The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Her work often followed her home. Her daughter, Theo, now a teenager, was working full-time as a painter at the studio. She would come home with her mother in the evening, ready to relax after a long workday, but she could tell from a twinkle in Sylvia’s eye that she wasn’t ready to leave her work behind. One night, Theo saw her mother set up her opaque watercolors and brush the paint onto a sheet of black construction paper. Sylvia was visited by a muse that night, one that guided her hand, making brushstrokes in a style that was not at all her own. She filled page after page, creating more than a dozen paintings of a couple dancing, a Parisian cityscape behind them. The experience would leave a lasting impression on her, and in a page of her notebook she scrawled, “We are Muses,” apparently writing to no one but herself.

  The sequence Sylvia painted that night would become the “Two Silhouettes” segment in the package feature Make Mine Music, released in 1946. It seemed that her future was secure; her salary had been raised to ninety-five dollars a week, and the freelance work she had been doing for Walt Disney’s Comics magazine had doubled. After years of struggle she was finally able to live comfortably with her children. Yet this façade of stability was about to crash down around her.

  On August 1, 1946, the studio laid off four hundred and fifty employees, 40 percent of their total staff. “The union trouble we were dreading has hit us with a bang,” Sylvia wrote in a letter, adding, “I am now laid off.” The Screen Cartoonists’ Guild had demanded a 25 percent raise for all employees and threatened a strike if the studio did not comply. The studio responded that the funds were not available, a plausible defense considering the meager profits made by Walt’s last few films, the massive debt still controlled by Bank of America, and the fact that a few months later, Walt would request an emergency million-dollar loan from RKO Radio Pictures, the studio’s longtime theatrical distributor. Unyielding negotiators and hot tempers brought the situation to a head in late July. On Monday, July 29, everyone received a raise, including Sylvia; her pay was bumped up to a hundred and twenty dollars a week. The good fortune was temporary. A few days later, nearly half the studio staff was laid off. This time, Sylvia wouldn’t come back.

  In the home they had shared for the past few years, Mary and Retta drank until they could no longer stand. The room seemed to spin as the women consumed martinis and talked late into the night. The two friends would soon no longer be roommates in the house where they had plotted and debated untold animation scenes. In the ashes of the gutted story department of 1946, nearly every individual who had brought creative force to the features of the past decade had been fired. Retta, once the darling of the animation department and then an employee of the story department, was now gone.

  Many employees, including Sylvia, were hoping they’d be rehired, but Retta was giving up all expectations. She had met someone—Benjamin Worcester, a naval submarine commander. The two were getting married, and now Retta and Mary toasted their friendship and Retta’s nuptials. Retta soon left California for Key West, Florida. Although Retta felt that a chapter was closing in her life, her work for Walt was not yet over.

  Unlike Retta, Mary didn’t know where she was going to end up. She had been traveling frequently on assignments for the studio and visiting Lee often at his base in Virginia. She felt like a vagabond without a true home.

  Lee was discharged from the U.S. Navy in 1946, and while Walt was eliminating staff with all the discrimination of a farmer using a dull machete, he was also courting Lee. Walt wrote to him, asking him to come back to his work at the studio. Perhaps Lee didn’t wish to return to the place where his wife was so highly valued, or possibly he doubted the long-term stability of Walt’s company, or maybe he was just ready to strike out on a new path. In any case, Lee decided to stay on the East Coast, where he and two partners formed Film Graphics, a company that produced television commercials, a relatively new field.

  In the 1940s, television was cinema’s annoying little brother, always trying to horn in on American visual entertainment but doing nothing more than pulling on the pigtails of his big sister. The television set had been introduced to the United States at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. The machines were expensive, costing around six hundred dollars each, about the price of a new car, and there existed only a single broadcast station, based in New York City.

