The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  The animators at the Walt Disney Studios were not the only ones dissatisfied with their lot. In 1938, the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild was formed in Los Angeles, led by Bill Littlejohn, an animator working on the new Tom and Jerry shorts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. As the guild’s ranks grew, so did its reach, and Walt, employer of more animators than any other studio in town, was in its sights.

  The tidal wave of turmoil about to wash over the studio started slowly. Demands began to increase, and although Walt made promises and even cut his own salary, he gave his staff no extra money. The public offering had not gone well. Stocks initially valued at $25 a share quickly plummeted to $3.25 a share.

  At the same time, Fantasia, the studio’s artistic darling, was proving a disaster. Finally released on November 13, 1940, it was introduced as a road show, moving among only thirteen theaters. This was due to the expense of the surround sound, or Fantasound, that the movie required. Fantasound necessitated eleven amplifier racks, dozens of loudspeakers, four hundred vacuum tubes, and a team of specially trained technicians to maintain and operate the equipment. The system weighed fifteen thousand pounds and took more than a week to install. At a cost of eighty-five thousand dollars per theater, it was an investment that few movie-house owners were willing to make.

  Not only hampered by limited screenings, Fantasia was also eviscerated by critics, with Newsweek stating, “Where Disney misses is in the creation of the smirking centaurs, the ‘art calendar’ cupids, the coy and flapperish centaurettes, and the comic-strip Bacchus, who all desecrate the Olympian background chosen for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.” In the New York Herald-Tribune, columnist Dorothy Thompson wrote, “The illustrations of the Beethoven ‘Pastoral’ are sufficient to raise an army, if there is enough blood left in culture to defend itself.… The clean, pure sounds—the unbearably clean, pure sounds—fall about us while we gaze on the raspberry and marshmallow Olympus, and the pure, strong music seems to be dropping cold and frustrated tears.” Then as now, the weakness of Fantasia lay in the misguided, and later considered sexist and racist, Pastoral Symphony scene.

  The film had cost $2.3 million to make, a million more than Snow White, and it seemed the studio would never recoup the loss. It was now imperative to hurry Dumbo and even the idealistic aspirations of Bambi along. Under such pressure, Walt had little incentive, and even less capital, to respond to the needs of his staff. The studio was $4.5 million in debt to Bank of America, and the freedom to raise salaries Walt had enjoyed just the year before was now gone. The stockholders had effectively seized control of his company, and unless something dramatically shifted, they would be the ones to have final say on all future feature projects. Walt’s studio was no longer truly his.

  The focus on money jarred some artists, many of whom could make more as clerks at retail stores than they made working at the studio. Mary Blair was as discontented as most of the employees around her, but for different reasons. She wanted only a decent salary and cared nothing for seeing her name on-screen. But she still felt removed from the studio, as if she didn’t belong. It was only when she sat next to Retta, the two of them sketching a live elephant named Mabel brought in to aid the artists, that she found happiness in her job.

  Unlike Mary and Retta, Bianca felt life at the studio was nearly torture. Story meetings, always a wearying exercise in personal criticism, had become even more intense. Instead of smoothing her path, Bianca’s success in Fantasia and her inspiration for Dumbo had hardened the men to her, and they took every chance to heap on more disparagement. She knew her ideas had potential, and yet she couldn’t advocate effectively for their production.

  Bianca was working on two projects, both based on stories she loved: Cinderella and Peter Pan. It seemed to her that Cinderella had the same dramatic potential as Snow White had had—a princess in distress, with the promise of evocative imagery. They could use animals in the story, and there were scenes she was sure would create dramatic tension. On her sketch pad she drew Cinderella running down a dark flight of steps in a voluminous blue dress, a glittering slipper lying behind her.

  She was also working on a character from Peter Pan that was of particular interest to her. Bianca had always been drawn to fairies, and here in the book was a mischievous one named Tinker Bell. She drew the tiny fairy again and again, giving her an impish expression and surrounding her with flying children and golden fairy dust.

