The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  The soundtrack for the fairy-godmother scene was “The Magic Song,” the lyrics of which were almost complete gibberish; it was later renamed “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” The effects animation was overwhelming, requiring a dynamic sense of timing and the technique to float magic dust across the scene using thousands of minuscule pencil marks. Marc oversaw every part of the sequence, bringing Mary’s magical vision to life. When Walt saw what they had accomplished, he stood in silent awe. It would remain, over the years, his favorite piece of animation.

  Yet it was still unclear whether anyone else would like it. After all, Walt had been enthusiastically predicting success for all his projects over the past thirteen years, and yet none had even come close to the commercial phenomenon of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Their future hung on the fate of a teenage girl named Cinderella, and with the clock about to strike midnight, they were nearly out of time.

  Chapter 11

  In a World of My Own

  There was paper everywhere—lining the walls, covering the floor, and even hanging from the ceiling. This was what it was like to work as an artist in Walt’s studio in 1950; you felt as though an ocean of drawings was swallowing you whole. The women working as assistant animators were riding the rough seas of Cinderella. They kept their fingers and thumbs lightly pressed together around their pencils, their palms relaxed, as they drew a host of helpful mice, a loyal dog, and a villainous cat. They flipped the top edge of the pages as they worked to follow the flow of the action from one moment to the next while the bottom edge of the paper was held down by pegs fixed to the desk.

  The characters they were creating were faithful representations of the animal cast that Bianca had proposed a decade earlier. The drawings piled up on their desks, but still they needed more. Every second of the final film necessitated twenty-four drawings. The pressure to produce was intense, especially as financial worries had limited hiring to the story and animation departments. With the studio starved of profit, a tidal wave of work was sweeping over them, and every animator needed to work at full capacity.

  The competition to get a job in the animation department was intense, regardless of one’s gender. But female applicants had to be better than good; they had to be exceptional. Their portfolios had to overcome the belief, ingrained in the minds of many of their colleagues, that women had no place in the animators’ room. Of the more than two hundred animators employed by the studio, twenty were women. The animators were working on not just one but two features at once. Even as they put the final touches on Cinderella, they also were drawing white rabbits and tea parties.

  Their next feature was an adaptation of the 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel, Through the Looking Glass, both volumes featuring detailed illustrations by the English artist John Tenniel. Like Cinderella, it was a relatively safe choice. Walt had conceived of both films at Laugh-O-Gram, the first animation studio he incorporated in Kansas City in 1921 when he was twenty years old. Walt ran the business, directed the shorts, and also worked as an animator alongside a host of impressive artists, including Ub Iwerks; Hugh Harman, who went on to cofound the Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation studios; and Friz Freleng, who later developed Bugs Bunny and other iconic characters for Warner Brothers. Cinderella was released by Laugh-O-Gram as a silent short in 1922, and the studio began the first of The Alice Comedies, a series of fifty-seven silent shorts that combined a live-action Alice with an animated world, which ran from 1923 to 1927. With so much uncertainty in Walt’s professional life thirty years later, perhaps it was natural that he would return to the simple story lines of his youth. He now had the resources to give the animation everything it had previously lacked.

  The project was not new to those at the studio. Story meetings had been held for Alice in Wonderland on and off since 1938, when Walt purchased the rights to the story and the original Tenniel illustrations. In the late 1940s Walt struggled to decide whether to make Alice in Wonderland or Cinderella first, going so far as to hold meetings with noncreative employees at his studio where he showed them storyboards and polled them on which film they preferred. While these opinions were informative, it was the challenge of bringing Alice to the screen that ultimately caused her delay.

  Aldous Huxley, the writer most famous for his 1932 novel Brave New World, wrote an early script for Alice in Wonderland. Walt hired him not for his dystopian vision of the future but because the writer was, by all accounts, “an Alice in Wonderland fiend.” It was a project Huxley loved far more than the other screenplays he had worked on, such as adaptations of Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. Part of the appeal was the challenge inherent in the text; there was no clear structure to build on. Instead, Huxley dived into nonfiction, focusing on the real-life relationship between the author and Alice Liddell, the girl who’d served as his inspiration. This concept didn’t last long. Walt disliked it and tossed the script aside.

  With no script or storyboard decided on, Mary had little besides the novels and Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations to guide her. She soon realized that translating Tenniel’s intricate designs, originally engraved onto wood blocks, into concept art was impossible and that having the animators hand-draw such a high level of detail over and over for each scene would be impractical. She had to find a way to connect with the whimsy of the text itself and create her own personal representation of Wonderland.

  Mary tackled these challenges in her studio space in the home she and Lee had moved into on the North Shore of Long Island, an hour’s drive from New York City. Lee’s gamble on television advertising was paying off, and his income was enormous, fifty-two thousand dollars a year. Mary’s salary from Walt, while a fraction of Lee’s, was among the highest paid to artists at the studio: three hundred dollars per week. With their combined wealth, the couple could afford a spacious home for their growing family, which included Donovan, born February 12, 1947, and Kevin Lee, born August 15, 1950.

