The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Tinker Bell’s impish yet sweet attitude is clear in Bianca’s sketches, where the fairy has a silly smile as she poses in front of a mirror while playing dress-up with Wendy’s belongings, or looks frightened by the children’s toys, or glows irresistibly above the three Darling children, who sit on clouds in a night sky. Bianca’s male colleagues at the time talked about Tinker Bell’s character in their story meetings, but most of them refrained from drawing her.

  Bianca, unburdened by their hang-ups, was free to create, and at first Walt seemed to be listening. “Bianca has been working on some very colorful sequences in which Pan shows how he can call the fairies from their seclusion by blowing upon his pipes,” he said in a story meeting in 1939. In Barrie’s book, Tinker Bell is just one of a large community of fairies who live in Neverland. Inspired by the text, Bianca drew many different sprites, envisioning a complete world for the delicate creatures. She created imaginative sequences such as one in which Tinker Bell leads the Darling children underwater, and, with the help of pixie dust, they transform into merpeople and explore a sunken pirate ship.

  Sylvia also worked on early concept art for the film, her paintings starkly different from Bianca’s and relying more on color than form to convey mood. She drew Wendy being crowned the Queen of the Fairy Ball by Tinker Bell, the girl’s eyes wide in wonder as the golden crown is lowered onto her head. Bianca worked on the sequence with her, imagining the fairies glowing like firecrackers around Wendy as they dance late into the night. Soon, however, the women who created fairies so successfully for Fantasia lost all hope for Peter Pan. The feature had been intended to follow Bambi, but with the overwhelming difficulties the studio faced in the 1940s it seemed unlikely ever to be made.

  While Bianca, Sylvia, and Dorothy had all been dismissed, the studio retained their artwork. Unused concept art was stored in what Walt nicknamed “the morgue,” a term borrowed from police departments and newspapers for rooms where old materials, such as notes, evidence, or clippings, were stored. At the Walt Disney Studios, this room was underground, down a concrete corridor beneath the Ink and Paint building and behind a wooden door with MORGUE written in fancy gold lettering on it. Inside, bookshelves and file cabinets housed every scrap of material connected to the studio’s past work. Artists were free to wander in and out, doing research and gathering the material they needed for their projects.

  When Mary began her work on Peter Pan, which Walt had finally green-lighted, she spent many hours in the morgue. She was reaching back in time to concepts and story lines that had been shaped by other female artists. Inspired by the bold vision of so many women before her, Mary began to chart her own passage. She painted a bright gold pirate ship sailing through the night sky, indigo clouds lapping like waves at its hull. Under her brush, green rolling hills flattened into the sandy beaches of Neverland, the entire island surrounded by a pink and purple aura. The darkness of the night sky overhead is punctuated by colorful nebulae. In Mary’s lagoons, mermaids feel the cool touch of a waterfall while resting on sunny rocks. Her imagination was unstoppable, and she also designed forest settings, a cozy grotto home for the Lost Boys, and, most unsettling, Skull Rock.

  Captain Hook’s hideout is untouched by her usually whimsical color palette and instead stands gray and forbidding, the jaw of the skull opening into the cave within. The image would become iconic, forever tied not only to the original Peter Pan but also to the many future movies set in Neverland. Confronted with the products of Mary’s talent, the restrained Walt was unusually effusive, gushing over her seemingly ceaseless stream of ideas. Her work was almost too beautiful to be concept art, which was destined for the exclusive use of the studio’s artists and not meant for the public eye.

  Mary’s paintings of indigenous peoples, however, did not deserve as much praise as they received. It was unfortunate that Retta Scott was no longer working as an artist at the studio. If she had been, she likely could have helped Mary refine her depictions.

  One of the last projects Retta worked on there was a later-abandoned feature called On the Trail. Retta always took her research for a film seriously, and for this project she had spent long hours studying the Hopi tribe of northeastern Arizona. Committed to accurately portraying indigenous populations, Retta studied many texts, particularly a book called Hopi Katcinas Drawn by Native Artists. Her sensitivity is reflected in her concept art for the project, which is inspired by the original artists rather than coarse stereotypes.

