The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  But despite the job’s advantages, life did not get easier for Sylvia. The school was understaffed and so she worked fourteen-hour days. She woke at five thirty a.m., the air still cold, and lit fireplaces throughout the building to get the classrooms heated and ready. She taught classes in the morning, and in the afternoon she saddled horses and instructed children in riding, ferrying the kids from the school to a ranch near the Salton Sea. In the evenings she watched the kids in study hall. It was lovely to have more time with her children, but the exhaustion was overpowering. She yearned for her old life at the studio and the artistic freedom it had once afforded her.

  With similar reasoning as Sylvia, Tyrus Wong also chose not to join the strike. His allegiance was not to Walt, whom he had never met, but to the studio itself, which had given him unprecedented independence on Bambi. Like Sylvia, he had a young family to support, a wife and a three-year-old daughter, and knew from experience that jobs in animation could be difficult to obtain.

  The studio shutdown was a dramatic turn of events, but Tyrus assumed that his influence and long hours on Bambi, as well as his loyalty to the studio, would result in his getting his job back. Behind the scenes, however, a group of strikers jealous of his talent and unreasonably angry that he had taken the company side were plotting against him. Although Tyrus’s expressive visual style was essential to Bambi, the film was nearly complete. Despite his artistry, Tyrus was fired. The experience was shattering, but Tyrus quickly pushed away his resentments and began looking for work. The search would not take long. With his Bambi sketches and two original storyboards in hand, he walked over to Warner Brothers and was promptly hired.

  Retta Scott, too, was among the non-striking artists at the studio. She felt great affection for Walt, whom she viewed as a second father. Her own father was more than a thousand miles away in Seattle, and with her limited resources, Retta rarely got to visit him. With her family so far away, she delighted in her relationships at the studio, especially with Walt, who called her “Little Retta” and sometimes stopped his car and offered to give her a ride if he saw her walking to work in the morning. He praised her work in story meetings and chided her only when he saw her feeding the stray cats at the studio. The animals had made the move to Burbank along with the artists and seemed to be a permanent part of the studio’s landscape. Walt did not mind their presence, but he preferred them to eat rodents rather than food given to them by his employees.

  Like Tyrus, Retta worked long hours on Bambi during the summer of 1941. The animators’ room was nearly empty, and only three artists remained—herself, Eric Larson, and Art Elliott. She drew over fifty-six thousand dogs for Bambi, then, because they were so short-staffed, did the cleanup work single-handedly, taking her rough sketches and transforming the lines into clean, crisp drawings that were ready for the Ink and Paint department.

  That summer Retta was not just behind the scenes but on-screen as well, appearing in a promotional film called The Reluctant Dragon, released on June 20, 1941. More an advertisement for the studio than a feature in its own right, it consisted of a live-action tour of the Walt Disney Studios, with a visitor roaming the grounds, going into the camera room, stopping by the story and animation departments, and even saying hello to the women of Ink and Paint. It also included four animated shorts dropped in at intervals. Filmed prior to the strike, the movie presented a studio starkly different from the current reality. Yet seeing Retta smiling on-screen from the studio’s life-drawing class, one of a group of animators sketching an elephant, girls in theaters across the country were inspired. Retta’s presence shattered preconceived notions and, for the young women watching, offered proof that their gender need not be a hindrance to a creative career.

  The next project was Dumbo, and Retta worked furiously, animating the film in record time considering the minimal crew. Every day was drudgery; long hours, with little relief from friends and coworkers, and anger and resentment specifically directed at her as she entered and exited the studio each day. She did not even have the comfort of her best friend, as Mary Blair was a world away. Despite the atmosphere of misery, Retta was not easily beaten down. She laughed in the face of her misfortunes and tried to make the best of her difficulties.

  Not all the news was bad. Thanks to Retta and the hardworking remaining staff, the studio was able to finish Dumbo on time, although just barely. The film was completed just two and a half weeks before its New York City premiere, October 23, 1941. The critical reviews were positive, and the New York Times declared the film “a fanciful delight.” From their experience with Pinocchio and Fantasia, the staff knew that praise from critics did not necessarily mean ticket sales, but Walt, newly returned from South America, was hopeful this film would help pay down debts and give the studio enough financial stability to bring staff back.

  Like Sylvia and Tyrus, Retta was shocked at the shutdown. Unlike them, however, she was one of the few artists immediately rehired, as her work was absolutely necessary for the feature films they were completing. Alas, Retta’s good fortune was not to last. The studio had gotten everything it needed from the young animator, and with the company’s future still uncertain, executives had little reason to keep her on. On November 24, the artist whom Walt had warmly praised only four months previously, the first credited female animator of the studio, was fired.

  In the fall of 1941, unlike most of her colleagues, Mary Blair returned to the studio she had once hastily quit confident of her employment, as were all the other members of El Grupo. The studio was a sad, empty place, to be sure, but there was much to rejoice in. She was coming home full of inspiration, her sketchbook replete with images, her mind bursting with ideas.

