I once saw an interview that both broke my heart and inspired me all at the same time.
In 1984, Ken Anderson did an interview for the Disney Channel as part of a series called the Disney Family Album, reflecting back on his time at Disney. He had a prolific career with Disney, from an art director designing Snow White’s cottage in the 1930s to developing Fantasyland for Disneyland. Walt Disney called Ken his “Jack of All Trades,” and he truly was a Renaissance man, able to do almost anything he was tasked to and do it well. And he did.
Well, except that one time he didn’t, and Walt was horribly disappointed.
You see, in the late 1950s, Ken saw a problem that had plagued animators for decades and decided to do something about it. In the animation process, the animator’s sketches were painstakingly traced onto clear sheets of celluloid (called “cels”) by the women in the Ink and Paint department. With every hand tracing, though, the sketches strayed further from their intended original, fundamentally altering the way the drawings felt. As Ken put it, “Drawing has life because it’s drawn out of your mind. When someone traces it, it becomes dead.” Marc Davis also lamented this unfortunate part of the production process and said many times that his characters lost their charm and charisma when translated onto cels.
So one day, Ken (and Ub Iwerks – another legendary Disney animator) decided to do something about it.
The Xerox process was new technology at the time, but the idea of being able to directly copy animator’s lines onto cels was revolutionary in his mind. No longer would any nuance or gesture be lost in translation; instead, the expression of the animator and their artistry would be on full display, unadulterated.
It was brilliant.
But since the technology was new, they decided to test it first for the Maleficent dragon in Sleeping Beauty. Though the scenes still went to the ink and paint department for finishing, the Xerox process experiment was seen as successful as it saved a tremendous amount of time. They found this technique also helpful for quickly replicating crowds of people in the film rather than hand-drawing hundreds of them.
Sure, it was a little rough around the edges, but it worked. It made everything faster, more cost-efficient, and maintained the integrity of the original animator’s lines.
What more could you want?
Ken was elated. As they moved forward with the development of a new picture based on Dodie Smith’s 1957 novel The One Hundred and One Dalmatians, he knew just what to do: finally make a Disney movie true to the animator’s vision. Using these new techniques, they could accomplish that goal at a fraction of the cost of the disastrously expensive $6 million Sleeping Beauty, the most costly picture that they had made up until that point. The film had, unfortunately, fallen quite short of their box office expectations, and nobody wanted to repeat that failure.
The answer to all their problems was obvious to Ken: make the whole picture using Xerox to copy animators’ sketches directly onto cels. Not only would it save time and money, but it would finally give the animators what they’d always longed for. That their work would be seen, fully, unadulterated by inkers or clean-up artists choosing which line to keep and which to toss.
And if you see 101 Dalmatians, there’s no doubt that the “rough” Xerox process is on full display. While one could argue it adds to the charm of the film, a unique artistic style, that was a full departure from every other Disney animated feature up until this point. Walt Disney had spent decades and millions of dollars perfecting the animation process to make it feel real, to make it believable, and to hide any hint that it was hand drawn or painted. Walt wanted to suspend reality and create a fully believable world that people wouldn’t think of as just a bunch of “drawings.”
I think some of this came from Walt’s desire to be accepted in the film community. Many people dismissed his studio early in his career as not a serious contender for art and film because they only made cartoons. It was one of the reasons he wanted to make a full-length animated feature, in many regards just to prove that he could, and make the characters so heartfelt and believable that they would move people the same as any live-action could.
Eventually, Walt did get into the live-action film business, wanting to feel on an even playing field with his competitors (likely aided by the fact that his post-war profits were also stuck in Europe). Walt saw live-action as a new challenge, a new frontier.
But animation was still where he’d gotten his start, and though he got too distracted by the building of Disneyland to pay as much attention to it, he still wanted his films to look a certain way, to be artfully produced. Sleeping Beauty, for what it lacked in story, was intended to be a masterpiece. As Walt said of the animated feature, “What we want out of this is a moving illustration. I don’t care how long it takes.”
And Sleeping Beauty was that, at least. A visual feast for the eyes, highly detailed and stunning in its perfection and precision. Though it failed to tug at the heartstrings the way many other Disney features had in the past (and lost the studio $900,000 after its initial release), it was every inch the artistic masterpiece Walt had hoped for, calling it the most beautiful film he’d ever made.
And directly following the Sleeping Beauty work of art?
Well, that’s when we got the 101 Dalmatians mess. Or, at least that’s how Walt saw it.
Ken thought he had made a revolutionary discovery in using Xerox technology. They were progressing toward making Disney movies cheaper and more efficient to produce, while simultaneously allowing the animators something they’d always wished for, that their art would make it to the big screen unadulterated by another’s touch.
It was the perfect solution.
But Walt didn’t think so.
