Wilfred Jackson discusses his work on the Mickey short, The Castaway.

I wanted to animate a whole picture myself and I used to come back at night and work a lot, and if Walt was doing things he’d let me help him, like cutting, editing the pictures, and things like that. One time I caught him in a real good mood and I said, “Well, if it ever turned out that way sometime, I’d like to handle the whole picture myself.” I meant animate, but it was a misunderstanding and we never did get that cleared up. I spent all the rest of my time at the studio trying to be a director.

Anyway, my first picture was a Mickey, we called it The Castaway. When I asked Walt if I could handle the whole picture, he said, “Yeah, Jack we’ll see.” Then a while after that he called me into his office and said that thing we talked about the other night, we’re a little behind schedule and I’ve got a whole lot of clips we’ve taken out of these Mickeys and he said, “I want you to get them out of the morgue, and I want you to look at these scenes and come up with something you can do with an idea of how you can tie as many as possible together into a picture somehow.”

He also said, “I’ve got a new musician coming in and I want to find out if he’s any good, so you can work with him to see if he can do anything.” That was Frank Churchill. That was footage of Mickey playing something on a piano, and footage of a lion chasing Mickey and Mickey turned around and reached in the lion’s mouth and pulled the lion inside out so the lion was running the other way. The only way I could figure to tie this together was a Robinson Crusoe thing where he got shipwrecked and a lot of stuff was washed ashore, lions, gorillas. So we made The Castaway.

I thought, I’m not going to get to animate much of this picture, because I salvaged a lot of stuff and it worked out fine: scenes to tie one another, worked out a music score with Churchill, and Walt finally okayed it and said, “Go ahead with it Jack.” I started making layouts and took it back to my room where I used to animate before I started working on this thing and animated my first scene. I was working happily away on this and I heard Walt’s footsteps go by. He stopped, came back, and said, “What are you doing, Jack?” I said, “I’m animating my picture, Walt.” He said, “Oh yeah, Rudy Zamora is out of work, you ought to give him a scene.”

It ended up I got one scene. I no sooner got started, Walt’s footsteps went by, stopped and came back. He said, “What are you doing, Jack?” I said, “I’m animating my scene, Walt.” He said, “Oh yeah, have you thought about your next picture? You’re going to have a lot of men out of work here.” I didn’t know I was going to do another picture. We never did get that cleared up, so I spent all the rest of my time working like hell trying to keep some scenes coming out.

The fact that he salvaged this stuff…he didn’t throw anything away.

When Castaway came out, Walt, Roy, and Johnny Cannon were talking. I was there and some of the other guys were standing around. Walt had his hat way down and his coat up around his ears. He looked like a wet bird. I walked by, and on the way by I heard Roy saying, “Walt, I don’t know if we should release this, it doesn’t look like a Disney picture.” But they had to, they were behind on schedule.

Continued in "Disney Legend Wilfred Jackson"!

In a letter to his wife Jane, dated March 8, 1945, Wilfred Jackson recounts traveling with fellow animator Ken Anderson to work on the animated sequences of Song of the South.

Ken [Anderson] is homesick too, so we are comforting each other. We’ve been doing it since 6:30 last night when the train moved the first inch away from home. I can’t say we had a miserable night, however, on the contrary most of it was fun. Ken is a swell traveling companion. The private compartment on the train was just like having a tiny little house all our own on wheels. There is a toilet, wash basin, clothes closet, card table, chair and couch all neatly arranged in a space about 8 feet square. To say nothing of the wide window through which we watched the scenery zipping by at pre-war speed. After dark, Ken taught me how to play gin rummy, but he didn’t teach me well enough—he consistently beat me. In spite of the feeling of strangeness and loneliness for you and the Little Big Squab and Bug which persisted in the background, the game kept us amused until 10:30 when we decided to turn in and get a good night’s sleep.

The porter then rearranged the furniture!! The card table miraculously disappeared into the wall; the couch became a bed with two pillows! And part of the ceiling swung down to become another bed, also with two pillows!

Then we settled down to get a nice long sleep after finding out we didn’t have to get up until 7:00 in the morning. But the window wouldn’t open. Careful examination showed it wasn’t supposed to open. The air conditioning pumped nice canned air in at a temperature that was about like that in the public library. With the window shade down, it was about as pleasant as I would imagine a submarine would be. So I kept the curtain up, giving the illusion, but none of the benefit, of an open window. Of course this allowed each airplane beacon all across the desert to stab blinding flashes of light into my face each time I started to drop off to sleep. Then when I would become sufficiently accustomed to this to doze off, the train would thump, bump, jerk, rattle, bounce and shudder to a stop in front of a station illuminated by a glare of lights that would put the noonday sun to shame. After the initial shock of this 3rd degree treatment wore off, I would become so intrigued with watching the people outside, that I wouldn’t feel like going back to sleep again until just before reaching the next station.

