The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  She left behind a bitterly cold December in British Columbia, with temperatures dropping to 10 degrees, far below what was typical of their normally mild winters. The streets were buried in snow, but that didn’t keep Frank from Christmas shopping, his spirits high as he thought of Sylvia’s imminent return. Then he fell ill. Frank lay in bed, burning up with fever. His condition quickly deteriorated as pain and pressure in his ear became excruciating. A physician’s exam confirmed what was obvious to Frank: he had an ear infection. However, the doctor could offer no treatment. The bacteria spread, reaching Frank’s inner ear and then infecting the mastoid process, the part of the skull behind the ear. Unlike most of the rigid bones in the human body, the mastoid process is porous, like a sponge, and filled with air cells. Bacteria can invade these spaces, leading to an infection that eventually reaches the brain. In the 1920s there was no medicine or surgery that could stop the progress of the deadly infection.

  Just three months earlier, in September 1928, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find, in his messy London laboratory, a mold called Penicillium notatum growing on his petri dishes. The mold had the mysterious ability to kill several strains of bacteria responsible for human infections. Although Fleming was intrigued by the lucky accident, it would be sixteen years before researchers found a way to mass-produce the antibiotic known as penicillin. These advances came far too late to help Frank. Within weeks, the bacteria reached his brain and he died.

  Sylvia returned to Canada a widow. She was twenty-eight years old and pregnant; shortly after she arrived home, she gave birth to a baby boy, whom she named Boris. In the throes of grief but with a toddler and a newborn depending on her, Sylvia tried to find a new rhythm for her life. She had always seen herself as resilient and independent, and she tapped into that inner strength as she tended to her children and planned for the future of the architecture firm that she now ran alone. The timing, however, was not in her favor. The next year, 1929, brought a worldwide economic crash. In the midst of the Great Depression, most people were losing their houses, not building new ones. Sylvia’s steady work as an architect vanished.

  One in a series of sketches drawn by Sylvia Holland depicting the death of a loved one and the grief of those left behind (Courtesy Theo Halladay)

  Years passed, but little improved for Sylvia. She received few commissions and struggled to pay the bills. In desperation, she moved to the Holland family farm outside the city, where she paid rent to her father-in-law. Then, when it seemed their situation could not get worse, Boris fell ill. The child clutched his ears and cried in pain, and when she looked into his eyes, Sylvia feared he’d suffer his father’s fate. She pleaded with the doctor to do something, but the physician had nothing to offer. Ear infections were a leading cause of childhood mortality in 1930 and widely available antibiotics still more than a decade away. Yet the doctor felt deep sympathy for the panicked mother and gave her the best advice he had: “Get him to a desert climate,” he told her, then added ominously, “or lose him.” The next day Sylvia and her children were on a southbound train headed for the medicinal sunshine of Los Angeles.

  The move meant Sylvia had to leave her architecture firm, but it also necessitated a more painful separation. In Southern California, after Boris recovered, Sylvia placed her two children in a boarding school, vowing that she would find work quickly and reunite her family. And so, with a determination that few other applicants could match, Sylvia walked into Walt’s office on a clear summer day in 1938 and pulled out her sketches. Invisible to others was the nearly unbearable weight of the past few years she carried on her shoulders—the anguish of grief, the financial and emotional toll of losing her husband, the recent illness of her son, and the despair of leaving her children. Few people would still be standing after suffering the blows she had endured. It seemed that everything she held dear was riding on the success of this one meeting. Fortunately, Walt immediately perceived Sylvia’s talent, and he hired her on the spot to begin work in the story department.

  Although, like her female colleagues, Sylvia was paid less than her male counterparts, she still earned more than she had in her last job, where she’d gotten about twelve dollars a week. The Walt Disney Studios were known for offering higher salaries than most of their Hollywood competitors. Yet even this extra income was not enough to bring her children home. She longed for the sweetness of everyday family life, and that desire drove her to exert herself to the utmost.

