Ginger Nutt's Bee Brother, an Animaland film directed by Bert Feldstead. © G.B. Animation. Courtesy of Streamline Pictures.

In the 1970s and 80s, anyone researching the history of classical American animation was faced with a panorama of numerous producers, directors and artists who were still alive and more than ready to tell of their experience; in addition, there were surviving friends, acquaintances and relatives, as well as earlier interviews. The only real mystery surrounded David Hand.

Hand had been Disney's right hand man on the creative side for about 10 years. He was credited as the director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi; he then emigrated to Great Britain to set up a large studio there. But after that? Nothing. He reappeared one evening, shortly before his death, to collect an Annie Award from ASIFA-Hollywood, a branch of the professional animator's organization, for his lifetime achievements. He did leave a small book of memoirs which were published posthumously on her own by his widow, Martha, and which only a few of us were lucky enough to get our hands on one. Now, precisely 10 years after his death (he was born in 1900), thanks to a lucky combination of chance and the clever intervention of an Italian company, the films he made in Great Britain have once again come to light.

Ginger Nutt's Bee Brother, an Animaland film directed by Bert Feldstead. © G.B. Animation. Courtesy of Streamline Pictures.

But let's start at the beginning. After gaining some experience in New York at the John Randolph Bray Studios, David Dodd Hand first came to Disney on January 20, 1930, a Friday. That was the day his difficult, contradictory but creative relationship with Walt (who, in the words of many studio veterans interviewed later on was, to put it mildly, "a very complicated man") began. Hand tells us that one of his boss' greatest problems was his inability to explain just exactly what he meant: he knew what he did not like, but did not know how to explain what changes needed to be made. Once, he made him redo a a scene six times until, enraged, Hand exaggerated all the positions purely to be polemical, making them completely unnatural by contemporary standards. "There you are, Dave, that is exactly what I wanted!," exclaimed "Mickey Mouse's father" before his amazed artist. This was to become a lesson on animated cartoons (to make a scene cinematically credible, never imitate reality, but caricature it instead and then carry it to excess), and also a lesson for Hand, who from that moment on was able to anticipate the taste and wishes of Walt Disney better than anyone else.

The British Adventure
On July 21, 1944, after the glory of Snow White and Bambi, Hand resigned. Marc Eliot, a real backbiter (as seen in Walt Disney, Hollywood's Dark Prince, the most hostile of Disney's biographers), suggests that the boss, a callous moralist, had begun to detest his employee when he had gone to live with a new companion before his divorce had been finalized. Hand is vague, in his memoirs, and describes a confidence which had deteriorated bit by bit, an atmosphere which had imperceptibly become unbearable. In fact, one might believe that he had almost begun to get in the way. Fond and loyal, but definitely not a yes man, he had grown professionally, until he had become not only Disney's right hand man, but almost his alter ego, a potential menace for a ruler who wished to be absolute.