Storyboarding bei Disney: entwicklungen, ambitionen, ordnungsmuster

In July 2015 I was invited to deliver a keynote lecture at the ‘Storyboarding: Frames of Reference’ symposium, which was hosted by the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin. Following this keynote, which I delivered in English, I was in invited to submit this research for translation and inclusion in the book Storyboarding: Filmisches Entwerfen (2017). Building on research conducted for my co-authored monograph Storyboarding: A Critical History, this new chapter expands the discussion of Disney’s role in the development of storyboarding within Hollywood.

The storyboarding practices at The Walt Disney Company, and more specifically the storyboarding of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937), represent a key moment in the history of the storyboard form. Disney’s commitment to the storyboarding of this film redefined the production process within animation, but equally the practices employed at Disney can also be said to have made an impact on live-action pre-production via the work of William Cameron Menzies on Gone with the Wind (1939). Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released while producer David O. Selznick was making important decisions about the planning of his spectacular adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, and Selznick reportedly became interested in the idea of storyboarding this project when his vice president at Selznick International Pictures (SIP), Merian Cooper, told him about Disney’s storyboards.

When asked about the storyboarding process, Walt Disney always credited it to Webb Smith, one of his studio’s staff members. This confident assertion that the studio was deeply linked with the formation of storyboarding continues to be borne out. While Disney did play a significant role in developing and conventionalising a particular type of ‘story board’, the complex early development of the storyboard form problematises the attribution of a founding role to any one individual. It is more accurate to see the Disney studio of the late 1920s and 1930s as a site of artistic convergence, where the ‘story board’, as a physical, board-based process was adopted to help bring order to gag development, and where, consequently, an altogether different – and new – form of storyboarding developed. This book chapter traces the development of these two different storyboarding traditions at the Disney studio through the 1920s and 1930s, a time when an increasing emphasis was being placed on formalising the processes by which the studio’s animation was produced.