Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney | The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

the upside down cake: how coding in film functions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork (screenplay based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame with additions by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony), Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney (directors) The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

 

If one truly wants to comprehend how cinematic “coding” works, one need only watch the Walt Disney feature of 1941, The Reluctant Dragon. Coding, I would argue, is an extreme form of irony, wherein you say one thing but mean or point to something else. But it functions mostly in reverse of the general examples of literary irony. If in irony one begins often by saying something quite outrageous, he is doing so to point out a reality that forces one to imagine that extreme, the real permitting us to imagine the absurd. When Jonathan Swift argues that the children of the extreme poor throughout the country might serve a great purpose as “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout,” he obviously is not arguing for cannibalism, but making the point of just how horrible the conditions are among the poor and how insufferable are those who will not work to find a way to help families pay and provide for their starving children. The absurd suggestion is an ironical statement that covers over his anger and frustration with a society not willing to help its own people and their children to properly survive.

      In “coding,” the statement being made generally begins as a placid one that fits into a fairly traditional viewpoint: a heterosexual hypochondriac gets the notion that he is about to die, so he begins looking for another man to replace him who might be suitable for his wife. Indeed, given the behavior of that man’s friend who is a bachelor who gleefully contacts women who are getting divorced or have just lost their husbands and pretends to console them with the real purpose of seducing them into his bed, the character (in this instance Rock Hudson, the film being Send Me No Flowers) is apparently attempting to be a good and protective husband. But the search allows him to spend the rest of the movie observing and commenting on the male sex, without having to devote hardly any time dealing with heterosexual matters. In short, Hudson’s character and his close friend played by Tony Randall to whom he has confided, are permitted to spend almost the entire film cruising men and at times one another.

      For the everyday theater goer, the humor of the film derives simply from the irony that, in fact, Hudson’s character is perfectly well, and all the efforts and mishaps he goes through in attempting to protect his wife are absolutely unnecessary. But for those viewers who knew of Hudson’s and Randall’s sexuality or at least suspected it, or for those who, without even knowing that both were actually homosexual, but perceived that the story was really a movie about something else, the humor is derived from the irony of the cinema’s pretense, the fact that he is hypochondrial being only incidental. I might just add, that since homosexuality was something rarely spoken about, moreover, and in many states against the law, Americans were generally much more innocent about such sexual possibilities and mostly unaware of gay humor.

     The example I used, however, is not typical of coding. In most films the thematic that lies underneath the veneer the surface plot, do not fully function throughout the film. Coding does not work like allegory, in which at nearly all times things can be seen in double. In most films with LGBTQ coding, the coded scenes are simply dropped in from time to time, with the major plot bubbling along in its heterosexual manner, usually ending in the prerequisite reiteration of heterosexual love and/or marriage. The characters often, in fact, change their sexual alliances according to the demands of the normative heterosexual template.

 

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      On May 29, 1941, animators at Walt Disney Productions went on strike to protest inequalities of pay and privileges at the studio in Burbank. The strike lasted for three months and 26 days. Wikipedia actually nicely summarizes the basic reasons for the strike:

 

“Disney's animators had the best pay and working conditions in the industry, but were discontented. Originally, 20 percent of the profits from short cartoons went toward employee bonuses, but Disney eventually suspended this practice. Disney's 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a financial success, allowing Disney to construct a new, larger studio in Burbank, California, financed by borrowing. At the Burbank studio, a rigid hierarchy system was enforced where employee benefits such as access to the restaurant, gymnasium, and steam room were limited to the studio's head writers and animators, who also received larger and more comfortable offices. Individual departments were segregated into buildings and heavily policed by administrators.

     The box-office failures of Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940 forced Disney to make layoffs, although Disney rarely involved himself in the hiring and firing process with those who were not atop the pay chain. The studio's pay structure was very disorganized, with some high-ranking animators earning as much as $300 a week, while other employees made as little as $12. According to then-Disney animator Willis Pyle, ‘there was no rhyme or reason as to the way the guys were paid. You might be sitting next to a guy doing the same thing as you and you might be getting $20 a week more or less than him.’ Staff were also forced to put their name to documents which stated that they worked a forty hour week, whilst their actual hours were much longer. In addition there was resentment at Walt Disney taking credit for their work, and employees wished to receive on-screen credit for their art.

