MAURICE NOBLE RECALLS WORKING WITH DISNEY AND DR. SEUSS
ANIMATION'S "OLD REBEL" SPEAKS OUT ABOUT WORKING WITH CHUCK AND THE STATE OF ANIMATION TODAY
an interview by Karl Cohen

Maurice Noble, who calls himself the "old rebel," worked for Disney on Snow White, Bambi, Fantasia and Dumbo. During WWII he worked for the Frank Capra film unit with Dr. Seuss on Private Snafu cartoons. In the 1950's he did the designs and layouts for Chuck Jones' greatest classic cartoons including Duck Amuck, Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, What's Opera, Doc? and the ever popular Roadrunner cartoons.
Noble says that at 86, he is the second oldest person working in the Hollywood animation studios today. Somebody at Disney is a year older than Noble. Chuck Jones is slightly younger so Noble calls him "Junior."
He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles with the help of a work scholarship. One of the first honors of his life was the school awarding him and Mary Blair their first full-time scholarships. She stayed on and graduated, but he eventually had to leave due to financial dificulties due to "the great depression."
About 1934, Noble took a job at Disney to get a $10 raise. He was working as a department store designer for $90 a month when he was offered a job at the studio for about $100. He says, "After all $10 is $10." I didn't know exactly what I was getting into, but I was going to earn $10 more a month.
The studio knew he was skilled with watercolors as Chouinard had presented a one-man show his work. Noble believes this was the first watercolor show to be presented by the school. In any case Disney put him to work doing watercolor backgrounds for their Silly Symphonies. He recalls doing backgrounds for Elmer Elephant (1936), The Country Cousin (1936), Woodland Cafe (1937), The Old Mill (1937), Wynken, Blynken and Nod (1938), and a lot of other shorts before he started work on Snow White.
The background materials used at Disney were Winsor Newton watercolors and Whatman paper stretched on boards. No opaque paints or airbrush were permited, not even to make a minor correction. He says, "A light pencil drawing was put onto the stretched paper by a tracer. Then we would look at the layouts given to us and interpret the shadows and other details. Then we would paint the backgrounds. It was a very long and painstaking process because we had to build up our colors wash after wash. When we got on Snow White we had to match six scenes in transparent watercolors in some sequences."
One section of Snow White where he had to do six matching background paintings was a sequence in the interior of the dwarf's cottage. He had to paint the same wall and props from six different camera angles. When the action cuts from one point of view to the next the background paintings had to look the same. And they did.
A memorable scene that he worked on was the moment when the prince kisses Snow White. Walt was rushing the film to completion so Noble says he was designing and laying out the scene while he was painting it.
As a background artist Noble didn't have to suffer through the famous "sweatbox sessions" where Disney critiqued what was being worked on by his animators. He often attended these screenings to learn how his backgrounds worked with figures over them and to see what was going on.
Background artists at Disney had to go through a different form of torture, "the ok session." Noble says some of the sessions were experiences similar to nervous breakdowns. "A critical jury had to pass on all the finished backgrounds. You know how difficult it is to make corrections with watercolors?"
One of the great moments of his career at Disney was attending the premiere of Snow White. He says it was a miracle that he got screen credit on the film and was given two tickets by Walt to attend the premiere. "That was a real thrill and a highlight of my life. It was interesting to watch the audience. All the movie stars were there. I wasn't sitting downstairs with the hoi polloi, but I had a front row seat in the balcony. When the picture was over they all stood up and cheered. It was really exciting. "Walt's folly had paid off! A million and a quarter dollars had been put into this cartoon. It was a real turning point in the animation business."
Another important moment for him was making the decision to go out on strike against Walt, "because I didn't believe that the wages being paid to beginners and some people who had been in the industry a long time, were sufficient to live on." Noble recalled how some people who went on strike lost their cars and homes. He also recalled soup kitches for the strikers and the Disney goon squads looking for trouble. He says, "the strike was a very dificult period."
