Ub Iwerks
Ub Iwerks, was an American animator, cartoonist, film director, film producer, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician. He was known for his early work with Walt Disney, especially for having worked on the creation of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, among other characters.
Iwerks and Disney met in 1919 while working at an art studio in Kansas City. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, they ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
One of Iwerks's most long-lasting contributions to animation was a refined version of a sketch drawn by Disney that would later go on to become Mickey Mouse. Iwerks was responsible for much of the animation for the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House, before a falling out with Disney led to Iwerks's resignation from the studio in January 1930.
Following his separation with Disney, Iwerks, operating under Animated Pictures Inc., created the characters Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper series as part of a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the new studio failed to rival its competitors. An independent series of Cinecolor ComiColor Cartoons were also not successful in the long term. Iwerks later directed two Looney Tunes cartoon shorts for Leon Schlesinger Productions and over a dozen Color Rhapsody cartoons for Screen Gems from his studio as contract work before joining Disney again in 1940.
As head of Disney's Special Processes and Camera department, Iwerks develops visual effects processes on productions such as Song of the South, Mary Poppins, and even Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. He also adapted the xerography process to be able to photocopy animation pencil drawings onto animation cels and contributed technical solutions to Disney's WED Enterprises group for Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and 1964 World's Fair attractions.
Iwerks had two children, Donald Warren Iwerks and David Lee Iwerks, with his wife Mildred Sarah Henderson. Iwerks died of a heart attack in Burbank, California, in 1971 at age 70. Iwerks was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1989. His likeness has been featured in his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks's 1999 documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story as well as the 2014 feature film Walt Before Mickey, in which he is portrayed by Armando Gutierrez. Iwerks received three nominations at the Academy Awards, for which he won two. He also posthumously received the Winsor McCay Award at the 1978 Annie Awards and the Hall of Fame award at the 2017 Visual Effects Society Awards. Iwerks is considered one of the greatest animators of all time.
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 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. 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 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 superimposed into an animated cartoon world. The shorts, produced for Margaret Winkler of M.J. Winkler Productions, proved popular enough to remain in production through 1926.
Oswald and Mickey (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 provide a cartoon series for release through Universal Pictures. Disney asked Iwerks to design 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 Oswalds from Charles Mintz, who reejected the request and then informed the stunned Disney that he had secretly hired away most of Disney's animators to make Oswalds directly for Winkler Pictures 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, Hugh 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 an market for his Powers Cinephone sound-on-film system. Credited as "A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks," Steamboat Willie was released in November 1928 and made Mickey Mouse an immediate sensation.
Several of the other early Disney sound cartoons were animated almost entirely by Iwerks. These included Plane Crazy, ''Steamboat Willie, The Haunted House, and the inaugural Silly Symphony short, The Skeleton Dance''. As both adapted and original music became more integral to the Disney cartoons, Carl W. Stalling, an acquaintance of Iwerks and Disney from Kansas City, was hired as music director.
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. At a party, a child requested that Disney 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?" An enraged Iwerks snapped "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 started 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 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, and his final Disney film as a director was the Silly Symphony ''Autumn. He also penciled the first strips of the Mickey Mouse'' comic strip.
Iwerks Studio (Animated Pictures Corp./Cartoon Films Ltd.)
''Flip the Frog'', ''Willie Whopper'', and ''ComicColor Cartoons''
Ub Iwerks' studio, Animated Pictures Corp., opened in 1930. Financial backers led by Pat Powers suspected 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 Disney veterans such as 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.Despite a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to distribute his cartoons, and the introduction of new characters Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, the Iwerks Studio was never a major commercial success and failed to rival either Disney or Fleischer Studios. Newly hired animator Fred Kopietz recommended that Iwerks employ a friend from Chouinard Art School, Chuck Jones, who was hired and put to work as a cel washer. Iwerks also lured Fleischer animators such as Grim Natwick, Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster, and Rudy Zamora from New York to Los Angeles to work for his studio.
The Flip the Frog cartoons, which lasted from 1930 to 1933, became Iwerks's most famous work outside of animating Mickey Mouse. Fiddlesticks, the first Flip short, was also the first individual sound cartoon short released in color
Once the Flip series fell out of popularity by 1933, it was replaced by the Willie Whopper cartoons, which failed to catch on. MGM ended its contract with Iwerks in 1934 and instead contracted with Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising's Harman-Ising Productions to produce a new color series of Happy Harmonies cartoons. The Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper cartoons were later distributed on the home-movie market in 8 mm and 16 mm prints by Official Films in the 1940s.
From 1933 to 1936, Iwerks produced a series of shorts using the two-strip Cinecolor process under the title ComiColor Cartoons. These shorts were released by Pat Powers through Celebrity Pictures. The ComiColor series mostly focused on fairy tales with no continuing character or star. Iwerks also experimented with stop-motion animation in combination with the multiplane camera, and made a short called The Toy Parade, which was never released in public.
The Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper cartoons were later distributed on the home-movie market in 8 mm and 16 mm prints by Official Films in the 1940s. The ComiColor cartoons received home-movie distribution through Castle Films and later Blackhawk Films.
In 1936, Pat Powers began working out a contract for a new series of cartoons based on the Reg'lar Fellers comic strip about a group of neighborhood kids. Powers wanted Iwerks to either move his studio to New York or allow Powers to set up a satellite studio in New York for the series; when Iwerks declined, Powers and Iwerks parted company and the Celebrity Productions backers withdrew their financial support from Animated Pictures. Only one Reg'lar Fellers cartoon, the ComiColor short Happy Days, was completed and released.