  Walt and Lillian came to visit Mary on Long Island, and Walt found his darling artist apparently unchanged by motherhood—her hair was perfectly coiffed, her clothes and makeup elegant. The only difference was that she had a three-year-old toddler playing at her feet and a baby bundled in her arms. She cooed over the infant sweetly, saying his name over and over again until it sounded like he was called “Heavenly.” Walt was more than Mary’s employer, however; he was intimately tied to the growing Blair family. Mary thought so highly of Walt that she named him godfather to both her boys.

  The scene was tender, and Walt and Lillian sat contentedly on the porch as the breeze floated off the sound. The visit was social, but as Walt examined Mary’s latest sketches for Alice in Wonderland, he turned quiet. Mary’s work was highly experimental. She had used aspects of the original Tenniel illustrations as a backdrop, their black-and-white composition contrasting with the brightly colored characters. The dreaded eyebrow rose sky-high, Walt’s signal that he wasn’t pleased. No words were spoken but a clear message was conveyed—Mary would have to try again. Walt easily controlled the story and animation departments and felt comfortable giving criticism to his employees, yet he found it nearly impossible to direct an artist like Mary. She would have to find the path for herself.

  The fact that Mary had a job at all was something wonderful. Even four months earlier, the future of Walt Disney Studios had still been uncertain. When Cinderella premiered, on February 15, 1950, the studio employees held their breath. Box-office success on this film was their only hope for salvation.

  The reviews came in swiftly and were generally full of praise. The Chicago Tribune gushed, “The film not only is handsome, with imaginative art and glowing colors to bedeck the old fairy tale, but it also is told in a gentle fashion.” Other reviews were mixed, with some touching on the lack of character development, such as one in Variety that described both Cinderella and her Prince Charming as “colorless.”

  The handful of lackluster reviews did not seem to deter audiences.
Lines to see the film wrapped around the block in New York City. It was one of the top-grossing films in 1950, pulling in eight million dollars at the box office. The studio had finally produced another blockbuster success after thirteen years of struggle. But it wasn’t just ticket sales that turned the economic tide for Walt. He had learned the power of a new deity in film production, and its name was merchandise.

  In Washington, DC, Retta was happy to be stationed with her navy officer husband, but she missed Mary’s loving presence in her life. After leaving California, she had joined Benjamin in Key West before he was transferred to DC. Both Mary and Retta were on the East Coast now, which made it easier to keep in touch, but it wasn’t the same as the years they had spent sharing a house. Retta was bouncing between animation studios, trying to keep her hand in while balancing the demands of being married to a military officer and, at age thirty-four, thinking about starting a family. Then came a welcome opportunity: Golden Books and the Walt Disney Studios signed a licensing agreement in 1944; the publishing company would now create books based on the feature films, and with Retta’s background, she was only too qualified to work as an illustrator.

  One of Retta’s early projects was a Golden Book to accompany Cinderella. To create her illustrations, she turned to Mary’s concept art. The result is a warm amalgam of the two artists’ work, integrating Mary’s colors and designs and Retta’s powerful and dynamic style. Her illustrations were not mere replicas of the film—in fact, they possess only a passing resemblance to the final animation art. Instead, they capture the feel of the film, thanks to their embrace of Mary’s vision. They stand as a tribute to amity, uniting the talents of two of the strongest female artists ever to work at the Walt Disney Studios.

  When the final book was printed, Retta gazed at the slim volume and then opened its cover. Beneath Walt Disney’s Cinderella, she found Illustrations by the Walt Disney Studio, adapted by Retta Scott Worcester. It was the kind of clear credit that she had often struggled to obtain on-screen. She might no longer be working directly for the studio, but her fortunes were still linked to Walt’s.

  A copy of the Cinderella Golden Book that Retta inscribed to Mary as a tribute to their friendship (Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair)

  For the first time, Walt released new merchandise in advance of the movie’s premiere, with products hitting the market in time for the holiday-shopping season in 1949. There were Cinderella-themed clothes, dolls, even a pair of women’s transparent, jeweled “glass” slippers that came in a Lucite box tied with a ribbon. The push was made possible thanks to the brand-new character-merchandising department, formed in 1949, and the Walt Disney Music Company, incorporated in 1947, whose first undertaking was Cinderella. The company was no stranger to the power of licensing. Previous deals, notably the Mickey Mouse watch in 1933, had been bringing in revenue for years. Now, however, the company took full advantage of branded products by expanding their reach and availability. Together with RCA, Disney released a multidisc soundtrack album of Cinderella that reached number one on the Billboard music charts just two months after the film opened. Similarly, the accompanying Golden Books picture book full of Retta’s brightly colored illustrations was massively popular.

  The artists had little time to bask in their success. Alice in Wonderland was waiting. Mary tackled the concept art afresh, but she struggled with the scenes. As an early member of the story department once said of the book, “It doesn’t have any plot at all.” Mary realized that to faithfully render the novel’s literary absurdity, she needed to create images that mirrored Carroll’s whimsy.

