ABSTRACT
All his life, going all the way back to his school days in Kansas City when he came in second place in a Charlie Chaplin impersonation contest, Walt was attracted to acting and actors. After he gained fame through the
Disney Studio cartoons, he developed personal friendships with many Hollywood actors, including, notably, Charlie Chaplin himself. In fact, Mickey Mouse’s personality is partly based on Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Given his fascination with the actor’s art, it is not surprising that, when he wanted his cartoon characters to give stronger performances, his basic approach to acting was sound. As Shakespeare put it in Act 3, Scene 2 of Hamlet, “the actor should hold the mirror up to nature”; that is what Walt tried to do with Mickey and Minnie and all the rest of them. He recognized that humans relate to one another emotionally, and so he endowed his Silly Symphonies characters with feelings. This was a revolutionary advance for cartoons and famously came to be known among Disney animators as “the illusion of life.” But emotion, which can be defined as an automatic value response, is only part of the equation for acting. Emotion tends to lead humans to action, and every human action, as Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics, has a purpose. In acting theory, that purpose is called an objective. The correct paradigm for strong performance is “acting is doing,” not “acting is feeling,” which is more or less where Disney was headed in the early 1930s. Emotions are actually not actable at all. You cannot, for example, act “sad” because there is no generic expression of sadness. You can be sad for myriad different reasons, and each situation seeks its own remedy. If you go on stage and try to act “sad,” what you are really doing is trying to show the audience how you feel. What you should be doing is getting involved in the pretend circumstances of the story and focusing on your character’s objectives. If a character is sad, the audience wants to know what he is going to do about that. When an actor attempts to act an emotion, he is committing an acting error called “indicating,” as in “indicating an emotion.” Walt Disney’s animators did not yet understand any of this and did the best that could be expected with acting. They lacked any reliable guidance. When they began working on Snow White in 1934, Constantin Stanislavsky’s books about acting theory had not yet been published in English. The only available text on acting had been written by Richard Boleslavsky, one of Stanislavsky’s former Moscow students. His book, Acting: The First Six Lessons, was published in 1933, but very few Americans had had ever heard of him. Bill Tytla, the Disney animator who brought the Dwarf Grumpy to life, reportedly bought a copy in 1935, but that says more about Tytla personally than it does about the general state of acting knowledge at the time. Walt Disney and his brilliant team of cartoonists were literally flying in the dark. Given how little was known about acting theory and aesthetics,
it is amazing that they got it right as often as they did. They made acting choices on the basis of nothing more than hunches. If it felt right, then it was right.