  Sylvia was sitting at her desk one afternoon working on story ideas when she heard Walt walking down the hallway yelling, “Anybody know how to draw a horse?” Sylvia didn’t waste a moment; she jumped up and yelled, “I do!” In truth, there was nothing he could ask for that she would not immediately attempt. She walked alongside the boss, sketching quickly on a piece of paper as they made their way down the hall. In mere moments she finished the drawing and handed the horse to Walt. As a result of that one hurried sketch, Sylvia received an opportunity at the studio that no other woman had yet garnered. And it would begin at a story meeting.

  Sketch of a horse made by Sylvia on scrap paper, date unknown (Courtesy Theo Halladay)

  Attending story meetings at the Walt Disney Studios was akin to getting one’s boots stuck in soft spring mud—once you were in, it was nearly impossible to get out. Grace Huntington spent 1938 in an endless number of such meetings. They took place Monday through Saturday, often first thing in the morning, with the group poring over every detail of the script and storyboards. Grace was working on a new Mickey Mouse short and she could hardly believe the countless hours spent on what, ultimately, would be a mere eight minutes of family entertainment.

  Despite a solid week of work on the Mickey short, the team of story artists had barely made a start. Until they had a finished script and storyboards approved by Walt, the animators couldn’t begin their work, and the whole project hung in limbo. At nine thirty a.m. Grace and her colleagues shuffled into the room, ready to start debate over Mickey Mouse again. These walls had become as familiar to her as the seven men she shared the space with.

  The group quieted down, and Peter Page, whose name was perfectly suited for his position as a writer in the department, began running through the storyboards, summarizing the action and calling out all the dialogue. His voice squeaked like Mickey Mouse’s as he described how the character meets Claudius, king of the bumblebees, and is then magically shrunk to the size of a bee. The room was silent for a moment, the calm before the storm, before the other team members began to rip the story apart, attacking every facet of the plot.

  Grace was quick to offer her criticism, saying, “The whole story is built on something that isn’t true in the first place, because they have a king of the bees and bees are known to have a queen. Not that it makes a lot of difference, but right there it isn’t true to life. The head of the hive is the queen and the males do very little except fly around and enjoy themselves.” Grace looked around the room with a wry smile before continuing, “It seems to me if we had the queen of the bees it would add to the story because at the end it is the queen who is in trouble; she is captured by the wasps. If Mickey were to save the queen it seems a stronger story point. Then he can save the whole hive by beating their armies.”

  “There again you have a false assumption because a queen never leaves a hive,” Peter responded.

  Grace shook her head. “She doesn’t have to leave.”

  They continued to argue over the short for the next few hours. Grace suggested a new approach to animating the bees in a way that would augment their story line. She tacked up her sketches of bees with light humanistic touches, their black legs dangling from their bodies. The men of the meeting widened their eyes before asking, “No clothes?”

  “No clothes” was Grace’s firm reply.

  Grace left the story meeting feeling they had accomplished but little. She was pleased that her work on the short, particularly sketching and writing the climactic bat
tle scenes, would continue but unhappy about nearly everything else. Like Bianca, she was growing increasingly frustrated at how often her ideas were disregarded. Her personality was not mild—she spoke boldly at meetings, and she could be as passionate as any story man when tacking her sketches to the storyboard. Still, it seemed she had to push unusually hard for her ideas to gain traction.

  The problem wasn’t that Grace couldn’t attract attention. A current of flirtation ran through the office, and Grace found that her male colleagues weren’t interested in her story ideas, but they were interested in dating her. Focusing on her youth and beauty, they frequently brushed aside her writing. She complained to Bianca and then vented her feelings onto her sketch pad, repeatedly drawing an obese and overbearing Mickey Mouse. Sometimes he leered at her over her desk in her sketches, proclaiming, to the cartoon Grace’s obvious horror, I luv you!, with menacing hands and an impish smile. Grace’s desire to flee was represented in the next frame, where all that was left of her was a cloud of dust and the word Zip!

