The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  After an awkward first few months for Grace, her isolation at the studio was ebbing. She had friends, her confidence was growing, and she found herself able to make significant contributions at story meetings for both the shorts they were developing and the one project that absorbed more energy than any other: Snow White.

  Perhaps the success of Grace and Bianca encouraged Walt to hire more women. In the summer of 1936, he brought a woman named Dorothy Ann Blank into the story department. Right away people realized she was an unusual hire, unable to sketch or draw, a talent that most of the writers used in shaping their plots. What she lacked in ability in the visual arts, however, she made up for in her adroit prose. Dorothy was a journalist who had worked for College Humor and Redbook before being hired by a publicist named Hal Horne. Horne published the Mickey Mouse Magazine, a children’s periodical that had so little success that by 1936, Walt and his brother Roy, feeling pity for the man, let him produce it on a royalty-free basis.

  Horne’s offices on Fifth Avenue in New York City looked like a hoarder’s paradise. Several rooms were filled with boxes of three-by-five-inch index cards; they lined the walls and occupied every inch of available space. These cards were his “gag file,” a collection of six million jokes that Horne sometimes rented to comedians or comic-strip artists. The cards were the comedic contents of his skull, although they were not particularly amusing. Along with stale, uninspired one-liners, the files were crammed with jokes organized into categories such as “Dumb Dames” and “Laziness.” Perhaps to compensate Horne for his failed enterprise and the loss of much of his personal fortune, over fifty thousand dollars, Walt agreed to purchase the gag file for a substantial sum: twenty thousand dollars. Walt had become accustomed to paying for laughs. In the story department, he regularly handed out five dollars per gag in the hopes of encouraging better comedy than his writers’ regular salaries could command.

  The collection of white cards made its way from New York to Los Angeles, but it did not travel alone. Accompanying the gag file to its new home was Dorothy Ann Blank, who, although Walt didn’t realize it yet, would become far more valuable to the studio than the vast joke collection. The index cards were soon organized by Dorothy and one of the studio’s librarians, Lillian Grainger, in a card-catalog format, neatly arranged in pullout drawers and housed in an area that became known as “the room of a million jokes.”

  Horne’s comedy was wooden and artificial, so the story department promptly dismissed the jokes on the index cards, but Dorothy could not be so easily ignored. Women were no longer a complete oddity in the story department, and it was quite clear that Dorothy could hold her own with the writers. She exuded confidence with the effortlessness of a person who knows her worth, and she dived into Snow White without hesitation. By the end of 1936 she was exerting significant influence on the scene cards for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, rewriting the summaries in her own succinct style. Most important, she was writing story treatments, the outlines that shape the script of the entire film.

  Dorothy realized that Walt was obsessed with every aspect of Snow White. At story meetings he would delve into each scene in detail. Yet he was concealing an issue that threatened all their livelihoods: The studio was completely out of money. Walt and Roy had spent a million dollars on it so far, a substantial sum for a film at the time, and they needed more. Around town, some called the movie “Disney’s Folly,” believing the big-budget cartoon was destined for failure. Walt hoped that making a feature film would end the financial woes of the studio, and he and Roy quietly met with their banker and desperately tried to convince the man that they were a worthy investment.

  Unaware of the troubles of her employer, Dorothy became consumed with whittling away at the scenes, keeping only what was essential. At Walt’s direction, she was paring down the script so that not a word was wasted. Dorothy also wrote the title cards, the filmed, printed text that accompanies the scenes. Near the end of the film, as the seasons pass while the seven dwarfs wait for Snow White to awaken from her slumber, Dorothy wrote, “So beautiful, even in death, that the dwarfs could not find it in their hearts to bury her.” And as snow falls: “They fashioned a coffin of glass and gold, and kept eternal vigil by her side.” Her sentences advanced the story in as few words as possible. It was Walt himself who rewrote the last title card of the film, editing Dorothy’s words to read simply, “The Prince, who had searched far and wide, heard of the maiden who slept in the glass coffin.”

