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Ub Iwerks
Iwerks animating his most famous co-creation, Mickey Mouse c. 1929
Born	Ubbe Ert Iwerks (1901-03-24)March 24, 1901 Kansas City, Missouri, U.S.
Died	July 7, 1971(1971-07-07) (aged 70) Burbank, California, U.S.
Resting place	Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery
Occupations	Animator cartoonist film producer inventor special effects technician
Years active	1919–1971
Employers	Walt Disney Animation Studios (1923–1930, 1940–1964) Leon Schlesinger Productions (1937) Columbia Pictures (1937–1940) Cartoon Films Limited (1936–1940)
Notable work	Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Mickey Mouse Flip the Frog
Spouse	Mildred Sarah Henderson ​ ​(m. 1927⁠–⁠1971)​
Children	2, including Don Iwerks
Relatives	Leslie Iwerks (granddaughter)
Signature

Ubbe Ert Iwerks (March 24, 1901 – July 7, 1971), known as Ub Iwerks (/ˈʌb ˈaɪwɜːrks/ UB EYE-wurks), was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, known for his work with Walt Disney Animation Studios in general, and for having worked on the development of the design of the character of Mickey Mouse, among others. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentious relationship with his father, who abandoned him as a child. Iwerks met fellow artist Walt Disney while working at a Kansas City art studio in 1919.

After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, Disney and Iwerks ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character. Following the first Oswald short, both Universal Pictures and the Winkler Pictures production company insisted that the Oswald character be redesigned. At the insistence of Disney, Iwerks designed a number of new characters for the studio, including designs that would be used for Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.

One of Iwerks' most long-lasting contributions to animation was a refined version of a sketch drawn by Disney that would later go on to become Mickey Mouse. Iwerks was responsible for much of the animation for the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House, before a falling out with Disney led to Iwerks' resignation from the studio in January 1930. Iwerks' final Mickey Mouse cartoon was 1930's The Cactus Kid. Following his separation with Disney, Iwerks, operating under Iwerks Studio, created the characters Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper along with the ComiColor Cartoons series as part of a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the new studio failed to rival its competitors. Iwerks later directed two Looney Tunes cartoon shorts for Leon Schlesinger Productions and several Color Rhapsody cartoons for Screen Gems before joining Disney again in 1940, after which he worked with special visual effects on productions such as 1946's Song of the South.

Iwerks had two children, Donald Warren Iwerks and David Lee Iwerks, with his wife Mildred Sarah Henderson. Iwerks died of a heart attack in Burbank, California, in 1971 at age 70. Iwerks was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1989. His likeness has been featured in his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks' 1999 documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story as well as the 2014 feature film Walt Before Mickey, in which he is portrayed by Armando Gutierrez. Iwerks received three nominations at the Academy Awards, for which he won one. He also posthumously received the Winsor McCay Award at the 1978 Annie Awards and the Hall of Fame award at the 2017 Visual Effects Society Awards.

Early life

Iwerks was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His father was born in the village of Uttum in East Frisia (northwest Germany, today part of the municipality of Krummhörn) and emigrated to the United States in 1869 around the age of 14. The elder Iwerks, who worked as a barber, had fathered and abandoned several previous children and wives. When Ub was a teenager, his father abandoned him as well, forcing the boy to drop out of school and work to support his mother. Iwerks despised his father and never spoke of him; upon learning that he had died, he reportedly said, "Throw him in a ditch." He attended Ashland Grammar School, graduating in 1914. Ub's full name, Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, can be seen on early Alice Comedies that he signed. Several years later, he simplified his name to "Ub Iwerks", sometimes written as "U.B. Iwerks".

Career

Disney work (1919–1929)

Iwerks spent most of his career with Disney. The two met in 1919 while working for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City, and eventually started their own commercial art business together. Disney and Iwerks then found work as illustrators for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company (which was later named The Kansas City Film Ad Company). While working for the Kansas City Film Ad Company, Disney decided to take up work in animation, and Iwerks soon joined him. There he attached a motor drive to the camera with a switch that resembled a telegraph key, reducing the number of people needed to animate from two to just one.

Iwerks was responsible for the distinctive style of the earliest Disney animated cartoons, and was also responsible for designing Mickey Mouse. In 1922, when Disney began his Laugh-O-Gram cartoon series, Iwerks joined him as chief animator. The studio went bankrupt, however, and in 1923 Iwerks followed Disney's move to Los Angeles to work on a new series of cartoons known as "the Alice Comedies" which had live-action mixed with animation. After the end of this series, Disney asked Iwerks to design a character that became Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The first cartoon Oswald starred in was animated entirely by Iwerks. Following the first cartoon, Oswald was redesigned on the insistence of Oswald's owner and the distributor of the cartoons, Universal Pictures. The production company at the time, Winkler Pictures, gave additional input on the character's design.

