The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  There was no mistaking the library for any other building in town. Its construction in 1926 marked a period of Egyptian frenzy in the United States. Just four years earlier, an excavation team had uncovered King Tut’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the Nile. The discovery of the mummy of young pharaoh Tutankhamen, along with his earthly treasures, was the archaeological triumph of the twentieth century.

  The Western world was soon swept up in “Tut-mania,” a craze influencing art, fashion, film, jewelry, and even architecture. The Los Angeles Central Library was modeled after ancient Egyptian temples, and atop its tower rose a vibrant golden pyramid adorned with tile mosaics that could best be seen from the sky. Above the west-facing entrance, Latin words were inscribed on the stone façade: Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt, meaning, “Like runners, they hand on the torch of life.” At the pyramid’s peak, covered in a shiny gold alloy, was the embodiment of these words: a hand grasping a fiery torch stretched to the heavens.

  Bianca passed under these words on her way into the library, which had become in many ways her temple. It was everything the studio wasn’t: quiet, respectful, and filled with women. She brushed her hand against the black marble sphinxes at the top of the staircase before heading into the stacks. Although it might seem she was merely avoiding work, she had a reason to be here. Walt had just announced that Pinocchio, not Bambi, would be their next feature film.

  Although Walt had finally gotten his hands on the rights to Bambi a few months earlier, he had been disappointed in the animators’ early sketches for it. He described the deer as “flour bags,” animals without shape or dimension. Walt wanted to move away from a cartoonish look and mirror the environmentalist message of the story with a more realistic style. It was clear that the project needed more time in development.

  Bianca immersed herself in the project of adapting Pinocchio. She sat between rows of books or sometimes found a quiet desk in the children’s literature section and wrote story treatments. The studio on Hyperion Avenue boasted its own library, of course, the shelves primarily filled with the work of illustrators; many of its volumes Walt had personally selected and brought back to the United States from family holidays in Europe. Given that the team was focused on European fairy tales, perhaps it was no surprise that the artists drew inspiration from the work of Richard Doyle, Gaspard Dughet, Paul Ranson, and J. J. Grandville, among others. The staff would perch the ornately bound books precariously on corners of their old, scarred desks and emulate in their sketches the drawings they found inside. Yet among the hundreds of prized books, there were relatively few works of fiction, and so when Bianca wanted new source material for her story ideas, she was only too happy to leave the studio and head to her favorite building downtown.

  Browsing through the library’s novels, she had found nothing to rival the book she already had, Walt’s personal copy of Le Avventure di Pinocchio: La Storia di un Burattino, by Carlo Collodi. First printed as a serial in an Italian newspaper and then published in its entirety in 1883, the book found immense popularity among readers in English-speaking countries as The Adventures of Pinocchio.

  After multiple readings, Bianca knew the story—the tale of the pitiable wood-carver and his mischievous marionette—intimately. Walt had been tentatively considering it for over a year, but although he owned several English translations of the book, he turned to Bianca for a fresh take on it. He appreciated that she was the only member of the story department capable of reading it in its original Italian and then assessing its potential as a feature film. The library was a quiet place to read and work, and Bianca was soon lost in the text, her pencil flying across her notebook as she translated bits of dialogue from her native tongue.

  As she delved deeper into the novel, however, she began to have reservations about its adaptability. The character of Pinocchio is, in many ways, unsympathetic. He is inherently cruel and frequently selfish, kicking the wood-carver Geppetto the very moment his creator carves his feet. In the original serialized version, Cat and Fox hang Pinocchio for his crimes and disobedience, thus ending the children’s story with his vivid death: “His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.”

  After this first serial ran, Carlo Lorenzini, who wrote under the pen name Carlo Collodi, was ready to move on from the puppet’s story, but his editor Guido Biagi did not want him to. The series was immensely popular, and Biagi pleaded for its continuation. He suggested resurrecting the insolent puppet and giving him a path to redemption that would occur over twenty more installments, culminating in a fairy with turquoise hair transforming the remorseful wooden child into a real boy. Six months later, after requests from not only his editor but also readers, Lorenzini agreed to continue the serial, eventually ending his story with the line: “How glad I am that I have become a well-behaved little boy!”

  Bianca loved the tale. There was something powerful and unexpected about this wooden puppet’s desire for life. But although she could clearly see the possibilities, there was something missing from the plot. In those final twenty chapters, Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy at last, but his motivation isn’t explained. As the sixteen original chapters of the story make clear, Pinocchio can do nearly everything a real boy can. He can eat, run, sing, and cause mischief like any child. In fact, Bianca realized as she made her notes for Walt, unless they animated the wood joints and strings clearly, there would be no way for an audience to distinguish Pinocchio from any other child on-screen.

  So if the puppet can do all these things, Bianca wondered, why does he want to be a boy? They needed to give the puppet a reason to want life, a spark that would make the troublesome character sympathetic and give the story greater meaning. Bianca made a list of possibilities. It could be for love, the longing to grow up and kiss the girl of his dreams, or it could be so that he could one day become a man and not be condemned to remain a small child all the days of his existence. In her quiet sanctuary, Bianca contemplated all the reasons one might choose to be alive.

