Ub Iwerks' 125th Birthday

 Today, everyone knows Disney and their iconic mascot, Mickey Mouse. While Walt Disney himself was responsible for Mickey’s personality and soul, credit should also be given to the one who first drew the character, Ub Iwerks. Ub’s story is one of advancement and different turns that lead to either success or failure but also the status of a film legend.

Born on March 24^th, 1901, in Kansas City, Ubbe Ert Iwwerks’ parents were Erert Ubbe Iwerks and Laura May Wagner. As a child, Ub spent a lot of time with his father and learned about machines and their construction. The time of Ub’s upbringing was a time of progressive movement where people tried to find the next great inventions to improve the quality of life and work. But very unfortunately, when Ub was a teenager, his father abandoned the family. This was painful for Ub. He would never see his father again, nor would he ever speak of him. To support his mother, Ub dropped out of school to work odd jobs. The rest of his education came from reading books in his spare time. But it was around this time that he developed a passion for art and drawing.

 

In 1919, Ub would find work at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio as an illustrator. There, Ub would meet another young aspiring artist named Walt Disney. The two had a lot in common and became fast friends. Soon after, they would start their own ad company. However, this venture proved to be a failure and the company was shut down in less than a month. To sustain themselves, Walt and Ub took jobs at the Kansas City Ad Film Company. It was at this company that the two would discover the relatively new innovation of animation. They were immediately hooked and in 1922, they decided to start their own cartoon studio in Kansas City called Laugh-O-Grams where Ub would be the chief animator. While production of the cartoons was fun for the crew, the studio struggled to earn a profit. As a last stitch effort, the team would produce a lavish short called Alice’s Wonderland in 1923. The film was a new take on what the Fleisher Studios did with their Out of the Inkwell series, which combined animation with live action. But instead of a cartoon character in the real world as the Fleishers did, this would instead feature a live action little girl in a cartoon world. When most of the short was finished, the money officially ran out. While Walt decided to leave for Hollywood, Ub went back to the Kansas City Film Ad Company.

 

As fate would have it, soon Walt struck a deal with cartoon distributor, Margret Winkler, to distribute his new series, the Alice Comedies, seeing the half finished print of the pilot short. Right when Ub was promoted as head artist at the Ad Company, he was invited to work in Hollywood with Walt on the Alice Comedies. Ub accepted and the series ran for four years. After that, Walt and Ub would create a new series starring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Ub would single handily animate the first short in an unprecedented time of two weeks, which is still an incredible accomplishment to this day. Also, around that time, Ub would meet Mildred Henderson and the two would marry in 1927. What made Ub’s master animation of Oswald important at the time was it planted the seed of what Walt called “personality animation”. Another important aspect of series was its use of mechanical creations in the cartoons such as a mechanical cow in the short of the same name. Despite the Oswald series’ success, in 1928 Walt had a sneaking suspicion of double dealing behind his back from the new distributor, Charles Mintz. As Walt found out, Mintz hired most of Walt’s animation staff to take over the Oswald series because Mintz owned the character. Dejected, Walt and Ub would team up to create a new character. As Ub remembered, he leafed through different magazines to find a new animal to be their star. It was Walt that came up with the idea of a mouse named Mickey Mouse. Ub would be the one to design and animate the character. While finishing up their last Oswald cartoons, Walt and Ub would work in secret on the short, Plane Crazy.

 

When it was finished, Walt shopped it around to find a distributor. Unfortunately, it failed to impress anyone, as did the follow up, The Gallopin’ Gaucho. It was then Walt decided that the next short needed a novelty. Then he decided that it should be produced in the new innovation of sound because it had never really been done before in animation. After making a deal with the then-top sound distributor, Pat Powers, to provide the necessary sound equipment, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was released to instant success. Not only would Ub’s personality animation improve since Mickey had more personality than Oswald, but it would successfully launch Mickey’s career as an American icon.

