The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  At the Chouinard Art Institute, which she attended on scholarship, Retta gained a reputation for being able to depict animals with startling realism. The Los Angeles Basin was strikingly different from the foothills of the Okanogan Mountains in Washington State where Retta had been raised, in a small town called Omak. Retta grew up running around her family’s fruit orchard, dodging between apple trees as she played with her five siblings while her mother, the daughter of immigrants, yelled for them in Swedish. Retta was the third of five daughters and had a baby brother seven years younger than herself whom the family all doted on.

  The Great Depression stole away the Scott family farm, as Retta’s father could no longer keep up with the mortgage payments. Seeking work, he moved the family to a rental home near Lake Washington in Seattle, and at first Retta worried that the city could never offer them the happiness that the open air of the country had. It was school that brought Retta joy in Seattle. Her parents, who had never attended school themselves, were astonished at her ability in her classes. She excelled in the fine arts from an early age, earning a scholarship in the fourth grade from the Seattle Music and Art Foundation to take art classes throughout her public-school education. After high school, she moved to California for college.

  Retta spent her time at Chouinard unimpressed with cartoons and animation, in her opinion a coarse, childish medium that seemed to have nothing to do with her aspirations as an artist. So she was surprised when, on the verge of her graduation in 1938, Chouinard’s director asked if she would consider applying to the Walt Disney Studios. He had heard that Bambi was being developed as a feature-length film and thought immediately of Retta and her distinct talent for drawing animals. Retta, with no affection for Mickey Mouse, warmed to the idea slowly. It wasn’t the career she had initially desired, but with the Great Depression still nibbling at the country’s heels, she was thankful simply to find work.

  The studio turned out to be different from her expectations. Hired in the story department, she was surprised at the devotion of the artists who worked alongside her, none of whom were merely scrabbling together rough drawings as she had once supposed. Instead, they spent countless hours perfecting the aesthetics of their work. She found that many of her colleagues were Chouinard graduates like herself, all having discarded their snobbery about what constitutes art after being admitted into the warmth of Walt’s inner world.

  Retta, like Walt, drew people to her. Her mere presence in a room could make a person smile. With her blond curls piled high atop her head, her tiny frame, and her bubbling enthusiasm, she appeared younger than her twenty-two years, but when she spoke, those around her took notice of her assurance and intelligence. Bianca, Grace, Dorothy, Sylvia, and Ethel had primed the men of the story department, gotten them accustomed to working alongside women, and so Retta’s voice, new and female though it was, was accepted.

  Walt, however, was not listening. The concert feature, although it remained nameless, seemed to be consuming him. He spent little time working on anything else. By the end of 1938, he had apparently forgotten about the studio’s troublesome second feature, and he stopped attending story meetings for Bambi altogether.

  The plane shot down the runway, the propeller whining, the metal fuselage rattling. Grace pulled on the yoke and the jolting ceased as the plane rose smoothly into the gray clouds of an overcast day. She hardly looked like herself that Monday afternoon in 1939, a day she would ordinarily have been working at the studio but that she had managed to take off thanks to her hours of overtime. She wore a wool flying suit several sizes too big, fur-lined gloves, and thick socks under tough leather boots. She piloted alone, her only companions a cylinder of oxygen, a flowmeter, and a Boothby-Lovelace-Bulbulian (BLB) mask tied down firmly within reach in the space where a seat had once been. That seat, along with its cushion, the toolbox, and whatever else Grace considered unnecessary weight, had been left behind in the hangar.

  Just two days earlier, she’d received a letter from one of the physicians who had developed the BLB mask, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II. He originally designed the equipment to give patients anesthesia more efficiently but then adapted the mask for aviators intent on breaking altitude records. Lovelace, like so many before him, had sent Grace a rejection letter, this one telling her that the metabolism laboratory at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota didn’t need any more pilots for their high-altitude experiments. Grace had become inured to refusal at this point, but she was grateful for the advice he’d sent her about using oxygen in the air.

  It was a warm day on the ground in Burbank, but the higher she climbed, the colder the air became, dropping two degrees Celsius per thousand feet of elevation. Despite the poor visibility and the chill, Grace was excited. Years of training and months of preparation had led up to this moment. With some difficulty, she’d borrowed two separate Fairchild planes from a local dealer who hoped to get some publicity from her flights. Grace then spent countless hours comparing the two planes, making careful charts evaluating their oil temperature, oil pressure, and manifold pressure. She borrowed her brother’s stopwatch to record the exact amount of time it took each plane to rise a thousand feet in the air. She swapped out propellers, searching for one with less drag, and shivered in the cabin as she made her test flights. Her struggle to get to this point—the pleading for opportunity, the embarrassment at mistakes made along the way—all seemed to drop away as she got higher in the sky. She was finally doing it, going for a new altitude record for a single-engine monoplane.