  The fact that Dorothy could not draw made her unusual in the story department. While most of the artists there sat at their desks sketching with paper and pencil, Dorothy was frequently at her typewriter. The clanging of the carriage return, loud as it was, could barely be heard above the persistent din of the department, which was frequently filled with the animated chatter of the artists as they sketched. Many of the writers couldn’t type; Grace could only peck at the machine with two fingers. Dorothy’s typewriter did give her the advantage of space, however. Most writers did not have the luxury of an office and so worked crammed together, their elbows occasionally bumping as they drew mouse ears or princess dresses. Dorothy and her typewriter had a prime corner location, and from this vantage point she could survey the room, her eyes meandering across the faces of her colleagues as she searched the air for ideas.

  Dorothy noticed that one of the story men was often looking back at her. Joe Grant had been working for Walt for three years. Originally hired as a caricaturist, he had made his way into the story department not so much because of his gift for words but because of his art, from which emerged complex plots and refined dialogue. Yet it now seemed that Joe had become obsessed with Dorothy’s image. She frequently saw him sketching her from a perch nearby, periodically staring at her before returning to the page.

  Most new hires would have shied from his gaze, afraid to disturb the dynamics of the story department and possibly become the target of pranks, but Dorothy was rarely afraid of anyone. “What are you doing?” she asked him bluntly when she noticed him watching her.

  “You are an inspiration,” Joe replied with a smile, but Dorothy was not so easily mollified.

  “But why are you sketching me?” she demanded.

  “I’m modeling your face for one of our characters in Snow White.”

  “Which one?”

  “The evil queen,” Joe replied curtly.

  Dorothy burst out laughing—his answer had been so unexpected—and soon Joe was laughing too. At last Dorothy said, “At least I’m not the old hag!”

  Thanks to Joe, it was not merely Dorothy’s words that would find a permanent home in the film but her face as well: her arched eyebrows, her almond-shaped eyes, and her long, straight nose were all reflected in the face of the beautiful but vain and wicked stepmother.

  In their own department, the animators frequently propped up mirrors on their desks so that they could capture their facial expressions and infuse realism into their animation. They would take their rough sketches, hand them over to be photographed, then bring the film to a Moviola, an early device used by film editors to view individual shots and check whether the movements they had created were true to life. Meanwhile, the story department went over the plot for Snow White again and again, mercilessly cutting scenes in order to bring the story into crisp focus and working with the composers to weave the musical score into the story. Yet no matter what they did, the art the animators created was flat. There was no dimension, no depth.

  In the mid-1930s, most animation was produced by hand-drawing the characters on cels and then placing the cels, one panel at a time, on top of a painted background. The animation camera would take a picture of the combined artwork from above, each shot but one frame of the movie. With every frame, the background shifted ever so slightly backward, so that when viewing the sequence on film, the observer got the impression of forward movement. Compared to the walking, talking characters, however, the background offered little variety. It was typically painted on
to a long roll of paper that was dragged behind the characters. There was no sense of perspective and little detail. If the camera zoomed in, the images would become severely distorted, making the scene even less realistic. It was an undeniable problem for the studio.

  The solution lay in a trick taken from live theater: adapt the set to let the characters move through the scenery, not merely on top of it. Just as cutouts and objects are placed at different points up- and downstage from the actors, the animators needed to create depth between the elements of their backgrounds. In early 1937, this became possible thanks to a relatively new invention in the art of animation: the multiplane camera. The camera stood just over eleven feet tall and incorporated horizontal beams over long metal cradles designed to hold massive glass frames.

  Instead of photographing a flat two-dimensional background, the multiplane camera separated each element of the scene: the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. Each part of the backdrop was painted on a long pane of glass and then placed in a cradle that moved independently of the others, up and down and from side to side. At the very top, positioned to look down through the panes of glass, were the eyes of the structure: a Victor 16 mm movie camera. Some of the pieces of glass were hand-painted in oils; the immovable glass closest to the floor was often tinted the color of the sky. Those panes closest to the camera were kept clear so that cels with the artists’ animation could be gently laid on top. With the camera shooting from above, the contraption gave depth and realism to the scene, transforming the flat panes of painted glass and plastic into a three-dimensional world.