 

However, as time went on and Mickey’s popularity grew by the end of the 1920s, tensions started to rise between Ub and Walt. Part of it was because of all the attention and credit Walt was receiving for co-creating Mickey even though Ub had a significant hand in the character’s creation. Another factor was because Walt started to get a little more controlling and even started to change Ub’s timing in his animation. Then, in 1930, Pat Powers would make a deal with Ub that he couldn’t resist. Since Powers thought Ub was the key to Disney’s success, he lured Ub away to start his own studio where he will receive a lot of credit for the work. Ub accepted the deal.

 

Opening the Iwerks Studio in 1930, the studio’s first creation was a frog character named Flip the Frog. What’s interesting is that the debut Flip the Frog cartoon, Fiddlesticks, was the first all sound cartoon released in color, albeit two-strip Technicolor. The initial distributor of the series was MGM since it was the time the studio entered the animated cartoon field to compete with Disney. As with other cartoon characters at the time, Flip bore an uncanny resemblance to Mickey, especially after Flip was redesigned to be less frog-like. Then in 1933, the studio started a new series called Willie Whopper, which was about the absurd stories told by a child. While still masterly animated, as far as quality was concerned, the cartoons were considered “mediocre” and the characters were rather “forgettable”.

 

Soon, the studio would develop the ComiColor series, which was one of several clones of Walt Disney’s successful Silly Symphony series in the 1930s. As the Disney series did, the ComiColor series focused on one-shot characters and retelling of classic fairy tales such as The Steadfast Tin Soldier. When the series was developed, the MGM contract expired and MGM decided to instead distribute the cartoons by Harman-Ising. Therefore, the Iwerks Studio’s cartoons were distributed independently. A reason MGM didn’t want to distribute the ComiColor series was the cartoons were very weird and not as appealing as the Disney cartoons. However, there was an important aspect in the series that would be an innovation. One of the early draw backs of animation in the early years was the backgrounds lacked a feeling of depth since it was painted on one plane. The Flieshers initially solved the problem with their process of building a tabletop model of the background and shooting the animation cels in front of it. But what Ub would do is put the background painting on different levels that would move at different speeds, and the far part would be a little out of focus. This would soon be refined at Disney and led to the invention of the Multiplane Camera, first used in the 1937 Silly Symphony short, The Old Mill.

As for the Iwerks Studio, the studio’s work never caught on, and the studio closed its doors in 1936. To sustain himself, Ub took contract work at Leon Schlesinger Productions and Screen Gems for a few shorts because he needed the work. But, in 1940, Ub would return to Disney. But he decided to stop animating and focus on his true passion; inventing. This would include inventing a then better technique of mixing live action and animation for The Three Caballeros (1945). During the planning of Disneyland, Ub would have a hand in creating the different attractions. For Mary Poppins (1964), Ub would create the Sodium Vaper process, would also aid in special effects shots such as the smoke staircase scene in the movie and the scene that combined animation with live action. Plus, Ub would invent a new traveling matte system for the film that was used in the Feed the Birds scene. These innovations would help Ub win the Academy Award for Best Special Effects. A contribution he made outside of Disney was the bird effects in Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds (1963), which was nominated for an Academy Award. In the field of animation, Ub would invent the Xerox process which printed pencil animation to cels without manually tracing them as before. The first feature to fully use the process was One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and the process would be continued up until The Little Mermaid (1989).

 

Ub Iwerks would continue to work at Disney until his death in 1971 of a heat attack. His eldest son, Don, would become a camera technician for Disney and would later co-found the Iwerks Enterprise, which became a lead developer in film special effects and virtual reality. Don’s daughter, Leslie, would become a successful documentarian and would be nominated for an Academy Award for Recycled Life. And in 1998, she would make an excellent documentary about her grandfather. In that, the Iwerks family will continue to make important contributions to the entertainment industry. And with all the new sophistication in animation and film effects, we should never forget the work of the one who first drew Mickey Mouse and his remarkable work.