In spring 1928, Disney was removed from the Oswald series, and much of his staff was hired away to Winkler Pictures. He promised to never again work with a character he did not own. Disney asked Iwerks, who stayed on, to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of frogs, dogs, and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were created at this time by Iwerks, but were also rejected. They later turned up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. Ub Iwerks eventually got inspiration from an old drawing. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. Then, on a train ride back from a failed business meeting, Walt Disney came up with the original sketch for the character that was eventually called Mickey Mouse. Afterward, Disney took the sketch to Iwerks. In turn, he drew a more clean-cut and refined version of Mickey, but one that still followed the original sketch.

The first few Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons were animated almost entirely by Iwerks, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House. However, as Iwerks began to animate more and more cartoons on a daily basis, he chafed under Disney's leadership. Iwerks also felt he was not getting the credit he deserved for drawing all of Disney's successful cartoons. Eventually, Iwerks and Disney had a falling out; their friendship and working partnership were severed in January 1930. According to an unconfirmed account, a child approached Disney and Iwerks at a party and asked for a picture of Mickey to be drawn on a napkin, to which Disney handed the pen and paper to Iwerks and stated, "Draw it." Iwerks became furious and threw the pen and paper, storming out. Iwerks accepted a contract with Disney's former distributor, Pat Powers to leave Disney and start an animation studio under his own name. His last Mickey Mouse cartoon was Wild Waves (1929) and final Disney film was the Silly Symphony Autumn (1930). (Powers and Disney had an earlier falling-out over Disney's use of the Powers Cinephone sound-on-film system—actually copied by Powers from DeForest Phonofilm without credit—in early Disney cartoons.)

After Disney (1930–1940)

The Iwerks Studio opened in 1930. Financial backers led by Pat Powers suspected that Iwerks was responsible for much of Disney's early success. However, while animation for a time suffered at Disney from Iwerks' departure, it soon rebounded as Disney brought in talented new young animators.

Despite a contract with MGM to distribute his cartoons, and the introduction of a new character named Flip the Frog and later Willie Whopper, the Iwerks Studio was never a major commercial success and failed to rival either Disney or Fleischer Studios. Newly hired animator Fred Kopietz recommended that Iwerks employ a friend from Chouinard Art School, Chuck Jones, who was hired and put to work as a cel washer. The Flip and Willie cartoons were later distributed on the home-movie market by Official Films in the 1940s.

From 1933 to 1936, he produced a series of shorts (independently distributed, not part of the MGM deal) in Cinecolor, named ComiColor Cartoons. The ComiColor series mostly focused on fairy tales with no continuing character or star. Later in the 1940s, this series received home-movie distribution by Castle Films. Cinecolor produced the 16 mm prints for Castle Films with red emulsion on one side and blue emulsion on the other. Later in the 1970s Blackhawk Films released these for home use, but this time using conventional Eastmancolor film stock. They are now in the public domain and are available on VHS and DVD. He also experimented with stop-motion animation in combination with the multiplane camera, and made a short called The Toy Parade, which was never released in public. In 1936, backers withdrew financial support from the Iwerks Studio, and it folded soon after.

In 1937, Leon Schlesinger Productions contracted Iwerks to produce four Looney Tunes shorts starring Porky Pig and Gabby Goat. Iwerks directed the first two shorts, while former Schlesinger animator Robert Clampett was promoted to director and helmed the other two shorts before he and his unit returned to the main Schlesinger lot. Iwerks then did contract work for Screen Gems (then Columbia Pictures' cartoon division) where he was the director of several of the Color Rhapsody shorts before returning to work for Disney in 1940.

Return to Disney (1940–1964)

After his return to the Disney studio, Iwerks mainly worked on developing special visual effects. He is credited as developing the processes for combining live-action and animation used in Song of the South (1946), as well as the xerographic process adapted for cel animation, which was used in 101 Dalmatians (1961). He also worked at WED Enterprises, now Walt Disney Imagineering, helping to develop many Disney theme park attractions during the 1960s. Iwerks did special effects work outside the studio as well, including the birds for his Academy Award nominated achievement for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Iwerks' last credit for Disney was for perfecting the travel matte system for the Mary Poppins sequence "Feed the Birds" Iwerks' most famous work, outside animating Mickey Mouse, was Flip the Frog from his own studio. While he was at Disney, he developed a variety of patents for applying Xerography for use in animation.