  Working on Long Island, Mary let her painting flow into realms of unadulterated imagination. She wasn’t relaxed—on the contrary, she sat tense before her easel, the brush gripped tightly in her hand as she worked. She painted Alice upside down on the canvas, her blond hair flowing beneath her, her blue dress curved like a parachute as she falls down the rabbit hole. Behind Alice, Mary designed a detailed backdrop, with red and gold wallpaper, lamps, and a rocking chair. A mirror floats opposite Alice, and her reflection shines in the glass, one girl upside down, one right side up, each with a startled expression on her face. While not a literal illustration of Carroll’s prose, the painting seamlessly captured the impression of Alice’s long fall down the rabbit hole in chapter 1.

  Mary soon became lost in her work, oblivious to everything around her, as she created hundreds of paintings. The scenes were undeniably striking; for example, the March of the Cards sequence, where Alice is chased by the Queen of Hearts’ army of playing cards, is exhilarating, with unexpected angles, long shadows, and rich colors.

  Mary visually rendered every part of the books. She interpreted one scene in which Alice gets lost by showing a dark wood with signs pointing in different directions reading UP, BACK, THIS WAY DOWN, TULGEY WOOD, and YONDER. Suddenly, the Cheshire Cat’s bright smile appeared. It was Dorothy Ann Blank in a story meeting in 1939 who expounded on the possibilities of this imagery, insisting they keep this part of the script true to the book and reminding them of Carroll’s line from chapter 6: “‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’”

  In Mary’s hands, Wonderland became a shadowy dreamscape. She sketched a surreal living flower garden where live crabs grow from the crabgrass, butterflies flutter with buttered toast for wings, and tiger lilies have orange-striped faces and whiskers. Mary put all of herself into her art, so even when she was with her children and husband, her mind stayed with Alice. The desire to pour herself into her work became stronger as her home life grew more volatile. In the evenings, her husband, Lee, was often in an alcohol-fueled fury, characterized by verbal and physical abuse. But inside the quiet of her in-home art studio, surrounded by her concept art, she felt safe.

  At the studio, the executives had deeper worries than how their next feature film would look. The landscape of entertainment was shifting, and television, once the quiet little sibling that no one paid any attention to, was now pushing and shoving to get a seat at the table. At the end of World War II, few Americans had known what a television was, but now, in 1950, there were three million sets across the country. The price of the product was dropping too, from six hundred dollars to close to two hundred, about the cost of a full set of living-room furniture. Those in the film industry watched the change with concern. If people could merely flick on their televisions in their living rooms when they wanted amusement, would they ever bother going to a movie theater? Their worries were justified, as audiences in movie houses across the country were declining. In 1930, 65 percent of all Americans went to the movies on a weekly basis. By 1950, the number had dropped to 20 percent. And the changes were becoming more precipitous. In 1952, fifty-one million people per week bought movie tickets, down from ninety million in 1948.

  Walt appraised the situation carefully and decided to take on the menace of television by advancing on three fronts. First, he’d make the experience of the movie house more awe-inspiring by investing in new technology so people would want to go to the cinema again. Second, he’d try his hand at television, including a venture in live action, in the spirit of the old adage “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Third, he’d start thinking outside the confining boxes of cinemas and television sets when it came to popular entertainment.

  These expensive undertakings were made possible thanks to Cinderella, whose popularity was soaring and whose profits were lifting the fortunes of the group in Burbank. The film was the sixth-highest-grossing film in the United States in 1950. Internationally, particularly in England and France, the film was also highly popular. The studio that had been on the threshold of bankruptcy was now swimming in cash, having been rescued once again by a demure princess.

  A twelve-year-old girl hung upside down, her face contorted in an expression of disbelief while the blood rushed to her face. It was a scene Mary had drawn down to the last detail, and
it was now coming alive on a soundstage at the studio in Burbank. The animators had used live-action footage as a reference for their drawings many times before, even as early as the development of Snow White, when they watched an actress dance around the room in a long flowing dress in order to get the movement as true to life as possible.

  The use of live action to inform animation was immensely popular, not just at the Walt Disney Studios but all over Hollywood. Yet some, especially those animators working for Walt, felt that the technique had gone too far. In 1917, Max Fleischer, whose animation studio brought Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor into the world, had patented a technique called rotoscoping. Animators at his studio and others who used the invention projected the live-action reference footage onto the back of an easel holding a glass pane. Paper was placed over the glass, and every frame was traced methodically, creating a near-perfect ink copy of the photographic image. The result was realistic character movement made in a fraction of the time it took an animator to sit down at a table and create a similar image from scratch. Detractors, however, complained that the final product was stilted and dull, drained of its artistic essence.

  A number of these critics were animators at the Walt Disney Studios, many of whom had gone to art school. They were striving to elevate the cartoon medium, which could be crass, into a beautiful, albeit imperfect, imitation of life. While the animation department respected the role live-action reference material could play, they refrained from tracing the images created. Instead, they studied the movement itself, incorporating not just how it looked but how it felt to a viewer. For Cinderella, they had filmed the majority of the feature using live actors and actresses. For Alice in Wonderland, they filmed it all.