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.The way the girls were done it s notan oªensive scene at all, but it probably could have been if it hadn t beenhandled in a very interesting way. 93As it is, there is an undertone of rape, but the sheer lavishness of the sceneencourages the squeamish spectator to put such doubts aside. We had madethe auctioneer pirate so sophisticated that you could watch him move and itwas as good as watching Lincoln, Marc Davis said. He had all the littlemouth movements and all that, and I mentioned to Walt that I thought itwas a hell of a waste. Walt said, No, Marc, it s not a waste.we do somuch return business down here, and the next time people come in they llsee something they hadn t noticed before. 94There was, however, an intractable problem with Audio-Animatronics, evenwhen its figures were as sophisticated that is, programmed with as manymovements as the pirate captain and the robot Lincoln.The problem, thesculptor Blaine Gibson said, was just how crude our medium is, relative tothe human figure.There are a whole lot of muscles that allow a human actorto go from one expression to the other with extreme ease.You can t programthis into a machine, and we don t have a material that can handle that. 95In short, the Audio-Animatronics figures were not really lifelike, and theycould not be.As clever and intricate as it was, Pirates of the Caribbean wasdiªerent only in degree, not in kind, from the tableaux that made up therides in Fantasyland.As in the 1930s, Disney had forced the growth of a kindres tles s i n the magi c ki ngdom, 1 959 1 965 295 of animation, bringing to the movement of robotic figures a subtlety thathad not existed before.In the 1930s, what he had achieved by the time hemade Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had opened up all kinds of possibil-ities for his medium but in the middle 1960s, he was about to hit a brickwall.Audio-Animatronics was never going to make anyone weep.It was akind of animation that could only remind Disney, as it became more so-phisticated technologically, of what he had given up, a quarter century be-fore, when he faltered in the face of the challenges and opportunities thatthe character animation in Snow White represented. For years afterward, Disney said in 1956, I hated Snow White becauseevery time I d make a feature after that, they d always compare it with SnowWhite, and it wasn t as good as Snow White. Wilfred Jackson, who was the most sympathetic and observant of Dis-ney s cartoon directors, confirmed that Snow White was a source of greattrouble to Walt in later years.Years and years after he made Snow White,we were discussing some footage to go on TV.He said then that it didn tseem possible to make a better picture than Snow White.I m not sure it gavehim a lot of pleasure to make that picture.He had a hard time trying to makea better one later on.Other pictures have had better animation or bet-ter dialogue or better techniques in recording.These were not Walt s crite-ria for a better picture.His criterion was the impact it had on the public.And that film was Snow White. 96Audio-Animatronics attractions were complex and challenging, but theyand by extension theme parks themselves were a dead end for someone whoseambitions were more than entrepreneurial, as Disney s clearly were.As he haddemonstrated repeatedly in work on Snow White and his other early films,he was a deeply serious man, but his life had run in reverse Disneyland, forall its virtues, was simply not as serious an undertaking as his early features,and there was no way Audio-Animatronics could make it so.To wind up, inhis sixties, playing with his toys was not where Walt Disney wanted to be.On the evening of July 17, 1965, exactly ten years after Disneyland opened,Walt and Roy Disney and their wives joined in a celebration with those em-ployees who had been with the park since the beginning.Walt spoke to thegroup, characteristically blunt and profane, but his words conveyed none ofthe giddy happiness of ten years earlier.He was more like the truculent ty-coon reporters had been surprised to encounter:Well, we had a lot of problems putting this thing together.There was pres-sure for money.A lot of people didn t believe in what we were doing.And we296 where i am happy were putting the squeeze play where we could.I remember we were dealingwith all three networks, they wanted our television show.And I kept insistingI wanted an amusement park.And everybody said, What the hell s he wantthat damn amusement park for? I couldn t think of a good reason except, Idon t know, I wanted it.ABC needed the television show so damned bad thatthey bought the amusement park.I just want to leave you with this thought,that it s just been sort of a dress rehearsal and we re just getting [started].Soif any of you start to rest on your laurels, I mean, just forget it.97There was no retracing his steps to become the artist he once was; and soDisney began devoting more and more of his time to projects that bore lit-tle resemblance to either his films or his park.One of those projects had its genesis in the mid-1950s, when Marc Davis,who had been teaching at the Chouinard Art Institute since 1947, receiveda phone call from its founder, Nelbert Chouinard.As a result of her call, WaltDisney sent two members of his financial staª, Royal Clark and ChuckRomero, to the school to, as Davis said, kind of take a look at her financialproblems, which were severe.When Clark and Romero inspected theschool s books, they soon concluded that it had been swindled out of tens ofthousands of dollars by its bookkeeper.Disney perhaps energized by thehonorary degree Chouinard gave him in May 1956 began taking a hand inthe school s messy business aªairs that year.Even with honest books,Chouinard was losing money, and so, in 1957, Walt Disney Productions be-gan subsidizing the school and, in eªect, took control of it.98 Walt alwayssaid she had been wonderful to him, Davis said. This was the basis of himgetting into that. 99By the late 1950s, Disney had seized on the idea of transforming Chouinardinto what one alumnus, Robert Perine, called a multi-disciplined school ofthe arts where the graphic arts, music, drama, and film could all be gatheredunder one roof and oªered to especially talented students who wanted topartake of this unique cross-breeding of activities. 100 Millard Sheets, a highlyrespected watercolorist and a Chouinard instructor, explained Disney s think-ing to Perine, as Disney had explained it to him around 1960:Walt felt that a new art would be born, a new concept of motion pictures.This was his whole dream.This is what very few people seem to understand,that a new form would come out of it, if a school was designed where therewas a school of dance, cinemaphotography [sic], drama, art, music, and even-tually literature where they could develop writers.He felt that if all these thingscould be, as he used to say, under one roof meaning they were really tiedres tles s i n the magi c ki ngdom, 1 959 1 965 297 together physically there d be a cross-fertilization in the activities of the schooland in the dormitories.He felt that for a six-year program, which he en-visaged, there d be a totally new synthesis in the sense of mutual respect andunderstanding, and that it would make the motion picture art a new art
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