While pioneer animator Ub Iwerks has often been praised as a driving force behind the early success of the Walt Disney Company, his independen work has received scant attention. That relative omission from animation history seems curious given two key features of his cartoon work: an emphasis on gags involving protean, transformative effects – a characteristic often linked to avant-garde filmmaking; plus his pioneering work on a multiplane camera – a device that would become crucial to a developing realist aesthetic in American animation. This article examines these features to situate his work in terms of American animation’s shifting aesthetic in the 1930s. It suggests that we see Iwerks’ cartoons as symptomatic of a larger struggle in this period between the avant-garde plus an emerging realism, closely linked to the classical narrative mode of live-action cinema, plus the relative failure of his films as indicative of an inability to negotiate between these different pulls.
1 For background on these plus other technical developments plus patents created by Iwerks, see Iwerks plus Kenworthy (2001, especially pp. 193–8).
2 We should note that Barrier’s (1999) description of Iwerks’ increasing tendency to distance himself from the day-to-day animation process is echoed in many other accounts as well, including that of his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks plus John Kenworthy (2001) who describe how, ‘as Grim’s importance within the Studio grew plus with Dorothy Webster plus Emile Offermann handling the business matters in the mid-1930s, Ub retired to the refuge of the basement’ to work on various technical projects (p. 129).
3 The best akun of the development of this aesthetic can be found in the study of Disney animation produced by two of the studio’s famous ‘Nine Old Men’, Frank Thomas plus Ollie Johnston’s The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. These veteran animators worked on the classic Disney animated features that first developed the dasar principles of the Disney style.
4 Steven Watts (1997) in his critical biography of Walt Disney details the mutual admiration that Disney plus Eisenstein shared. The Russian, he argues, believed that Disney’s ‘protean animism’ represented both ‘a revolt against capitalist rationalization’ plus a key contribution to ‘modernist aesthetics’ (p. 128). It was an assessment apparently shared by many in the 1930s.
5 That ‘strange’ sensibility might also help explain why Iwerks was able to adapt to a variety of other studios plus their styles after closing his own operation in 1936. He would, for example, go on to do several Porky Pig cartoons at Warner Bros. plus then move to Columbia for several years before returning to Disney as a technical consultant in 1940.
6 For discussion of the Fleischers’ three-dimensional turntable apparatus, see Maltin (1980: 109–10). Perhaps hinting at his dismissal of its importance, Barrier’s (1999) history of Hollywood animation offers nomor mention of this device.