  Bill Garity and a team of engineers were testing the limits of this new technology in the studio’s motion picture laboratory, improving on the design as he tweaked the camera’s motion and timing. As innovative as the equipment was, though, it was hardly the first of its kind.

  Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger, a German filmmaker, is widely recognized for developing the first multiplane camera for her 1926 animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Reiniger’s features were filmed in silhouette. To create her characters, she would deftly cut out of black cardboard the shapes of people, flowers, animals, and fairies. She placed the silhouettes, exquisite in their detail, onto vertical planes of glass hung in front of the movie camera. The resulting scenes were so rich that her fairy-tale films drew viewers deep into misty forests, took them on a flight through the clouds on a magical horse, and plunged them beneath the surface of a meadow pond.

  Reiniger’s innovations were finding fresh application in California. Even before Walt began testing the multiplane camera, his competitor and sometime friend Ub Iwerks was building his own. Iwerks and Walt had met in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1919, where Ub animated Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts and played a critical role in shaping Walt’s characters. By 1930, he’d left Walt to start his own studio, and by 1933, he had built a multiplane camera from an old Chevrolet chassis. Its structure was horizontal, unlike Reiniger’s vertical mechanism, but otherwise operated similarly. Yet despite his prowess at bringing depth into his cartoon shorts, Iwerks couldn’t match the success of Mickey Mouse, and his studio closed its doors in 1936.

  Walt saw the potential of the multiplane camera to bring realism to Snow White. But before Walt Disney Studios could use the system for a feature film, they had to assess the technique. Their testing ground was an animated short titled The Old Mill. Released in 1937, the cartoon had neither a defined plot nor any central characters, but it was a veritable workshop for the many improvements Walt wanted to bring to Snow White. In addition to their first use of the multiplane camera, the team toyed with complex lighting and water effects, realistic portrayal of animals, and heightened mood and suspense. The outcome was stunning. The cartoon would go on to win two Academy Awards, one for best short and one for technical achievement. The company filed a patent for the multiplane technology and set to work filming Snow White with the nimble new machinery.

  By the winter of 1937, the pressure on Walt Disney Studios was mounting and its precarious financial situation threatening the livelihood of every employee. The cost of Snow White had vastly exceeded expectations. The studio had spent $1.48 million on the film, the equivalent of more than $25 million today, and its future depended on whether audiences would want to sit through an hour-and-a-half-long cartoon.

  By December, Bianca and the entire studio staff were nervously anticipating the premiere night. The glamour of the movie’s release was completely new to them—shorts never received half as much attention—and the staff fretted over how the press and public would react to the film.

  On Tuesday, December 21, all their lives shifted dramatically. The animators and story artists were bunched around desks and standing in groups in hallways, excitedly discussing what might happen that evening. A few hundred of them would be attending the event, having purchased tickets early. Few of the one hundred and fifty women of the Ink and Paint department were going, despite the long hours they had labored to bring about the historic film, including creating fifteen hundred custom color shades for it. They had lovingly hand-tinted the cheeks and lips of the princess with more care than they gave to the makeup on their own faces.

  But not all the women of Walt Disney Studios were excluded from the night. Besides Walt’s wife, Lillian, a former Ink and Paint girl, there was her sister Hazel Sewell, now the head of the department. Hazel had a skilled eye; she’d carefully chosen the color palette for Snow White and served as art director for the film. Grace was also fortunate enough to have a ticket, and her stomach fluttered in anticipation of the event.