Eventually the strikers won their long and difficult battle with the studio. When he went back to work things had changed. None of the people who had remained loyal to the company would talk with him. His new office was a former broom closest. He had to stand on a chair to reach the window if he wanted to open it. The studio didn't give him any work to do so when he reported to work each day he read while waiting to get an assignment. Two or three weeks later he was laid off for lack of work. A few weeks after that Pearl Harbor was bombed. Three days later he made an important decision, he joined the Army Signal Corps. At the time he didn't know that his brother, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor, had survived the bombing unharmed.
Noble has mixed feelings about running into people who didn't go on strike at Disney. He isn't bitter, just realistic. They benefited from what he and the others fought for. All that most of the strikers got for their efforts was severance pay.
Noble's war years were spent in the Army Photographic Signal Corp. He joined at the request of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Part of his time he traveled to different bases and helped present showings of films produced for soldiers by Colonel Frank Capra. Eventually he was transfered to Capra's command at Fort Fox in Los Angeles. He was assigned to the film unit headed by Major Theodor Geisel, a man known to his readers as Dr. Seuss. There were about 12 men in the unit. "We turned out propaganda booklets, health things, VD posters, 'don't trust the enemy' type of posters, maps for Capra's films, and the Snafu cartoons."
When Noble was asked to describe Geisel he replied, "He was very neat, slender, beady-eyed and wore his hair quite closely cropped." I then asked if he was a funny person and the response was, "Oh no! Ted was never a funny person. There were no yuck yuck yucks to this guy. He was all business. He had a sense of humor and a keen sense of story as demonstrated in his children's books. He struck me as a rather serious person. I knew him for many years and worked with him on a good number of his pictures. He was friendly. You knew him up to a certain point and then a wall came down."
He continued, "In later years when I worked with him he was always well dressed, polished shoes, cashmere sweaters, $400 loafers and stuff like that. I would say that he was a very reserved person, not much laughter. As a mater of fact I can't ever remember hearing Ted laugh. Of course we were dealing with serious business of story and picture development. He was a perfectionist. Every drawing, every bit of dialog had to be just right. And I appreciated that because I'm a little bit that way myself." Noble is glad to have had the privilege of working with Ted over the years.
At Ted Geisel's memorial service his doctor told Noble that Ted really loved How The Grinch Stole Christmas (1966), especially his work on it. Noble says, "he never mentioned it while he was alive." The complement meant a lot to him as he considers the TV special one of his best works. He was glad to finally learn the author shared this opinion.
When Noble got out of the Army his war-time marriage had ended and he had no job. He lived at home with his mother and took whatever free-lance work was available. Eventually he took a full-time job in St. Louis working for a company doing film-strips for the Lutheran Church and other clients. He developed a solid reputation for his department's work, but the promised promotion to a partnership in the firm didn't materialize. When Warner Brother contacted him in 1952 and asked if he wanted to do layouts for Chuck Jones, he and his new wife return to Hollywood. Noble barely knew Jones during WWII. They had met briefly when he visited Warner Brothers on official business. The Snafu cartoons were written and storyboarded at Fort Fox and then the materials were sent to Warner Brothers to be produced. Jones was one of the directors working on the Snafu propaganda cartoon series that were being made for guys in the Army.
When Noble joined Chuck Jones' unit, "it was a very hectic period. I had never laid out a picture in my life. When you go into a new place you don't want to display your ignorance so I just had to figure things out. I looked around and saw what everybody was doing." He had to figure out how they used exposure sheets at Warners, had to learn their technical vocabulary, etc. "Little by little I taught myself how to do layouts." He adds that he was very fortunate to work with a lot of people who helped him develop his skills at Warners including background artist Phil DeGuard, and animators Benny Washam and Ken Harris.
Part of Noble's brilliance is his use of strong simple shapes to define the spaces where the animation is to take place. He was able to create unique designs for each film that he worked on. Jones let him develop whatever designs and looks he thought would work best with the animated action being planned for the project.
Noble's layouts in the 1950's avoided the fussy details of Disney and the over-designed look of UPA. Some of the people he knew at Disney before the strike were now working at UPA and were getting lots of acclaim for their modern look. He felt their work was too arty and that it was void of "heart response." One memory from a visit to UPA is that they all wore berets.
