As the story department studied the different versions of the sleeping-beauty folktale, it became clear that the plot itself was troublesome. In neither the Perrault nor the Grimm brothers’ version does the villain play any significant role. She merely appears, casts her evil spell, and leaves. And Sleeping Beauty was not inspiring as a character, being merely a girl who spends most of the story slumbering.
Story meetings were no longer the traumatic proceedings that had once caused Bianca to flee the room like a wounded animal. For one thing, there were far fewer gatherings where ideas were bounced around; for another, the boss was rarely present. Whereas Walt had previously spent countless hours in the meetings, wanting to be involved in nearly every detail of plot development, he now rarely participated, instead brainstorming on his own and approving storyboards between his many other pursuits. The writers’ room, once the scene of so much excitement and competition, was now in danger of extinction.
Walt wasn’t the only one absent from the story department. The hiring of story artists remained stagnant following the massive layoffs of 1941 and so the department was slowly shrinking. Women in particular were vanishing from its ranks. The rooms once crowded with female talent that had taken Walt years to recruit—Bianca, Grace, Dorothy, Mary, Sylvia, Ethel, and Retta—were now devoid of their ingenuity. They had all left, and very few voluntarily.
Mary’s art had turned improbably dark. She had already finished concept art for their next feature, Lady and the Tramp, which was one of the first projects she had worked on at the studio and which, like so many before it, had lingered in production. She was now focusing on Sleeping Beauty. As she sketched the villain, the evil fairy, each shadow was a reflection of the growing darkness in her own life. Her misery informed the spectral world the “mistress of all evil” waded in. In contrast were the light scenes she painted of the Princess Aurora and Prince Philip. Rendered in her fresh, bright style, the couple shine in the warm glow of the sun.
Whereas the studio’s last three films arrived after many years of development, Sleeping Beauty was a mere adolescent, its plot raw and unrefined. Some in the story department believed there wasn’t enough time to create a script and wished that Walt had chosen the other fairy tale the studio had been seriously considering, one that had been in development for far longer: “Beauty and the Beast,” based on the 1740 French story by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot. But there was no going back now, and so, to hurry along the film, the writers started to sift through their previously used or discarded ideas.
Many of the evil fairy’s facial features could be borrowed from Snow White’s wicked queen, who had in turn originally been modeled on writer Dorothy Ann Blank. Mary borrowed a dance sequence she’d developed for Cinderella in which Cinderella and the prince dance among the clouds, unbounded by gravity, and took out old concept art to design the villain’s clothing. Other artists similarly rescued their rejected story ideas. In meetings, they pondered a deleted sequence from Snow White in which the prince was kidnapped and held captive in the evil queen’s castle. Surely that scene could work here, they told one another. They had never recycled material to such an extent, and the practice was eating away at their self-confidence.
Another challenge in adapting Sleeping Beauty was that the characters, particularly the princess, were so bland and lifeless that the entire plot felt heavy and dull. The writers needed to bring conflict into the script and create far more compelling action.
As the months progressed, Princess Aurora lay passive, with no writer able to give her deficient character a push. They wrote her just eighteen lines of dialogue, barely enough for her to be considered a supporting character, although she was presumably the heroine. The evil fairy, however, was growing stronger. Her appeal was similar to that of the rule-defying Tinker Bell—her character had potency and resolve. But the group had little to work with, as the villain of Perrault’s and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales was as unformed as she was unnamed. At last, the group decided to name her Maleficent.
The story group turned to Tchaikovsky’s 1890 ballet The Sleeping Beauty, with its malevolent Carabosse, the wicked fairy godmother. It wasn’t just the music of the ballet they decided to incorporate into the film but also the look of its characters. In the original performance, the female Carabosse was played by a man, but later the part would be played by both sexes, one of the few roles in ballet to maintain such fluidity. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, later known as the Royal Ballet, premiered Sleeping Beauty in 1946 in London, a city trying to recover its arts and culture after World War II. The Royal Opera House’s lights dimmed, and with the royal family seated in their box, the theater came alive with dancers arrayed in costumes, tights, and shoes that had all been purchased with ration coupons.
That night, the role of the villain Carabosse was played by Robert Helpmann, and his costume could not fail to make an impression. His dress was exquisite, covered in black velvet with dragon-like wings protruding from the arms. Most memorable of all was his headdress, capped by two stylized, pointed horns. It was this feature that Mary noted in 1953 when the ballet company made its third tour of the United States, performing in twenty-one cities, including New York and Los Angeles.
As Mary developed concept art for Maleficent, the ballet costuming inspired her. It was reminiscent of a sketch she had made, but never used, for Cinderella. In that drawing, the fairy godmother is dressed in long flowing black robes lined in pink with a single long, twisted horn on her head. She is not a grandmotherly old lady; she is young and vital. When designing Maleficent, Mary combined the ideas, putting the headdress with two horns atop the youthful head of Cinderella’s would-be godmother. A smile spreads across her face, and in her hand she holds a magic wand.