You could see all the pencil lines that Walt had spent years trying to erase. The style was chaotic and abstract, not precise and pretty.
He told Ken, “No more of that 101 Dalmatian stuff” and publicly stated that Ken would no longer be an art director on his films because of what he saw as a massive failure.
Walt didn’t talk to Ken for a solid year after that.
When you watch interviews with Ken Anderson, you can see the depths of the pain of that era in his eyes. That he let down someone whom he’d wanted to impress. Someone he wanted to make proud with his innovation, and instead, he’d ruined everything.
It didn’t matter that people loved the movie, or that it became a classic in the end. None of that mattered because Ken had failed Walt.
The year after the animator’s messy lines were shown to the world, Ken had a stroke. And then another.
1962 found him paralyzed, unable to control his body the way he used to. He couldn’t pick up a spoon to feed himself let alone a pencil to sketch. For a time, Ken even lost his sight.
Recovery was slow. While his sight returned and small gains in healing were made, it was excruciatingly snail-paced and frustrating. To keep his hopes up, his wife Polly took him on outings to a local park named Descanso Gardens, one they’d always frequented near where they lived.
And it was there he found the trees.
Above his head, they gnarled and spiraled, branches reaching toward the endless sky. Some grew at awkward angles or leaned this way or that. They weren’t perfect, but they continued to grow, year after year. Ken later said, “If the oak trees could contort themselves into lovely shapes, if they could endure, if they were so strong to hold themselves in impossible angles” then maybe he could, too.
The trees inspired him to take three shaky, unsure steps. Then he added a few more. And over time, he regained his ability to walk, to move, to thrive.
Sometimes our mistakes can halt our forward progress. All we can see is our failure. How badly we messed up, that there is no way to come back from it. Maybe our failure causes us to lose people we love. The respect of people we cared about. Our sense of safety or self-confidence. Our health and well-being. Maybe we lose our tenacity, our determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other, too afraid we’ll make another misstep.
We become Ken in his post-Dalmatian era, immobilized by our failure, staring up at the trees.
I imagine Ken could have given up easily then. Called it a day, said he’d already accomplished what he needed to, and it was okay to give up and let the earth reclaim him. But he didn’t. He looked around and found that something else had been broken, stressed, and challenged, and it persevered. It endured year after year, and so he could too.
Ken called that moment his “redirection of life.”
Your failure, that mistake you made, is not the end of you.
It’s a redirection of your life.
It’s a chance to try again, to take some shaky first steps in a new direction, to regain what was lost and push beyond it. It’s a chance to become a new person with scars that tell a better story than any tattoo ever could.
And, eventually, you get to be the trees for someone else, proof that you endured.
Survived.
Didn’t give up, even when all felt lost.
The last time Ken saw Walt before he passed, Ken said, “Gee, it’s sure good to see you again, Walt.” Walt was quiet for a moment, then responded, “It’s sure good to be back, Ken.” Ken said he didn’t know how he knew it, but that was the moment he knew Walt had forgiven him for his 101 Dalmatians failure.
Maybe Walt forgave him. Maybe he let bygones be bygones after years had passed and he was at death’s door.
Or maybe Ken had finally forgiven himself.
Because that’s what gives you permission to put that self-berating story you’ve been reading for much too long back on the shelf; choosing to forgive yourself and let it go.
Too often we are still standing in our old failure long past the time when everyone else has forgotten it ever occurred. We feel like that’s what we deserve, to be reminded of how we let someone down or made the wrong choice. We stay there, determined we aren’t worthy of standing anywhere else. We become caged in by our choices, a prison we’ve built of our own pain, the bars made of memories and mistakes.
But the key to your release isn’t dangling in the mouth of some mangy prison dog just out of reach; it’s in your own hand.
You just have to decide that you deserve better than living out the rest of your days trapped behind the bars of your regret and shame.
Ken eventually recovered from his paralysis, moving on to create many beloved classics like Robin Hood, The Aristocats, The Jungle Book, and Pete’s Dragon, among many others. Despite Walt’s words, Ken did become an art director once again. And when it came time to renovate Fantasyland in Disneyland in the 1980s, he was asked to contribute his expertise, consulting on the creative direction for how to make Walt’s favorite land in his beloved park anew. His artistic eye was trusted in a way I’m sure he thought it never would be again after Walt’s disdain of his Dalmatians.
Ken’s redirection made him stronger. He allowed himself to be transformed by his failure, and over time reclaimed his self-confidence, his self-worth.
You can reclaim yours, too.
You just have to look at that key, waiting for you in your hand, and decide to use it.
(And you do deserve its freedom. I promise.)
I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from my new book A Glimmer of Pixie Dust: Finding Our Hope in the Disney Story. If you’d like some more stories of Disney history and inspiration, you can find this book (and all of my others) on Amazon!
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