Odds & Ends

Trust Michael Barrier to step in and complicate the Joe Grant story by bringing up the question of whether what is being written about him in the current round of obituaries is actually true. Barrier was prompted by the following over-the-top passage in the obituary by LaughingPlace:

Joe Grant will forever haunt animation, move audiences to tears, and swirl about our hearts like bright autumn leaves, reminding us that those who have come before us are not to be discarded and forgotten, but to be used as a source of courage and inspiration. True inspiration. Never has anyone so unassuming, so gracious and so gentle walked the halls of Disney Animation. Never has any one person - outside of Walt himself - inspired so much creative magic at Disney.

Websters would do well to slip his portrait neatly beside the definition of “gentleman.” It would have to be a lively caricature that emphasized the snowy wave of hair and apple blush cheeks that framed those jewel-brilliant eyes. Joe Grant’s face shined with a Father Christmas sort of secret knowledge of exactly what you were wishing in your heart, and for decades he granted those wishes.

A bit of hyperbole that prompted the following response from Barrier on his page:

...Joe was a gifted, intelligent, and exceptionally interesting man, but any resemblance to Santa Claus was strictly accidental, not to say misleading. It's a pity that Dick Huemer, Ward Kimball, Bill Peet, and Frank Thomas, among others, aren't around to repeat or elaborate upon the assessments of Joe and his career that I heard from them years ago; but then, one of the advantages of living to be almost ninety-seven, as Joe did, is that any skeptics among your contemporaries will most likely have been silenced long before you.

Milt Gray and I interviewed Joe Grant a number of times in the seventies and eighties, and I visited him and his wife, Jennie (who died in 1991), on other occasions. Those visits were almost always pleasant, but by the early nineties I had concluded reluctantly that I no longer liked Joe very much. I found him simply too patronizing and manipulative, the very traits that angered or annoyed a number of his Disney colleagues. I have no reason to believe that Joe was even aware that I had pulled back, much less that he cared. At the most, he would have been amused by my naivete.

Anybody who actually speaks the truth about the newly deceased is going to suffer an angry response: after all, we live in a world where even Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen can be praised in death. But I know where Barrier is coming from: writing on animation has all-too-often enshrined the myths generated by studio publicity machines or recognition-starved artists as fact. Barrier has spent decades trying to cut through that mythmaking and document animation history in a rigorous and accurate way. I can understand why he wants to correct some of the hyperbole that has embellished the obituaries.

Fortunately, though, I think there is little danger of the one-sided view of Grant solidifying into fact. My main source of information on Grant, John Canemaker's book Before the Animation Begins, is very frank about the tensions between Grant and his colleagues in the animation department. Canemaker's book, published in 1996 by Disney's own publishing label, Hyperion, but Canemaker is able to be honest enough to state that animators "thought Grant a blatant empire builder, a ruthless accumulator and consolidator of power."

People like Canemaker and Barrier deserve recognition for bringing writing on animation out of the quagmire of legend-building that it used to be, and getting people to accept that an honest history will include accounts of creative disagreements. You can't really blame Barrier for remaining vigilant.