The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story

Walt Disney hired geniuses. In recent years, the company has even begun to admit this; they don’t just hype Walt at every opportunity. Now, goodness knows the company as it is would not be what it is without Walt, and not just because, you know, it’s called Disney. Walt was the promoter and the hustler. He was the one who got things together. He arranged for the important people to come to Hollywood when he moved the studio there. Walt put in the effort, and that’s important. But there is no Walt Disney Studios without Ub Iwerks.

This documentary, narrated by Kelsey Grammer, was made by Leslie Iwerks, Ub’s granddaughter. It details the partnership between Walt and Ub. Apparently Ub’s father had a tendency of getting married, fathering children, and abandoning them; Ub was a child when he had to start supporting himself and his mother. He finally managed to go to art school, wherein he met the young Walt. The pair started several businesses together over the years, all of which failed, until Walt started the company that would bear his name. Ub initially owned a percentage, but he grew frustrated with Walt’s limitations and asked to be bought out.

Frankly, I think one of the issues with his work in the years between leaving and returning to Disney was his own creation’s success. The movie merely says that animation found its audience in children, but I think that’s because Mickey because so popular. There’s a lot of clips from Ub’s non-Disney animation, and I think there’s an audience for it now that it’s been acknowledged that animation can be for anyone. There’s even a clip with St. Peter flipping off a pilot. Tell me that wouldn’t be a hit today.

I think Ub was one of those people whose brilliance could not be confined to a single thing. He only received one competitive Oscar nomination, for The Birds—losing to Cleopatra, of all things—but he received two technical awards for his work in developing cameras to combine animation and live action. He worked on the Alice shorts, helping to develop that technique. He developed new techniques for The Three Caballeros, and then he developed even more for Mary Poppins. (Which one for Special Visual Effects, but Ub was not one of the nominees.) He was a talented animator, a heck of a gag man, and a technical genius in addition to, you know, having created Mickey Mouse.

It is worth noting that I’m referring to Ub as Ub because he is the first of three generations in his family to have worked for or with the Disney companies. His son Don, also a Disney legend, worked with his father on special effects for Disney companies. While granddaughter Leslie has also made documentaries about things like the poor in Guatemala and oil sands in Alberta, she’s done a fair amount that’s available on Disney+. This is not. I’d make a snarky statement about that fact, but since there’s barely any Walt on Disney+, either, my snark should be directed more toward how little of the company’s history is preserved there at all.