The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Magic, the lost art history of the Walt Disney Studio The Courvoisier years, 1938-1946

This article is dedicated to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Italian historian and writer.

There is no glitter that plays with the souls of film fanatics like the art produced by the Walt Disney Studio. The films made by Disney hold an emotional spot in the hearts of their fans and this is not by accident. Their characters are drafted to connect to how we feel about ourselves and where we feel we fit within our own lives. The good-versus-evil plot lines that come out of Disney sell us the fantasy that people in power are punished when they try to hold other people back, and the way these narratives are designed to exploit our need to believe in these happy endings has created a cash machine for Disney that is almost unique in the realm of big box office animation.

But on the other side of Disney lies the history of the studio. Not just the history of its art — but the history of its corporate culture.

And there is no study of what happened to the production art made by Disney that isn’t intertwined with its corporate culture, and how the culture at Disney was affected by the Union Strike of 1941.

Before the strike, the studio cultivated top-tier talent and these artists were the tools Walt Disney used to rachet up the aesthetics of animation. Aesthetics Walt Disney lifted from the live-action cinema of the day. And from these live-action movies, Walt took emotive character performance, musical scoring, meaningful songs, and art direction and he imbued these qualities into the vaudeville-like animated aesthetic that was the norm in the 1920s.

But with success came money, and the artists who did the work for Walt Disney wanted to share in the profits they felt they helped create. This led to a rift between Walt Disney and the people who helped him achieve his goals. When the strike that followed ended, so did the creative arch the studio was on. In the strike’s aftermath, Disney lost a good deal of the innovators who set up his aesthetic. And to make matters worse, because of WWII, Disney also lost a significant amount of overseas revenue. Revenue that was paying for the excesses of Walt’s art for art’s sake way of doing business.

In the wake of these events, Disney animated features would take an artistic step backward in order to regain their footing, and in the post-1942 Bambi (David Hand, 1942) era, you see that a number of “package pictures” were made. Feature films like Saludos Amigos (Norm Ferguson, 1942), Make Mine Music (Jack Kinney et al, 1946), Melody Time (Clyde Geronomi et al, 1948), Fun and Fancy Free (Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts et al, 1947) and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Ben Sharpsteen, 1949) to name a few that included a number of shorter animated sequences.

These full-length films were not an effort to fill the screen with one larger than life children’s fairy tale like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) or Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen, 1940) or Bambi. Rather, these features were made up of shorter animated segments that were made using reduced budgets. These budget cuts caused the studio to simplify the aesthetics they were using pre-strike. And it is in this time period, like the “Silly Symphonies” in the 1930s, that these “package pictures” became a sort of unplanned testing ground to get this next version of the Disney aesthetic fully functioning.

But there was a problem.

The “package pictures” made between 1943-1949 failed to bring in the money that was needed to sustain the making art for art’s sake business model that put Disney on the map, and this is where Walt’s brother Roy O. Disney came into play. Under Roy O.’s influence, the storytelling and the performance animation innovated pre-strike were simplified and commercialized. The intention of their films went from making striking artistic statements and Disney became a machine that pumped out similar before-middle-and-end storylines that included character animation that was less about nuanced performance and instead used caricature rather broadly to make its point. Starting with Cinderella (Wilfred Jackson, 1950), which was released in 1950, their new string of less artistically ambitious Disney animated features contained only one narrative, and the profits generated by this new formula became something the studio could rely on. And this shift to dumbing things down into a formula so they could make money was not the only thing that manifested during this phase of the studio.

To the studio’s new assembly line, a corporate reward system of sorts was added. One that groomed the employees who remained after the strike and trained them — that if they did what they were told — (unlike the innovators who challenged the studio’s management), they would stay employed, and if they survived the power plays at the studio (from other artists and from management), they could aspire to become one of “The Nine Old Men.” Artists who to a great extent were largely copying the aesthetic created by the pre-strike artists and artists who thanks to the efforts of Disney publicity still occupy a wildly disproportionate space of importance in the minds of Disney fans.

Why do I bring this up?

Because the idea of doing what you’re told and using people who have been groomed to work in this sort of system factor into what happened to the Art History of Walt Disney Production Art. So, let’s start by explaining what “Production Art” is and why “Production Art” is valuable.

If you look at any Animation Art auction catalogue, you will find that the artifacts that leave Disney are sold to the public by describing them as one thing: “Production Art.” The use of that specific adjective and that specific noun means one thing: the history of the artifact at the time when it was photographed at Disney and as you see it in a Walt Disney film or short. To the hearts and souls of Disney fans, when one of them buys a piece of “production art” it is because they want to own that particular moment in the film history. A moment they can freeze-frame when they watch the film and say to themselves “I own this.” With the Production Drawings and the Production Concept Art made for Disney films, it is not typical that you see a disconnect from what the artifact was during its role in production and how it looks today.