He says the look of his layouts were not influenced by what was happening at UPA. Instead they were simply his personnel feelings about what would work best with the project he was working on. He began to feel comfortable at Warners when, "I started to design stuff and they liked it."
The list of well know works Noble worked on include Rabbit Seasoning, 1952; Duck Amuck, 1953; Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century, 1953; Bully for Bugs, 1953; What's Opera, Doc? 1957, Hare-Way to the Stars, 1958 and the ever popular Roadrunner cartoons. When asked if he designed the amazing landscapes in these films, or if the concepts were those of his background artist Phil de Guard he said, "I designed everything. I not only gave Phil the layout, but the color sketches as well. I designed the pictures. He had to copy my sky, my colors, everything." In the book Duck Amuck Chuck Jones calls Maurice Noble the architect and Phil de Guard the builder of the backgrounds in his films.
Noble explained that those wonderfully strange cliffs and pointed spires with rocks balancing on the tops of them in Roadrunner cartoons are exaggerations of his childhood memories of the desert. He grew up in New Mexico and visited Monument Valley, Zion, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks as a kid. He says he loved doing desert settings for cartoons. Each time he would do one they would become more exaggerated. He loved to balance big rocks on spires or on top of small ones and says "I did it for the fun of the thing. It became Roadrunner country."
Noble says "I'm often asked the question if we knew we were working on great cartoons and the answer is no, we had a job." He looks back on his career and is amazed at the quality of the work Chuck Jones' unit produced, but he maintains that the unit simply thought of their work as a job. He describes the group as "a basic crew of 10 or 12 people who turned out 11 cartoons a year from beginning to end."
When asked if he could add to the discussion about where that brilliance came from he said, "I've often said Mike Maltise enjoyed writing the stuff. I can remember watching Chuck chuckling over his drawings - making Daffy do something silly, or insane or insulting. I enjoyed designing the stuff. The animators enjoyed drawing the stuff and Phil enjoyed painting it. It all kind of rubbed off on the audience... We worked like demons."
Later in the interview he returned to the topic of what made their unit great. He said, "Chuck had a great ability to direct his characters. He did all his character sketches." He praised three animators, Ken Harris, Ben Washam and Abe Levitov, who were capable of understanding Chuck's notes to them on the drawings about timing and other nuances and were able to turn Chuck's ideas into remarkable performances. He is proud that he was part of Jones' small unit and that their work is now recognized as some of the best from the Golden Age of Animation.
Despite all the stories that have been told over the years about the gang at Termite Terrace having fun on the job, Noble says most of the time it was serious work for him and the people around him. Life among his co-workers was very informal and there were gags (comic drawings) floating around. He adds, "I can't remember Chuck laughing much (at work)."
Among his fond memories are the lunches cooked by Benny Washam for the gang. Noble says that once in a while on Fridays Benny would pass the hat and then go out and buy some provisions. It turns out that Washam was an original partner in the Bob's Big Boy restaurants. He quit and became an animator because he didn't make much money in the food business. Noble's favorite meal cooked by Benny was lamb stew with French bread. The little fat guy in the restaurants logo is a self-caricature of Benny. Noble and Benny once worked on a training film for the restaurant chain.
Other fond memories concern writer Mike Maltese who Noble described as having a good wry sense of humor. Noble says they were very good friends and would go antique hunting together. As he talked he looked around the room and saw a chest and other things that reminded him of his adventures with Maltese.
At Warners only a few cartoons were ever given official premieres, most just opened at downtown theaters without any fanfare. The studio made a big deal out of the premiere of What's Opera, Doc? because it was the only cartoon to use a 50 piece orchestra. The event was held at a theatre on the studio lot. He doesn't remember who was in the audience, but he recalls the red curtain parting and that it was wonderful to see this great parody on the screen. "It was a big event. I was quite surprised that when I saw the picture that it turned out to be such a grand tour de force."
