many years later in the natural artistry of the sea lion in our filming of Kipling’s “The White Seal” as a half-hour television special. (Sea lions are sometimes mistaken for seals, even by Rudyard Kipling.)
Again, as always, all animals move the way they must move, because their unique anatomy develops as necessary in each unique environment, and the sea lion is no exception.
Since the story “The White Seal” is in the Bambi tradition, the characters must move authentically. The sea lions, like the deer in Bambi, are humanized only in the sense that they talk to one another. Their strengths and their weaknesses, their problems and their triumphs, are all ultimately conditioned by their unique anatomical structure.
I could not conduct a course in comparative anatomy with my animators. I was not educationally equipped to do so; therefore, I followed the most logical substitute—comparing my own anatomy to that of the sea lion. This is not as difficult as it might sound, since all vertebrates have more structural matters in common than differences. Our bones and muscles all bear pretty much the same names and are readily identifiable; the great differences are primarily in length and weight of the bones and the musculature, and, of course, in the skull structure.
So I went down to the wonderful San Diego Zoo, where I could examine sea lions at their and my leisure, and there they were, as brown as a bunch of movie producers in Palm Springs, only lacking cigars in their fat faces and a bit of colored cloth across their loins to complete the masquerade. Their movements onshore had the same complacent wobble as did many cinematic moguls of that day. Their barks, too, seem to have a similar authoritative ignorance, but once in the water, the sea lion becomes a sinuous master of the aquatic arabesque, a series of grace notes swirling through the water with confident beauty.
And close examination showed that both front and hind flippers had small but very evident toenails. So these were really hands and feet, not fins. It seemed to me that the upper arm-bones, the ulnas, were buried in the body itself but were probably still there; that, in human terms, only the arms from the elbow down were exterior, and the long legbones were also immured inside the long sleek envelope of the body, only the feet emerging as flippers.
The best way to make a boy into a sea lion is to tie him up in this manner
Having grandsons of eleven and thirteen, I explained the situation to them and asked their help in demonstrating to my animators how a sea lion had to move.
Simplicity itself. I tied their arms to their bodies at the elbow, tied their legs at the knee and ankle, put swim flippers on their feet and hands, and threw them into the swimming pool. Within minutes they were swimming the only way they could swim—awkwardly, but exactly as a sea lion swims. Even arcing down into the depths and surfacing quickly to breathe. They were as close as a human being could be to a sea lion, and the awkwardness of their movement could easily be corrected by the animator.
Running attitudes are as diverse as are our characters
Comparative anatomy is a vital tool of the complete animator or director. What he looks for is not how another creature is different but how he is the same—an example is what I call the tennis-shoe proof. If one ascertains where the toe bones, heels, and ankles of a horse, a dog, and a man are, and then creates a tennis shoe to fit that structure, the comparisons become relatively easy and the movement more easily understood.
This kind of analysis is only necessary when you are animating animals as they appear. With Bugs, Daffy, etc., we invented our own anatomical structures and were faithful to them. And, speaking of comparative anatomy, let me lay to rest for all time—a big order, but one easily demonstrated—that when we animated Bugs, Daffy,