But you will see that severe alterations were made to Disney Production Cels and Production Background Paintings - the very images you see when you watch one of their films. And the reason for that is because Disney allowed people who were on hand, people they liked, people who were not trained to do the work they were taking on, to take on the task of altering the studio’s art history so the art could be sold to the fans of their films.

So how did this get started?

The answer is rather innocently: the studio went to someone who was working for them who had no knowledge about making decisions concerning the longevity of their materials. But she knew how to work within the culture of the studio. Due to this, it can be no surprise that Disney cel inker and painter Helen Nerbovig was left to have to pull from what she did know, and to discuss what she did know, I will allow her sister Buf E. Nerbovig and her husband Robert J. McIntosh (who were both Disney employees) to speak about Helen. To do this, allow me to pull from 17 pages of transcribed but unpublished interviews I did with Buf E. Nerbovig and Robert J. McIntosh in the summer of 1997.

Robert J. McIntosh:

“She [Helen] grew up in San Diego and Los Angeles and as a child, she was already interested in art. She won the Hollywood Bowl Easter poster contest. An original artwork Helen did. [It was] her impression of a cat; it is really in the art nouveau, art deco style of the twenties and early thirties. Again, that’s done with airbrush and stencils which she ended up using in the Disney setups. It is something I want to give her credit for in that [regard]. That she took cels and she united them to the elements that she was adding to them. They don’t appear that way in the film. She made them into a piece of artwork by using what was left around, using these different papers and the wood veneer but she united everything together with an airbrush glazing of shadowing on top of let’s say a cel of Dopey, [which] may have been trimmed into a circle an applied to a wood veneer.”

“Before Courvoisier I believe Helen made up special cel setups for either friends or business associates of Walt’s. The girls [the women Helen worked with in Ink and Paint at Disney were] all enthused over these setups and [they] urged her to show them to Walt. So she would take these things up to him. There was some lapse of time there between the first setups that Helen made and the time when Courvoisier began the distribution.”

Fig. 1 - Production Art from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Buf E. Nerbovig:

“At the end of Snow White they were getting the stuff ready for the morgue to hold scenes and backgrounds and everything (Fig. 1). And that’s when Helen put together a beautiful setup to give to Walt for his office.”

“We used to back and forth and take watches home [from Walt to our father]. Walt collected music boxes and he used to send those home because my Dad was also a watchmaker. Dad repaired these things. So we went back and forth to Walt’s office quite often and it wasn’t too unusual that Helen would make a beautiful setup and give it to Walt for his office.”

“Well, then [Guthrie] Courvoisier, who had a little gallery where he sold prints and stuff, he saw the setup in Walt’s office and said that he could certainly merchandise it and make some money. So he got that [a contract to distribute the art] and then they had Helen get a bunch of girls together and she had a little room [at Disney] which was called The Cel Setup.”

Robert J. McIntosh:

“The best cels were made using the original production backgrounds. You see, they [the cels and backgrounds] were all kept in the morgue stacked together. In other words, each scene would have a stack of cels, inked and painted animation cels with the production background. Helen made the first setup with the production background. Maybe Snow White and the Prince at the wishing well, or something like that. Well, you have maybe a few dozen very nice cels from the same scene but you’ve already used the production background. That’s how the stenciled [airbrushed] backgrounds came about.

Helen designed a simplified version of the background by cutting cels of the objects [friskets], you know [of] a tree, and maybe the wishing well, and [for] the sky, a cloud or two. In other words, she greatly simplified. Helen did this by cutting stencils [friskets]. Helen designed everything that went into these first cel setup[s]. She made the first prototype. When they needed more backgrounds, that’s where the twenty girls came in. Under Helen’s direction, they cut the cels [down around the character or they cut the sheets down], and [they] made replica backgrounds and assembled these cels using rubber cement.

[Another] one of the first ones [cel setups], one of the backgrounds for the dwarfs. Helen got actual thin wood veneer, shaved wood glued to board. And she would simply cut a stencil of the dwarf and then [she would] spray with black airbrush, [a] dark airbrush spray [to indicate] shadows on [the cel and on] the wood background and immediately it had dimension. The dwarfs seem to be casting a shadow on the wall.”

The wood veneer was available in shops that featured art papers. I remember way back there was a paper dealer on 7th Street near Art Center School. McManus and Morgan, I remember going there a few times at least and they had a wonderful selection of quality papers and these art papers. I think sometimes a paper would be done with wood blocks with one or more colors. The cel setups, she [Helen] continued doing them I believe through Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi.”