  In contrast, Mary’s paintings of the “Indian Camp of NeverLand” lack the refinement that study and application would have given them. They pull imagery from a mishmash of native cultures and have no fidelity to any real tribe. Nearly every stereotype of indigenous peoples is represented in the final film, including halting speech, tepees, feathered headdresses, and totem poles. Although Mary’s art alone would not have rescued the film from its racial caricatures, which are a central feature of the original play and book and were soon made even more pronounced by the animators, her edification might have at least softened their crudeness.

  In 1951, in the midst of production on Peter Pan, a man named Eyvind Earle began work at the studio. The place was new and intimidating to the thirty-five-year-old artist whose background was in the fine arts and who had never worked in animation. As he wandered around his new workplace, he came upon a wall covered with small paintings. Over a hundred diminutive images filled the space, as exquisite in their squares as the truffles in a box of chocolates. Every single one had been done by Mary—she was already a legend at the studio, her name known to all. Earle stood before the images and felt deeply envious. Here was a woman who seemingly did everything: designed characters, fixed plots, selected color palettes, created scenery, and shaped the feel of an entire film. Studying the paintings, he thought, That’s the job I want at Disney.

  Mary’s talent, advantages, and gender had always sparked strong reactions among her colleagues. Many seethed with resentment and jealousy, but for those artists able to appreciate her skill and work alongside her, the rewards were great. Marc Davis was among those who collaborated closely and successfully with Mary. Davis was sometimes known around the studio as a ladies’ man, not for his propensity to flirt with women, but for his mastery of the female form. Mary had worked with Davis on the title characters in Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. Now they were brought together again for Peter Pan.

  As an art director, Mary was designing every scene of the movie, although some would not make the final cut. Her work was wide ranging—in one scene she heightened the tension between Peter Pan and Captain Hook, while in another, she created the fantasy of a mermaid lagoon. Davis, as a character animator, had a more focused role. Mary experimented with color and concepts, but he was responsible for creating the final animation that would bring Tinker Bell and Mrs. Darling to life. It was the challenge of Tinker Bell that had brought Mary and Davis together, with Mary’s art informing Davis’s drawings. Neither was content with Tinker Bell’s superficial depiction in the book, and they resolved to make her more independent than any female character they had previously developed.

  That representation, however, conflicted with the wholesome portrayal of women that was typical in the 1950s. At a story meeting, one of the men shook his head in disgust and then blurted out, “But why does she have to be so naughty?” Other story artists complained that her hips were too curvy and her personality too bold, the opposite of the demure and sweet Wendy Darling. Building on the work of so many artists before him, Davis infused Tinker Bell’s look with attitude, giving the playful fairy a loose bun with swooped blond bangs, green slippers with puffy white pom-poms, and a green leaf dress hugging her curves.

  The one thing the artists didn’t have to worry about was Tinker Bell’s dialogue—she didn’t utter a single line. The only sound that came from her mouth was that of a tinkling bell. Since the fairy was denied words, Tinker Bell’s body language in the film was especially important. Davis called in Ginni Mack
, a young artist working in the Ink and Paint department. Davis and the other animators crowded around Mack to sketch her lovely face and figure while she sat perched on a stool, posing and gesturing as directed. Professional actors, including Kathryn Beaumont, the woman who had modeled for Alice, were also brought in to film the movie in live action.

  Male story artists and animators had long shunned drawing fairies, but Tinker Bell was turning the tide. Animating her represented an irresistible challenge, and her charming and impish nature was more interesting than the many docile female characters previously crafted at the studio. She quickly became a favorite.

  Giving Tinker Bell the magical glow that Mary had painted on canvas seemed at first impossible on the acrylic cels. The solution lay in an unlikely source: the bile of an Asian ox. The studio employed multiple chemists whose role was highly creative. They experimented with various materials, becoming general problem solvers for the artists and creating paints that were completely unique to the Walt Disney Studio. By mixing gouache paints, a type of opaque watercolor, with ox bile, head in-house chemist Emilio Bianchi invented a sparkling glaze that would become essential to Peter Pan.

