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decisively. His distress probably arose from that circumstance, and it may have been building for years, contributing to his repeated arguments with his closest associates.
    By 1931, Disney’s involvement even in story, the area where he concentrated his efforts after he surrendered the director’s duties to Iwerks and Gillett, had diminished with the hiring early that year of two full-time gag men, Ted Sears and Webb Smith. After so many years of animating and then directing—and, before that, years of other kinds of jobs that required working with his hands, and before that, years of manual labor, all the way back to his newspaper-delivery days—Disney now had to persuade himself of the legitimacy of purely mental work.
    He was still trying to persuade himself, a quarter century later. “People don’t . . . attach any importance to the coordinating of all the talents that go into these things,” he complained in 1956. “The vital part I played is coordinating these talents. And encouraging these talents. . . . I have an organization over there of people who are really specialists. You can’t match them anywhere in the world for what they can do. But they all need to be pulled together.”
    For Disney to be a coordinator in 1931 was especially hard because he was not leading his men toward some goal that only he could see. He was leading them toward something that even he had only a vague conception of. His new role—and his difficulties in adjusting to it—were making more complex what been a basically simple personality. Like his father, he had always been an entrepreneur by nature, with an entrepreneur’s rather diffuse urge to dominate and control. Now he was on the verge of becoming an artist, too. With that change would come an impulse to control for increasingly distinct and ambitious purposes.
    Disney passed through his crisis as the studio itself was becoming a somewhat different place, one where more of the people who worked there were taking their work seriously—not just feeling delight in the occasional well-executed scene, but striving for consistency at a higher level. There was still plenty wrong with the Disney cartoons. However much Disney may have wanted to ban rubber-hose animation, it still turned up, in quantity, in the
Mickey
called
Barnyard Olympics
, released in April 1932. More than one Disney cartoon from early 1932 brims over with obvious, cost-cutting cycles. But the tide was turning the other way.
    â€œEverybody was enthused in those days,” Ed Love said. “We’d have meetings, and Walt would talk, and everybody would yak. I remember they’d talk about simple things like how do you go from putting stuff on
twos
to on
ones
.It was a big deal, and nobody could figure out what to do.” 72 (The questions involved were when to use the same drawing for two successive exposures, or frames of film, as opposed to using a separate drawing for each frame, and how to manage the transition from one to the other.) Dick Marion (later known as Dick Hall), who worked as an inbetweener under the animator Jack King, was fired by Disney around the end of 1931 when it came out that he was looking for another job. “You had to be dedicated,” he said, “and that was not being dedicated. I shouldn’t have even thought about leaving.” 73
    Around the beginning of 1932, in a step that speaks of Disney’s new confidence in his role as coordinator, he ordered his animators to start making their animation drawings as rough sketches, rather than finished drawings, and to make pencil tests of the roughs. Until then, pencil tests were shot only after the animation was in finished form, ready to be inked on cels. In Wilfred Jackson’s recollection, it was seeing some of Norm Ferguson’s very rough animation in pencil test—animation that “read” clearly despite the sketchiness of the