Noble was at Warners when the studio closed Termite Terrace and opened a new studio built for the animators on their back lot in Burbank. The site had been a trash pile. After the studio ended animation production the building became a music library, a computer center and a few other things before it became Chuck Jones' studio.
Noble describes his relationship with Chuck Jones as strictly business. It was between two men who still have enormous respect for each others abilities and a recognition that their skills complement each others talents. Noble had co-director credit with Jones on several Warner Brother cartoons in the 1960's. He says, "I owe a great deal to Chuck because he let me do my own thing. We got to do a lot of very interesting pictures together."
Noble's relationship with Chuck was "nothing social." He would attend parties for the whole unit at Chuck's house, "but never any lunches or socializing... It was strictly a business relationship and that's probably why we could work together for so long. I'd say good night and he would say good night and that was it."
Jones praises Noble's brilliance as a layout artist in the book Duck Amuck. Among the fine things he said is the statement, "He never showed off, but he showed up every other layout man I have ever known by his honesty, his devotion to his craft, and above all, his devotion to the film at hand, and this is nowhere more vividly demonstrated than in What's Opera, Doc?"
Noble presently works as a consultant for several Hollywood companies. He is called in to critique a lot of work. He says, "I check it out with the young artists. I try to suggest where they can make improvements. I work with young directors. We talk over story and story points. In other words I'm the old guru."
When asked about the training of young talent today he said, "The Warner Brothers Feature Animation Development Department has a very competent training program. They have classes, not only in animation, but in layout and other basics. They also teach improvisation so the students can spontaneously react to things. A good animator is always a kind of actor. They also hold life drawing classes 3 or 4 times a week. In other words they are improving all their skills. I've talked with the heads of the training department and they say the studio can't find enough experienced help so we are going to develop it ourselves."
When asked about his favorite recent animated features he says "Well I'm rather hard put there. You know the fact that a feature makes money doesn't mean it's a good picture. They say the Lion King has made over a billion dollars including income from the by-products, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Lion King is a good picture."
One point that he stated several times is, "the studios are cursed with live action writers. They don't have the visual writers. You say a lot of things in words that you can do in one drawing. They don't realize this. Recent features contain a tremendous amount of unnecessary dialog and situations that don't really present themselves in a graphic way. This is the curse of all the studios."
He blames the controlling interests in the studios for wanting to do blockbuster type films and wanting to make millions of dollars. They don't want to explore the graphic potential of animation. He feels that creative animation people in Hollywood really want to do something good and the frustration comes from being handed scripts that are verbal, not visual.
Another problem he talked about is the present fascination with computers. "The way they are using this computerized stuff is the difference between a lathe and a hand carving. The computer is a tool. When they over emphasize it like they did in the Hunchback you feel like you are on a roller coaster ride all the time. Incidentally, I think it is a terrible picture. They didn't really give you a chance to sit and see anything. They truck and then cut. Just about the time you are going to look at something they cut. They made unnecessary cuts - over decorating something. It jumps all over the place."
Another problem he had with Hunchback is it containing what he considers the ultimate in bad taste. He was referring to the roasting of a frankfurter while Paris burned. He said, "this is not a gag. People are dying and somebody roasts a frank. I think it is the worst picture Disney ever made."
He also objects to the over use of music in recent animated features. He says, "they over orchestrate them. The Hunchback was terrible. All they did was sing these lousy tunes throughout it."
"I know it's very difficult to find a good story to animate, but they shouldn't be throwing millions of dollars around and produce these so called epic type Gone with the Wind animated features. There are so many good possibilities in animation. I'm sure there are good stories to be found. Why do they insist upon 'the cutting edge?' What do they mean by it? In essence animation is about satire, exaggeration, puns and poking fun at human foibles. Real good adult humor is subtle humor. A good fun zany satire is wonderful. This is the field animation should work in instead of being bad live action."
Noble loves the work coming out of the Chuck Jones Studio. He works for them as a consultant, checking layouts, colors, background and other details of their productions. He says they are the only studio producing cartoons that are pure fun. "The whole thing is geared to have fun and not to be too serious. They capture the essence of what made a cartoon fun in the old days. It's not old hat. A good laugh is a good laugh whether it's an old one or a new one. It's just how you do it. It's amazing that one studio in Hollywood is still towing the line doing full animation and having fun with it."