Personal life

Iwerks had two children with his wife, Mildred (née Henderson): Donald and David. Donald went on to work for the Walt Disney company and to found Iwerks Entertainment. His granddaughter is documentary film producer Leslie Iwerks. David Iwerks became a portrait photographer.

Iwerks died in 1971 from a heart attack in Burbank, California, aged 70, and his ashes are interred in a niche in the Columbarium of Remembrance at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills Cemetery. The last project he worked on was the Hall of Presidents.

Influence and tributes

The Ub Iwerks Award for Technical Achievement, as part of the Annie Awards, is named in his honour.

A rare self-portrait of Iwerks was found in the garbage bin at an animation studio in Burbank. The portrait was saved and is now part of the Animation Archives in Burbank, California.

After World War II, much of Iwerks' early animation style was imitated by legendary manga artists Osamu Tezuka and Shotaro Ishinomori.

In 1989, Iwerks was named a Disney legend.

In the 1996 The Simpsons episode "The Day the Violence Died", a relationship similar to Iwerks' early relationship with Walt Disney is used as the main plot.

A documentary film, The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story, was released in 1999, followed by a book written by Iwerks' granddaughter Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy in 2001. The documentary, created by Leslie Iwerks, was released as part of The Walt Disney Treasures, Wave VII series (disc two of The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit collection).

A feature film released in 2014, Walt Before Mickey, showed how Ub Iwerks, portrayed by Armando Gutierrez, and Walt Disney, portrayed by Thomas Ian Nicholas, co-created Mickey Mouse.

The sixth episode from the second season of Drunk History ("Hollywood") tells about Ub's work relationship with Disney, with stress on the creation of Mickey Mouse. Iwerks was portrayed in the episode by Tony Hale.

Filmography

1922

1923

1924

1925

1926

1927

1928

1929

1930

1931

1932

1933

1934

1935

All Comicolor shorts

1936

All Comicolor shorts

1937–1940

• Contract work to Leon Schlesinger Productions – two cartoons
• Contract work to Screen Gems/Columbia Pictures – 17 cartoons (Iwerks was only personally involved with 16 of the Color Rhapsody series, the last cartoon in the deal was completed by Paul Fennell after Iwerks had left his own studio)
• In 1940, Iwerks produced his last series, Gran'pop Monkey, featuring the art of British illustrator Lawson Wood. Three cartoons were made: "A Busy Day", "Beauty Shoppe" and "Baby Checkers".

Accolades

See also

• Walt Disney (2015 PBS film)

