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title—but sound had strengthened him in that role by giving him more control over the timing of the animation. His animators had to adhere to the timing on the exposure sheets, which Disney and Stalling wrote as they planned the music. Now, though, Disney was actually pulling back. Burt Gillett “moved into Walt’s music room to help prepare the shorts for animation very soon after he came out from New York,” Jackson said. 15
    The division of responsibility between Gillett and Disney was indistinct, Ben Sharpsteen said: “There wasn’t anything formal in the division there, and Walt wouldn’t hesitate to criticize Gillett in front of one of us. . . . Nothing was sacred to anybody then.” 16 All the lines between jobs were fluid in the late 1920s, as Jackson explained: “Each animator drew his own layout [a drawing that showed the staging of a scene], working from Ub’s little thumbnail sketch, each time he started to animate a scene—and the first animator, or inbetweener, who ran out of work as a cartoon was nearing completion was likely to be given the task of painting the backgrounds for the picture.” 17 As the staff filled out with experienced New York animators, the animators’ responsibilities in particular came to be better defined. Carlos Manriquez, who had started in ink and paint, became the first full-time background painter, probably sometime in 1929. 18
    The writing of the cartoons continued much as before. Sharpsteen remembered night meetings “for each new story concept. That’s how Walt would get going on a new picture. He’d let us know what he had in mind,and the possibilities he saw in it. We were privileged to sit there and make sketches of ideas as they came to us. Otherwise, we’d turn in something at a later date.” 19 Dick Lundy, who joined the staff as an assistant in July 1929, remembered that Disney called such meetings “a ‘round table.’ We had it in the director’s room when we were small, but later on . . . they would have it in the sound stage, and the whole group would get a synopsis of . . . a story idea. ‘Now, what gags can you think of?’ ” 20 As in the
Oswald
period, some gags came perhaps too easily. “In the early days,” Wilfred Jackson said, “we always figured that we had three laughs that were free, and we had to work for the other ones. One was the drop-seat gag, two the thundermug [chamber pot] under the bed, and three the outhouse.” 21
    The Plowboy
, from June 1929, is filled with just that sort of cheerful farmyard ribaldry. A cow’s udder is animated with great plasticity as Mickey milks it, and two of the cow’s teeth move up and down like window shades to let out a stream of tobacco juice. The cow literally licks Mickey’s eye shut—twice. The first time, he squirts milk from the cow’s own udder in its face; the second time, he pulls the cow’s tongue out to great length and wraps it around its muzzle. There’s an undercurrent of lasciviousness, too. When Minnie calls to Mickey and his horse, both wave back—then the horse hitches up his chest and starts to swagger over, until Mickey orders him back. When Minnie is singing, wordlessly, she puckers, her eyes closed, and Mickey, drooling with desire, seizes the opportunity to kiss her (she smashes him over the head with a bucket). The cow laughs at Mickey—a trombone provides the laughter—he gives the cow the razzberry, and she stalks away, first flipping her udder at him in disdain.
    The Plowboy
ran afoul of a few censors, as did a couple of other 1929 cartoons. Disney expressed mystification that “anyone could take offense at any of the ‘stuff’ contained in our pictures; especially how anyone could be offended at anything pertaining to the milking of a cow.” 22 Coarse, exuberant comedy of that kind was just