  As planned, the artists who had gone to South America began turning their months of travel into films celebrating the diverse cultures of the continent. Unfortunately, as no new features were in the works, the story department had been stripped down and there were few people left who could put together a nuanced storyboard. The animators, though talented, were more adept at gag humor, using the slapstick movements of their characters to evoke laughter without the need for words.

  The studio was further handicapped by the fact that most of the artists working on the picture, which would be known as Saludos Amigos, hadn’t been to South America and so were re-creating scenes they hadn’t witnessed firsthand. Without artists to provide the finesse the studio had once been capable of, the South American culture was lost in translation.

  Early one Sunday morning in December 1941, a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii took twenty-four hundred lives and changed the fate of the nation. Most Americans stayed near their radios with no thought of carrying on normal life. But that morning, while many Californians worried that they were next in line to be attacked, Walt, who hadn’t yet heard the news, was working. He had a story meeting scheduled.

  That fateful December day, Walt was discussing a feature he had been hoping to make for years based on the 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. He had no money to develop a new feature and yet he was optimistic that they would somehow find a way. Oblivious to the impending chaos of their world, Walt and a group of story men discussed the plot. At one point, Walt said, “Oftentimes the best sense is nonsense. I’d like to finish the whole thing by coming out with some bit of nonsense that makes very good sense—the implication would be ‘There. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you.’”

  The riddles of Lewis Carroll could not distract Walt from reality for long. The next day, the U.S. Congress officially declared war on Japan, and days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The delightful absurdities of Alice in Wonderland had to be set aside. The South American feature now took on new importance. It was more than a film; it was a hand reaching across continents to potentially warm the hearts and gain the political sympathies of the United States’ neighbors.

  Mary’s sketches for Saludos
Amigos captured the vibrancy she had experienced in Brazil, but her work was only one part of the larger project. The movie would be a package film—a collection of related shorts—each of its four sequences endeavoring to illustrate the spirit of one of the countries El Grupo had visited. Between the segments, real footage of the trip was incorporated, and Mary Blair, smiling on an airplane, stood out from the male artists on the trip. With a cartoon plane moving across a map of the continent, the film took the reverse course of their route, going from Lake Titicaca to Chile to Argentina and ending in Brazil.

  Alô Amigos, the Portuguese title of the film, premiered in Rio de Janeiro on August 24, 1942. It would be six months before an English-language version of the studio’s shortest picture, at forty-two minutes, would be shown in North America. The delay was deliberate, the exclusivity meant to underline the fact that the film was primarily intended to entertain South American audiences and hopefully strengthen ties between the Americas. The film yielded mixed reactions, bringing in a modest profit for the studio along with praise and criticism from both sides of the equator.

  The Chilean segment failed to capture the rich culture El Grupo had encountered during their time in the country. The short’s hero is a young mail plane named Pedro on his first trip across the Andes. The plane struggles with the weather and altitude before heroically delivering the mail from the high plains of Mendoza, Argentina, down to Santiago, on Chile’s coast.

  Many Chileans found the puerile plane a disappointing character. One of those Chileans was René Ríos Boettiger, a former medical student who in the 1930s had traded in his stethoscope for pencils. In 1941 he met Walt in Santiago, where Boettiger was working as a cartoonist under the pseudonym Pepo. The meeting was cordial, but Boettiger’s amicable feelings vanished after he saw Saludos Amigos in 1942. In response, he decided to create his own character, one that would properly represent the country he loved. Boettiger selected the condor from the Chilean coat of arms, and in 1949, the comic Condorito was born, the protagonist an endearing rascal who frequently falls to the floor with a plop! His popularity would far outstrip that of Saludos Amigos, reaching readers across the world as an influential ambassador for the land of the Andes.

  It wasn’t solely the Chilean segment of Saludos Amigos that was lacking. The representation of Argentina was similarly dissatisfying to many. It depicted the character Goofy learning the ways of the gaucho, the national symbol of Argentina. While the beginning of the short depicts the elements of traditional gaucho clothing, the rest of it is composed of typical gag material as Goofy struggles with his lasso and saddle.

  Only in its last segment did the film approach its aspirations. In time to the beautiful song “Aquarela do Brasil,” written by Ary Barroso in 1939, the short unfolds from the perspective of a paintbrush, seemingly held by the audience, capturing in watercolors the luscious beauty of Rio de Janeiro. The animation is free and artistic, with greater ambition than its predecessors. Unsurprisingly, it is also the only short in which Mary Blair’s influence and style are displayed.

  It was Mary’s brush that made bananas turn into yellow-billed toucans, flowers burst into color against a pitch-black sky, and twinkling lights shine along the shore of the city. Even the Urca casino where Walt and El Grupo spent a glamorous evening made an appearance. The sequence celebrates the wild beauty and urban sophistication of Rio de Janeiro that the artists adored. It also introduces José Carioca, a Brazilian parrot who becomes fast friends with Donald Duck and who would return for the studio’s next Latin American film, The Three Caballeros. Thanks to Mary’s concept art, the piece was extraordinarily beautiful, a visual love song to the country that had transformed her as an individual and as an artist.

