Ub Iwerks

Early life

Iwerks was born Ubbe Ert Iwwerks in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Ert Ubbén Iwwerks, was born in the village of Uttum in East Frisia (northwest Germany, today part of the municipality of Krummhörn) and immigrated to the United States in 1869 around the age of 14. The elder Iwwerks, who worked as a barber, had abandoned several previous wives and children. When Ub Iwerks was a teenager, his father abandoned him as well, forcing the boy to drop out of school and work to support his mother. Iwerks despised his father and never spoke of or saw him again; upon learning that he had died, he reportedly said, "Throw him in a ditch." Years later, when Iwerks's son Don asked about his grandfather, Ub stopped Don, telling him "We don't talk about that."

Ub Iwerks attended Ashland Grammar School, graduating in 1914. Ub's full name, Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, can be seen on early Alice Comedies that he signed. After moving to Hollywood in 1924, he began simplifying his name to "Ub Iwerks", sometimes written as "U.B. Iwerks", and legally changed his name to "Ub Iwerks" in 1926.

Career

Early work with Walt Disney (1919–1926)

Iwerks spent most of his career working with or for Walt Disney. The two met in 1919 while working for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City, and eventually started their own commercial art business together. Disney and Iwerks then found work as illustrators for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company (which was later named The Kansas City Film Ad Company). While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Disney decided to take up work in animation, and Iwerks soon joined him.

At Kansas City Film Ad, Iwerks displayed what became a life-long devotion to mechanics and invention. To make the process of photographing the animation drawings more efficient, Iwerks attached a motor drive to the animation camera with a switch that resembled a telegraph key. This allowed the camera to be operated by a single seated person who could both photograph the drawings and switch out and adjust the drawings - without requiring a second person to stand and work the camera.

In 1922, when Disney began his Laugh-O-Gram cartoon series, Iwerks joined him as chief animator. The studio went bankrupt, however, and in 1923 Iwerks followed Disney's move to Los Angeles to work with Walt and his brother Roy on a new series of cartoons known as the Alice Comedies. The Alice shorts featured a live-action little girl (portrayed by Virginia Davis and later Dawn O'Day (Anne Shirley), Margie Gay, and Lois Hardwick) superimposed into an animated cartoon world. The shorts, produced for Margaret J. Winkler of M.J. Winkler Productions (later Winkler Pictures), proved popular enough to remain in production through 1926.

Oswald and Mickey Mouse (1927–1929)

After the end of the Alice series, Disney asked Iwerks to design a new character who would star in all-animated - and lower-budgeted - cartoon shorts. Winkler Pictures had been taken over in 1924 by Margaret Winkler's husband, Charles Mintz, who had contracted to produce a cartoon series for release through Universal Pictures. At Disney's request, Iwerks designed the character who became Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first Oswald cartoon to be completed was Poor Papa animated entirely by Iwerks and featuring a heavyset and middle-aged version of Oswald. Universal, who would own full rights to the prospective character, rejected Poor Papa and Mintz and Disney had Iwerks design a younger, thinner version of the character. Trolley Troubles, featuring the redesigned Oswald, became the first cartoon in the series to be released, in September 1927.

In February 1928, Walt Disney requested a budget increase for the Oswald cartoons from Charles Mintz, who rejected the request and then informed the stunned Disney that he had secretly hired away most of Disney's animators to make Oswald cartoons in-house instead. These animators included Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, and Friz Freleng, all of whom had also followed Iwerks and Disney from Kansas City to Los Angeles. Only Iwerks and a small handful of other holdouts - Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson, Johnny Cannon - had remained loyal to Disney and refused to sign with Mintz. A stunned and angry Walt Disney vowed to never again work with a character he did not own.

