The Creator Of Mickey Mouse

How Walt Disney Makes His Cartoons
Perfect Synchronisation
Mr. David Low, the celebrated caricaturist, was greeted by a storm of cheers when, at Grosvenor House on Tuesday, he introduced Mr. Francis Meynell, who spoke on Mickey Mouse Cartoons. To most of the audience Mr. Low was personally unfamiliar, though his features, so often portrayed in his own caricatures, were immediately recognised as he came into the room.
Mr. Walt Disney, the creator of Mickey Mouse, it will be recalled, visited London last summer.
The speaker said that Mr. Disney never talked about his art, though he constantly referred to it as his business. That, according to American custom, was both good and old. Old, because in the old days art and craft were one. Mr. Disney left the word art to "artistic hairdressers" and "art morticians," as the undertakers styled themselves. His craft was his art, but he was unlike the Viennese pastrycook who said that there were three arts, poetry, painting and pastry-cook decorating, of which last architecture was a subdivision.
Describing the technical process used in making the films, Mr. Meynell said that 24 drawn pictures took one second to be pro
jected on the screen. Some 12,000 pictures. therefore, went to a film of eight or ten minutes' duration. The film took two or three months to make.
First general ideas were discussed, then "gangs of gag-writers" were set to working out the jokes in detail. Sketches were made, but drawing was not started before the music had been composed.
" Silty Symphony " masterpteen A masterpiece of synchronisation such as a Silly Symphony was only achieved by calculating the music in bars scheduled in seconds. In this way action could be drawn to synchronise exactly with music and noise. Even the voice entered into this, the dialogue being made before the drawing. for the characters had to look as though they were forming the words they spoke. Mickey and Charlie Chaplin alone would survive of contemporary stars, thought Mr. Meynell, because they shared the same simplicity and ingenuity of invention.
Mr. Disney he described as "a smalltown man, who has read very little, seen very little, heard very little." That, however, only stimulated his imagination.
His was a world of fun into which tragedy did not enter. /Esop killed the lazy cricket, but Mr. Disney saved the grasshopper in The Grasshopper and the Ants. In Snow White, a picture of an hour and a half's duration which Mr. Disney was now making, even the Red Queen, a monster of fantastic evil, would not be allowed to die, but simply fade away. There was "no death in Disney."
.The lecture was given in aid of the Walter Hines Page travelling scholarships, founded by the English-Speaking Union.