At the same time, the group was aging three of their female characters. Since 1952, the story department had been developing the team of good fairies who confer gifts on Aurora and ultimately come to her rescue. Once regarded with abhorrence by the male artists, fairies were now bringing the group together as its members debated their portrayal. They were originally envisioned as nature sprites with the ability to control, respectively, the plants (Flora), the animals (Fauna), and the climate (Merryweather). Their roles were not minor in the story—it was their skill and bravery that, with some assistance from Prince Philip, would ultimately bring Maleficent to her knees.
While the fairies’ part in the plot was becoming fixed in the story department, their appearance was still a source of debate. This is where the animation department came in. Walt considered making the three identical, but the animators rebelled against this homogeneity. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt’s Nine Old Men (and now in their forties), began studying how women several decades their senior moved through the grocery store. They paid close attention to the wardrobe and hairstyles of seventy-year-old women. In the story department, the fairies had been labeled “positive and aggressive,” but it was only under the animators’ pencils that each was given her own body type and personality. The result was a trio of women who seemed ripped from real life, each one grandmotherly in appearance but with a unique height, weight, and way of carrying herself. Although the feature’s title character might be dull and sleepy, the new host of female characters were charismatic and powerful.
Mary was traveling so frequently that she became a member of TWA’s elite million-miler program. As much as she tried to keep her work and home life distinct, her worlds were collapsing. She was drinking more; some days she drank herself into a stupor to blunt the pain of Lee’s frequent verbal and sometimes physical attacks. Yet the emotional toll could not be so easily dampened. At night, as she lay in bed beside her husband, the effects of his words lingered. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone about it, not even her closest family and friends, so she kept the suffering in until it seemed she would burst with it. Mary decided to resign. Someone had to hold the pieces of their lives together before the vicious discontent that defined her marriage ripped them all apart
.
Walt was careful not to show his displeasure when she told him. His letters remained full of affection, and every Christmas he sent boxes of toys to the children. Perhaps even then he was thinking of how he might lure Mary back to the studio one day, and so he was careful not to betray even an ounce of bitterness to the artist who got away.
Letters from Walt and other friends at the studio kept Mary abreast of their progress. Walt shared his excitement about the development of Disneyland, especially when he and Roy finally purchased 160 acres of orange groves and walnut orchards in the sleepy town of Anaheim, southeast of Los Angeles. And now Walt was about to share his plans with the country. Buoyed by his experience with One Hour in Wonderland, he signed a deal with the ABC television network on March 29, 1954, to produce a weekly hour-long series called Disneyland that would promote the park by showing off its future attractions. In addition, each episode would tell a story, either live action or animated, that would take place in one of the park’s four regions: Adventureland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, or Tomorrowland.
Thanks to investment from ABC, construction progressed at a rapid pace. The builders broke ground in July 1954, and by that December the park was already taking shape. In a letter to his sister, Ruth, Walt shared his happiness. He took particular delight in the Christmas decorations, describing the frosted windows of Main Street, the white and green trees, and the thousands of twinkling lights.
The decorations were ready but it would be six months and many millions of dollars before Disneyland would be open to the public. Yet Walt was already eagerly sharing his joy about it with everyone who would listen.
Disneyland was built swiftly and opened in 1955 while the asphalt was still soft enough to take impressions of the high-heeled shoes that strolled the “happiest place on Earth.” In its first seven weeks, the park had more than one million visitors, each paying one dollar a ticket. By contrast with the theme park, the studio’s next feature was barely crawling along. Mary was gone and so was her inimitable perspective on not just color and styling but also character development.
Marc Davis began working with her early concepts and then added significant research of his own as he animated a large cast of characters: Aurora, Maleficent, Diablo the raven, King Stefan, and Queen Leah.
Yet it was Maleficent who grabbed his attention. He studied medieval history books and old religious texts from Czechoslovakia, noting the long flowing robes and dark colors that filled paintings of the era. He soon became preoccupied with the sorceress, giving her the power to hypnotize, teleport, and turn herself into an enormous green—later, black and purple—dragon. He sculpted her head from dark clay in life-size, realistic proportions, her chin jutting out and her horns regally twisted. To appear truly menacing, he decided, she would move very little. Her stillness would make her especially chilling, as would her sinister dialogue spoken to her pet raven Diablo. He wasn’t afraid to confer with Mary about his ideas when he saw her during her social trips out west or his out east. She might be gone from the studio but she was hardly absent from his professional life.