Disney asked Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas - in secret, as the defecting animators would not leave for the new Winkler studio until May 1928. Iwerks tried sketches of frogs, dogs, and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. Mice characters had turned up periodically in the Alice and Oswald shorts; Harman, one the animators who had just defected to Mintz, had drawn some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney back in 1925. With additional inspiration from the work of Life magazine cartoonist Clifton Meek, who'd drawn mice characters since the 1910s, Iwerks and Disney worked out a series of sketches that evolved into the character that would be named Mickey Mouse. Iwerks drew the final designs the character, who resembled Oswald with round mouse ears instead of rabbit ears, and animated the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Plane Crazy, by himself - mostly in secret behind a locked office door until Harman and the other animators left for Winkler.

As with Oswald, Plane Crazy was not the first Mickey short to be released, as neither it nor the follow-up, The Galloping Gaucho, were picked up by a distributor. With the arrival of sound films in the marketplace, Disney and Iwerks designed the third Mickey cartoon, Steamboat Willie, to be synchronized with music and sound effects. Both the needed sound equipment and film distribution were provided by Pat Powers, an veteran film impresario looking for a market for his Powers Cinephone sound-on-film system (actually an unlicensed clone of Lee DeForest's Phonofilm system). Credited as "A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks," Steamboat Willie was released in November 1928 and made Mickey Mouse an immediate sensation.

Break from Disney (1929–1930)

Across 1929, Iwerks became increasingly resentful of Disney's leadership and felt his contributions to the success of Mickey Mouse were under-appreciated, despite being the sole animator to receive on-screen credit. On one occasion, a child asked Disney to draw Mickey Mouse on a napkin, and Disney handed the pen to Iwerks, saying, "Why don't you draw Mickey and I'll sign it?" Iwerks retorted, "Draw your own Mickey!" and stormed off. When Charles Giegerich, an associate of Pat Powers, surreptitiously approached Iwerks in September 1929 with an offer to start his own studio, Iwerks eventually accepted. At the time Iwerks signed with Powers in January 1930, Powers was still distributing the Mickey Mouse cartoons, and had arranged distribution of the Silly Symphonies through Columbia Pictures. However, his dealings with the Disney brothers had become increasingly tense and he decided to deal directly with Iwerks instead.

Iwerks waited until January 21, 1930 - after Walt Disney had gone to New York to meet with Powers over financial disputes - to both tender his resignation to Roy Disney instead, and to inform him of his new side deal with Powers. The Iwerks deal and resignation triggered a business crisis that resulted in several months of acrimonious negotiations and business disputes. Upon learning that Iwerks was leaving, music director Carl Stalling resigned as well, later joining Iwerks at his new studio.

The situation was eventually settled by May 1930, with Columbia paying Powers to assume distribution of the Mickey Mouse shorts and Powers negotiating a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for Iwerks' new studio. Roy Disney bought back Iwerks' 20% interest in Walt Disney Productions as part of his exit from the company. The last Mickey Mouse cartoon Iwerks directed and animated on was Wild Waves (1929), and his final Disney film as a director was the Silly Symphony Autumn (1930). He also penciled the first strips of the Mickey Mouse comic strip.

Ub Iwerks' studio, Animated Pictures Corp., opened in 1930. Investors led by Pat Powers eagerly provided support under the impression that Iwerks was responsible for much of Disney's early success. However, while animation for a time suffered at Disney from Iwerks's departure, it soon rebounded as his former co-workers Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson, and New York imports Norm Ferguson and Burt Gillett were joined by new recruits such as Art Babbitt and Fred Moore.

Visual effects supervision at Disney (1940–1964)

Ben Sharpsteen, who had worked under Iwerks when he first came to the Disney studio in 1929, was by 1940 general manager of the Disney studio. He hired Iwerks back to Disney in August 1940 as an animation checker after hearing of Iwerks' financial struggles. Iwerks reconciled with Walt Disney over lunch, and after learning Iwerks was more interested in working on mechanical processes than working directly on animation, Disney assigned Iwerks to work on the development of a new visual effects optical camera.

