Ub Iwerks ( ; born Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, March 24, 1901 – July 7, 1971) was an American animator, cartoonist, film director, film producer, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician. He was widely known for his early work with Walt Disney Productions, especially for having worked on the creation of Mickey Mouse and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, among other characters.
Iwerks met Walt Disney in 1919 while working at an art studio in Kansas City, Missouri. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, they ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. At Winkler Pictures, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. One of Iwerks's most long-lasting contributions to animation was a refined version of a sketch drawn by Disney that would later go on to become Mickey Mouse. Iwerks was responsible for much of the animation for the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House, before a falling out with Disney led to Iwerks's resignation from the studio in January 1930.
Following his separation with Disney, Iwerks founded Animated Pictures and produced the Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper series as part of a contract between Celebrity Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the new studio failed to rival its competitors. An independent series of Cinecolor ComiColor Cartoons were also not successful in the long term. The studio was later reorganized in 1937. Subsequently, Iwerks directed two Looney Tunes cartoon shorts for Leon Schlesinger Productions and over a dozen Color Rhapsody cartoons for Screen Gems from his studio as contract work before joining Disney again in 1940. As head of Disney's Special Processes and Camera department, Iwerks developed visual effects processes on productions such as Song of the South (1946), Mary Poppins (1964), and even Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). He also adapted the xerography process to be able to photocopy animation pencil drawings onto animation cels and contributed technical solutions to Disney's WED Enterprises group (now Walt Disney Imagineering) for Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and 1964 World's Fair attractions.
Iwerks had two children, Donald Warren and David Lee, with his wife Mildred Sarah Henderson. Iwerks died of a heart attack in Burbank, California, in 1971 at age 70. Iwerks was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1989. His likeness has been featured in his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks' 1999 documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story as well as the 2014 feature film Walt Before Mickey, in which he is portrayed by Armando Gutierrez. Iwerks received nominations for three Academy Awards, for which he won two. He also posthumously received the Winsor McCay Award at the 1978 Annie Awards and the Hall of Fame award at the 2017 Visual Effects Society Awards. Iwerks is considered one of the greatest animators of all time.
Early life Iwerks was born Ubbe Ert Iwwerks in Kansas City, Missouri. His father, Ert Ubbén Iwwerks, was born in the village of Uttum in East Frisia (northwest Germany, today part of the municipality of Krummhörn) and immigrated to the United States in 1869 around the age of 14. The elder Iwwerks, who worked as a barber, had abandoned several previous wives and children. When Ub Iwerks was a teenager, his father abandoned him as well, forcing the boy to drop out of school and work to support his mother. Iwerks despised his father and never spoke of or saw him again; upon learning that he had died, he reportedly said, "Throw him in a ditch." Years later, when Iwerks's son Don asked about his grandfather, Ub stopped Don, telling him "We don't talk about that."
Ub Iwerks attended Ashland Grammar School, graduating in 1914. Ub's full name, Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, can be seen on early Alice Comedies that he signed. After moving to Hollywood in 1924, he began simplifying his name to "Ub Iwerks", sometimes written as "U.B. Iwerks", and legally changed his name to "Ub Iwerks" in 1926.
Career 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.
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. At Disney's request, Iwerks designed 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,: "The real inspiration for centralizing the mouse in the cartoons and the model for his rough design, according to several of Walt’s associates, including Iwerks, were the drawings of Clifton Meek, whose work ran regularly in the popular humor magazines Life and Judge, which Walt, Roy, and Iwerks were riffling through at the time. 'I grew up with those drawings,' Walt told an interviewer. 'They were different from ours—but they had cute ears.'" 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.
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 a 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 start 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.