Early work with Walt Disney (1919–1926) Iwerks spent most of his career working with or for
Walt Disney. The two met in 1919 while working for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City, and eventually started their own commercial art business together. Disney and Iwerks then found work as illustrators for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company (which was later named The Kansas City Film Ad Company). While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Disney decided to take up work in animation, and Iwerks soon joined him. At Kansas City Film Ad, Iwerks displayed what became a life-long devotion to mechanics and invention. To make
the process of photographing the animation drawings more efficient, Iwerks attached a motor drive to the
animation camera with a switch that resembled a telegraph key. This allowed the camera to be operated by a single seated person who could both photograph the drawings and switch out and adjust the drawings - without requiring a second person to stand and work the camera. '' (1927), animated by Iwerks In 1922, when Disney began his
Laugh-O-Gram cartoon series, Iwerks joined him as chief animator. The studio went bankrupt, however, and in 1923 Iwerks followed Disney's move to Los Angeles to work with Walt and his brother
Roy on a new series of cartoons known as the
Alice Comedies. The
Alice shorts featured a live-action little girl (portrayed by
Virginia Davis and later
Dawn O'Day (Anne Shirley), Margie Gay, and Lois Hardwick) superimposed into an animated cartoon world. The shorts, produced for
Margaret J. Winkler of
M.J. Winkler Productions (later Winkler Pictures), proved popular enough to remain in production through 1926.
Oswald and Mickey Mouse (1927–1929) After the end of the
Alice series, Disney asked Iwerks to design a new character who would star in all-animated - and lower-budgeted - cartoon shorts. Winkler Pictures had been taken over in 1924 by Margaret Winkler's husband,
Charles Mintz, who had contracted to produce a cartoon series for release through
Universal Pictures. Disney asked Iwerks to design the character who became
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first
Oswald cartoon to be completed was
Poor Papa animated entirely by Iwerks and featuring a heavyset and middle-aged version of Oswald. Universal, who would own full rights to the prospective character, rejected
Poor Papa and Mintz and Disney had Iwerks design a younger, thinner version of the character.
Trolley Troubles, featuring the redesigned Oswald, became the first cartoon in the series to be released, in September 1927. In February 1928, Walt Disney requested a budget increase for the
Oswald cartoons from Charles Mintz, who rejected the request and then informed the stunned Disney that he had secretly hired away most of Disney's animators to make
Oswald cartoons in-house instead. These animators included
Hugh Harman,
Rudolf Ising, and
Friz Freleng, all of whom had also followed Iwerks and Disney from Kansas City to Los Angeles. Only Iwerks and a small handful of other holdouts -
Les Clark,
Wilfred Jackson, Johnny Cannon - had remained loyal to Disney and refused to sign with Mintz. A stunned and angry Walt Disney vowed to never again work with a character he did not own. Disney asked Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas - in secret, as the defecting animators would not leave for the new Winkler studio until May 1928. Iwerks tried sketches of frogs, dogs, and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. Mice characters had turned up periodically in the
Alice and
Oswald shorts, Harman, one the animators who had just defected to Mintz, had drawn some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney back in 1925. With additional inspiration from the work of
Life magazine cartoonist Clifton Meek, who'd drawn mice characters since the 1910s, Iwerks and Disney worked out a series of sketches that evolved into the character that would be named
Mickey Mouse. Iwerks drew the final designs the character, who resembled Oswald with round mouse ears instead of rabbit ears, and animated the first
Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Plane Crazy, by himself - mostly in secret behind a locked office door until Harman and the other animators left for Winkler. '' (1928), one of the first few Mickey Mouse shorts, which was animated almost entirely by Iwerks As with Oswald,
Plane Crazy was not the first Mickey short to be released, as neither it nor the follow-up,
The Galloping Gaucho, were picked up by a distributor. With the arrival of
sound films in the marketplace, Disney and Iwerks designed the third Mickey cartoon,
Steamboat Willie, to be synchronized with music and sound effects. Both the needed sound equipment and film distribution were provided by
Pat Powers, an veteran film impresario looking for an market for his Powers Cinephone
sound-on-film system (actually an unlicensed clone of
Lee DeForest's
Phonofilm system). Credited as "A Walt Disney Comic by Ub Iwerks,"
Steamboat Willie was released in November 1928 and made Mickey Mouse an immediate sensation. Several of the other early Disney sound cartoons were animated almost entirely by Iwerks. These included
Plane Crazy, Steamboat Willie,
The Haunted House, and the inaugural
Silly Symphony short,
The Skeleton Dance. As both adapted and original music became more integral to the Disney cartoons,
Carl W. Stalling, an acquaintance of Iwerks and Disney from Kansas City, was hired as music director.
Break from Disney (1929–1930) Across 1929, Iwerks became increasingly resentful of Disney's leadership and felt his contributions to the success of Mickey Mouse were under-appreciated, despite being the sole animator to receive on-screen credit. On one occasion, a child asked Disney to draw Mickey Mouse on a napkin, and Disney handed the pen to Iwerks, saying, "Why don't you draw Mickey and I'll sign it?" Iwerks retorted, "Draw your own Mickey!" and stormed off. When Charles Giegerich, an associate of Pat Powers, surreptitiously approached Iwerks in September 1929 with an offer to started his own studio, Iwerks eventually accepted. At the time Iwerks signed with Powers in January 1930, Powers was still distributing the
Mickey Mouse cartoons, and had arranged distribution of the
Silly Symphonies through
Columbia Pictures. However, his dealings with the Disney brothers had become increasingly tense and he decided to deal directly with Iwerks instead. Iwerks waited until January 21, 1930 - after Walt Disney had gone to New York to meet with Powers over financial disputes - to both tender his resignation to Roy Disney instead, and to inform him of his new side deal with Powers. The Iwerks deal and resignation triggered a business crisis that resulted in several months of acrimonious negotiations and business disputes. Upon learning that Iwerks was leaving, music director Carl Stalling resigned as well, later joining Iwerks at his new studio. The situation was eventually settled by May 1930, with Columbia paying Powers to assume distribution of the
Mickey Mouse shorts and Powers negotiating a deal with
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for Iwerks' new studio. Roy Disney bought back Iwerks' 20% interest in Walt Disney Productions as part of his exit from the company. The last Mickey Mouse cartoon Iwerks directed and animated on was
Wild Waves (1929), and his final Disney film as a director was the
Silly Symphony Autumn (1930). He also penciled the first strips of the
Mickey Mouse comic strip.
