Ub Iwerks

Ub Iwerks could draw. That seems an obvious statement, I’m sure, but it’s an important distinction between him and his famous partner/employer. In fact, when the pair lost their contract to make Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts, it was Iwerks who experimented with various characters to start their new studio on. (They had, for a while some time earlier, had another one, with his name first, initially, because putting his name last made it sound like an optometrist.) After playing around with frogs, dogs, and cats, Iwerks ended up drawing a mouse that appealed to his partner/employer (the pair had both relationships over the years). He looked similar to Oswald, whom Ub had also created, but it would be his face that launched a powerhouse.

Ubbe Eert Iwwerks was born in 1901 to German-American parents. Iwwerks senior had already abandoned several wives and children, and when Iwerks was a teenager, his father left them, too. Iwerks dropped out of school and supported his mother; he later refused to tell his own son anything about his father, and when he found out his father was dead, he advised throwing the body in a ditch. Honestly, hard to blame him. In 1926, he changed his name to the simplified Ub Iwerks, another distancing between himself and his awful father.

Iwerks did a lot of the work a certain other person gets the credit for. He was chief animator at Laugh-O-Gram and did most of the animation on the Alice shorts. He, as mentioned, designed Oswald, and eventually he designed Mickey Mouse. He also did pretty much all the actual animation on the early shorts, animated “Plane Crazy” completely by himself. He also did much of the animation on others, including “Skeleton Dance.” However, while his name was on the cartoons, they weren’t listed as his cartoons. Feeling—and frankly being—unappreciated, he left and formed his own studio.

Flip the Frog had minor popularity, but Willie Whopper wasn’t popular with audiences. He did contract work for Schlesinger, and some of the Porky Pig shorts are his work, but eventually Schlesinger just increased his own studio instead. Eventually, he returned to the studio he left and reconciled with his old/new boss over lunch. Instead of animating, he was now at his own request in charge of the Special Processes and camera department, where he helped develop the techniques with which the studio would blend live action and animation into a single image or duplicate Hayley Mills.

His most notable work for a different megalomaniacal filmmaker is The Birds, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. (Somehow, he lost to Emil Kosa, Jr., for Cleopatra.) Wikipedia says he was nominated for one for Mary Poppins, but it doesn’t show on his Oscar page. The film did win, but he isn’t listed as one of the winners. Still, he won two sci-tech awards. The studio would continue to rely on the techniques he developed even after his death. I’m not saying it should be named after him, but it’s based more on his work than they want to admit.