  That evening, the lucky employees arrived at the Carthay Circle Theater, a movie palace whose whitewashed walls gleamed under the arc lights brought out for special occasions. Above them was a high bell tower trimmed in blue and a neon sign that could be seen for miles. The crowd was completely overwhelming; the street swamped with thirty thousand fans. The mass of people had no hope of being able to squeeze into the fifteen-hundred-seat theater, so they formed a canyon of sorts, sitting in tiered stands along the red carpet for the mere pleasure of being part of the occasion. Advance ticket sales had outpaced any other event held at Carthay Circle, and those who couldn’t get in preferred to crowd onto the streets rather than stay home.

  The streets themselves were worth seeing. Walt had transformed a block of Los Angeles concrete into pure make-believe. There was a replica dwarf village nearby, its cottages complete with shuttered windows, a churning waterwheel, and flower-lined paths.

  Movie stars began trickling into the theater. Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. smiled, waved to the crowd, and posed for photographers in the bright lights. A nine-year-old Shirley Temple arrived with a dwarf character on each arm and five more behind, her height level with the costumed men as they made their way up the red carpet. A lumpy Donald Duck waved to cameras while Mickey and Minnie Mouse delighted the crowd as they hugged and kissed, their pointy noses bumping awkwardly.

  The artists and writers from the studio were eagerly anticipating the film, whose every scene, made possible by one million of their own hand drawings, they knew by heart. The movie began, and following the title, a message flashed on the screen. It was a personal thank-you from their boss: “My sincere appreciation to the members of my staff whose loyalty and creative endeavor made possible this production.” Below these grateful words was Walt Disney’s signature. It was a compensation of sorts for the next few frames, the opening credits for the movie.

  Only sixty-seven studio employees were listed, despite the fact that hundreds had worked on the film. A lack of on-screen credit would become a painful source of discontent in the years ahead as the staff began demanding acknowledgment of their efforts. Among the many women who had worked on Snow White, only Hazel Sewell and Dorothy Ann Blank were named. Hazel was credited as an art director while Dorothy was the only woman from the story department acknowledged.

  But resentments evaporated as the movie played, es
pecially during the final scene, when the prince leads Snow White up a hillside, a hazy castle becoming progressively more visible through the clouds and against a pink and gold sunset. Grace glanced around the theater, eager for the crowd’s reaction. Even in the gloom of the cinema, with only the projector’s indirect light illuminating their faces, she could see the glistening, wet cheeks of the audience members. She had never seen, never even heard of, anyone crying over a cartoon before, but here was a whole theater of people hastily dabbing at their eyes before giving the film a standing ovation.

  Chapter 3

  When You Wish Upon a Star

  When the studio became overwhelming for Bianca, as it had a tendency to do, her favorite place of refuge was the Los Angeles Public Library. It stuck out like a sore thumb among the department stores, hotels, and banks that lined Fifth Street in downtown Los Angeles. The urban landscape reflected the city’s rapid growth over the past three decades. Thanks to the region’s sunny, moderate climate, ideal for year-round shooting, moviemakers had begun flocking to Southern California in the early 1900s. At the same time, a metal forest of oil derricks started spreading across the Los Angeles Basin.

  The first boom occurred in 1893 when prospectors struck oil in the area that is now home to Dodgers Stadium. By 1923, the region was producing one-quarter of the world’s crude oil. The influx of new industry meant that the city was growing at a frenzied pace. Its population doubled between 1920 and 1930, rising to more than a million and making Los Angeles the fifth-largest metropolis in the United States. The swift growth was reflected in the skyline, its architecture a hastily erected mix of art deco office buildings and the low-pitched red tile roofs of Spanish colonial revival homes.

  Bianca skirted the edges of multiple construction sites downtown early one morning. Around her, a mass of pedestrians was getting off the city’s streetcars, a system made up of Los Angeles Railway’s Yellow Cars and Pacific Electric Railway’s Red Cars. It was the largest transit operation in the country, busier even than that of New York City, and choked the avenues by midmorning. Bianca was headed to the library, a rare patch of green within the growing city. A path of trimmed arborvitae and three long reflecting pools led her to the white stone steps of its grand entrance.