Iwerks Studio (Animated Pictures Corp./Cartoon Films Ltd.) Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper, and ComicColor Cartoons Ub Iwerks' studio, Animated Pictures Corp., opened in 1930. Investors led by Pat Powers eagerly provided support under the impression that Iwerks was responsible for much of Disney's early success.
Fiddlesticks, the first
Flip short, was also the first individual sound cartoon short released in color. (
Walter Lantz's animated segment for
King of Jazz earlier in 1930 was the first sound color animation to be released.) Once the
Flip series fell out of popularity by 1933, it was replaced by the
Willie Whopper cartoons, which failed to catch on. MGM ended its contract with Iwerks in 1934 and instead contracted with Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising's
Harman-Ising Productions to produce a new color series of
Happy Harmonies cartoons. The
Flip the Frog and
Willie Whopper cartoons were later distributed on the home-movie market in
8 mm and
16 mm prints by
Official Films in the 1940s. '', a 1935 ComiColor cartoon From 1933 to 1936, Iwerks produced a series of shorts using the two-strip
Cinecolor process under the title
ComiColor Cartoons. These shorts were released by Pat Powers through Celebrity Pictures. The ComiColor series mostly focused on fairy tales with no continuing character or star. Iwerks also experimented with stop-motion animation in combination with the
multiplane camera, and made a short called
The Toy Parade, which was never released in public. The
Flip the Frog and
Willie Whopper cartoons were later distributed on the home-movie market in
8 mm and
16 mm prints by
Official Films in the 1940s. The
ComiColor cartoons received home-movie distribution through
Castle Films and later
Blackhawk Films. In 1936, Pat Powers began working out a contract for a new series of cartoons based on the ''
Reg'lar Fellers comic strip about a group of neighborhood kids. Powers wanted Iwerks to either move his studio to New York or allow Powers to set up a satellite studio in New York for the series; In early 1937, Leon Schlesinger Productions contracted Iwerks to produce four Looney Tunes shorts starring Porky Pig and Gabby Goat, reuniting him with Carl W. Stalling and Chuck Jones in the process. Only one more cartoon, Get Rich Quick Porky'', was made by Clampett, with assistance from Jones, at Iwerks before he and his co-workers were returned to the main Schlesinger lot and Clampett was given his own unit. In 1937, Iwerks worked out an arrangement with British producer and financier
Lawson Harris to reorganize his animation studio. Now known as Cartoon Films Limited, the films were instead released through
Monogram Pictures after Educational experience financial problems of its own. By 1939, Iwerks had ceded most of the creative supervision and directorial duties to Paul Fennell, and was supplementing his income by teaching animation at an area vocational school. The following year, Iwerks was offered an opportunity to return to Disney and resigned from Cartoon Films on September 9, 1940, and Harris and Fennell continued production at Cartoon Films Ltd. on their own through 1943.
Visual effects supervision at Disney (1940–1964) Ben Sharpsteen, who had worked under Iwerks when he first came to the Disney studio in 1929, was by 1940 general manager of the Disney studio. He hired Iwerks back to Disney in August 1940 as an animation checker after hearing of Iwerks' financial struggles. Iwerks reconciled with Walt Disney over lunch, and after learning Iwerks was more interested in working on mechanical processes than working directly on animation, Disney assigned Iwerks to work on the development of a new
visual effects optical camera. In December 1945, Iwerks became the head of the Special Processes and Camera department at Disney. His refined optical camera processes for combining two pieces of Technicolor film (often to combine live-action footage with animation, but also to
composite pieces of live-action film as well) were used at Disney on films such
Song of the South (1946),
So Dear to My Heart (1949), and
The Parent Trap (1961). Iwerks and his team at Disney would continue to refine these processes for decades, and Iwerks was given a 1960
Academy Award for Technical Achievement for his improved optical printer and matte process. Iwerks and his team also spent years adapting the
xerographic process for cel animation, in order to directly
photocopy animators' pencil drawings to
animation cels, speeding up the animation process by minimizing the need to trace each drawing from paper to celluloid by hand via the "
inking" stage. First used in primitive form for
Fantasia (1940), Iwerks developed a variety of patents for applying xerography for
use in animation. The matured animation xerography process was first used in the climax of
Sleeping Beauty (1959) before being used for most of the animation for
One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). Xerography quickly became a standard procedure for the animation industry due to its cost-savings. While developing the sodium screen process for
Poppins, Iwerks was tapped by
Alfred Hitchcock to supervise the special effects for his 1963 film
The Birds. Many of the visual effects shots for
The Birds were devised and filmed by Iwerks at the Disney studio, and Iwerks was nominated for the 1964
Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. For his work on Mary Poppins, Iwerks and his team were awarded a second Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1965. == Personal life and death ==