The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  She entered the famed D wing of the studio, where the Nine Old Men had once sketched a host of classic films and whose halls a few of them still roamed, but it was different than she’d expected. Its walls were shabbier and its occupants sometimes difficult to get along with. As an inbetweener on a probationary trial, she often found her lines erased or traced over by the more senior animators. The environment was competitive and full of jealousy. The top animator positions were just beginning to open up, and assistant animators who had worked at the studio for two decades without an opportunity for advancement eyed the jobs possessively.

  While women in the 1970s were entering the workplace in unprecedented numbers elsewhere, at the Walt Disney Studios the opposite was true. In the story department, the number of women had dropped from a peak of approximately 40 percent in 1940 to roughly 10 percent in 1975. In animation, women were confined to assistant animator positions. The most precipitous drop was in the Ink and Paint department, whose ranks were almost depleted. A core group of twenty-four women remained and still hand-painted each cel and inked fine detail work onto the scenes. Altogether, there were far fewer women employed at the studio than a decade earlier, and the histories of those former female employees were rapidly fading from consciousness.

  As Heidi was graduating with her bachelor of fine arts, a man named Edwin Catmull was also getting his degree. He was earning a bachelor of science in physics from the University of Utah and yet he felt like a mere beginner in the field.

  As a child, awestruck by Pinocchio and Peter Pan, he had dreamed of becoming an animator at the Walt Disney Studios, but his inability to draw soon convinced him to put those aspirations aside. Instead, he decided to pursue the emerging field of computer science. Ivan Sutherland, known for his development of Sketchpad at MIT, had just started as a professor at the University of Utah, and Catmull found in him a mentor and, later, when he entered the university’s graduate program, an adviser.

  For a man studying computer science, Catmull seemed to be taking a strange approach to a class project in graduate school. He was making a mold of his left hand, painfully ripping out the hair on the back in the process. He filled in the mold with plaster, and then, after it was set and freed, he began to draw directly on it. Catmull and his fellow student Fred Parke drew three hundred and fifty black polygons on the plaster model of his hand, following its contours and making careful note of their dimensions.

  To digitize the model, they painstakingly measured the coordinates of each polygon and entered the data into a 3-D animation program Catmull had written. Using the animation program, they could get Catmull’s disembodied hand to flex its fingers, point, and make a fist. Then the program dramatically panned in from the base of the hand to show the model from inside the fingers. Using a 35 mm movie camera adapted to the computer screen, they were able to make a short film of the process. Catmull and Parke also digitized an artificial heart valve and, in a fit of ambition, the face of Parke’s wife. The final product was waxy and misshapen, but those at the University of Utah who saw the films were speechless—it was 1972 and they were getting their first glimpse of the potential of computer graphics. The Library of Congress would later call the film “an early landmark in the development of computer animation.” The work would be a stepping-stone to the three-dimensional wonder that would later characterize the nascent field of computer-generated imagery, or CGI.

  Despite Catmull’s stunning achievements, the job opportunities he was hoping for didn’t materialize. His adviser set up a meeting with executives at the Walt Disney Studios, persuaded that the technology could augment traditional animation, but the meetings weren’t fruitful. If Walt had been alive, it seems likely from his history of investing in new and unproven technology that Catmull would have been given the opportunity. For the remaining executives, animation was a dying art that they were unwilling to put resources into.

  However, they didn’t turn Catmull away empty-handed. Recognizing his talent, they offered him a position as an Imagineer at Disneyland, where he could help develop a new space roller-coaster ride, later called Space Mountain. Catmull declined and returned to the University of Utah and his dissertation.

  Even though he didn’t take the job with the company, Catmull kept fiddling with Walt’s characters. He was working on a mathematical approach to representing curved surfaces in his programming. As part of his dissertation, he figured out a way to project an image onto a curved surface, an invention called texture mapping. It allowed him to replace the waxy look of his graphics with a projection of any surface type he wanted—wood, marble, even feathers. His first selection for a curved surface to work with was the face of Mickey Mouse.

  Catmull graduated in 1974 but despite his originality, there were few job prospects. Computer-animation departments were scarce, and he was turned down for a teaching position at Ohio State University. With a wife and a two-year-old daughter to support, Catmull decided to take a dull programming job in Boston. He wondered if he’d ever get to pursue his real interests in computer animation.

  After Walt died, in 1966, his brother Roy became president of Walt Disney Productions. Roy was seventy-three years old and had retirement in his sights, but he felt his presence was distinctly needed on the “Florida project,” later known as the Walt Disney World Resort when it opened on October 1, 1971.

  One of the attractions of the new theme park was the It’s a Small World ride, a near-identical twin of the California version. The ride had achieved the pinnacle of theme-park popularity: a long line snaking its way into the attraction. When the park opened, Mary was staying at the Contemporary Hotel, part of the new resort and the home of the last assignment Walt had given her. For the Grand Canyon Concourse, Mary had designed a ninety-foot-tall mural. The mural was composed of eighteen thousand hand-painted tiles shipped from California to Florida, and it had taken the artist and her staff more than eighteen months to build. The result was an eye-popping array of images of animals and children in a style that was completely Mary’s own.