  Climbing above the haze over the Los Angeles Basin, or “going upstairs,” as Grace called it, she reached nineteen thousand feet in fifty minutes. Even with the limited oxygen at that elevation and the risk of hypoxia, Grace was feeling fine. She had not even touched her oxygen mask. The plane, however, was not doing so well. Grace couldn’t believe that today of all days, the Fairchild would act up. She tried everything she could think of but it refused to climb higher than nineteen thousand feet. She had reached the aircraft’s ceiling and was now getting low on fuel. Gas weighs six pounds a gallon and Grace was carrying as little as possible despite a member of the ground crew pleading, “Grace, please take more than last trip. You came back with only about half a teacup left in the tank!” These words rang in her ears as she began her return, aware that she had not a drop to waste.

  She descended as quickly as she thought safe, leaving behind the San Gabriel Mountains and flying over Pasadena on her way west toward the setting sun. When she dropped down into the clouds, visibility sharply decreased. She could see only half a mile ahead of her. She began to worry about Burbank closing their airport. If she landed under such conditions, she would be violating the Civil Aeronautics Administration regulations and potentially endangering others. She also couldn’t help but remember a close call she’d had once before, flying through the valley, when she hadn’t been paying enough attention and had nearly collided with a large DC-3 transport plane, avoiding disaster only by making a last-minute dive. She thought of the transport planes below her now, circling in poor weather over Burbank, and decided it wasn’t worth the hazard. Although she knew she was nearly out of fuel, she decided to take the risk of flying all the way to Glendale instead.

  The rubber wheels bounced down the runway as Grace scanned the airfield. She parked the plane, placed blocks in front of the wheels, and grabbed the sealed barometer, which could not leave her sight and would later be sent to Washington, DC, to officially record her altitude attempt, before rushing to a nearby phone to let her friends at Burbank Airport know what had happened to her.

  Grace stood chatting with a mechanic for companionship as she waited for her friends to pick her up. Now back in the July heat on the ground, she was sweating in her flight suit. She had worn nothing underneath it and so had to stew until she could get home to change.

  When the press arrived, along with her friends, there was a flurry of excitement. She posed for pictures both in the cockpit and outside the plane, a smile plaste
red on her face. But once she got home, feelings of inadequacy rose within her. She wished the plane had climbed higher, as it had during her test runs. She worried that all her preparation would be for naught if she hadn’t attained a new altitude record. These lonely feelings stayed with her as she tossed and turned through the night.

  The next day she opened the morning Los Angeles Times, and there was her picture, an oxygen tube and mask hanging around her neck, alongside the headline “Woman Flyer Sets Altitude Record.” Delayed feelings of happiness and accomplishment washed over her as she excitedly showed the paper to her mother. Yet her mother’s gaze held not pride, but disgust. To Grace’s shock, she said in a sour voice, “You’re only interested in the publicity.”

  The locomotive was racing down the track, but no one had built a station for it to stop at. This was how the studio’s development of the concert feature was advancing in the fall of 1939. Without a clear end date for the film, some artists wondered if this would be Walt’s undoing, his first unfinished picture. Coincidentally, this was how Walt himself viewed it, albeit in a more favorable light. He envisioned the concert feature as a never-ending orchestral mix in which classical music could constantly be replaced and reimagined with new animation, thereby running in theaters perpetually. Yet even with this idyllic prospect before him, Walt knew the train had to stop sometime. He began having the story directors present their Leica reels, a kind of developed storyboard using filmed animated stills, in conjunction with the soundtrack.

  Sylvia’s nerves were on edge as she presented her second set of Leica reels to Walt. Indecision gnawed at her, not about her work on the concert feature, where she guided with a sure hand, but about whether to ask Walt for more money. She wondered if it was better to ask now or wait until she’d presented her work. Perhaps if Walt liked it, she reasoned, her raise would be higher. Sylvia, although a story director and with a family to support, made considerably less than her male counterparts. She took home thirty dollars a week. Other story directors, all men, were paid between seventy and eighty dollars a week. She had been hesitant to ask for a raise—she didn’t want to appear greedy—and so she put it off again. She concentrated on her reels instead, spending long hours in the studio and then watching closely as the animation she had developed was filmed in Technicolor and then “blooped,” a term for setting it to music.

  Part of Sylvia’s caution stemmed from the fact that a man kept taking credit for her work. One of the directors of the picture had an infuriating habit of stealing Sylvia’s ideas and passing them off to Walt as his own. Sylvia could do little but watch her colleague continually receive praise for work that she had performed. On February 5, she decided to take her revenge. It was the director’s birthday and as a special treat, she sneaked into his office before working hours and covered the entire space with streamers of toilet paper. When he walked in that morning he was met with laughs and a sprinkle of applause. Amid the revelry, he had no choice but to smile and chuckle at the new decorations. Sylvia was laughing too, although not in the same spirit.