There are only a few productions besides those coming from Chuck Jones that Noble approves of. He says, "Bill Melendez has stuck to his simple approach to things. I think his simple animation, his very direct simple dialog, his simple backgrounds and the choice use of the little guy at the piano here and there result in a very consistent product. Melendez is a very keen guy. He is one of my favorite people." Noble considers A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) one of the nicest things every put on film.
Noble concluded by saying "I'm known as the old rebel. I'm invited to come talk here and there. I keep preaching the idea of full animation. Go easy on the computer. Let's have stories and graphics and satire and fun. The general level of acceptance of inferior animation is unfortunate. Look at some of the subtle animation done years ago. My favorite picture is Dumbo. Such a complete one. Not a bit of wasted footage. It runs the gamete from tears to outrageous slapstick with the crows. Each section is so well done. The business needs more cartoons like this. Dumbo is a classic."


"It either works or it doesn't. When it works well you appreciate it and go on to the next picture."
He said he was aware that Disney continues to offer their staff classes, but he was not familiar with the present training program.
When asked if the young animators are learning to work with the stars of the past, he said, "what they are doing is learning the fundamentals of fine animation. The new features deal with new characters. Now there is only one studio that really works with the old characters. It's the Chuck Jones Studio and it's the only one in Hollywood that is carrying on the tradition. It's quite amazing. They are doing it very well."
Noble works for Jones as a consultant. "I go over and check their layouts, their colors (note: he was a color coordinator on Dumbo), their backgrounds and all that. I have a very fine working relationship with Linda Jones who runs it. Chuck doesn't come in very often. He has to come up all the way from Corona Del Mar to Burbank to go to the studio. I live in Glendale which is about a 15 minute trip to the Burbank studio."
When asked about the new Michael Jordan feature with Bugs Bunny he said, "Space Jam is an example of an in your face type of show. You may have noticed how many close-ups were in it to hide the bad acting. They couldn't act. Lousy animation. I hope it makes money purely for the sake of the young people employed by the studio. Let's keep the studios open. It keeps the animation steam roller going."
He hated Lola Bunny in the film. He exclaimed, "Oh for heavens sakes. It was ridiculous. She looked like a piece of wilted lettuce. She was about as interesting as a sex symbol as a pollywog. Excuse me, I'm rather outspoken."

He also mentioned that it now takes about 75 people at Disney in Florida to produce one cartoon a year.
Noble has worked for other studios including John Sutherland xxx for a short period in the 1950's. While he was there he got to know Bill Scott and Bill Melendez. He says Melendez is one of his heros. He thinks Melendez's early Peanuts specials are gems and that Charlie Brown's Christmas Story is one of the nicest things ever put on film.



Lola Bunny -

One time I recall Witch Hazel. At the end of one cartoon she turns into a pink bunny at the end of a cartoon.. Bugs says "they are all witches underneath, aren't they" and they walk off together at the end of the picture. I showed that thing at Harvard all the women in the audience got mad, all the men loved it. One woman asked why there aren't more women in the animation business. I said because women can't laugh at themselves. Oh god did I get into a hot argument. Their vanity doesn't permit them to poke fun at themselves. Men can look at ourselves and say what assholes we are.
He also got complaints about the ending of the Hunchback. People complained to him that he didn't get the girl, he loved her and did all these wonderful things for her. Instead a big hunk comes in and takes her. It tells that unless you are a big hunk or a superhero your not going to get the prize. It upsets him that all the hard work resulted in...

The animation medium is one of exaggeration, puns, satire, and poking fun at human frailties in a wonderful satirical way. Emulating live action stories, and live action reactions who cares about a breast shot of a dame. After all the real thing is far more interesting than a drawn one.
- product - your not a good American unless you've seen it. You have to have your Mickey mouse underwear on, your mm slippers on, your mm t shirt on, now you can go see a mm picture