One evening in 1956, Marc visited Mary’s home in Long Island, his new bride, Alice, joining him. Alice was a graduate of the Chouinard Art Institute, which she’d attended on scholarship. She’d taken classes from Gyo Fujikawa and had originally wanted to become an animator but was convinced to push those daydreams aside by her teachers, who viewed the field as the domain of men. They encouraged her to pursue costume design, which ultimately proved profitable advice. A few years after graduation, she received a call from Marc, a former teacher of hers at Chouinard, asking if she’d like to work on wardrobe for Sleeping Beauty. It wasn’t long before he started calling her for other reasons, and the pair fell in love and married.
On their honeymoon, Alice entered the Blair home in Long Island for the first time and was instantly drawn to Mary. She had heard so much about the artist, not only from Marc but also from people at Chouinard, where Mary’s paintings were frequently exhibited. In her playful manner, Mary pointed to a tray sitting on a table by the window that held a pitcher and two martini glasses. She handed a glass, a piece of ribbon tied around its delicate stem, to Alice. Alice was puzzled at first but then understood that it was a game, and she was instructed to follow the ribbon through the house. She moved from room to room, looping the slack around her hands, and finally made her way into the kitchen. The ribbon went straight to the refrigerator. When she opened the door, she was stunned to see a candle burning on a shelf of the fridge, obviously placed there but a minute earlier. She’d never seen such a thing before: a burning flame contained within the cold walls. With a smile, Mary announced, “I’ll always leave a martini in the window for you, and a candle in the fridge.” Marc and Lee started laughing and soon Alice joined in, entranced. “It’s a wedding present,” Mary explained, indicating the handsome tray, pitcher, and glasses, all covered in etched flowers and the words His, Hers, and Ours. “Anyway, it’s better than giftwrap, don’t you think?” As she drank the icy gin and vermouth, Alice nodded in agreement.
At the studio, Marc Davis became fanatical about Maleficent, his interest leading him to develop her character in compensation for everything else that was lacking in the plot. The feature was progressing slowly, particularly without Walt driving it. The boss rarely participated in regular story meetings, as he had far too much else to interest him with his new amusement park and his Disneyland television show.
Yet even with these distractions, Walt was showing the film’s new color director support. With Mary gone, Eyvind Earle’s dream of getting her job had come true, and at a salary twice what she had commanded. It wasn’t enough for him merely to occupy her role, however—he was also emulating her style. Earle took inspiration from Mary’s graphic, flat, thoroughly modern look that had become as distinctive as her signature on the bottom of each painting. His Sleeping Beauty artwork was occasionally indistinguishable from hers, although some critics would later note the difference between the two, saying, “You wouldn’t call Earle endlessly inventive like Mary Blair, who was like an explosion.”
Although his work imitated Mary’s, Earle rarely named her among his inspirations. Instead, he cited the vast research he had performed for the film, and when asked about the artists who stimulated him, he invoked “Van Eyck, and Peter Bruegel, and Albrecht Dürer, and Botticelli.” Then he added, “On top of all that I injected a little piece of Eyvind Earle.”
Armed with his research and Mary’s concept art, Earle began to show the animators his work. Walt insisted they incorporate Earle’s style, but this in itself was nothing new. He had been similarly insisting on “more Mary” for years. If she were at the studio, Mary might have told Earle that he was on a fool’s errand—most of the artists were highly critical of modernism and believed it had no place in informing the look of their characters. Yet instead of struggling to have his art represented, as Mary had done, Earle was listened to. The animators grumbled over the stylistic differences that added hours to their work, but they accepted the changes.
With all the challenges and delays to production on Sleeping Beauty, perhaps none presented more difficulties than the technical aspects of making the picture in the new wide-screen format. Wide-screen gave a panoramic view of the backgrounds, shifting attention away from the character animation on the cels. This presented both opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, the lavish detail of the backgrounds would draw viewers into the scene; on the other, there was far more to draw. Whereas a background for a particular scene had once taken a day for an artist to complete, it now took ten. Assistant animators accustomed to producing tens of drawings a day were now able to complete only a few. There was so much to do that the studio instituted a quota system, insisting that the artists complete eight girls, thirty-two birds, and twenty-two squirrels a day.
To meet such high demand, the studio once again began advertising in the papers for new artists.
Elizabeth Case Zwicker, kno
wn as Liz, was twenty-six years old when she started scanning the want ads in the Los Angeles Times. There were two separate sections, one for women and one for men, but Liz was never one to follow rules blindly, so she perused the men’s section too.
Liz was an artist and poet. She was born in Long Beach, California, to an artist/writer mother and a radio-announcer father. The family soon moved to New York, where Liz grew up a sickly child, confined to her home for months at a time. She suffered from severe ear infections that made her too weak to attend school or even hold up a book. In the 1930s, without the benefit of antibiotics, middle ear infections were a leading cause of childhood mortality. Eventually, Elizabeth grew stronger, and around the age of eight, she was able to resume normal schooling. She graduated from Elmira College in New York and then attended the Art Students League, a school in Manhattan that offered studio art classes.
The Queens of Animation Page 23