  During World War II, television-set production was banned, as the cathode-ray tubes necessary for their manufacture were needed for U.S. military technology and radar development. A poll in 1945 found that the majority of Americans had no idea what a television was. For Lee to take a chance on the rising popularity of the medium in 1946 was a tremendous risk. Mary wasn’t worried; she loved Lee and would follow him down any path, no matter how uncertain.

  Walking down Fifth Avenue to her new Manhattan apartment, Mary let the crowds of rushing people move around her. Even in the middle of a packed city sidewalk she felt like the only woman in the world. She had just received the news she had despaired of ever hearing: her baby had a heartbeat. In the 1940s, before pregnancy tests were common and obstetrical ultrasounds developed, prenatal care was limited to the latter months of pregnancy. Mary had never made it that far before, her miscarriages occurring, as most do, in the first trimester. The repeated heartbreak of loss had robbed her of hope, so this time, when Mary suspected she was pregnant, she tried to push the thought from her mind. But now here she was, five months along and, after seeing the doctor press his stethoscope to her belly, full of anticipation. Mary was thirty-five, a decade older than the average first-time mother in the United States, but the added struggle to conceive a child only made the moment that much sweeter. The baby growing within her was the fulfillment of her deepest wishes.

  For many women in 1946, motherhood was a thief, stealing away the careers they had begun during the years of war. More women were having babies following World War II than previously, and fewer were working outside the home. This was not by choice—94 percent of women of color and 75 percent of Caucasian women had planned to keep working following 1945. Employers, however, were averse to letting women continue to work, particularly those married with young children. Four and a half million women lost their jobs after the war.

  Mary was not one of those millions. Even though she now lived three thousand miles from the studio in Burbank, Walt was not willing to give up his favorite artist. He allowed her a freedom that few other artists ever received—he permitted her to work remotely, creating her concept art at home and flying back to the studio regularly to share her ideas.

  While Mary cherished her new freedoms, other women at the studio were clinging uncertainly to their positions. World War II had opened new doors for women in the animation, camera, background, and editorial departments. Walt’s training program for Ink and Paint employees had broken women out of the Nunnery, their separate building, and allowed them to be employed throughout the lot. With the layoffs of 1946, some of these opportunities were swept away, but other doors were unsealed. Young men might be returning to work, but the women who’d held on to their positions of creative influence had no intention of letting their jobs go, especially with the new opportunities before them. International markets were slowly reopening, and feature-length animation was ready to bounce back.

  Walt was painfully aware that the studio could not bear another massive loss. Convincing the banks to underwrite even a single feature-length animated film was challenging. Should the movie fail, his business would likely never be given another opportunity. He had to manage expenses more vigilantly and choose the next project with tremendous care.

  The story department had developed many ideas over the years, and perhaps it was a safe choice to pick another princess—after all, their first stab at such a tale had been far more profitable than any of their subsequent films. Walt chose Cinderella, pinning the hopes of his entire business on it. The simplicity of the story was appealing, and it would allow the studio’s full artistic expression while minimizing costs
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  At story meetings for Cinderella, Walt seemed like his old self, expounding on his ideas endlessly. Mary seldom spoke up in these, and it would have been difficult even if she’d wanted to. There was hardly a chance for anyone but Walt to talk, which he did exuberantly, crowding the room with the expanse of his vision.

  Even with Walt’s concepts before them, the team faced difficulty. They simply could not afford a film with the intricate backgrounds they had crafted in the past. The level of detail they had brought to Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi had required an enormous investment in terms of both the number of artists and the hours necessary for the features’ creation. It took intense effort to create twenty to thirty drawings for every second of screen time, and every line drawn represented dollars. Now the artists faced a new challenge: How could they give Cinderella a sumptuous look at a budget price? To solve this riddle, Walt turned to Mary.

  Mary carefully considered how to take advantage of color when addressing the film’s economic limitations. It would have to be used in place of the detailed lines the studio usually relied on to add richness to its films. Mary was uniquely positioned to carry out this task, given her own minimalistic artistic style. She embraced modern midcentury graphic design, a movement popular from the 1940s to the 1960s and exemplified by Paul Rand, Alexander Girard, and Lucienne Day, whose work frequently depicted flat visuals in bright colors. Her goal was to use these techniques to trick audiences into thinking they were seeing a film as decadently animated as those of the prewar years.