Notes

1. For example in the opening credits of Little Black Sambo (1935)

References

1. ^ Korkis, Jim (July 1, 2020). "Who Was Ub Iwerks?". Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
2. "'Minitoons' from Cartoon Films LTD/ Animated Cartoons Inc". April 7, 2016. Archived from the original on May 2, 2022. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
3. "Mildred Sarah Henderson 1899–7 July 1971 (Age 72)". FamilySearch. Retrieved February 22, 2023.
4. ^ Lenburg 1993, p. 25.
5. "Ub Iwerks | American Animator and Special-Effects Technician". Britannica.com. Archived from the original on September 10, 2017. Retrieved December 26, 2021.
6. Iwerks & Kenworthy 2001.
7. Gabler 2006, p. 46.
8. Gabler 2006, pp. 47–50.
9. Gabler 2006, p. 50.
10. Gabler 2006, p. 56.
11. Gabler 2006, p. 58.
12. Burnes, Av Brian; Viets, Dan; Butler, Robert W. (2002). Walt Disney's Missouri: The Roots of a Creative Genius. Kansas City Star Books. ISBN 9780971708068 – via Google Books.
13. ^ Maltin 1987.
14. Apgar 2015, pp. 34–37, 61.
15. Gabler 2006, p. 109.
16. Gabler 2006, p. 53.
17. Iwerks & Kenworthy 2001, p. 54.
18. Apgar 2015, p. 76.
19. Apgar 2015, pp. 80–81.
20. Gabler 2006, p. 143.
21. Gabler 2006, p. 144.
22. Not!, Ripley's Believe It or. "Wonderfully Weird Facts You Want To Know About Walt Disney". Lethbridge News Now. Retrieved May 7, 2023.
23. Kaufman, J.B.; Gerstein, David (2018). Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: The Ultimate History. Cologne: Taschen. p. 53. ISBN 978-3-8365-5284-4.
24. Ryan, Jeff (2018). A Mouse Divided: How Ub Iwerks Became Forgotten, and Walt Disney Became Uncle Walt. Post Hill Press. pp. 181, 184. ISBN 978-1-68261-628-4.
25. Telotte, J. P. (2008). The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 9780252033278 – via Google Books.
26. Counts, Kyle B.; Rubin, Steve (Fall 1980). "The Making of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds". Cinefantastique. Vol. 10, no. 2. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
27. Marks, Scott (May 19, 2016). "Fiddlesticks Flips Flip in First Color Cartoon". San Diego Reader. Archived from the original on May 2, 2022. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
28. "USPTO Search Results for Iwerks and Xerographic".
29. "Untold with Leslie Iwerks". Disney. May 12, 2020. Archived from the original on July 22, 2023. Retrieved July 22, 2023 – via YouTube.
30. Iwerks, David Lee. "John F. Kennedy, Head-and-Shoulders Portrait, Facing Slightly Left". Library of Congress. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
31. Iwerks, David Lee. "Charles Richter with Seismogram". calisphere. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
32. "Dave Iwerks Catches Great in the Eye of His Perceptive Camera". Hollywood Studio Magazine. Sherman Oaks, CA: San Fernando Valley Pub. Co. November 1966. Retrieved March 7, 2022. via: archive.org
33. Iwerks, David Lee. "Upton Sinclair, Half-Length Portrait, Facing Right". Library of Congress. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
34. "23 Things You Can Find in Walt Disney's Office Suite". Disney News. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
35. "Celebrating Ed Wynn: Walt Disney's Partner in Laughter". The Walt Disney Family Museum. January 19, 2017. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
36. Copyright Office (1962). Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third series. Library of Congress. p. 224. Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
37. Spry, Jeff (February 1, 2020). "The Son of Mickey Mouse's Co-Creator Opens Up the Book on Disney Classics". Syfy Wire. Archived from the original on May 2, 2022. Retrieved May 2, 2022.
38. "The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story (1999)". The Walt Disney Family Museum. Archived from the original on March 8, 2022. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
39. "The Hand Behind the Mouse: Stories of Ub with Don and Leslie Iwerks". The Walt Disney Family Museum. Archived from the original on March 8, 2022. Retrieved March 8, 2022.
40. "Preserved Projects". Academy Film Archive. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on May 6, 2022. Retrieved May 20, 2020.
41. Stanchfield, Steve (March 20, 2014). "'Beauty Shoppe' (1940) with Gran' Pop Monkey". Cartoon Research. Archived from the original on January 16, 2019. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
42. Lenburg 1993, p. 88.

Sources

• Apgar, Garry (December 22, 2015). Mickey Mouse: Emblem of the American Spirit. San Francisco, CA: Weldon Owen. ISBN 978-1-61628-672-9. OCLC 1349253324 – via Internet Archive.
• Gabler, Neal (2006). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-26596-8. OCLC 232315401.
• Iwerks, Leslie; Kenworthy, John D. (2001). The hand behind the mouse : an intimate biography of the man Walt Disney called "the greatest animator in the world". New York: Disney Editions. ISBN 978-0-7868-5320-5. OCLC 44669781.
• Lenburg, Jeff (1993). "Ub Iwerks". The Great Cartoon Directors. New York: Da Capo Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-306-80521-9. OCLC 1035310767 – via Internet Archive.
• Maltin, Leonard (1987) . Of Mice and Magic. New York, NY: Plume. ISBN 978-0-452-25993-5. OCLC 1319416533 – via Internet Archive.

Further reading

• Boje, David M. (August 1995). "Stories of the Storytelling Organization: A Postmodern Analysis of Disney As "Tamara -Land"" (PDF). Academy of Management Journal. 38 (4): 997–1035. doi:10.5465/256618 (inactive November 1, 2024). Retrieved March 8, 2022.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
• Iwerks, Don; Maltin, Leonard (2019). Walt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: the Genius of Ub Iwerks. Los Angeles: Disney Editions. ISBN 978-1-4847-4337-9. OCLC 1133108493.
• Iwerks, Leslie (December 17, 2008). "The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story". via: TCM. Leslie Iwerks Productions, Walt Disney Pictures.

External links

• Media related to Ub Iwerks at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by or about Ub Iwerks at Wikisource
• Ub Iwerks at IMDb 
• Ub Iwerks at Inducks
• Ub Iwerks at Find a Grave

• 1901 births
• 1971 deaths
• Recipients of the Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit
• American comic strip cartoonists
• American comics artists
• American people of Frisian descent
• American animated film directors
• American animated film producers
• Animators from Missouri
• Burials at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills)
• Disney imagineers
• Film directors from Missouri
• Walt Disney Animation Studios people
• Artists from Kansas City, Missouri
• American special effects people
• Disney comics artists
• Warner Bros. Cartoons directors
• Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners
• Laugh-O-Gram Studio people
• Disney Legends