Ub Mice and Men: Mickey’s Parents Divorce
But no matter what we might say of this or that studio, and how one or the other, or a certain number of them would come to prominence and challenge their position as top dog, it’s a fact that even right into the twenty-first century Disney remains the “gold standard” and was largely responsible for what was termed the Golden Age of American Animation. We’ve already looked into the creator himself, but what of those who worked for him? Well, we have read about Ising and Harman, but a man more closely associated with the early Disney products, while not quite airbrushed from the history of animation, has nevertheless sort of been pushed a litlte into the background in recent years, but he is basically the one whom we have to thank, or curse, for the creation of Disney’s greatest and most famous character.
Ub Iwerks (1901 - 1971)
Surely the strangest name ever for an American animator, Iwerks was born in Missouri to German parents, hence I guess the odd name. His father was by all accounts what we would call today a bastard-maker, fathering children and leaving them and their respective mothers behind as another man might throw away a crisp packet when he was done. True to form, when Ub was born his father, then 57, fu
cked off and left him, and Ub never forgave him. On learning of his death, Ub was reputed to have opined that his father could be thrown in a ditch. I know how he felt. Ub met Walt Disney in 1919, the first to partner up with the father of American cartoons and together they opened a studio and created their first successful character, as already related, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. When creative control of the character was taken from Disney, he and Iwerks began working on a new character, the rights of which the two would own. This was of course the most famous cartoon character in history.
Life with Disney however was not by any means all roses, and Iwerks resented the fact that he was not getting the credit he deserved, not only on the creation of Mickey Mouse but on other characters too. He did, after all, single-handedly animate what would go on to become, until the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s most famous cartoon, Steamboat Willie, the first to use synchronised sound. Besides this, he found Disney’s style dictatorial, and so in 1930, after a particularly acrimonious spat, he left to set up his own studio. It was not, to be fair, successful, and again to be fair, or not, Disney did not fall apart without him, even though many believed Iwerks to be the real genius. Walt Disney hired other animators, and the studios continued to grow and influence the emerging animation market, eventually becoming the colossus it is today.
Iwerks, in the meantime, created a new character, Flip the Frog, who would star in over thirty features from 1930 to 1933. He also created others, but Flip was supposed to be his main one, his Oswald or Mickey. As already explained, his ex-boss had an exclusive contract to use the three-strip technicolor system so Ub, like other animators in other studios, was constrained to the two-colour, and it shows. The cartoon looks faded and washed out, though I consider the possibility that this may be the first time proper sound effects were used in a cartoon, such as the slide-whistle thing when the tortoise, with what would become typical cartoon logic, examples of which we have already seen in
Plane Crazy and
Trolley Troubles, and even the Felix the Cat cartoons, extends its shell like a scissors lift and ejects him off it. The sound synchronisation, though minimal, is quite impressive. I see he rather cheekily included some mice who bear a striking resemblance to Disney’s main character, down to the white gloves and red shorts, but then, since he was also involved in the creation of Mickey Mouse, why not?
The cartoon seems to use little if anything in the way of speech or voices, despite the original sort of singing by Flip, and relies mostly for its sound on music and sound effects. This, I suppose, was in order to make it easier to animate. If you don’t have the characters talking, you don’t need to worry about lining up the words with the movement of their mouths. Overall I can see how
Fiddlesticks wasn’t successful: it’s good animation but basically it’s over twelve minutes of watching a frog and various animals play music and dance, and let’s be fair, this has been done before. And better. Did it improve with time? Let’s see. Two years on we have
Flip and the Milkman, famous (or infamous) for using so-called curse words. Well, I can’t say for sure, but the version I can find is in black and white, and I have to say at this point I already dislike Flip the Frog with an intensity I haven’t experienced for other cartoon characters. He’s just very annoying, and not in a comic way.
Anyhow, let’s see how this plays out. Well it may be the first time the sun is anthropomorphised, haven’t seen that before that I remember, and for a kid’s cartoon yeah, it is quite violent, and with speech this time, not just sound. I must say though, Flip looks so much less like a frog now than he did in 1930, and you can certainly hear Mickey’s voice in his. The idea of another character Ub created for Disney, Clarabelle Cow, is again explored here, and while Flip has the high-pitched voice of Disney’s star, the insect on the cow who backtalks him has a thick Bronx accent or something, very deep and masculine. Two flies coming with a stretcher to take away the squashed one (with attendant Death March music on maybe kazoo) is clever, though again slightly dark for children? This sort of thing would of course become a mainstay of shows like
Roadrunner and
Tom and Jerry in time to come, but quite brave, I feel, in 1932.
Early usage, too, of “action lines”: Flip passes a dustbin in which a child is hiding and it vibrates with his cries, the line showing that it’s moving, and also tears flying from the child’s eyes. The cartoon logic comes into play when, as one milk bottle falls from the window sill of one of the houses, the other comes to life and catches it, smiling as it resettles it on the sill. Cute when the “bad word” is said - “What the hell do we care?” - it’s said by the horse pulling the milk cart, and Flip tells it “mustn’t say that bad word.” Kind of giving the censor the finger there, Ub! Yeah, a lot better: much more going on and despite the very limited speech and the lack of colour, quite entertaining.