     The Screen Cartoonist’s Guild and [their president Herbert] Sorrell started meeting on a regular basis at the Hollywood Hotel from the start of 1941 to hear Disney workers' grievances and plan a unionization effort. Many animators, including Art Babbitt, grew dissatisfied and joined the SCG. Babbitt was one of Disney's best-paid animators, though he was sympathetic to low-ranking employees and openly disliked Disney.  Babbitt had previously been a senior official in the Disney company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, but had become frustrated due to being unable to effect change in that position. Disney saw no problem with the structure, believing it was his studio to run and that his employees should be grateful to him for providing the new studio space

     Sorrell, along with Babbitt and Bill Littlejohn, approached Disney and demanded he unionize his studio, but Disney refused. In February 1941, Disney gathered all 1,200 employees in his auditorium for a speech:

 

‘In the 20 years I've spent in this business I've weathered many storms. It's been far from easy sailing. It required a great deal of work, struggle, determination, competence, faith, and above all unselfishness. Some people think we have a class distinction in the place. They wonder why some people get better seats in the theatre than others. They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot and others don't. I have always felt, and always will feel that the men that contribute most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges. My first recommendation to the lot of you is this; put your own house in order, you can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.’

 

     Understandably that speech was not well received and in May many of the animators and others went on strike. During that time, of course, projects that had already been started and new projects were halted; and Disney, at the pitch of its early popularity, had no way to proceed with new pictures. Although an agreement was eventually forced upon the company, it resulted in the loss of some of its major animators and other executives, at least temporarily, and helped to delay some of the features the studio had been working on, including Peter Pan until after World War II.

     In order, apparently, to resolve that situation and to provide further product, in June the studio released what can only be described as a kind of “cover,” a feature film that pretended to be filled with new animated works, but actually features only two short films, the longest, The Reluctant Dragon being only 20 minutes in length.

     Most cleverly, moreover, this film engaged the popular comedic raconteur, former member of the Algonquin Round Table, Robert Benchley to supposedly attempt to pitch the children’s book, Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, read to him by his wife, for production by Disney, although what rights he had to do so is never explained. In fact, it is merely a cover to allow him, supposedly on the run from the designated studio guide Humphrey (Buddy Pepper), into the deeper recesses of the Disney factory. Playing the somewhat fey common man that he often portrayed, Benchley appears to be reluctant to actually meet with Disney or attempt to sell him the book.

    What it allowed Disney studios to do is to show off their remarkable studios in its many manifestations and to feature some of their more loyal and noted animators, while simultaneously promoting the company characters such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Pluto while pretending that all operations were continuing on smoothly and regularly, all in the guise of a featuring new works.

       Almost like Dante, Benchley tours the nine celestial spheres of Disney’s Paradiso. He first stumbles into a life drawing session where animators study how the make caricatures of people and animals by observing them in real life. Today’s subject is a live elephant, who Benchley mocks and praises alternatively, the animal sometimes reacting anthropomorphically, which is of course a Disney secret of their success. At each level of his holy journey is he provided with a small gift; here he receives a quick sketch of an elephant bearing a remarkable resemblance to himself.

     Again attempting to dodge the insistent Humphrey, Benchley attends a film scoring with a full orchestra and performers Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, and Florence Gill, the voice of Clara Cluck. Nash teaches him how to use his cheek for the Donald Duck effects.

      At a foley session, featuring a cartoon sequence from Casey Junior from Dumbo, he meets his Beatrice, Doris (Francis Gifford), who explains how to use the sonovox for the train sounds while the foley experts demonstrate how they create the noises of the traveling train and a storm that nearly destroys him. Doris allows him to play with sonovox as a treat.

      Finding himself in the camera room, featuring a demonstration of the multiplane camera, everything is turned from grayscale and black-and-white into Technicolor, Benchley himself examining his own now red and blue tie and commenting, when Doris asks if he remembers her from the foley room, “Yes, but look different in Technicolor!” Donald Duck makes another appearance on the camera stand as the cameraman explains how the duck is made to walk in animated photography. From here on Benchley has been given the gift of color.

    In the ink-and-paint department, the technicians show Benchley and the audience how the various colors are mixed and applied to cels such as that of the figure of Bambi we are shown and which is presented to Benchley to hold up against various backgrounds of glens and forests.

     Still evading Humphrey, he enters the maquette-making department which casts small statues to help animators envision their characters from all perspectives. A number of the maquettes are on display, including those from future films such as Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Tinker Bell, John and Michael Darling, Smee, and Peter himself. Benchley admires a small black zebra centaurette from Fantasia which is given to him along with a maquette of himself, quickly done by an employee, a work later purchased for the collection of Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones.

     Hiding out in the storyboard department Benchley encounters a group of so-called “storymen,” one them portrayed by Alan Ladd who flips through a completed story book to glimpse the animation process. There also he is given a premiere look at a planned work, Baby Weems (the creation of Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, and John Miller) with the use of an animatic, a story reel that uses limited animation. The lead director of this entire film, Alfred Werker, then working for 20th Century Fox, but loaned out for this film, was the first director to use the storyboard as developed by Disney staff in the early 1930s.

     In the penultimate room he meets up with the animators themselves, Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, and Norm Ferguson, where he is treated to a preview of the Goofy cartoon, How to Ride a Horse, which was later released as a stand-alone short in February 1950. Ferguson also shows him his new animations of Pluto.