On Tuesday, February 21, 2017, the Walt Disney Museum published on their website an article by Tracie Timmer, Education Coordinator at The Walt Disney Family Museum. In it, the author states: “In addition, when Roy Disney priced out the cost of paying the artists and the supplies needed to prepare the art, he realized that this method was not particularly cost-effective. Roy decided that after the release of Pinocchio in early 1940, he would ask Courvoisier to take over the task of preparing the artwork for sale. This Guthrie did willingly, and hired art students in San Francisco to help them with the task.”

I talked with Buf E. Nerbovig about this very topic when I interviewed her and she had this to say:

Buf E. Nerbovig

“No! It didn’t stop then. It was into the 40s. They wouldn’t ship all that stuff out someplace else. And, [as] you know, the cels have to be handled so carefully. He wouldn’t have known what to do with them or how to. He [Guthrie Courvoisier ] only put his name on it as a distributor. I mean that’s actually all he should have done. No, it was all done in the studio, every bit. He never made any backgrounds.”

I also asked Buf E. Nerbovig about the lamination of the Disney cels which given what the Walt Disney Museum article states would have been done in San Francisco. And Buf E. told me “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.” That the art was laminated at Disney, not in San Francisco, and for the reason she stated above.

Because the lamination of Disney art happens after the release of the art from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I asked Buf E. Nerbovig what cel setups do you recall Helen working on?

Fig. 2 - This is the same 4-laminated cel sheet composite from Walt Disney’s 1941 feature film Dumbo. The image on the left was captured in 2003. The image on the right was captured in 2017. This laminated cel and background were kept in temperature and humidity controlled environment and in a housing made my me - and the lamination process continued to damage the opaqued painting layer because the lamination process did not allow the paint layer to perform as Emilio Bianchi designed the paint later to perform. Time and time again, this is where the way things are done at Disney is tied to the insecurities of the people in their corporate culture and how people who are told to do certain jobs may or may not have the ability to handle those tasks.

Buf E. Nerbovig:

Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Dumbo (Fig. 2). I know she worked on Cinderella too. It only could be done [at the studio] when they were getting stuff ready for the morgue, you know. Where they saved anything at all. It had to. You have no idea how tenderly they [the cels] were handled and how if any of the inked lines popped off, they had to be put back on. Had to be the right number [of Disney] ink and all that sort of thing. You know, it wouldn’t be anything anybody could do on his own unless they were given all that information and could read exposure sheets and that sort of thing.”

And Buf E. Nerbovig is right about this.

From my 36 years of direct experience, I can tell you the materials used to prepare the art and how the technical preparations that were done to the art do not change during the entire time Disney art was prepared so it could be sold through Courvoisier. The papers and boards are the same. The various tapes placed on the setups are the same. The backing boards are the same. The clear sheets used to cover the artwork often have Disney punch in that plastic and are identical plastics to Disney cel sheets. The clear sheets used to do the lamination are clear Disney cel sheets that often have Disney punch on the clear cel sheet. The only way you can get those clear cels with the unique Disney punch is from Disney. The so-called adhesive used at Disney from the beginning of when Helen started to prepare the art is also the same throughout all the Courvoisier releases, and it is not rubber cement (even if it was sold to them as that as Robert J. McIntosh states). If the art was prepared by art students in San Francisco as the Walt Disney Museum article states, they would have had to be using the same supplies and in the same way Helen and her team did.

I emailed the Walt Disney Museum asking for the author to send me the sources she used to draw her conclusions but did not hear back.

***To read the full version of this article, complete with additional artwork, please visit: https://www.foundin.la/animationartconservationcom.html***

**Article published: May 24, 2024**

Biography

Ron Barbagallo is the founder, principle executive and chief conservation technician at The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation. The Research Library at Animation Art Conservation is a conservation practice devoted to the ethical repair and scientific study of art made for the animated film. One of this country's leading authorities on the materials used to make animation art, Barbagallo has drafted the mission statement and the conservation policies for the care of one of the large studio collections of animation art.

His client list includes The Walt Disney Company, Warner Bros., Hanna-Barbera, Nickelodeon, UPA, Christie's East, Linda Jones Enterprises, museums, galleries, private collectors including art from the personal collection of Roy E. Disney and Walt Disney. He was in charge of the preservation of the animation artifacts that survived WTC Tower One on 9/11, the pastel style guide art created by Mary GrandPré for the first eight Harry Potter films, and the conservation analysis for the Christopher Nolan Batsuits for the Warner Bros. Studio. In 2015, using high resolution jpegs, Barbagallo created and premiered an animatic that restored Salvador Dalí’s original intent back to Dalí failed Disney film “Destino.”

His library holds over 30 years of Conservation Science and as well as thousands of examples of his experience in the Preservation of Walt Disney Production Cels and Backgrounds. His efforts have helped preserve some of the most prominent pieces of production art made by the Walt Disney Studio.