  Strange devices were taking over the film industry in the 1930s. New camera and projection motors were able to sync their shutter speeds, making possible a rear projection system that allowed inventive backgrounds to be placed behind actors. A couple could sit in a car going nowhere as the background raced behind or beside them, giving the illusion of movement. For the first time, movie studios had special effects departments that created miniature ships to fight pirate battles on the seas of a soundstage, yanked doors open with wires as if by magic, and built trick floors that made disembodied footprints appear in the snow.

  Although Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been the last major studio to convert to sound, by the late 1930s it was leading in special effects. In 1938 Arnold Gillespie, MGM’s special effects coordinator, was working on an upcoming film called The Wizard of Oz. He threw away the studio’s lifeless rubber tornado, which looked more like a gaudy orange traffic cone than a devastating storm, and began observing the undulating wind socks that were used to determine wind speed and direction at the airport. He had never seen a tornado in his life, had never even set foot in the state of Kansas, yet he recognized something familiar in the way the sock filled with wind. It moved as if it were alive. Inspired, he took a thirty-five-foot-long muslin sock, surrounded it with fans placed at just the right angles, and proceeded to blow dust across the MGM soundstage. The tornado that he created would shock audiences when they finally saw it on-screen in 1939. Moviegoers turned to each other as they exited theaters across the country and asked in excited voices, How did they do that?

  Walt was asking a similar question. While every live-action movie studio was clamoring for realistic special effects, he wondered how to bring realism into the world of animation. Not to be outdone by the live-action studios, he appointed an effects supervisor for Pinocchio, Robert Martsch. Walt’s goal was to bring new techniques to the film,
to create a groundswell of artistic achievement that would separate cartoon from animation and make their scenes as lifelike as a terrifying tornado fabricated from a long, dusty sock.

  The zeal for visual effects was reaching into every department of the studio. In the all-female Ink and Paint department, the women were developing “the blend.” A woman in the department named Mary Louise Weiser had originated the technique using a pencil of her own invention that she nicknamed a “grease pencil.” Standard pencils could only feebly scratch the glossy, nonporous surface of the cels. Weiser’s pencil had a waxy exterior that the women could rub across the borders of their colors to soften their lines and create shading and depth; for example, it could tint the cheeks of a character with a diffuse, natural blush. Weiser filed a patent for the grease pencil in 1939, and eventually, its utility would reach far beyond the studio. It became an essential component of military defense and aircraft control centers in the 1950s, used to mark the locations of aircraft, weapons, and fuel on panels of glass.

  In their separate workspace at the studio, the women of Ink and Paint experimented with other techniques, dabbing their cels with sponges and then rubbing the grease pencils sparingly across the surface, giving the characters’ faces a youthful roundness; Pinocchio’s body got a drop or two of lacquer to give it the look of real, polished pine. The women also wiped stiff, dry brushes across the cels’ plastic to give texture to Figaro the cat’s fur while adding vivid new colors never before seen on-screen to their palette.

  While the group received little formal acknowledgment for their contributions, there was undeniable camaraderie in Ink and Paint. It was enough to make the other women of the studio occasionally wistful at their more isolated experiences, particularly Bianca, who was reminded of her own thwarted efforts in the story department.

  Bianca yearned to bring emotional depth to the script for Pinocchio and she fretted over the puppet’s character, which, despite her best efforts, remained mischievous and, she worried, unlikable. The story team seemed more concerned with creating gags for him, crafting a brash personality that echoed the original Collodi story but did not fit Bianca’s vision for the film. Other characters who could balance the harsh quality of Pinocchio’s nature, such as Jiminy Cricket, had not yet been substantially developed.

  Other constraints weighed on Bianca. Proud of the success of her Elmer Elephant short, she began writing additional scripts for the character. She was encouraged by both the short’s popularity and the opinion of Walt’s distributor, who hinted that merchandising the elephant would likely prove profitable.

  Walt, unlike the heads of other animation studios, jumped into selling character-branded merchandise early on, beginning in 1929 when a man offered him three hundred dollars to put Mickey Mouse’s face on notebooks marketed to children. Walt agreed, not because he believed the venture would be particularly successful but simply because he needed the money. To his surprise, merchandising quickly turned lucrative. By the mid-1930s, the Ingersoll-Waterbury Company had sold more than two and a half million Mickey Mouse watches, and other small toys and dolls were moving quickly and bringing the studio needed income. The potential was there, yet Elmer was going nowhere.

  Despite her abilities, Bianca couldn’t get another script approved. She wrote one script she was particularly proud of, Timid Elmer, in which she enlivened the warmth of her main character with playful gags, like Elmer using his trunk to trip a monkey, that she knew would appeal to most of the members of the story department. But even this didn’t work—Walt was completely uninterested. In early 1938 it seemed to Bianca that everything she touched was fated for oblivion, discarded before she could prove its worth.