  One of Sylvia’s colleagues admiring his newly decorated office. Halo added by Sylvia Holland. (Courtesy Theo Halladay)

  Urgency to finish the concert feature was percolating throughout the studio. They had already been working on the film for three years and so the need to hurry could be felt in every department, even in promotional materials, where an artist named Gyo (pronounced “Geo”) Fujikawa worked. Before she was born, her father, sure that she would be a boy, had decided to name her Gyo, after a wise and benevolent Chinese emperor. When she came into the world clearly a female, he stubbornly refused to change the name. So Gyo she became, a nisei woman from Berkeley, California, who had the easy temper and academic prowess of the emperor she was named after. When she graduated from San Pedro High School, all her friends were getting married, and for a short while it seemed she would join them; she became engaged at the age of nineteen. But ultimately she decided to break off the engagement, much to her mother’s embarrassment. Her mother was so mortified that she sent her daughter to Japan for a year, hardly a punishment to Gyo, who feasted on traditional art by masters from across the centuries, including Sesshu, Utamaro, and Hiroshige, and soaked up color palettes inspired by the smoky-hued silks of kimonos.

  When she came home, all thoughts of settling into a normal, domestic life had vanished, replaced by her fierce desire to become part of the art world. She received a scholarship to attend the Chouinard Art Institute and packed her bags for Los Angeles, a city that would be her home for the next decade. After graduating from the institute, she decided not to leave, joining the faculty. As a professor, Gyo helped guide countless artists, one of whom was the quiet and determined Mary Blair. It was clear to Gyo that Mary, who seemed older and wiser than her peers and had a gift for design, would find success in the art world.

  After four years of teaching, Gyo realized that her own needs as an artist had outgrown her affection for the art school, and she moved on, working on murals and displays for department stores and refining her illustration style in her own pieces at home. A friend recommended her to Walt Disney Studios, where she began work in the promotions department.

  Gyo’s artistic style quickly drew attention. Artists, many of whom she was familiar with from her tenure at Chouinard, gathered around her desk. One of her new admirers was Art Babbitt, a top animator at the studio. Babbitt asked Gyo for a date, to which she quickly agreed. The news buzzed around the studio, and Gyo was soon the recipient of all kinds of unwanted advice and off-color warnings—for instance, that she would become pregnant before she even entered a room with Babbitt. Dating among the artists was not unusual and neither was the gossip it incited, but Gyo did not enjoy the attention. Rather than risk endless rumors, she decided to call off the date.

  Gyo’s career at the studio was broadening. She designed products based on the upcoming concert feature, items such as saltshakers, china sets, and glassware, and illustrated a tie-in picture book. She created a theater program for the film’s premiere in select cities. The brochure was important if unusual. The concert feature would be the first American film released without credits, not even the standard “Walt Disney Presents.” The lack of opening credits was meant to give the audience the sense of being at a real concert, not a movie. The film begins with the opening of a curtain, the rush of musicians taking their seats, and the sound of them tuning their instruments in preparation to play.

  Opening credits for the studio’s films had long been a subject of contention. Animators complained of having to fight for them, with only the most ruthless successful in getting their names onto the silver screen. The established convention at the studio was that if you produced at least one hundred feet of work, you received on-screen credit. The reality was far more complicated, particularly for those story artists whose contributions could not be measured in feet.

  Sylvia was about to feel the chafe of this injustice. She was reviewing the film with Walt and a small group of directors at what Walt called a “sweatbox meeting,” as employees perspired liberally while going over the raw, unedited footage, although whether the sweat arose from the small, stuffy theater or Walt’s sharp criticism was never clear. Sylvia was not especially anxious at this particular meeting. She felt confident in the film they were reviewing and it quickly became clear that Walt was pleased, as he complimented her work in his usual encouraging style.

  With the stressful part of the meeting over, Sylvia relaxed. The credits, though they would ultimately be printed only on a program, were thrown up on the screen for review. She glanced through the names casually, never doubting that her own would make the cut. But as the list unspooled, she was shocked to find herself omitted. Sylvia was usually calm and cool but this provocation was too much for even her easy temper. She went completely silent, stood up, and walked out of the room. “Sylvia? Sylvia!” one of the men called out after her, but she didn’t turn around. It was obvious that she was livid, yet she
refused to say a word to any of them. Walt, sensing trouble, followed her down the hall. “What’s wrong?” he asked. The anger coursed through her and at first she was too mad to even answer. After a minute of silently boiling, however, she turned to Walt and exploded. “It’s outrageous!” she exclaimed, then insisted that her work be properly credited.

  Sylvia would get the satisfaction of seeing her name, though many others wouldn’t. While no names would grace the screen for the concert feature, that did not mean that the struggle for credit was any less ugly or less exclusionary than on other films. For the Nutcracker Suite segment, for instance, credit in the program was eventually given to twenty-two artists, fewer than half of the total fifty-three men and women who’d worked on it. Sylvia made certain that not only her name but also the names of two of the women who toiled alongside her, Bianca Majolie and Ethel Kulsar, were featured prominently. Theirs were the only women’s names in the entire program.

  The studio still had to find a title to emblazon on the program’s cover; it couldn’t be known as “the concert feature” forever. The answer came from an unanticipated source, the conductor Stokowski, who would shake hands with Mickey Mouse on-screen. He suggested the name Fantasia, a word first tied to music in the sixteenth century and meaning a free-form composition not bound by structure. It fit their boundary-breaking film perfectly.