  Bianca had been developing the projects for years at the studio without gaining traction. Her newest story treatments didn’t draw Walt’s notice. She wondered if the only way to get him interested in her ideas was to have them presented by someone else. Feeling frazzled and unappreciated, she decided to take a vacation and refresh her artistic sensibility. When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she felt the city was “young, beautiful, and full of angels,” but now she was desperate to leave town, if only temporarily.

  But when she returned to the office after her vacation, she was confused. Her office was not as she had left it. Her pencils, sketchbooks, and story notes were all gone. Sitting at her desk was a man she had never met. In astonishment, she backed out of the room, believing that she must have made a mistake; perhaps she had entered the wrong office. But no, this was her room. In the hall one of the men saw her stunned expression and told her, “You know you’re fired.” But Bianca hadn’t known. No one had bothered to tell her. And her high-school friend Walt did not take the trouble to say goodbye.

  Chapter 7

  Aquarela do Brasil

  Grace was usually gentle as she pulled back the throttle during takeoff, but today she threw caution aside, opened up the mechanism, and let the plane climb as fast as she dared. She passed the Burbank tower at one thousand feet and kept pressing. She was leaving disappointment and pain back on the ground behind her. It was 1940 and she had left the studio abruptly after she was offered a job that felt like a dream dropped from the sky. Yet only weeks later, after she’d quit her job at the studio, her prospects were crushed by the rising threat of war. Archibald M. Brown of Fairchild Aircraft rescinded his recent offer of employment, explaining in a letter that it was due to “circumstances beyond everyone’s control with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler.”

  Grace was devastated, but in her grief, she became more determined. She decided to go for another altitude record. A twenty-year-old with the patriotic name Betsy Ross had recently tried to set a new record for light planes but came up short, reaching eighteen thousand feet in the sky above Pennsylvania. Grace knew that she could beat not only Ross’s attempt but also her own previous record set in 1939. If she did, then perhaps someone would finally hire her. From a dealership interested in publicity, she was able to borrow a plane, a Taylorcraft two-seat painted a sleek black with red trim. Grace nicknamed it “Black Beauty.”

  Forty-five minutes before takeoff, Grace began stretching her muscles and breathing pure oxygen out of a mask. It was a new technique for removing nitrogen from the blood and avoiding the effects of rapid changes in atmospheric pressure. Grace cleared her mind as she walked to the plane, her brother Charles beside her, carrying her oxygen tank.

  After takeoff, she climbed quickly through the air above Burbank until it seemed she was barely moving at all, her altimeter oddly stuck at 21,000 feet. When she looked at the more sensitive altimeter she had brought on board, however, she noted that it read 22,750. She was startled. She hadn’t expected to reach any higher than 20,000 feet. She knew now that she was going to make a record, and she wanted to keep going, keep pushing higher, and really see what she was capable of. At the high elevation she was feeling no dreaded light-headedness or nausea, only a growing sensation of boredom, when she suddenly heard boom.

  There was no worse noise a pilot could hear. She ran her eyes over the plane and equipment. She knew it could have been the motor backfiring or perhaps a broken cable, and so, while trying to stay calm, she searched for the cause of the frighteningly loud sound. The answer was staring right at her. The
windshield was cracked. She saw the break splitting the glass from top to bottom. If the windshield caved in now, Grace might completely lose control of the plane. She examined the glass carefully from her seat and thought it looked fairly intact. She decided to take her chances and press on.

  It was then that Grace noticed just how cold she was. Her more sensitive altimeter had stopped registering the changing altitude, but it was obvious from the temperature that she was continuing to climb. It was twelve degrees below zero, and Grace’s hand shook as she gripped her pencil and, from habit, tried to note the false unchanging altitude in her notebook. Even with her windshield cracked and her body shivering, Grace kept going up; she started descending only when her fuel gauge told her she had just enough in the tank to get home.