  The foul-smelling paint was kept refrigerated, and the artists had to work fast when they used it, as the chemical could not be exposed to the air for long. Carmen Sanderson, an artist in the Ink and Paint department, spent long hours working on the three-and-a-half-inch sprite. To make Tinker Bell’s wings and body glow, she flipped the cel over and brushed the bile solution across the plastic. She used only a small amount and it had to be applied in a very thin layer. It was so delicate that if not glazed on properly, it pooled and formed ugly dark spots. When it was finished, however, Sanderson could admire its iridescent effect around the fairy’s body, the way it made her wings look radiant. The glow would combine with twinkling grains of pixie dust, each dot hand-drawn by the female artists, to make the fairy look utterly magical.

  While the team concentrated on Peter Pan, it often seemed that Walt was somewhere else entirely. At story meetings, he frequently broke into discussions about plot and dialogue to discuss his favorite topic: the Mickey Mouse Village. He loved to talk about the train that would wind its way around the park, stopping at Main Street, a replica of a small town’s center that would be a relaxing place for people to sit and rest and that would have a string of stores selling company merchandise, a large movie theater, and a hot dog and ice cream stand. There would be rides too, carriages pulled by Shetland ponies, and even an old-fashioned riverboat. It was designed to be a trip back in time to an America that had never actually existed. Yet the nostalgia was intoxicating, not only for Walt but also for the many artists he was pulling in to work on the project, including Marc Davis. By 1952, the park that lived in Walt’s imagination had a new name: Disneyland. But as the park of his dreams slowly materialized, his animation studio started to falter again.

  Chapter 13

  Once Upon a Dream

  Each lens fit perfectly in a human hand. They were heavy, square, and trimmed in gold and silver alloys, and they were considered so valuable that they traveled only under the protection of guards. As the technicians at the studio physically mounted the precious lenses on their movie cameras, it was hard to understand what all the fuss was about. Walt had paid a substantial sum to be one of the first to license the anamorphic lenses known as CinemaScope from the Twentieth Century Fox film studio.

  The technology, although valuable, was not new. In 1926, Henri Chrétien, a French astronomer and inventor, patented a technique using a distorted lens. When the lens was attached to a camera, it created an optical illusion, an image far wider than that of a standard lens. This was because his anamorphic lens compressed the image along its longest edge, improving image quality while widening scope. Chrétien had originally developed the lens cylinders for tank periscopes during World War I as a way for French soldiers to get a wider look at what was occurring outside. Despite the French inventor’s attempts to get the film industry to notice his lenses, they went largely unappreciated until the 1950s, when the threat of television forced filmmakers to pursue novel approaches.

  In the early 1950s executives from Twentieth Century Fox flew all the way to Paris to see the lenses for themselves. There were only a handful remaining—the inventor’s laboratory had been bombed during World War II, destroying much of his work. The film executives were impressed with what they saw and decided to purchase the system and rename it CinemaScope. They described their wide-screen film format by urging consumers to “imagine Lauren Bacall on a couch—and sixty-four feet long!”

  They weren’t the only ones who wanted to get their hands on new lenses. Considerable interest in the wide-screen format was building at studios all over Hollywood, and different technologies were emerging. Warner Brothers had their own anamorphic lens system that they called WarnerSuperScope, and Paramount was speedily working on a new wide-screen projector mechanism that improved definition called VistaVision.

  Walt became eager to use the French lenses and quickly licensed them from Twentieth Century Fox. The anamorphic lenses attached directly to a standard camera lens and gave a “big screen” experience to an audience jaded by entertainment in their living rooms. CinemaScope, however, was imperfect—it produced an image that was stretched sideways, resulting in blurriness. Walt decided to trust in a company he had long been associated with, Technicolor, which was merging the technologies, combining the anamorphic lenses of CinemaScope with the sharp quality produced by VistaVision. Not to be outdone by others’ flashy trademarked names, the company called it Technirama. In addition to the standard 35 mm format, they could also create a higher-resolution 70 mm film in a stunning 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is the width of the screen compared to its height. In comparison, the Academy ratio, created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1932, is 1.37:1. The first film to be made in Super Technirama 70 was Sleeping Beauty.

