WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY, 52 Years Later

a rare film by Walt Kelly that I helped preserve

In 1971, for the second-ever Earth Day, Walt Kelly released a 12-minute animated short film that he made with his wife Selby Kelly. Its title is based on a famous POGO poster and comic that appeared on the very first Earth Day in 1970.  

Walt Kelly with Pogo, and Pogo with the (polluted) Okefenokee Swamp. Kelly photo from 1953. Pogo Poster for Earth Day, 1970.

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US was distributed to high school libraries. I saw it and was very impressed.

Kelly's animation is stunning. He was one of the all time greats. Selby was art director and her son Scott Daley wrote the final music.

The film was nearly impossible to see for many years, but amazingly, it’s now back online. 

Here it is. The sound is a bit low, so some of the dialogue may be hard to hear. Kelly is doing all of the voices.

The 12 minute version that was shown in my high school Environmental Science class, and many other classes. Kelly’s animation on Mr. Pig is some of the finest animated acting I’ve ever seen, and Selby’s colored pencil work is superb.

In 1979 I started working for Zander's Animation Parlour in New York. I was 21 years old. One day our production manager told me that one of the assistants wanted to speak to me.

I wasn’t happy to hear that. I’d had a problem earlier that month with an assistant who phoned me to complain that my dialogue animation was ‘totally wrong!’ I replied that I couldn’t analyze drawings over the phone. When I met with him it turned out that he objected that the character’s mouth shapes were not exactly like the ones in the Preston Blair book The character was two inches high and had a long beard. His mouth was a hole in the beard with one tooth. The lipsynch was phrased, and worked just fine. I told this person that ‘This had better be a joke’, checked every drawing to see that he had not screwed everything up, and asked the production manager to get me a new assistant.

This proved to be a blessing in disguise. The new assistant was Selby Kelly, and when she contacted the production manager and asked to speak to me it was not to complain; she liked the animation she was getting and wanted to know who this new young female animator was.

Selby’s career began in the thirties when she had her first illustrated book published when she was only 18 years old. She applied for an animation trainee position at the Disney Studio in 1936 and was told ‘Go across to the Ink and Paint Building. We don’t hire female animators.”

Selby became head paint mixer (Disney made their own paint) for the first four Disney features. You can see her in one scene in THE RELUCTANT DRAGON. Selby was also one of the participants in the 1941 strike. (She was dating Art Babbitt at the time and knew everything about what was going on.) Later on she was the second president of an animation union and was a producer, with her first husband Roger Daley, of short films in a studio located in Mexico. She drew the POGO comic for two years after Walt Kelly died, working with his daughter Caroline Kelly.

We became friends. One day Selby said casually, "Kelly and I made a film together. Would you like to see it?" (She always called him Kelly).

Of course I would love to see WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY again, I replied. I had a 16mm projector in my apartment and invited Selby for dinner and the screening.

I immediately noticed something odd about the reel. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY was only 12 minutes long, yet this reel was double the length, nearly 30 minutes (Before digital media we could measure the length of film by how much space it took up on a reel.)

Now in those ancient days when film was on actual film, you had to check the first 30 feet to be sure there were no tears or bad splices. Badly maintained projectors with dirty gates or nicked pulldown claws…(look it up) could really tear a print up. My 1955 Kodak projector was kept in tip top condition.

I checked the first 30 feet and replaced one bad splice. "There seem to be a lot of them," I remarked.

"Oh, this is the work picture. There are no other copies," Selby replied.

 My guts turned to ice. I checked the entire reel. It was obvious that this was a completely different movie.

I threaded up the projector and threw the ‘on’ switch…and worried.

 I had nothing to worry about, but I sure had something to look at.

This was a story reel with filmed storyboards and Kelly reading the script, and a 'needle drop' track. (canned temp music) It was  twice as long as the released version because it had a horrific dream sequence that was cut and a decidedly downbeat ending that was sweetened up for the 12 minute version.

Although they were both at Disney’s in the thirties, Selby only met Walt Kelly when they both worked on Chuck Jones’ POGO SPECIAL BIRTHDAY SPECIAL in 1969.  Kelly was not happy with the project; the animation was not the quality that he wanted. In all fairness, even then, there were budget and animation cutbacks from the glory days of HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS done just three years earlier. Television animation did not have feature budgets, especially without sponsors.

“Let’s make a film the way WE want to make it,” Kelly told Selby.

And so they did. Kelly drew the boards. Selby provided the color.

Kelly produced the reel himself and hoped to find a sponsor for his original television special. He did not have a lot of money, so he rented a sound studio and read the entire script, cold; then hired a cameraman to film the storyboards for the Leica. It was a complicated process, and it was done in 16mm because it was cheaper than 35mm film. 16mm film could also be shown on a standard projector in corporate boardrooms and television studio ‘screening rooms’.

Walt Kelly could not find a sponsor. No TV network in the USA, then or now, would have produced his very depressing (and sadly prescient) story. He got backing from a NGO for a 12 minute version, cut out the horror sequence and gave it an upbeat ending. He published this book and this famous cartoon in 1971 when the short film was released (as mentioned before, it was shown only in educational venues; it was never broadcast on television.)

Walt Kelly’s 1971 book was a tie in with the film. The basic story is here, along with additional material. Caricatures on the cover, l. to r.: FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Attorney General John Mitchell, Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The book was released at the same time as the film; this famous cartoon appeared on Earth Day 1971 and is based on the poster from the year before.

That short version has a link above. Watch it, if you have not already done so, and then continue with this article.

In 1991 I was directing a TV show for Warner Brothers New York. Selby was planning to move West and leave the city. She still had her print of WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY.

I contacted producer Greg Ford and said "We have to transfer this film to tape before it disappears forever."

Greg had the 16mm print transferred to video and gave the Kelly family the Beta tape.

They released the film on VHS in 1992. Here it is.

This is the 27 minute version of WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY that I projected in my New York apartment in 1980. I was the first person to see it since 1969, when Kelly pitched it, without success, to the television networks.

A word about the soundtrack: Kelly couldn't afford to hire a session director. So the soundman was the only person in the booth. The soundman never told Kelly when to cut or do a retake. "He read the script cold, and was getting madder and madder, because he wanted the man to tell him when he made a mistake," Selby told me. (Kelly was a big bear of a man who took absolutely no crap from anyone—he’d stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover!) and he obviously intimidated the sound man, who was too scared to tell him when he needed to do a retake.

So, Kelly read the entire script in one 27 minute long take. You can actually hear him turning the pages. The sound on this version is far clearer than on the 12-minute version.

 He made mistakes but kept on going. This is what a good story pitch man does. I was amazed by how effortlessly Kelly switches between character voices.  There are some hilarious ‘saves’ when he makes a mistake, and some amusing directorial notes. (“We truck in, from a rare medium long-shot…”)

POGO characters often spoke their own version of English.  Kelly made up words such as ‘scooterbaggle’ and ‘rowrbazzfazz’. These are not mistakes.

This  film is the only recorded example of a Golden Age Disney Studio Story man doing a pitch. All that’s missing is Kelly, with a pointer, standing by your screen, indicating the frames as they pop on.

The shorter film has some dialogue cuts, and Kelly’s reading is tighter and obviously not done ‘cold’. He made some lovely layouts that 'plus' the visuals and sometimes improve the staging. And of course his animation is superb. But the story reel is the more powerful version.

 It pulls no punches.

There is no happy ending.

Happy Earth Day 2023.