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When Jerry met Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly taught Jerry how to dance!
Don't you love an Old Hollywood movie, with glamorous costumes and big dance numbers? Sometimes when talking about the Golden Age of Animation, we forget that it occurred at the same time as Old Hollywood - and this is a story about the two worlds colliding in the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh. It all started when actor Gene Kelly decided that he wanted to dance with a cartoon mouse.
The movie follows two sailors on leave in Hollywood, where Kelly's character, Joe Brady, visits a school where the children ask him how he won his medals. He quickly tells them a story about how he visited a grumpy little king who outlawed singing and dancing, and taught the king how to sing and dance. The scene is composed in a way that takes place in the children's imagination as Kelly tells them the story, so it's a mystical land filled with animated scenery and talking animals. Kelly originally approached Walt Disney to try to have Mickey Mouse play the king. Disney turned him down flat, so Kelly went to the next up-and-coming cartoon mouse, Jerry! Kelly went to Tom and Jerry producer Fred Quimby, who also turned him down!
According to Bill Hanna's memoir A Cast of Friends, Kelly next approached Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera: "When Gene walked into our office, it was apparent that he was brimming with creative enthusiasm about something. 'Bill! Joe!' was the opener delivered with a grin and an Irish lilt. 'Gotta way to make your little mouse Jerry into a star!" Hanna and Barbera argued that Jerry was already a star, but they were excited by the idea.
As a team, Hanna and Barbera had developed the method of limited animation and were trying to test new methods of creating animation. Hanna said of the concept, "Including animation figures in live action sequences had been done in a limited form in the past, but here was a chance to combine the two mediums in a really sparkling and spectacular way." Hanna and Barbera wanted to say yes to Gene Kelly, but Quimby was their boss, and they had to go with his decision.
Ever-determined, Gene Kelly decided to go straight to the top for this one. He asked Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM Studios, to put Jerry in the film. Mayer approved the idea, and suddenly Hanna and Barbera were on set with Gene Kelly. They created the scene by choreographing Kelly's dance scene, filming it, and creating a first draft pencil animation to show where Jerry would go in the scene. Once that had Kelly's approval, Hanna, Barbera, and their team set out animating Jerry in the dance scene. Jerry also talks in this movie, having to explain his dilemma as a king with no dance skills. Sara Berner was a natural choice to voice King Jerry; she had voiced him in other cartoons like The Zoot Cat and The Mouse Comes to Dinner. She also acted in cartoons for Warner Bros., Walter Lantz Productions, and Walt Disney Productions.
The film turned out to be highly popular, and critics loved the surprise of seeing Jerry in the movie. Hanna reflected on the Anchors Aweigh, "The sequence turned out to be the highlight of the movie and its popular success encouraged the hope in both Joe and me that we would be able to work on other combined live-action/animation projects." With the success of Anchors Aweigh, Hanna and Barbera proved that a live-action film could feature animated characters in a high-quality and engaging way, and it set the bar for later live-action/animation crossovers like Mary Poppins, Space Jam, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