  When she wasn’t using her free time to lampoon the image of Mickey Mouse, Grace liked to sketch airplanes, which remained her passion. The shapes of her imaginary aircraft were buoyant above the clouds, and she invariably placed herself in the cockpit, a content smile on her lips, her own initials gracing the tailfin. She still dreamed of becoming a licensed pilot. On paper, at least, she was free to leave the limits of the earthly studio and take to the air.

  While Bianca and Grace felt that their careers were progressing slowly, the studio as a whole continued to break new ground. In his quest to advance special effects in animation, Walt founded a new airbrush department, the aim of which was to produce realistic visual effects, particularly in the backgrounds of scenes. An airbrush uses a jet of compressed air that acts as a pump, drawing the paint from its reservoir in a cloud of tiny droplets to create a mist of color. The technique was developed in the late 1800s and first used by American Impressionist painters, who found the gentle spray ideal for portraying the diffuse glow of natural light. Soon after that it was adopted by illustrators and muralists as well as photograph manipulators, who used the delicate application of paint to retouch or doctor images.

  Grace Huntington’s depiction of life as a female artist at the studio (Courtesy Berkeley Brandt)

  To lead the new department, Walt hired Barbara Wirth Baldwin. Barbara shaped the group, growing it to twenty-five men and women. There was grumbling among the male artists about having a woman as their leader. Bristling at any display of femininity, they were especially vexed when Barbara insisted that her group wear hairnets to prevent a single strand of hair or flake of dandruff from falling onto the cels. Barbara laughed off their complaints with a firmness that spoke of her innate confidence and quickly got down to the responsibilities of her job. She started by working with the massive multiplane camera housed in its own chilly studio space. Holding the nozzle of the airbrush steady, she pressed the trigger ever so gently and painted clouds directly on the glass. She was incredibly nervous while airbrushing in the studio for the first time, aware that the slightest touch of her fingers could ruin the art irrevocably.

  Barbara and her team worked closely with the special effects animators in creating a range of visuals for Pinocchio that had never been attempted before and in pushing the capabilities of the multiplane camera. The airbrush allowed the film to include subtle touches, such as the haze of smoke and the luminosity of moonbeams. Barbara’s team distorted the edges of goldfish Cleo’s bowl with airbrushed shadows and specially fitted glasses placed on top of the camera lens. They took real twinkle lights and fastened them into a black canvas, then used the airbrush to spread gray paint over the surface so that it glowed like stardust between blazing suns. They even showed the saltwater spray of fierce ocean waves and the flickering of candlelight in the darkness, and they imbued the Blue Fairy with her heavenly glow.

  The delicate artistry of their special effects contrasted with the darkness of the tale they were telling. In Collodi’s original text, Pinocchio bites off a cat’s paw and later kills Jiminy Cricket. Although the story department ultimately stripped away much of the horror, a dark mood clings to the film’s dialogue and characters. The ominousness is reflected in its cinematography: seventy-six of the film’s eighty-eight minutes are either in darkness or underwater.

  The bleak concept art they were producing for Pinocchio reflected the fearful headlines studio employees were reading in their newspapers each morning. Bianca watched in horror in 1938 as Benito Mussolini, the dictator who ruled her native Italy, legalized a set of racial laws that stripped all Jewish Italians and other targeted minorities of their citizenship. It was clearly a grim portent.

  Many employees with European ties were nervously following the news, including Sylvia, who was on the hunt for updates from England. After Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, he announced that “a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.… Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” Instead of resting, fifteen thousand people protested in Trafalgar Square. For those who opposed Chamberlain, it was clear that instead of the peace he promised, turbulence was ahead. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that, hearing of such disturbing developments, the studio artists chose to include in Pinocchio so many of the dark elements of Collodi’s text.

