T. Hee was never the name above the title. He directed sequences inside other people's features, and the two he is remembered for, in Pinocchio and Fantasia, are the ones where Disney let a caricaturist loose. We rate them highly and wish there were more.
Fi1m perspective
Early in Pinocchio (1940) a fox in a top hat steps into the road, sizes up a wooden boy and starts talking. His cat says nothing and does most of the acting with his face. The sequence is T. Hee's, and it is the point at which the film our review called a fable about a child lied to by every adult he meets gets its first proper liar. Everything Hee had learned drawing caricatures shows in those two: the fox is all elbows and eyebrows, the cat a bag of loose parts, and neither looks like anything else in the picture.
Hee came to Disney in 1938 with a caricaturist's training, first at Hal Roach and then as a character designer at Leon Schlesinger's studio for Warner Bros. from 1935 to 1938. Disney used him for what he was good at: the comic set pieces inside a larger feature. On Pinocchio he was sequence director; on Fantasia the same year he directed 'Dance of the Hours'. He left after the 1941 strike, came back, went to UPA in the fifties and Terrytoons in the early sixties, and from the late 1940s spent much of his time teaching, at Chouinard and then at CalArts, where he founded the character animation programme with Jack Hannah.
'Dance of the Hours' is the clearest statement of what he did. It is a ballet danced by zoo animals, and the joke is not that they are clumsy but that they are serious: the hippo in her tutu means every step. Hee drew them the way a newspaper cartoonist draws a mayor, everything essential pushed a little too far, and they move the same way. It is the funniest stretch of a film that badly needs one.
The Honest John sequence is better still, and it is the one we keep returning to. We laughed at the fox's pitch the first time and have felt worse about it with every viewing, because Hee paces the patter so that the boy never gets a word in, and the cat's mugging keeps us amused while the deal is done. That is the whole of Pinocchio in one scene: a con that plays as comedy until you notice who is being conned.
The honest caveat is that this is nearly all there is. Hee never directed a feature of his own. After 1940 his Disney credits are story work, on Victory Through Air Power (1943) and the 'Willie the Operatic Whale' segment of Make Mine Music (1946), and animation histories are kind to him without having much to point at. His larger mark may be the animators he taught. If you want to see what he did himself, put on Pinocchio and wait for the fox.