  After she landed, the first question the press asked was “How high did you go?” With a smile on her face, Grace responded, “The altimeter registered 22,750 feet.” She wouldn’t know that she had reached 24,311 feet, breaking the previous record by more than 4,000 feet, until the official barometer was sent to Washington and analyzed. She had come back down to Earth with no job, no security concerning her future in aviation, and no exact answer to what altitude she had attained, but she felt just fine.

  Everything was not fine at the studio. Grace’s departure left a hole in the story department. Her colleagues, particularly the women she worked with, felt the loss keenly, even though it was not a surprise. For years, Grace had talked of finding her fortune in aviation, despite her talent for writing scripts and putting together storyboards. But Grace’s work had made an impression on her employer; it was clear that the ambivalence about hiring women Walt had expressed when he first brought Grace in four years earlier had dissipated.

  The strides being made by women at the studio were not confined to the story department. In the early 1940s Walt instituted a new training program to bring women from Ink and Paint into animation. If you were a woman working for Walt Disney Studios, you suddenly had unprecedented opportunities in the animation industry, opportunities that existed at no other studio in town.

  The only other animation studio of the era with similar openings for women was Japan Animated Films, later renamed Toei Doga, based in Tokyo. Like the studio in Burbank, the company was unusual in that it hired women directly into the animation department. It was their female employees, such as Kazuko Nakamura and Reiko Okuyama, who would later become the mothers of anime and give life to a genre elegant in its blend of emotion and art.

  The rise of women in the workplace, no matter what side of the world it occurred on, was frightening to some men, and they approached the perceived threat much as toddlers would a monster under the bed—by crying about it. Just as, over the centuries, some Americans have blamed immigrants for siphoning jobs away from them, a subset of male employees blamed women for stealing work they felt was rightfully theirs, and some of the men at the Disney studio accused Walt of hiring women only as a way to save money, as they could be paid so much less. In this environment of fear and unhappiness, Walt gathered all his employees at the Burbank studio on February 10, 1941, to address these complaints directly.

  Another ugly rumor is that we are trying to develop girls for animation to replace higher-priced men. This is the silliest thing I have ever heard of. We are not interested in low-priced help. We are interested in efficient help. The girls are being trained for inbetweens for very good reasons. The first is to make them more versatile, [so] that the peak loads of inbetweening and inking can be handled. Believe me when I say that the more versatile our organization is, the more beneficial it is to the employees, for it assures steady employment for the employee, as well as steady production turnover for the studio.

  The second reason is that the possibility of a war, let alone the peacetime conscription, may take many of our young men now employed, and especially many of the young applicants. I believe that if there is to be a business for these young men to come back to after the war, it must be maintained during the war. The girls can help here.

  Third, the girl artists have the right to expect the same chances for advancement as men, and I honestly believe that they may eventually contribute something to this business that men never would or could. In the present group that are training for inbetweens there are definite prospects; and a good example is to mention the work of Ethel Kulsar and Sylvia Holland on The Nutcracker Suite, and little Retta Scott, of whom you will hear more when you see Bambi.

  It was a strong defense of the value of women independent of wartime or economic pressure, and Walt’s words buoyed the confidence of Sylvia, Ethel, and Retta in particular. For many of the men, however, there was little Walt could say to quell their fears. They were simply not ready for such radical change.

  Whether or not they were ready, upheaval was coming for all of them. In early 1941, although the United States was still ostensibly uninvolved in the violence and destruction occurring in Europe and Asia, it was clear to most Americans that the fragile stability of peace could not last and that they had best prepare for war.

  Life at the shiny new studio in Burbank was also poised for turmoil. All spring Walt had been meeting with leaders of the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild and members of his staff who were demanding a more equitable approach to salary and screen credits. Like many studio heads, Walt resented having to speak with Herb Sorrell, who was a powerful union organizer and leader and particularly skilled at negotiation. In public, Walt blamed Communist forces for the unrest, but in private he took personal offense at the position of some of his favorite animators.

