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. 133 Dis-ney s new sound cartoons were being distributed just as his Alice Comedieshad been not just a less prestigious method of distribution, but one withproblems of its own.With states-rights distribution there could be no na-tionwide release date.If Disney was eventually successful in finding a na-tional distributor, there was the risk that its releases of his new cartoons wouldcollide with states-rights releases of cartoons he had made a year or two ear-lier.The older cartoons would dilute the market for the new ones.Disney s immediate challenge was to find ways to put his powerful newtool, synchronized sound, to its most eªective use.Even Wilfred Jackson, newto animation, was aware of how hard that might be. For most of us.whenI first came to the studio, he said, if it seemed to move it was animationand if it looked funny to us when it moved, that was good enough. Disney,he said, was not.so far ahead of the rest of us in knowing how to achieveconvincing action and characterization with animation. The studio s library reflected Disney s lag.It consisted of a folder of clippings of magazine andnewspaper cartoons, along with two books Lutz and Muybridge, or some-thing very similar like those that had been his instructors almost a decadeearlier.134Just how limited Disney s horizons were at this time was revealed in a re-mark he made sometime in 1928.after viewing one of his last Oswald car-toons or one of his first Mickeys, Jackson recalled.Disney said to Jackson: Some day I m going to make a cartoon as good as a Fable. 135 That was notmuch of an ambition.Paul Terry s Fables were furiously busy cartoons, butthat was about all.As animation s equivalents of the most brutal slapsticklive-action comedies, they were populated by characters distinguishable fromone another not by how they moved or what they did, but mainly throughtheir starkly simple designs.There is, however, no reason to doubt Jackson smemory on this point, or to believe that Disney was being facetious.Morethan ten years later, Disney himself wrote: Even as late as 1930, my ambi-tion was to be able to make cartoons as good as the Aesop s Fables series. 136the s elf- taught fi lmmaker, 1 923 1 928 67 chapter 3 You ve Got to Really Be Minnie Building a Better Mouse1928 1933Walt Disney and Carl Stalling disagreed over the music for the Disney car-toons almost from the day they began working together in Los Angeles inDecember 1928. Walt was a person with no musical background at all, Wil-fred Jackson said. He was also not a person to recognize any limitation asto what could be done.When he thought a piece of action should be ex-tended or shortened somewhat beyond what would fit with some certain partof a piece of music, he expected his musician to just simply find some wayor other to expand or shorten that part of his music. 1Jackson remembered a tremendous outburst of bickering betweenStalling and Disney about whether some music should be changed; and it smy recollection that a kind of compromise was arrived at, in that if Carl wouldmake his damned music fit the action Walt wanted in this Mickey, Walt wouldmake a whole series.where the music would have its way. 2 The MickeyMouse cartoon in question was almost certainly The Opry House, the first car-toon that Stalling scored in Los Angeles.The Skeleton Dance, the first car-toon in the new music-dominated series called Silly Symphonies, went intoproduction next, before The Opry House was finished.Disney later spoke of the Silly Symphonies as if those cartoons had been morehis own idea We wanted a series which would let us go in for more of thefantastic and fabulous and lyric stuª 3 but Stalling had suggested such a se-ries months earlier, probably when Disney stopped in Kansas City around thefirst of September on his way to New York.Disney told Roy and Iwerks aboutthree weeks later that there was a damn good chance to put over a series ofMusical novelties such as [Stalling] had in mind.We will have to make68 one and show it before we can talk business.We have in mind somethingthat will not cost much to make.It would only be good in Sound Housesand the field is limited.Therefore it would have to be inexpensive tomake What he has in mind sounds like it wouldn t cost much to make. 4(Disney s words might seem to apply to Steamboat Willie, too, but he pre-pared a silent version of that cartoon that diªered a little from the sound ver-sion.He also prepared silent versions of the next few Mickey Mouse cartoons.)Disney wrote to Roy on September 28: Carl s idea of the Skeleton Dancefor a Musical Novelty has been growing on me.I think it has dandypossibilities.It would be dandy with all the diªerent eªects in it. Theeccentric punctuation here is Disney s.He used strings of dots freely, but notcarelessly, as an aid to a kind of free associating
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