  Mary had flown to Florida to celebrate the resort’s opening with a group of friends and family. She wished Retta could be there, but, sadly, the artist was living more than four thousand miles away. Retta’s husband, still in the military, had been transferred to Honolulu, Hawaii. The move had wiped out her employment opportunities; she was simply too far away to work for Walt Disney Productions or any other animation studio. Instead, she focused on her artistry, learning calligraphy, experimenting with silk-screening, and sending her friends and family the most exquisite Christmas cards they’d ever laid eyes on.

  Even as Mary basked in the praise for her work at Disney World, she knew the company was changing dramatically. After Roy Disney passed away in late 1971, Esmond Cardon Walker took the helm as president of the company and Donn Tatum became chairman and CEO. The two men were already planning on expanding their successful theme parks internationally. The animation department, however, was working on far fewer feature projects than it had in any decade previously. Of the fifty-two films the studio released in the 1960s, only two were animated: The Sword in the Stone (1963) and The Jungle Book (1967). Both films were conceived and developed at the studio during Walt’s lifetime. With the exception of Mary Poppins, the sole live-action/animation hybrid, the rest were all live-action films. Although both of the animated features made modest profits, the rewards were not large enough to tempt executives to continue them. Animation, just like Catmull’s new technology, was seen as too risky.

  In the 1970s, the number of women in professional fields was increasing. They made up 40 percent of the workforce in the United States and played a key role in computer programming, accounting for 28 percent of all graduates in the field. But that was not the case in animation. When CalArts unveiled its character-animation program in 1975, one of the first of its kind in the country, there were only two women in the program. Without women in the pipeline, few could be hired by Walt Disney Studios to work on their newe
st features.

  Thelma Witmer in backgrounds and Sylvia Roemer in layout had watched many changes sweep through the studio’s halls over the decades, none so devastating as the passing of Walt. Although imperfect, he had frequently been an advocate for female artists. Without him, not even the exceptionally talented Mary Blair could find work.

  Mary was now based in Soquel, California, a community about an hour and a half south of San Francisco. She had thought that finding jobs on the West Coast would be easier than it was in the east, but the opposite proved to be the case. The studio that had employed her for over two decades was no longer interested. Marc and Alice Davis sent her to an agent in San Francisco, but he quickly rejected her. Despite Mary’s portfolio of diverse artistic endeavors, no one would hire her. Perhaps people sensed her desperation.

  After getting multiple traffic tickets, Lee was caught driving while intoxicated and was sent to jail for twelve months. His arrest, along with Donovan’s hospitalizations, brought Mary low. She was sixty years old but sometimes she felt much older. Now that Kevin was out of the house and in the navy, she was frequently alone. The need to anesthetize her mind from the world grew dominant. The melancholy was deepening, and Mary was desperate for relief.

  At the studio, Heidi replicated the animators’ drawings, filling in the action between their scenes and transforming their rough pencil sketches into clean, crisp lines suitable for transfer onto cels by the Xerox machine. Sometimes she needed to lay a fresh piece of paper over the original work so that the lines could be neatly traced. Other times she could break out a kneaded eraser and beat the graphite pencil smears into submission. She always preferred to erase if she could, not because it was faster—in fact, it always took longer—but because retaining the animator’s lines preserved the spark of life of the original drawings.

  At home, Heidi created her own animated scenes, also bristling with life. She was determined to be hired after her probationary period, but to accomplish this she’d need to execute her own sequences, which she would then turn in to a review board of animators and directors. If they liked her work, she would be promoted from temporary inbetweener to animation trainee.

  While Heidi was prepared to dive into their next feature, she wasn’t expecting to fall in love with the character Tigger. The studio was in the process of making the third of three short Winnie the Pooh films: Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, all based on A. A. Milne’s books Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, published in the 1920s. It was one of the last animation projects Walt had championed at the studio. He had bought the rights to the books in 1961 and helped develop the shorts, the first of which was released in 1966 before his death. They would repackage all three shorts, editing them together to make the two-hour feature called The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Walt Disney Studios’ twenty-second animated film, released in 1977.

  As Heidi sketched Tigger, she found that he seemed to have a life of his own. He was joyous and completely content in his own skin. As in previous decades, the animators worked closely with the story department. She chose him directly from the storyboards, tickled by a sequence in which he falls out of a tree, hits the ground below, and bellows, “Oooohhhh! Good ol’ terra firma! Smmmaaack!” Heidi envisioned him splayed happily on the ground, not caring how silly he looked, and then pressing his lips to the earth in a loud kiss.

