PINOCCHIO, under Walt Disney's enchantment was a little wooden puppet without strings into which a Blue Fairy breathed life. But Pinocchio and all the other rather wonderful Disney characters are puppets drawn on sheets of transparent celluloid by some 900 creative artists—45,000 drawings to make an average 700-ft, short production. Chances are, the breath of life in them is electricity, employed in a comprehensive variety of applications and processes.
The new Walt Disney Productions studios, just completed near Burbank, Calif., are not alone the most completely and exactly air-conditioned motion picture studio city, but employ electricity in more ways and newer ones than most any other theatrical enterprise. A cartoon moving picture, in color and sound, is essentially a triumph of mechanics over nature, and throughout the involved process electricity "pulls the invisible strings" by which sound, dialog, drawings and color are blended and seemingly given life on the screen for the enjoyment of millions of humans.
To understand better where electricity plays a part at the new Disney studios, a brief idea of preparation of such a movie is helpful. For a feature, such as Pinocchio, a full script is re quired, but for most short productions a brief plot and a series of colored sketches pinned in sequence on a huge board start the work. When approved by Disney, direction is assigned to director, musician, layout man, background artists and animators.
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