  “It isn’t exactly like anything the Disney boys have ever done,” wrote Bosley Crowther in his 1943 review of the film in the New York Times. In his praise of the Brazil sequence, where he complimented the “exquisite sequence of animated water-colorings,” Crowther managed to completely overlook Mary Blair, even though her face and name were right there on the screen.

  Hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Los Angeles was sent into action, rounding up individuals and freezing the assets of over a thousand Japanese community and religious leaders. For those of Japanese descent living in the United States, regardless of citizenship, persecution was imminent.

  Two months later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which stated, “War requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.” He instituted military zones that would be used as internment camps for all persons living on the West Coast who were one-sixteenth Japanese or more. The United States was not alone. Similar violations of civil rights were being committed in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

  Fear reverberated around the studio as some employees became apprehensive over the uncertain fate of their colleagues. Walt was particularly concerned for artist Gyo Fujikawa, who had been born in California but whose parents were from Japan. In anticipation of the danger that could befall her, Gyo decided to transfer from the studio in Burbank to the company’s offices in New York City, where she could continue her work as an illustrator. Prejudice existed on the East Coast too, but at least there was no danger of internment. Gyo left, grateful for Walt’s consideration, but she was soon consumed with guilt when she learned that her parents had been sent to the Rohwer Relocation Center, an internment camp in Arkansas.

  Although New York City had become her sanctuary, Gyo often had to travel outside its borders. She returned to the studio in Burbank at regular intervals and even bravely went to Arkansas to visit her family. Her fellow travelers questioned her heritage on these trips, suspicious that she might be a Japanese spy. Gyo would laugh and say she was Anna May Wong, a Chinese American fashion icon and Hollywood movie star.

  Walt dropped into Gyo’s New York office one day and asked, “How are you doing? I’ve been worried about you.”

  “I’m doing okay,” Gyo replied. Gaily making light of her situation, she said, “If people ask me what nationality I am I tell them the truth or give them big lies, like I’m half Chinese or half Japanese, or part Korean, part Chinese, and part Japanese.”

  “Why do you have to do that?” Walt said, enraged. “For Christ’s sakes, you’re an American citizen!” Gyo understood his point perfectly. His words captured her own ambivalence about hiding her identity. Walt’s outburst strengthened her self-confidence, and from that day on, when someone asked where she was from, she said simply, “I’m an American.”

  While Gyo was falling in love with the bustle of New York City, Sylvia had at last received the call to return to the studio. With modest profits coming from its most recent features, the studio was slowly rebuilding, and Walt needed a story department if it was to have a future. Sylvia was buoyant at seeing that her friend Ethel was back too. Now that the strike was over, the divisions that had separated them seemed less important. Yet she had little hope for resurrecting their script for The Little Mermaid. There was no way the studio was ready to invest in an expensive new feature. Unfortunately, in comparison to the projects they had worked on previously, the jobs currently on the table were far from inspiring.

  Sylvia’s skills were being distinctly underutilized; she was plotting advertisements for Coca-Cola that included playful gnomes that stole away bottles of the soft drink. The partnership between the two companies began when Walt advertised Saludos Amigos on a radio show sponsored by Coca-Cola in 1942. The association was fortunate for Walt, who badly needed money. Advertising did not ignite the passion of his artists, but for the moment it was helping to keep the doors open and the lights on.

  As Sylvia had feared, there were no new animated feature films being developed. The once-bustling story department, whose job had been to develop a fat portfolio of new ideas, scripts, and storyboards, was eerily quiet. Other than the government-backed South American features, the st
udio was working on nothing but its animated shorts, some commercial projects such as the Coca-Cola campaign, and propaganda films commissioned by branches of the military and the U.S. government.

  With so few resources, Walt had let go of the features, the films that had defined the studio since the release of Snow White five years earlier. Their artistry and storytelling were simply too expensive. Walt began assessing the potential of live-action films, a more economical alternative to animated features. Overwhelmed by personal and professional struggles, he nevertheless knew that he had to find a fresh approach to the timeworn medium of actors in front of a camera. Fortunately, one of his oldest colleagues had returned to help him do just that.

  A technology called the optical printer had been in development since the turn of the twentieth century. Early on, it was used primarily to duplicate film. The original film was placed in a projector with a movie camera mechanically linked to it. Using a lens, the film was projected directly onto new, unexposed film, creating a copy. The technique was like taking a picture of a picture—imperfect in terms of quality, but it got the job done. However, the potential for effects inherent in the setup was apparent from the beginning. Filmmakers immediately began zooming in on different areas of the film they were interested in or cutting out those they wanted to get rid of.

  The idea of altering the film being produced was as old as the movies themselves. As early as 1898, the filmmaker Georges Méliès used mattes, pieces of glass painted black, to keep certain parts of the film unexposed. He would then rewind the film, remove the original matte, cover everything else to protect the original shots from being double-exposed, then project new images onto the clean film. With this careful process, he created footage that seemed to alter reality; for example, in one scene, he appeared to pop his head off his body, set it on a table, and then continue talking.