In December 1945, Iwerks became the head of the Special Processes and Camera department at Disney. His refined optical camera processes for combining two pieces of Technicolor film (often to combine live-action footage with animation, but also to composite pieces of live-action film as well) were used at Disney on films such Song of the South (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1949), and The Parent Trap (1961). Iwerks and his team at Disney would continue to refine these processes for decades, and Iwerks was given a 1960 Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his improved optical printer and matte process.

Iwerks and his team also spent years adapting the xerographic process for cel animation, in order to directly photocopy animators' pencil drawings to animation cels, speeding up the animation process by minimizing the need to trace each drawing from paper to celluloid by hand via the "inking" stage. First used in primitive form for Fantasia (1940), Iwerks developed a variety of patents for applying xerography for use in animation. The matured animation xerography process was first used in the climax of Sleeping Beauty (1959) before being used for most of the animation for One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Xerography quickly became a standard procedure for the animation industry due to its cost-savings. He also did work for WED Enterprises, now Walt Disney Imagineering, helping to develop many Disney theme park attractions during the 1960s.

Iwerks's last major work for a Disney film was the further improvements of his visual effects processes for Mary Poppins. This included the purchase and re-development of the sodium vapor screen filming process (informally referred to as "yellowscreen," despite being a different process from chroma key) to achieve improved visual effects compositing quality in scenes from Dick Van Dyke's "Jolly Holiday" dance with cartoon penguins to the "Feed the Birds" sequence.

Personal life and death

Iwerks married Mildred Henderson about 1926. They had two sons, Donald and David. The former went on to work for the Walt Disney company and to found Iwerks Entertainment, while the latter became a portrait photographer. His granddaughter is documentary film producer Leslie Iwerks.

Iwerks died on July 7, 1971 from a heart attack in Burbank, California, aged 70, and his ashes are interred in a niche in the Columbarium of Remembrance at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills Cemetery. The last project he worked on was the Hall of Presidents.

Influence and tributes

The Ub Iwerks Award for Technical Achievement at the Annie Awards, the annual awards ceremony for the American animation industry, is named in his honor.

A rare self-portrait of Iwerks was found in a garbage bin at an animation studio in Burbank. The portrait was saved and is now part of the Animation Archives in Burbank, California.

After World War II, much of Iwerks's early animation style was imitated by legendary manga artists Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori.

In 1989, Iwerks was named a Disney Legend in both the Animation and Imagineering categories.

In the 1996 The Simpsons episode "The Day the Violence Died", a relationship similar to Iwerks's early relationship with Walt Disney is used as the main plot.

A documentary film, The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story, was released in 1999, followed by a book written by Iwerks's granddaughter Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy in 2001. The documentary, created by Leslie Iwerks, was released as part of The Walt Disney Treasures, Wave VII series (disc two of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit collection).

A feature film released in 2014, Walt Before Mickey, showed how Ub Iwerks, portrayed by Armando Gutierrez, and Walt Disney, portrayed by Thomas Ian Nicholas, co-created Mickey Mouse.

The sixth episode from the second season of Drunk History ("Hollywood") tells about Ub's work relationship with Disney, with stress on the creation of Mickey Mouse. Iwerks was portrayed in the episode by Tony Hale.

Filmography

1935

All Comicolor shorts

1936

All Comicolor shorts

1936-1940

Contract work to Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures – 16 cartoons (Iwerks was only personally involved with 15 of the Color Rhapsody series, the last cartoon in the deal was completed by Paul Fennell after Iwerks had left his own studio)

Contract work to Leon Schlesinger Productions – two cartoons

In 1938, Iwerks produced his last series, Gran' Pop Monkey, featuring the title character created by British illustrator Lawson Wood. There were three cartoons produced: "A Busy Day", "Beauty Shoppe" and "Baby Checkers". All three were released theatrically by Monogram Pictures between 1940 and 1941.