Let’s cut to the end, to Flip’s final cartoon, released in 1933, so still stuck on those two-colour - oh. No. Still in black and white, according to YouTube. Hmm. Soda Squirt sees Flip opening his drug store, and I don’t know what the rules were on copyright at this time, but Ub has caricatures of Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and possibly Mae West? Some Hollywood screen goddess anyway. A little
risque for the times, as Flip, obviously into her, holds an ice cream cone and it melts in his hand. Oh, I see: drug store means something different than I thought it did. Seems to be a soda parlour, I believe you guys called them back then. Makes sense, given the title. Clever usage of rhymes to keep the audience’s attention, though for some reason Flip seems to be dancing a lot. Bit macabre near the end when a customer drinks a soda and turns into some sort of monster.
After Flip ended on a rather less than grandiose note in 1933, Ub went on to tackle a series of fairy tales under the title of Comicolor, using a different colourising process called Cinecolor (which never caught on as Technicolor became the standard) in order, I presume, to circumvent Disney’s exclusive contract and yet allow him to produce proper colour cartoons. In
Sinbad the Sailor (1935) he seems to have pioneered the idea of characters running while getting nowhere, which again would become standard in cartoons, along with the sound of coconut shells being banged together, or some sort of bongo drum beat, whatever they used; we all know the sound, accompanied by a circle of moving feet and a cloud of dust, making the person seem to have more than two feet, almost like wheels really. Sinbad himself looks like some sort of mad cross between Elmer Fudd and Popeye, while it is very interesting to see what I believe is the first representation of a character meant to be gay, as a very effeminate-looking pirate is pinned to the cabin doors with swords thrown at him, in what must surely be an early version of gay-bashing on screen, even if it doesn’t result in anything.
More things coming to life, with the actual skull-and-crossbones flag talking and doing things like using its bones as telescopes and pointing, and a very reluctant cannon spitting out a cannonball that has been forced into it by a very angry pirate. Typically American then, Sinbad starts playing baseball with the cannonballs, knocking them back towards the pirate ship. Meanwhile his ship, which for some reason is a Viking longship, develops legs and runs over the water, but the pirate captain throws his anchor like a shot putt or lasso and catches it, dragging it back to him where a fierce fight ensues. All to upbeat music, of course. Again, not much in the way of speech here.
It’s actually quite hilarious that all through everything - fighting the pirates, firing from the topmast, having to walk the plank, even sinking to the bottom of the sea, the pipe never falls from Sinbad’s mouth, not once. Ub then channels the Three Stooges in a fight among the pirates on the island Sinbad ends up washed up on, when he, perched in the tree, throws coconuts at one and that one thinks the guy beside him is responsible, and they start fighting. Yeah, pretty damn good I would say. You can see how removing the restrictions imposed upon him by Disney’s monopoly of the Technicolor three-strip freed him to really express himself in terms of colour, light and effect, and it really works so much better than the poor, drab cartoons of the Flip the Frog era. There’s still a certain zing lacking here compared to what you see in early colour Disney, but it’s streets removed from the earlier stuff.
Ub’s lack of commercial success after nearly six years in business saw his backers all head for the hills, and as finance dried up his studio closed. He worked for three years for Leon Schlesinger on
Looney Tunes cartoons, but eventually as the work became harder to come by he was forced to return, tail between his legs, to Disney. The overall impression given of his return was one of coldness by Walt Disney; the two men had been friends but had fallen out, and when Ub returned he was not, by all accounts, greeted as Walt’s old partner but just as another guy working for him. Ub remained at Disney for the rest of his working life, retiring in 1964 at the age of 63, having worked on some mega hits such as Song of the South and 101 Dalmatians, as well as sequences on the live-action Mary Poppins. He died, aged 70, in 1971.
In the end, though an extremely talented animator, Ub Iwerks lacked the imagination and flair of others of his contemporaries. Chuck Jones is on record shrugging “he just wasn’t a funny guy”, and this is hard to disagree with when you look at the Flip the Frog cartoons. Okay, I only watched three, but none of them made me laugh once, and his Comicolor tales, while clever, aren’t really that funny either. Ub also stuck to a more rigid, older style of animation, reluctant to take chances and embrace the new techniques. This is evident from the first Flip cartoon,
Fiddlesticks, although it can be allowed that he was prevented from using the three-strip by Disney. Still, it’s a pretty boring, if well-drawn piece of animation, and unlikely to hold anyone’s attention, I feel. The last of these, as we looked at above, is just a little too surreal and yet rooted in the real world to work; unlike Disney’s efforts, nothing comes alive or is treated really as anthro - everything relies on the characters, which, making it worse really, are caricatures of real people, meaning you have to know them to get the joke, if there is one. It makes the cartoon very dated indeed, and the Jeckyll-and-Hyde idea seems uncomfortably tacked on at the end, as if he had run out of ideas and didn’t know how to end the cartoon.
He certainly deserves the credit for Mickey Mouse though, and other Disney creations, but unfortunately for him it probably would have been better had he remained and stuck to what he knew. Even at this early stage in his career, it was clear to anyone who knew him that getting on the wrong side of Walt Disney could buy you a one-way ticket to oblivion. Disney had his revenge, got all the credit, and while Ub Iwerks is recognised within the animation industry, I would venture to say few people outside of it have even heard his name. Which is sad, but perhaps a cautionary tale. Sometimes the grass isn’t greener on the other side, and sometimes maybe it’s best to just get your head down and do the work. It takes a special kind of talent to enable a man or woman to go out on their own and carve their personal path in the world, and sadly Ub Iwerks was just not that kind of man.