  Chief among these was Art Babbitt, the animator who’d drawn the wicked queen in Snow White and created the character of Goofy. Babbitt couldn’t claim that he was unappreciated. He was one of the highest-paid animators at the studio and saw his name frequently in the credits. He lived a lavish lifestyle complete with a large home, servants, and three cars. It seemed preposterous to Walt that the studio that had given him so much should be the target of his antipathy.

  Babbitt, for his part, viewed his position of power in the studio as giving him a responsibility to aid the less privileged artists around him. He didn’t confine himself to the men but spoke to as many studio employees as he could, frequently visiting the Ink and Paint department. In fact, Babbitt claimed that concern over the health of one inker, who had passed out at her desk because she was unable to afford lunch, had prompted his involvement in the union.

  On May 28, 1941, the meeting became ugly. Sorrell yelled at Walt, “I can make a dust bowl of your studio!” The shouts and threats yielded neither side what it sought. As the angry meeting broke up, Walt turned vindictive. He immediately fired Art Babbitt and sixteen other pro-union artists. It was the ammunition the union needed to strike.

  On the morning of May 29, everything changed. Hundreds of employees stood blocking the studio entrance on Buena Vista Street with signs that read THERE ARE NO STRINGS ON ME, ARE WE MICE OR MEN?, and IT’S UP TO WALT TO CALL A HALT.

  Suddenly, the employees were divided by their loyalties, and some friendships were destroyed over union sympathies. Walt’s niece Marjorie Sewell was working at the studio as a painter and rooming with one of her coworkers, an inker, and as they fell on opposite sides of the strike, the tension at their home was high. Sewell would drive her roommate to the studio in the morning, drop her off outside to protest, then drive through the gates to work.

  Many single women at the studio did not have the financial means to join the strike no matter what their personal feelings about supporting the union were. Retta drove across the picket line with her heart heavy. She knew that some of the anger she witnessed was reserved for her. The men were irate that she had dared to take a job that they felt belonged to them. She had not been an animator long and was fearful of losing her prized position, and she couldn’t afford to go on strike even if she wanted to. As she drove through the throng of hundreds, men began to pound on her car, yelling, “What are you doing here? You should
be home having babies!”

  Sylvia was also nervous about her job prospects in light of the strike. She could not jeopardize her employment—everyone in her family was counting on her income. One close friend at the studio, however, felt differently. Ethel Kulsar, also with two young children to support, decided to join the picket line. For two women who had so much in common and had worked together so closely, the separation was deeply felt. Their relationship was just one of many fractured in the strike.

  Sylvia, unlike Ethel, had no outside family to aid her, and she knew that without her income, she could lose her children. She would rather accept meager wages and endure long hours than risk that. She was already making about sixty dollars less a month than she had been promised in her last promotion and it seemed likely that the cuts would continue. She didn’t blame Walt for the tumultuous conditions. Instead, she blamed the company’s lawyers for not finding a way to compromise with the strikers, and she did her best to keep working.

  There was much to do. Before striking, Ethel Kulsar had written a story treatment for “The Little Mermaid,” by Hans Christian Andersen, and Sylvia now spent long hours storyboarding the film and taking the helm during story meetings with Walt. She was outspoken in her vision, frequently dominating the meetings, and Walt was as impressed with her confidence as he was gratified by her loyalty.

  Neither Sylvia nor Mary Blair nor Retta would join the strikers, but for Mary in particular, the ensuing chaos distracted her from her work as an artist. She didn’t want to be drawn into long discussions about money and screen credit; she would rather be at home painting. Abruptly, she resigned, feeling she was making the best move artistically for her career.

  With multiple vulnerabilities confronting the Walt Disney Studios—financial strain, employee unrest, and a world war on the horizon—Walt thought it seemed like a good time to leave town. An opportunity had presented itself from an unlikely source: the State Department. The U.S. government wanted to send Walt and a few select studio employees on a goodwill tour to South America, hoping to impede the political inroads that Nazi Germany was making throughout the continent.