One factor often referred to in discussions of Disney Studio’s historic success has been their obsession with 'realistic' detail in their cartoons. Moreover, the popular press regularly pointed out that Disney did not just make cartoons, they made art, thereby transforming animation into a higher expressive form. Early praise of Disney cartoons centred on their being closer to ‘art' than cartoons by Warner's or other animators, partly because of Disney’s ‘work on the level of sheer craftsmanship'. In fact, one of the innovations that Disney brought to commercial animation was a rigorous training program for apprentices coupled with continuing art classes for all animators (even 'old-timers’). The Chouinard Art School's instructor Donald W. Graham became so powerful at Disney that he may be credited with reinforcing and systematising the 'Iook' of Disney animation at a time when the cartoons were growing from eight-minute shorts to eighty-minute features (by 1938 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). I would like here to argue that there was not only a perceived need for Graham's instruction at Disney, but that his ideas contributed greatly to the style and procedures employed at Disney during the 1930s and beyond. […]