Contract work and ''Gran'Pop Monkey''
The Iwerks studio continued on by doing advertising films and contract work for other animation studios. In early 1937, Leon Schlesinger Productions contracted Iwerks to produce four Looney Tunes shorts starring Porky Pig and Gabby Goat. Iwerks began the project with his own crew working from Schlesinger staff storyboards, but when production fell behind, Schlesinger assigned Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, and Robert Cannon to report to the Beverly Hills Animated Pictures offices and help bolster the Iwerks staff.While Iwerks completed direction on the first two shorts, Porky and Gabby and Porky's Super Service, he quit the project during production of the third, Porky's Badtime Story. He had reportedly grown frustrated with the Porky Pig character, and stopped reporting to work at his studio. Clampett, who'd resented both the Iwerks assignment and not being able to direct, took over direction of the short himself. Only one more cartoon, Get Rich Quick Porky, was made by Clampett, with assistance from Jones, at Iwerks before he and his co-workers were returned to the main Schlesinger lot and Clampett was given his own unit..
Iwerks also did contract work for Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems cartoon division. Between 1936 and 1940, fifteen of the Screen Gems Color Rhapsody were produced and directed by Iwerks with his facilities and staff.
In 1937, Iwerks worked out an arrangement with British producer and financier Lawson Harris to reorganize his animation studio. Now known as Cartoon Films Limited, Iwerks was named vice-president and continued his contract work for Screen Gems while also attempting to launch one final self-produced series, Gran'pop Monkey. Based upon the work of British cartoonist Lawson Wood, three Gran'Pop Monkey cartoons were made in 1938. Intended for release through Educational Pictures, the films were instead released through Monogram Pictures after Educational experience financial problems of its own.
By 1939, Iwerks had ceded most of the creative supervision and directorial duties to Paul Fennell, and was supplementing his income by teaching animation at an area vocational school. The following year, Iwerks was offered an opportunity to return to Disney and resigned From Cartoon Films on September 9, 1940, and Harris and Fennell continued production at Cartoon Films Ltd. on their own through 1943.
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 in 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 were used at Disney on films such Song of the South, So Dear to My Heart, and The Parent Trap. 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, 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 before being used for most of the animation for One Hundred and One Dalmatians. 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 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.
While developing the sodium screen process for Poppins, Iwerks was tapped by Alfred Hitchcock to supervise the special effects for his 1963 film The Birds. Many of the visual effects shots for The Birds were devised and filmed by Iwerks at the Disney studio, and Iwerks was nominated for the 1964 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. For his work on Mary Poppins, Iwerks and his team were awarded a second Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1965.
Personal life and death
Iwerks had two children with his wife, Mildred : Donald and David. Donald went on to work for the Walt Disney company and to found Iwerks Entertainment. His granddaughter is documentary film producer Leslie Iwerks. David Iwerks became a portrait photographer.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 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.
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 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
1929
1935
All Comicolor shorts| Title | Release date | Notes |
| Little Black Sambo | February 6 | No longer shown on American television due to offensive black stereotypes |
| Brementown Musicians | March 6 | |
| Old Mother Hubbard | April 3 | |
| Mary's Little Lamb | May 1 | |
| Summertime | June 15 | |
| Sinbad the Sailor | July 30 | |
| The Three Bears | August 30 | |
| Balloonland | September 30 | This is known as both Balloonland and The Pincushion Man |
| Simple Simon | November 15 | |
| Humpty Dumpty | December 30 |
1936
All Comicolor shorts| Title | Release date | Notes |
| Ali Baba | January 30 | |
| Tom Thumb | March 30 | |
| Dick Whittington's Cat | May 30 | |
| Little Boy Blue | July 30 | This cartoon is variously known both as Little Boy Blue and The Big Bad Wolf. |
| Happy Days | September 30 | Last of the Comicolor cartoons, based on the comic strip Reg'lar Fellers. The last cartoon made prior to reorganizing the studio. |
1936-1940
- Contract work to Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures – 16 cartoons
- 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.
| Title | Release date | Notes |
| Two Lazy Crows | November 26, 1936 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon; First Color Rhapsody directed by Iwerks |
| Skeleton Frolic | January 29, 1937 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon; remake of Iwerk's earlier The Skeleton Dance |
| Merry Mannequins | March 19, 1937 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Porky and Gabby | May 15, 1937 | A Looney Tunes cartoon; First Looney Tune by Iwerks and debut of Gabby Goat |
| The Foxy Pup | May 21, 1937 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Porky's Super Service | July 3, 1937 | A Looney Tunes cartoon; Last Looney Tune by Iwerks |
| The Horse on the Merry-Go-Round | February 17, 1938 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Snow Time | April 14, 1938 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| The Frog Pond | August 12, 1938 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Midnight Frolics | November 24, 1938 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| The Gorilla Hunt | February 24, 1939 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Nell’s Yells | June 30, 1939 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Crop Chasers | September 22, 1939 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Blackboard Revue | March 15, 1940 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| The Egg Hunt | May 31, 1940 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| Ye Olde Swap Shoppe | June 28, 1940 | A Color Rhapsody cartoon |
| A Busy Day | July 22, 1940 | A Gran’ Pop Monkey cartoon |
| Wise Owl | December 5, 1940 | A Color Rhpsody; Last Color Rhapsody directed by Iwerks, Last cartoon Iwerks directed before returning to Disney |
| Beauty Shoppe | January 19, 1941 | A Gran’ Pop Monkey cartoon |
| Baby Checkers | February 2, 1941 | A Gran’ Pop Monkey cartoon |
| The Carpenters | March 14, 1941 | A Color Rhapsody; Directed by Paul Fennell, Iwerks was not involved in the creation of this cartoon but it was made as part of his contract with Screen Gems |