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It goes without saying that the history of animation is riddled with groundbreaking developments and touchstone moments that Disney continues to bring to the genre. The multiplane camera brought the illusion of depth. Xerography cut animation costs and sped up production. CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) brought digital coloring, crisper animation, and CGI effects and environments, a big step forward for animation thanks to Disney’s work with Pixar. Along those lines, Disney was among the first – but not the first – to marry live-action with animation in short-form, but was the first to do so for a feature-length project, 1941’s The Reluctant Dragon, a live-action tour through Disney’s animation studio with animated sequences. Since then, Disney has utilized the hybrid in a number of films: Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and (shudder) Song of the South. There was one film, in planning well before The Reluctant Dragon, that would have predated the lot but never came to fruition. That film, of which little is known, was The Life of Hans Christian Andersen.
Disney is no stranger to the works of Hans Christian Andersen, with no less than eight interpretations of his tales present in the Disney catalog, from short-form (1939’s The Ugly Duckling, from the Silly Symphony series) to feature-length (The Little Mermaid). It isn’t surprising, then, that the studio and Walt Disney himself would have an interest in telling a biographical tale of the writer. What is surprising is the timing. Talk about a film featuring Andersen’s fairy tales first surfaced in 1937, shortly before the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a film hailed as “Disney’s folly” that literally held the fate of the studio in its hands. To that point, Disney had never made a biographical film, let alone a live-action one, so planning a future project with no promise of even having a future was bold.
‘The Life of Hans Christian Andersen’ Would Have Seen Disney & MGM Work Together
The original concept of The Life of Hans Christian Andersen was to have a film featuring multiple animated shorts based on Andersen’s works. In December 1939, two titles were registered by Disney with the Hays Office: The Story of Hans Christian Andersen and The Tales of Hans Christian Andersen. However, Samuel Goldwyn of MGM had previously registered the title The Life of Hans Christian Andersen, having initiated progress on a film in 1936. Disney agreed, but the conversation between the two Hollywood heavyweights sparked the idea of a partnership in March 1940, turning the film into a co-production. The live-action biographical moments were to be filmed by MGM, while animated segments, created by Disney, depicting his fairy tales would be intertwined in the film. The animated segments that were being developed included “The Little Mermaid”, “The Little Fir Tree”, “Through the Picture Frame”, “The Emperor’s Nightingale”, and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.”
Reportedly, the early scripts that MGM sent Disney’s way weren’t received positively. As is often the case when looking at Disney throughout its history, they favored a more likable, sincere, and interesting “character”, a caricature of Andersen, not a warts-and-all depiction of the Danish storyteller. The partnership idea cooled for a time, but the project was still very much in progress. In December 1940, a screenplay written by Larry Clemmons, titled “The Story Teller”, was submitted, which reignited the idea of the joint collaboration. In 1942, Goldwyn and some of his staff were invited to view the initial storyboards that were created for the animated segments from artists like Bill Peet and Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen. They were floored. What they had seen made them excited to move forward with the film.
‘The Life of Hans Christian Andersen’ Became a War-Time Casualty
However, Disney was headed into dire straits. Pinocchio and Fantasia were costly to make, and didn’t rule the box office like Snow White had, not helped by an international market that was largely cut off due to the threat of war. Internal disputes in the Disney studio pushed Disney’s animators to the picket line, a 5-month push for unionization. To keep the studio afloat, Disney took on the work of creating propaganda cartoons and informational military reels, like Der Fuehrer’s Face (with Donald Duck and some seriously un-PC depictions of the Axis forces) and Victory Through Air Power, for the U.S. government. The Life of Hans Christian Andersen became an afterthought to Disney, before being lost altogether. Goldwyn, however, never gave up on the project and eventually co-produced the 1952 RKO Radio Pictures musical Hans Christian Andersen, featuring the talented Danny Kaye as Andersen. The film ended up fairly similar to the original vision for it, with live-action dance sequences filling in for the animated segments.
Disney and MGM would eventually come together on a project, the Disney-MGM Studios theme park at Disney World that opened on May 1, 1989. That partnership ended amid legal battles, leading to the park becoming Disney’s Hollywood Studios in January 2008. Disney would go on to create many animation/live-action hybrid films, although the form was arguably starting to stale by the time Pete’s Dragon was released in 1977. The 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, distributed under Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, launched a new age of animation/live-action hybrid film (and proved Disney could play nice with other studios after all, with Warner Bros. characters sharing the screen with Disney’s). The continuing progress of computer animation has fused animation with live-action in a way that Walt Disney could never have imagined, a seamless interaction of two different worlds existing in one. Oddly enough, it’s that integration that is essential to the latest live-action Disney adaptation from its animated catalog, The Little Mermaid, bringing animated characters like Flounder and Sebastian to life alongside Halle Bailey‘s Ariel. The fact that the film is based on a Hans Christian Andersen story would suggest, ironically, that the tale of The Life of Hans Christian Andersen has come full circle.
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