  Contrasted with the gloom, however, is the well-meaning sweetness of the wooden puppet. Thanks to dramatic revisions by the story department and an expanded role for Jiminy Cricket, the film was transformed into something closer to Bianca’s original concept, a tale that attempts to show what it means to be human.

  The character Bianca crafted and that she advocated passionately for in story meetings was starkly different from the original wooden puppet. Her character does not arrive in the world with a malicious heart, but, like many of us hapless humans, he is frequently led into sin. He is exposed to what is arguably the worst society has to offer: thieves who take advantage of him, a man who imprisons him and threatens him with murder, even child trafficking. By making Pinocchio more like us, a flawed being trying to navigate the world as best he can, Bianca ultimately magnified Collodi’s themes about the meaning of life. It doesn’t matter whether one’s limbs are wooden or flesh; it is not our bodies that make us human but the way we treat one another.

  Bianca would receive little public acknowledgment for her contributions to the film. Neither would many others. The movie’s credits, like those of Snow White before it, were a source of anger and resentment. Only a fraction of the artists and writers who worked on Pinocchio saw their names on the silver screen. Despite the stunning technological advances made by Barbara Wirth Baldwin and Mary Weiser, neither woman’s name, nor that of any other female employee, was included. The absence of acknowledgment for women’s efforts on the film was echoed in the paltry number of female characters, only one of whom—the Blue Fairy—spoke at all.

  When Bianca arrived at work on February 7, 1940, she found the men crowded around a copy of Hollywood Citizen News, a local newspaper. Bianca wasn’t surprised. Today marked Pinocchio’s release and everyone was anxious for reviews.

  Bianca was settling in at her desk when one of the men called her over. “Bianca, this one’s about you,” he yelled. Confused, Bianca ambled over to the group and took the newspaper with no suspicion of what its pages contained.

  It is no longer news when a woman takes her place in a man’s workaday world. But it was news when a woman artist invaded the strictly masculine stronghold of the Walt Disney Studios. The event took place about five years ago. Until that time the only girls in the studio were the few necessary secretaries and the girls who did the inking and painting of celluloids. The girl who caused all this excitement was a young artist who, as a child, had gone to school with Walt in Chicago.

  Bianca laughed at the piece, and before she gave the paper back to her colleagues, she sardonically wrote in t
he margin, Who is this girl? The reporter had found it unimportant to mention her name.

  Chapter 4

  Waltz of the Flowers

  “This is not the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here. We’ve got an hour and forty-five minutes of picture and we’re doing beautiful things with beautiful music. We’re doing comic things, fantastic things, and it can’t all be the same—it’s an experimental thing and I’m willing to experiment on it. We’ve got more in this medium than making people laugh. We love to make people laugh, but I think we can do both.” Walt paused as he addressed the team of writers during a 1938 story meeting. “This stuff means more, it’s richer, like a painting. Excuse me if I get a little riled up on this stuff because it’s a continual fight around this place to get away from slapping somebody on the fanny or having somebody swallow something.”

  As Sylvia listened to Walt, she found her artistic spirit reawakened. The creative pleasures of her youth that had been submerged under the weight of adult responsibility were only now beginning to bob back up to the surface. When describing his lofty ambitions for the new film, known around the studio as the “concert feature,” Walt seemed to be detailing her innermost desire.

  To hear Walt tell it, they weren’t involved in a solely commercial endeavor designed to steal the nickels of children in exchange for a few laughs. They were being tasked with using their art to move audiences in unexpected ways. Like Sylvia, Bianca was mesmerized by Walt’s words. What he was describing was the essence of why she joined the studio in the first place. Instead of writing gags, she longed to create meaningful work.

  The concert feature was technically skipping ahead in line. Bambi would have to wait its turn yet again. The challenge of bringing an entire forest of animals to life was overwhelming the animation department and necessitating a lengthy development.