  For Cinderella, she chose unusual palettes not merely for her own pleasure but to help shape the narrative. Each sequence she designed was basic in its use of lines—the key to cutting costs—but full of unexpected bursts of color that distracted the eye and saturated the scenes with a sense of opulence.

  In some ways, Mary created Cinderella in her own image. She drew the young woman up in her tower room looking out onto a majestic castle in the distance, the sky pink with the rising sun, while the only color in Cinderella’s immediate surroundings was a cheerless gray. The scene matched a self-portrait Mary had drawn early in her career in which she gazed into the distance, disregarding the troubles around her.

  Mary also brought an interpretation of modern fashion into her sketches that had previously been missing from Disney films. She drew gowns that Snow White could never have worn: calf-skimming and cinched at the waist, revealing the character’s hourglass figure, and confections covered in bows and ribbons. The designs celebrated the new postwar fashion era. It was a response to years of utilitarian military uniforms, Rosie the Riveter denim coveralls, and clothing rationing in Europe, where details such as cuffs, pockets, and ruffles had been tightly restricted. French designer Christian Dior’s postwar New Look used ten times the fabric of a typical wartime dress to create a full-skirted silhouette that accentuated the hips, sometimes including extra padding. The top of each dress featured a tight, fitted bodice and rounded, soft shoulders. The resulting look was an embrace of femininity that was soon found on fashionable women across the globe. Even the glass slipper Mary drew was reminiscent of the popular postwar pump, a shoe with a stacked heel and blunt toe.

  There was hardly a scene of Cinderella that Mary did not influence. Her touch was everywhere, from the stepsisters’ singing lesson at the harpsichord to the squat and balding king dwarfed by the grandeur of his palace, from the gothic staircase that leads to Cinderella’s tower to the birds and mice uniting to complete a pink gown with ribbons. She even designed a visually fantastic dream sequence complete with seven housemaids, although eventually, much to her disappointment, it would be discarded.

  Perhaps nowhere was her influence more keenly felt than during the dance sequence in which Cinderella and the prince waltz to the love song “So This Is Love.” Mary worked closely with the songwriting team—Mack David, Jerry Livingston, and Al Hoffman—to ensure that this duet, the first between a heroine and her prince in a Walt Disney production, would suitably advance the plot. Mary painted the romantic scene in dark, vivid blues so that the sky and earth seemed to merge and send the couple dancing among the stars. She placed sumptuous touches in the scene—a white Grecian-style gazebo and urns, flowers sprinkled here and there. The result perfectly conveyed the mood of falling in love and contrasted sharply with the rising action of the chase scene that followed. Here, Mary created a fleet of king’s men racing after Cinderella, their horses seemingly sprinting on shadows, the men’s dark red capes flowing behind their bodies, creating an intensely dramatic turning point.

  Mary’s concept art made its way to nearly every department of the studio, including animation, Ink and Paint—where colors were selected—and layout and editing. But the artists working on her vision were starting to fear not only for their jobs but for the longevity of the studio itself.

  “This is it. We’re in a bad way. If this picture doesn’t make money, we’re going to be finished. The studio’s going to be kaput!” said Walt to a group of artists working on Cinderella.

  Thelma Witmer, one of the artists feeling the pressure of Walt’s dire warning, was working on background art for the film. She’d been born in Nebraska, but her father, a shoe salesman, moved the whole family to Northern California during the Great Depression. She’d come to Los Angeles for art school and worked odd jobs until she was hired in 1942 by the Walt Disney Studios. By this time, she was in her forties and, like Sylvia, older than most of her female coworkers. She was brought directly into the background department, and unlike many women hired at the time, she managed to hold on to her job even after the war ended.

