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drawing—that spurred Disney to order the change. 74
    Kendall O’Connor, who as a Disney layout artist knew Ferguson a few years later, described him to Mark Langer as “a typical New Yorker, high pressure and very fast. I think he thought we were all too slow out here. . . . He twiddled his hair, a little forelock, with a finger all the time he talked to you. He was a very nervous chap.” 75 That nervous energy probably found a readier outlet in rapid sketching than in finished drawings.
    â€œBy encouraging Fergy to concentrate on the
actions
with rough drawings and assigning to him an excellent draftsman to clean up his animation drawings,” Jackson wrote, “Walt felt Fergy was able to produce better quality as well as great quantity of outstanding animation. Walt felt, also, that it should work this same way for his other animators and let them know he expected them to do their animation in the same way, too.” 76
    Ferguson was possibly not the first Disney animator whose work was cleaned up by others, Jackson said. But “I do recall Fergy’s use of a cleanup assistant being held up as
the
example of how he wanted all the other animators to work by Walt, when some of them were reluctant to adopt that method.” 77 Before Disney’s edict, by the time he saw a scene in pencil test it was so far along the road toward ink and paint that his criticisms must have frequently been more relevant to the animator’s next assignment than to the scene at hand. But now he could use pencil tests of rough animation to get at his animators’ work before it was too late to make major changes. “Walt felt that if you roughed out an action,” Les Clark said, “you could see much faster whether it would turn out the way Walt wanted it to. If it didn’t, discardit, and make changes. You didn’t have to throw away a lot of cleaned-up work.” 78
    By insisting that they draw their animation roughly, Disney was encouraging his animators to think in terms of movement, rather than individual drawings. “The hardest job,” he said in 1956, “was to get the guys to quit fooling around with these individual drawings and to think of the group of drawings in an action. They couldn’t resist when they had a drawing in front of them that they had to keep noodling.”
    Some among the New York animators, especially, showed a taste for essentially mechanical solutions to animation’s problems. Dave Hand, when animating something like a flock of birds in
Flowers and Trees
(1932), “would chart it out,” Dick Lundy said, so that the birds moved not in flowing, slightly irregular movements that would suggest real life, but in robotic patterns instead. 79 It was probably in Jack King’s work that those old ways of animating collided most conspicuously with the new ways that Disney was cultivating.
    Chuck Couch, one of the young Californians who began populating the Disney studio’s lower ranks in the early 1930s, was King’s assistant, and he remembered King as “a meticulous draftsman; he didn’t rough stuff out very much. He’d always make very clean drawings.” 80 When King joined the staff in 1929, such “clean drawings” were highly valued because the inkers had so little difficulty tracing them onto cels. Dick Lundy, who was also hired in 1929, remembered that one reason he got his job was that “they liked my line. I had a hard line, which was great for inking.” 81 King’s drawings, though, were not simply clean, but rigid. King traced one coin for Mickey Mouse’s head and another for his belly—small coins for long shots, larger coins for closer shots—and, as Wilfred Jackson said, “that made a real stiff little character.” 82 Les Clark saw Ben Sharpsteen, too, use coins to draw Mickey’s head. 83 Such expedients weighed against moving the animation in the direction