About 3:00 a.m., I heard Ken rustling around up above in the part of the ceiling that was now a bed. I found out he wasn’t having any better luck sleeping than I was. Also he was just as miserable about being away from his family. We each told the other how unhappy and homesick we were, and mutually wondered how we could be such suckers as to be talked into working on a picture that would uproot us from our happy homes and transplant us to foreign soil. We each gained enough comfort from the other’s troubles to settle down happily to go to sleep.

At 3:30 I just closed my eyes when suddenly it was somehow 7:00 a.m. and the porter was making us get up because we were almost to Phoenix. I now know how Ginger feels in the morning. I’m sure I could have slept for two weeks solid.

We struggled out of bed and into our clothes with our heads just as clear and our outlook on life just as bright as though we had been out on a big drunk. But after a very nice breakfast life again seemed interesting, if still a trifle unusual.

With about 30 minutes until we would reach Phoenix, we returned to our bedroom, which had changed back into a combination living room, bathroom and clothes closet. It was light, so we settled down to watch the scenery again.

We looked and looked, trying to see something that looked enough like Putnam County, Georgia, to justify coming all this distance to shoot the picture, but it all looked big and flat and empty ... and very, very much like southern Arizona.

Suddenly we were in Phoenix where we were met by Dick Pfahler and a chauffeur (driver, in case the misspelling might fool you) with a big shiny Cadillac ... and whisked in the most elegant fashion imaginable two blocks to the Hotel Adams, which is filled brim-full of Disney people and Goldwyn people, all of whom greeted us like long-lost friends. They all wanted to know what was happening in Hollywood, as though they had been lost on a desert island for years, but we didn’t know of anything in particular that had happened since they were there, which seemed to be very disappointing to them.

There was no hotel room for us, so Dick Pfahler put our luggage in his room to keep it out of harm’s way while we were driven out to the set (about 5 miles out of town). On the way, we looked with even greater interest than before, to see what Putnam County, Georgia looked like. But it still all looked pretty much like Arizona to me. Then, we turned a corner on a dirt road, and there was a red dirt lane leading through a grove of stately trees, past Negros’ shacks to a large colonial mansion. It didn’t seem possible, yet there it was!

Since there seemed to be 4 or 5 days before we would start shooting any scenes that concerned the cartoon part of the picture, Ken and I spent a leisurely day cooking (and I mean cooking) in the hot sun, while looking around for the best locations in which to shoot our scenes. We were mostly waiting for tonight when we were to have a conference over the one record of the soundtrack and our sketches for our section. After the conference, if our sound and layouts were approved, we would be able to loaf around for 3 or 4 days while waiting for the duplicate acetates to be shipped out from the studio.

After the day on location, Ken and I were driven back to the hotel. I thought it best to see Perce and find out when the meeting would be tonight, before we cleaned up and went out to eat.

I found Perce. Walt was with him. During the day, they had changed the shooting schedule. Now, we are going to start shooting our scenes tomorrow!!! Instead of shooting all our scenes during two or three days, starting 3 or 4 days from now, they will shoot 1 or 2 scenes each day for 10 days. They didn’t think there was any use having a conference tonight because there wasn’t time enough to change anything now anyway. However, in about 5 minutes, Walt did talk radical changes into about half our scenes.

Ye Gods! I have only one record of the sound. If it breaks, the shooting schedule will be all mixed up again while we wait for the duplicates to arrive in 3 or 4 days, as originally planned. Our props won’t be here, so we will have to avoid using them until they arrive. The changes Walt is talking about making won’t work with the soundtrack of the song that I have with me.

Ken and I ate quick. We didn’t even bother to clean up much. Then we came back to the hotel. We both promised each other, that if we didn’t have a room yet, we were going back home and let Walt shoot his old picture himself ... even if we got fired for doing it. Unfortunately, someone was moving out of a room just as we got to the hotel and they moved us right in.

We started re-planning our sequence while they cleaned up the room, as much to their annoyance as to ours. Ken gave up and went to bed about 11:30 and I started this long beef to you. He just emitted his first snore a minute ago, so I’d better stop writing pretty soon.

Continued in "Disney Legend Wilfred Jackson"!