  With her nerves on edge, Heidi showed the completed set of pencil sketches to a handful of animators on a Moviola, the simple projector device that had been at the studio so long that even Bianca had regularly used one for film editing. Heidi was tense for a moment afterward, perspiration building on her skin, but then the laughter started, and warm congratulations poured in. The sequence she had drawn was a hit with the group. She was not safe yet, still not past her probationary period, which would be repeatedly extended, but the euphoric feeling of making legendary animators laugh stayed with her.

  The history of women at the studio was already becoming lost, buried by those who preferred to forget, and so Heidi believed that she was one of the first women there, oblivious to the many female artists and animators who had once trodden the same halls and occupied the same rooms. She was, however, about to enter a world her predecessors had never seen. On a Friday afternoon, she got in an elevator that had long been barred to women and took it to the top floor and the forbidden Penthouse Club.

  Women were being permitted entry because of a momentous occasion—employees were celebrating the fortieth anniversary at the studio of animator Milt Kahl, one of Walt’s Nine Old Men. As Heidi’s eyes roamed around the exclusive club where Walt and his favorite animators had spent countless hours, she couldn’t help but feel jealous. Female animators had no such retreat. The club was restricted to male executives, senior animators, and select assistant animators. It seemed unfair that no matter how many hours she worked or how high she rose in the ranks, she’d never gain admittance. Certainly the old tearoom in the Ink and Paint building was no substitute for all the amenities of the club, which still offered massages, haircuts, and an exclusive restaurant.

  But Heidi had an advantage that previous generations of women working in animation had not: the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it barred discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, or gender. Unfortunately, at first the legislation was toothless, lacking a way to enforce it. It was not until the 1970s, when Congress passed a series of laws giving the EEOC the ability to sue employers, that businesses felt any pressure to comply with the law. Subsequent protections for female employees were even further delayed. It wasn’t until 1986 that the Supreme Court judged that women should be protected from a “hostile or abusive work environment.”

  Heidi and another female trainee decided to make an official complaint to the National Organization for Women, which had been founded in 1966. The two were hoping the studio would open up the Penthouse to women or, alternatively, create a similar space for its female employees. Instead, the club was closed down, the private elevator boarded up, and resentment against female animators gained new ammunition.

  Heidi had little recourse against other, more distressing behavior at the studio. Outside the doors of her animation wing was a counter where the animators would drop off their pencil drawings, which would then be transferred to the camera operators. Since assistant animators produced dozens of drawings a day, they spent considerable time at the counter. Yet Heidi and her female colleagues wished they didn’t have to.

  Hustler, the pornographic magazine published by Larry Flynt, had just hit the market in 1974 and its depictions of women were known, even when compared to Playboy and Penthouse, to be particularly explicit and demeaning to women. Heidi was shocked to find all three walls behind the counter plastered in pages ripped from the magazine.

  The culture of pranks around the studio had not diminished with time, and as Heidi looked at the revolting images before her, she had an idea. Another magazine had recently entered the scene: Playgirl. Working late hours when the men who acted as messengers at the counter had left for the day, Heidi began to sneak pictures of nude men in with the women. Days passed and no one seemed to notice the change. Then one of the men caught sight of a picture and pointed it out. The man working at the counter had a fit, cursing at the image as he tore it off the wall. In retaliation, Heidi decided she had better paste up more pictures, preferably higher up, where it was harder to rip them down. The antics saved her sanity, and in 1978 Heidi finally attained the position she’d yearned for. She was no longer an assistant but a full animator. The legacy of the women who had come before her, however, remained unappreciated.

  Fresh CalArts graduates kept streaming through the front doors of the studio as they had for generations. Yet there was something different about the new group of inbetweeners that started after Heidi was promoted in the late 1970s. For some r
eason, they kept going down to the morgue.

  The morgue still comprised a complex of rooms in the belly of the studio, beneath the old Ink and Paint building, connected by long concrete tunnels with pipes hanging from the low ceilings. It was where all the materials previously used for films, including research, scripts, and concept art, were housed. But it was not a place for art to die. Nor was it yet organized as a formal research library with museum-quality standards, as it would be in the late 1980s. Instead, it served as a source of inspiration, a place where studio employees could borrow previous artwork for months and let the style of past greats influence their present work. The historical significance of the material the morgue housed was just starting to be recognized. For the new generation of artists, the ability to peruse the work of their heroes, the animation greats they had learned about in art school, was intoxicating.

  Michael Giaimo was a recent graduate of CalArts who, along with his contemporaries, had just discovered the wonders contained in the morgue. The 1970s had seen just four fully animated films from the studio: The Aristocats (1970), Robin Hood (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and The Rescuers (both 1977). Michael was working as an assistant animator on The Black Cauldron, a dark piece of animation loosely based on a series of fantasy novels published in the 1960s by Lloyd Alexander.

  As Michael and some of his young colleagues were searching for hidden treasures one afternoon, they came across an old cardboard box. When they opened its lid, they were stunned at its contents. The box was filled with the most astounding concept art in colors and incorporating a style completely unlike any other at the studio. The pieces were signed with the name Mary Blair.