  When the wide-screen lenses first arrived at the studio’s motion picture laboratory, located off D wing next to the Ink and Paint building, they were hardly inspiring on their own. It wasn’t until the artists got involved with the process, testing their pencil sketches under the new lens, that it became clear how the technology would change the aesthetic of moviemaking. A main character could no longer dominate a scene—there was too much room left over on either side. The animators needed to develop more action scenes to take advantage of the added space.

  The studio had always prided itself on cleverly detailed backgrounds, but now it had to emphasize them even more, as audiences would be seeing more of them. Thelma Witmer, with her extensive experience, was now absolutely essential to the making of their next picture.

  Alice in Wonderland had flopped at the box office, and Peter Pan did not fare much better. After premiering in New York City on February 5, 1953, the film got a largely positive critical reception, with several reviewers commenting on the innovative use of color and lush backdrops. Once again, the only two female artists to receive on-screen credit—Mary as color director and Thelma on backgrounds—could not have been insensible to the compliment to their work.

  But criticism was leveled at the film as well. The New York Times labeled Tinker Bell a “vulgarity,” while other reviewers were taken aback that Peter Pan, always played by female actresses onstage, was now unabashedly male. Oddly, the same New York Times critic who had bashed Song of the South seven years earlier for its racist depiction of the “master-and-slave relation” now praised scenes in the “Indian village” as having “gleeful vitality.”

  The reviews were generally favorable, and moviegoing audiences, such as they were, were heading to the box office. The film grossed $7 million, far more than flops like Alice in Wonderland, which had grossed $5.6 million, but not as much as Cinderella, which had grossed $8 million with a much smaller production budget. Live-action movies, however, could generate similar profits and cost much less to make. With a budget of $2 million, the ro
mance From Here to Eternity, released by Columbia Pictures in 1953, earned $12.5 million.

  It seemed to some executives at the studio, including Walt’s brother Roy, that the artistry and detail-oriented-ness that defined Walt Disney Productions was financially untenable. The profits made from each film were sunk right back into the business, where investment in production, along with new technology, was swallowing them whole. Hand-drawn animation combined with years of story development and refinement was slowly killing the studio.

  Walt’s was not the only studio under financial strain; other animation studios were similarly struggling. In response, many adopted what was called the UPA style. UPA was an acronym for the United Productions of America, a studio formed in the wake of the Walt Disney Studios 1941 strike, and the style was a form of limited animation that reused drawings, kept character movement to a minimum, and generally cut costs by reducing artwork. When Walt charged one executive with finding a way to “produce better pictures at a lower cost,” these were the tactics that the manager came back with. Walt immediately rejected them, yet concerns over the long-term viability of the work remained. Faced with obsolescence, the studio returned to what it had succeeded with in the past: a princess fairy tale.

  Like Snow White and Cinderella, the story of a young maiden in an enchanted sleep who can be awoken only by a kiss has been told and retold over centuries. Its origins trace back to a gothic romance titled “The History of Troylus and Zelladine” in a collection called Perceforest, believed to have been produced in France in the 1300s. In it, Princess Zelladine falls asleep after pricking her finger on a piece of flax that she was about to spin into linen. In the original tale, this sleeping beauty is not kissed by her true love but raped. She wakes up to discover that she has given birth to a baby boy, who is suckling her finger. A hundred years later, Giambattista Basile published an Italian version of the story. His adaptation is even more brutal: A married king comes across the sleeping beauty’s lifeless body and rapes her. The princess awakens only after she has given birth to twins. In this version, the malevolent character is the betrayed queen, who takes her revenge by ordering the babies to be killed and served to the king for dinner and by attempting to throw the princess into a bonfire. Subsequent adaptations by Perrault (“The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”) and the Brothers Grimm (“Little Briar Rose”) would eliminate the themes of adultery, rape, and cannibalism and substitute an evil fairy and the prick of a spindle.