Breaking Into Disney

The Audition and Donald Duck

After Herron, a brief, dispiriting stint illustrating sympathy cards for a greeting-card company sent Bill west when a friend handed him a Disney recruiting brochure. In 1937 he survived a brutal month-long audition (only three of fifteen made it) and was set to work as an in-betweener on Donald Duck shorts, which he likened to “telling someone who wanted to be an architect to lay bricks.”

He nearly quit, storming out shouting “No more ducks!” But his wildly imaginative “Boogie Men” sketches for Pinocchio earned him a move to the story department. He spent two years on Pinocchio with no screen credit, “it was a crusher,” a grievance over how the studio doled out credit that would never fully heal.

From Pinocchio to Story Man

On Dumbo, a circus tale tailor-made for a boy who had sketched circus elephants backstage, Bill rescued a faltering sequence, redrawing key footage to Walt’s delight. He came up with Dumbo’s final character design, and his infant son Bill Jr. shaped how he drew the baby elephant. After the 1941 strike, which Bill joined on principle, he became a full story man who did his own sketching.

A Place at the Studio

The break into the story department settled the question of what kind of artist Bill would be. He was never going to be content laying bricks. He wanted to invent characters and stage whole scenes, to think in pictures the way Walt himself did. Within a few years he would prove that he could carry an entire feature on his own shoulders, an unheard-of feat at a studio built on teams of artists. The boy who had filled his textbook margins in Indianapolis had found, at last, the one place big enough for his imagination.