  Thelma was finding a way to use Mary’s concept art to saturate Cinderella with the lavish look audiences expected from a Walt Disney production. It wasn’t the first time Thelma had worked with Mary’s paintings as inspiration, having created backgrounds for Song of the South and the package film Melody Time. Though Thelma hadn’t gotten screen credit for either film or for the shorts she had worked on, she was being given new responsibilities, and her talent in the background department was on the verge of being recognized.

  Background artists created the scenery and backdrops used throughout the film. In some ways they had an easier task than the character animators. Background artists didn’t have to produce the massive number of drawings needed to depict action on-screen. Yet in other ways, the job was more challenging, as they had to bring detail and realism to the animated set design. The work required intense creativity; the artist had to invent a world that was believable for the characters while still advancing the narrative.

  Given her experience, Thelma knew the task ahead of her would not be easy. Translating Mary’s scenes into the film was one complexity, utilizing her distinctive color scheme another, but a far greater challenge was incorporating her style. The look of Mary’s paintings was exceedingly difficult to reconcile with their animation techniques. This was because midcentury modernism lacked perspective. While the graphic elements were easy to incorporate in textiles and logos, in animation, the lack of dimension made the character, foreground, and background indistinguishable. Yet Walt was insistent they find a way to bring Mary’s style into the film.

  The demands for “More Mary” from Walt brought anger and jealousy from many men at the studio. When she flew in from the East Coast, Walt would immediately heap compliments on her paintings. Embittered, a group of story men and animators complained about the chosen artist and spread rumors accusing her of exploiting her gender to take advantage of Walt. “It’s just because she’s a woman that she gets away with it,” they said.

  The discontent spurred this group of artists to veer away from Mary’s work, leaving aside some of her best ideas just when the studio needed them most. The character animators in particular were unwilling to adopt her designs, as they feared any change to their standard methods. Fortunately, Thelma harbored none of these petty resentments. She incorporated the look Mary envisioned into as many details as she could, includ
ing the paintbrush style of the title cards, the staircase and tower room, the royal castle interior, and especially the backgrounds for “So This Is Love.” The men who worked on the character animation may have dismissed Mary’s talent, creating characters that looked much like those they had styled previously, but Thelma was unafraid to wholeheartedly embrace Mary’s artistic vision.

  Sometimes Mary’s concept art was challenging to the artists working on Cinderella not because of their resentment and envy but for technical reasons. One scene in particular required an unprecedented marriage of sophistication and technique: the fairy godmother’s enchanted transformations. In Mary’s paintings, as the fairy godmother waves her wand, sparks of magical dust fly, enveloping a pumpkin and transforming it into a magnificent carriage whose rounded shape and spiraling wheels retain its vegetable heritage. She then turns her wand on Cinderella and transforms her rags into a magical silvery ball gown.

  Working on the scene was veteran animator Marc Davis. Marc had first applied to the studio after seeing a newspaper ad announcing “Walt Disney Wants Artists,” but he was immediately rejected. The letter sent to him began “Dear Miss Davis” and went on to explain that “at the present time we are not hiring women artists.” Marc was puzzled and then figured that someone must have mistaken his name for a feminine one, perhaps reading Marc as Marge. As soon as he corrected this misconception, he was hired, yet this brush with gender discrimination would stay with him, forever influencing the consideration he gave the female artists he worked with.

  Marc had started at the studio in 1935 and was one of Walt’s “Nine Old Men,” a group of gifted animators; the others were Les Clark, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Woolie Reitherman, and Frank Thomas. Walt gave them their nickname not based on their ages, as they were all in their twenties when they were hired, but in jest after President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the members of the 1937 U.S. Supreme Court the “nine old men.” Roosevelt had meant this to be derogatory, as at the time he was pushing to increase the number of justices to fifteen, but Walt felt the talents of his core animators were truly superior. As part of the group, Marc had considerable influence. He was also, unlike many of his fellow animators, unafraid to openly admire Mary’s talent.