     Finally, Humphrey catches up with him, following rather than leading him directly to God, Disney himself in a previewing room about to watch a new completed feature, the 20-minute short of which this film bears the title and which Benchley had hoped to sell to him, The Reluctant Dragon.

     Handing over all the gifts that he has accumulated along the way, almost as in tribute to Disney, Benchley can finally sit back and watch the story created with a screenplay by Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork, based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame and rewritten by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony. The directors include Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwwerks, and Jack Kinney. In all there were some 44 animators and background painters, only 11 of them credited.

 

    Almost as what appears to be an in-joke, that animated short is itself a coded gay movie, featuring a Dragon (voice by Barnett Parker) who is befriended by a young Boy (voiced by Billy Lee) when the boy’s father and the community becomes terrified of the nearby beast. Visiting the Dragon, of whom the Boy has read, the Boy discovers that the storybook villain is not all interested in fighting but rather enjoys tea parties, playing his flute to accompany his bird friends, and, most of all, writing poetry. In every way possible—as the dragon tosses out its tiny front feet with the curvature of a limp wrist and sash-shays its huge rump with disdain of those who disagree with him, calling them sweethearts and dear ones—the writers, animators, and directors convey clearly that this Dragon is gay. Poets are, after all, the standard stand-in for fussy queers, and the poem he recites makes quite clear his inclinations:

 

Sweet Upside Down Cake

Cares and woes you’ve got them.

Because Upside Down Cake

Your top is on your bottom.

Alas Upside Down Cake

Your trouble’s never stop.

Because Upside Down Cake

You’re bottom’s on your top.

 

    (For those straight readers who have never watched TV, seen a film, and seldom leave their houses, I remind you that a top is the gay man who does the fucking, the bottom the one receiving. When the bottom is on his top, presumably he’s enjoying as ass-licking in preparation for the fuck.)

     When Sir Giles (voice by Claud Allister) shows up to fight the dragon, the Boy is equally disappointed that not only he is an old man, but he also writes poetry, although not of the same sort as the Dragon, his being more about the red radishes he downs in delight. When he discovers that the Dragon has no intentions in fighting, he secretly suggests they fight in gest, he pretending to slay him, while the Dragon will receive great attention and applause.

      Even Sean Griffith in his exploration of Disney characters in Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out notes of “the delight and acceptance [in this film] of an effeminate male.” He continues: “The dragon sports long emotive eyelashes and contains not an aggressive bone in his body, with the dragon prancing and pirouetting throughout the story... There is no mistaking how the film makes fun of the dragon's mincing manner and prissy pretentions. Yet, the film also makes it quite clear that the dragon does not believe in fighting, and the film doesn't specifically make fun of him for that... Just as in Ferdinand the Bull, The Reluctant Dragon presents an easily read gay character under the guise of fantasy and shows characters accepting him as he is."

     But the truth is that the Boy has a great deal of difficulty in accepting the Dragon, and does in fact taunt him, commenting, when the Dragon is unable to even get up enough macho to breathe out fire on the day of the fight: “Too bad you’re not a real dragon, instead of a puff poet.” That is the equivalent of calling him a faggot. And it so angers the sensitive beast that he suddenly draws up enough inner fuel to spew up a torrent of forgotten flames, allowing him to give the performance of his life.

 

     Like all gay films, the Dragon must die, or at least pretend to. Later, when the community discovers that he still lives, he must swear: "I promise not to rant or roar, and scourge the countryside anymore!" But then, of course, he never did rant or roar or scourge anyone before.

    Whether or not the average parent with children in tow saw this pacifist Dragon as being homosexual I cannot say. Did Disney know what his own remaining animators had cooked up as core of his personal tribute to his studio and himself? Certainly, it slipped by the watchful eyes of the Hays Board, who demanded that the film be censored only of the Dragon’s navel. What they might have been thinking of, I can’t imagine. Did a navel of this already totally anthropomorphized beast simply step over the line regarding him being too human?

     Clearly The New York Times reviewer entirely missed the point or purposely covered over it, writing: “As if to atone for the fearsome witches and monsters of his previous films, he has made of his dragon as dizzy a dowager as ever frolicked forth from her cave reciting little roundelays. Whatever the villagers think, she is nonetheless just a harmless old biddy forever drinking tea, and though, according to the best medieval practice, she is supposed to breathe flame, her very best is to emit one tiny smoke ring.” That’s certainly one way of escaping an effeminate beast.

       Did most of the audiences of the day simply read this as a parable of pacifist behavior, and if so, what did that mean to them in 1941, on the eve of the one of the most horrific wars of all time? We can no longer perceive it from the perspective of that moment.

     But if we can now see this work structured in a manner that might remind one of a series of increasingly smaller Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, the fruit we find in the final container is the sweetest one we might ever have imagined.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).