PrintMindy Aloff is a dedicated member of Barnard’s dance faculty, and a published writer. She has contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Nation, the Dance View Times, and Voice of Dance, among other publications. She has published several books related to dance, and her most recent, Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation, explores the intricate relationship between Disney animation and choreography. From Disney shorts to full-length, modern movies, Aloff examines the way dance is used by Disney and what it means for the viewer. Zach Dyer talks with Aloff about the hippos, ducks, and implications of Disney’s choreographed animation.
Where did the concept for this book come from?
Christopher Caines—then an editor at Disney Editions [the publisher of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation] and, as I note in the acknowledgments, the author of the book’s title—had been thinking about the idea of such a study for several years. As it happened, I’d also been thinking about the topic, and for well over a decade. When I wrote a small weekly, unsigned column on dance for the New Yorker in the early 1990s, one of those little essays was devoted to a discussion of dancing in animation, with an emphasis on Disney. Christopher knew about my column, and he recommended me to Wendy Lefkon, the editorial director at Disney Editions. I wrote a proposal and then met with Wendy and her staff. They liked what I suggested, and felt that even though I was a dance person and not an animation expert, I was capable of learning enough about animation on the job to produce a useful book.
How long did this project take you?
Around five years, including three trips of a full week each to Disney archives in California.
Is this a topic that has always interested you?
Yes! That’s what the book’s introduction is mostly about. Disney’s feature-length animated film Peter Pan was the second movie I ever saw. I grew up with many of the shorts and features, including the ones from the 1930s and ’40s in their theatrical re-releases, as well as the TV programs and the live-action films. At the same time, I saw many animated shorts from the Fleischer and Warner Bros. studios. I found them all enchanting; they were funny, and strange—even haunting, sometimes, in the case of the Fleischer films—and I was enraptured by the idea that lines and patches of color could, when moved around by craftsmen who knew what they were doing, be so magical and entertaining.
However, the Disney animated films were something more; perhaps the word is “thoughtful.” They were driven by story and character, and their narratives unfolded both patiently and logically. Also, so many of the Disney films in particular were musical. Music and movement lead irresistibly to dancing in Disney pictures; and since I not only studied dance from an early age, but was also encouraged by my family to read about dance history, and was taken to see all kinds of dance in the theater from the time I was in elementary school, my love of animation and my love of dance converged in the Disney films.
What do you want people to get out of this book?
I’d like readers to get an inkling of how complex and difficult it is to choreograph, and to dance, and to compose, and to produce an animated film, so that they will have respect for animation that even attempts to combine them. I’d like for readers today, many of whom write off animation in general as “kiddie stuff,” to think again about the value of films that are made for general audiences. I’d very much like people who dismiss Disney pictures for various political reasons to be made aware of how decisions were actually made on some of the historical films, especially the ones where Walt Disney himself had tremendous input. And I’d like intellectuals who routinely dismiss both dancing and animation as not worth their time to take a moment before they project their preconceptions on these arts. But the thing I’d most like readers to find in this book is pleasure that perhaps makes them want to learn more about dancing and animation, and that stimulates them to seek out the films.
There was obviously a lot of research involved in the writing of this book. How was it, working so closely with the people at Disney?
Heaven. I’ve tried to name everyone I worked with at Disney in Hippo’s acknowledgments. From the top animator Andreas Deja to a student intern named Steve Vagnini, they kindly and patiently tutored me. I learned a lot there about devotion, as well as about animation.
Why is there so much choreography in Disney animated films?
The mission of Disney animation is to give the “illusion of life.” As a variety of motion, dancing is useful in pursuit of such a mission. However, it’s important to remember, too, that Walt Disney was committed to the best in music, and music plus movement equals dance. Furthermore, the top priority for a Disney animated picture is to tell a story, with a clear beginning, middle, and end, and to tell it through visual art, whose principles are based on the art of older masters. You can’t speak of such art without speaking of design, patterning, in time as well as space, in the case of animation. Choreography is the design of bodies in space and time. It furthers the key mission of the entire enterprise.
What was it about the Hyacinth Hippo that made you want her as the representation of your book as a whole?
She has the most complex choreography of any animated character in the Disney canon, she’s a star personality, and her character—now flirtatious, now vulnerable, now assertive, now meek—is quite complex as well. And we know everything we know about her entirely through her dancing.
What is your favorite choreographed number from a Disney film?
I have three favorites: the “Dance of the Hours” in Fantasia, the Carioca in the Silly Symphonies’ Cock o’ the Walk, and the jitterbug-truckin’ number in the short Mr. Duck Steps Out. I name them because the music and the dancing are two aspects of the same energy, because the dancing figures are presented with fantastical sensitivity and nuance, and because the choreography is very fine. Close to them in my affections are the minuet-jitterbug for Ichabod Crane and Katrina Van Tassle in the featurette The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the “Nutcracker Suite” in Fantasia, and the utterly magical construction by forest animals of the heroine’s dress in Cinderella. That scene, and not the ballroom scene, contains the picture’s true dance number, and it’s enchanting.