  By early June, however, Walt was in agreement with Bianca on the Pinocchio script’s troubles. He, too, saw Pinocchio as unsympathetic and viewed his stunted character development as poisoning the rest of the narrative. The gag-driven script was at its core immature and, to Walt, past all redemption. To the shock of those at the studio, Walt threw everything away. It didn’t matter that the team had already worked for five months on the project, produced 2,300 feet of film, and spent thousands of dollars. They would all have to start from scratch.

  The story department was in crisis. Following Snow White, some writers had bragged about how well they understood the complex nature of feature-length animation, but now that puffed-up confidence evaporated. Amid the general gloom and the nagging feeling that they were chasing an unattainable standard of perfection, Bianca found herself returning to notes she had made a year earlier. She was one of the few in the story department who had a smile on her face.

  Walt wasn’t letting the reset affect his optimism for the future of their endeavors. Just two months after he scrapped all work on Pinocchio, he was ready to fund his next big venture. Money was no longer a primary source of anxiety. In the first six months after the release of Snow White, the studio not only paid off its debts but also grossed four million dollars. Walt, along with his brother Roy, made a ten-thousand-dollar down payment on fifty-one acres for their new dream studio in Burbank. Walt Disney Studios, which now had approximately six hundred employees on its payroll, was outgrowing its modest dwellings on Hyperion Avenue.

  The current lot held two animator buildings, a soundstage, the Ink and Paint annex, and a new features building constructed just that year. Yet space was in short supply. The animators sat crammed at their desks, their elbows rubbing against one another’s and occasionally causing Mickey Mouse to sprout whiskers on the top of his head, and in the story department the noise level had reached new heights. And with production ramping up on a new feature, even more workers were moving into the buildings on Hyperion Avenue.

  August 1938 brought with it not just the promise of new buildings and spacious offices but a fourth woman in the story department. Her name was Sylvia Moberly-Holland, and working for Walt had been her ambition since she’d sat in a darkened theater and felt the enchantment of Snow White sweep over her. The film was life-altering. As soon as the lights came on, Sylvia turned to her mother and in an excited voice declared, “I’ve got to do that.” She quickly found a job as an inker with the Ink and Paint department at Walter Lantz Productions at Universal Studios. She saw the job as a stepping-stone, a way to attain her all-consuming desire: to work for Walt Disney.

  By the summer of 1938 there was a rumor circulating around Hollywood that Walt’s next movie after Pinocchio would be a musical feature. This greatly piqued Sylvia’s interest, as music had formed an essential part of her childhood, a joy she had shared with her father, a vicar in the small English village of Ampfield, where she was raised. Excited by the possibility of combining music with her art, Sylvia applied to the studios and was granted an interview with Walt himself.

  This was highly unusual. Most women hired at the studio were in their early twenties, unmarried, and unattached. They were placed in a training program and only a fraction of these women would go on to join Ink and Paint. Advertisements run by the studio in the 1930s proclaimed: “Walt Disney Needs Girl Artists Now! Steady, interesting jobs for girls, 18–30 with elementary art training. No cartoon experience needed; we’ll train you, pay you while you learn. Apply Disney Studios, Art Dept. Bring samples of your work.” Sylvia didn’t fit the criteria—she was a thirty-eight-year-old widow with two small children—but she needed this job desperately.

  When she was a child, Sylvia received as a gift an early Kodak point-and-shoot box camera that she excitedly aimed at garden roses, craggy rocks, and the wild heather that grew across her native English countryside. She developed the photographs in her grade-school bathroom, much to the chagrin of her teachers, who took issue with the sinks of the girls’ room being constantly filled with soaking prints.

  As a teenager, Sylvia was sent to the Gloucestershire School of Domestic Science, a respectable school for young girls to learn the work of women: cooking and teaching. She lasted two years in the program before moving on to the Architectural Associatio
n School in London, transferring from a school of all women to one that contained practically none. When she graduated, she was the first woman to join the Royal Institute of British Architects.

  In the first bloom of her career, Sylvia was fortunate. One of her early projects was designing the British Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925. She had her degree, meaningful work, and the love of a man named Frank Holland, a fellow student. The two married and then moved more than four thousand miles away to begin their own architecture practice in Victoria, British Columbia. Sylvia quickly made an impression in her new country, becoming the first woman accepted to the Architectural Institute of British Columbia.

  In 1926, the couple welcomed a little girl, Theodora, whom they called Theo. In her home office, Sylvia leaned over her drafting table, sketching the lines of light-filled rooms while she gently rocked her infant daughter in a cradle placed at her feet. Vibrancy and joy filled their Canadian home. Frank and Sylvia were young and very much in love, and their shared passion for the elegant Arts and Crafts–style homes they designed together was eclipsed only by their excitement at their growing family.

  Pregnancy and birth will often make a woman reflect on her own upbringing, and so it was for Sylvia, who, seven months pregnant with her second child, longed to see her parents in England, particularly her mother, who had never met her granddaughter. The journey was expensive, so she took one-year-old Theo with her to England, leaving Frank alone at home.