The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  The Little Mermaid had initially been developed back in the 1940s, when Sylvia Holland and Ethel Kulsar wrote treatments and scripts for the Hans Christian Andersen story. It was their extensive work, brought up from the morgue, that some of the team were now reviewing.

  In many ways the story department of Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1987 was not very different from its counterpart in 1940. The group still hand-sketched drawings and pinned them up on corkboards with pushpins. They still stood up in front of one another and acted out the scenes, pointing at each drawing as they sang and sometimes danced. They still criticized one another, often harshly, in an effort to improve the story. But a component was missing—there were almost no women. The story department of nearly fifty years earlier had benefited from the brains of Bianca Majolie, Grace Huntington, Mary Blair, Retta Scott, Mary Goodrich, and Ethel Kulsar, among others, but in 1987, one woman stood alone. Her name was Brenda Chapman.

  Brenda grew up in rural Illinois, the youngest of five children. Her brothers and sisters were all much older; her closest sibling was eight years her senior. Brenda sometimes felt like an only child growing up in the middle of her farming community. There wasn’t much to do—the nearest movie theater was ten miles away—and so from an early age, Brenda loved to read and draw. Her family was supportive, and after studying art at Lincoln College in Illinois, she moved to California to attend CalArts.

  Brenda graduated in May 1987 and applied to Walt Disney Feature Animation. The man interviewing her was not enthusiastic about her future at the studio, telling her, “If you don’t work out after six weeks we’ll just hire another trainee.” He grudgingly explained that the studio’s new executive leadership, which included Eisner and Katzenberg, wanted more women hired in animation, particularly in the story department.

  Brenda was embarrassed by the tenuous nature of her employment and was determined to prove her capacity for hard work. As she sorted through scenes created in the 1940s of a glittering undersea palace, she was inspired by the work of the female pioneers who preceded her, although their names had already faded from the studio’s consciousness.

  Much of what the story and animation departments were producing now was new. The story department played with different ideas for the villain of the film, Ursula the sea witch. In one sketch they made her into a manta ray with sharp facial features, in another she was a lionfish, and in yet another, she was an attractive, albeit evil, swordfish. But it was a sketch from animator Rob Minkoff that caught Ashman’s eye. This Ursula wore jewelry and heavy makeup and had a stout frame. She looked familiar to Ashman; he declared that she was the spitting image of Divine, the legendary drag queen known for her performances in the John Waters movies Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. Ashman, a gay Jewish man, felt a connection with Divine, who’d grown up in the same neighborhood in Baltimore as himself. The staff decided to embrace the inspiration and created an Ursula with the body of a squid who not only resembled Divine superficially but swung her hips and sang like her too.

  The film perfectly embodied the transformation occurring in animation as it merged the old with the new. It was the first Disney film to use computer software and the last to use the multiplane camera, the 1937 technology that had been so critical to the company’s success.

  Working on The Little Mermaid, Ellen Woodbury became skilled at blending colors and generating shadows, rendering the shade created by objects and animals in a way that seemed impossibly real. Unlike hand-drawing, computer animation could depict transparency, allowing layers and colors to blend together in a style completely new to the studio. As much as she enjoyed seeing what the computer program could do, Ellen was intensely frustrated by the two-and-a-half-second lag time between her movement of the mouse and the cursor’s movement on-screen. It seemed that the computer should make their work go faster, but the opposite was often true. When she attended the Disney life-drawing class during her lunch hour—the same class that Bianca, Retta, Sylvia, and Mary had enjoyed decades earlier—she reveled in the ease of putting pencil to paper again.

  The animators played with CAPS during various sequences of the movie, but it was the second-to-last scene of The Little Mermaid that put the software to its critical test. As Ariel and Prince Eric sail away after their wedding, a crowd of merpeople wave goodbye and a rainbow appears on the horizon. The scene created by CAPS generated a rainbow that was bright and yet had just the right level of transparency. No hand-drawing could have created such perfect translucency; it blended into the sky almost like the real thing. It was clear that computer animation was superior. Xerox and cel animation were done for.

  The studio did not expect the movie to do particularly well at the box office despite the new technology and catchy score. “It’s a girl’s film,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg to the directors, perhaps forgetting the power of princess movies in the studio’s history. As the movie neared completion, however, his attitude shifted. It was clear to all that they had something special here.

  When the film opened on November 17, 1989, the critics were ebullient, with Variety specifically praising the character Ursula, whom the reviewer called “a visual feast.” Roger Ebert, then a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, favored Ariel, whom he described as “a fully realized female character.” The film would go on to win two Academy Awards: Best Original Song (“Under the Sea”) and Best Score. In addition to winning awards, the movie was a hit at the box office, pulling in $84.4 million in its first run.

  It was a complete turnaround for animation at the studio. With their new success, the executives decided to expand the department and opened Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, a small group of forty artists digging into new story lines. While the profits made from The Little Mermaid had clear consequences for the future of animation and technology at the studio, the fate of female characters was far murkier.

  “Belle is not baking a cake!” Linda Woolverton yelled during a story meeting about the studio’s next feature, Beauty and the Beast. Woolverton was on her way to becoming the studio’s first credited female screenwriter, and she was increasingly frustrated with many of the male writers she worked with. She stared disbelievingly at the storyboards in front of her. In her script she had written a scene where Belle puts pushpins in a map to signify all the areas of the world she wants to explore. The writers adapting her scene into storyboards had changed the setting and action, placing Belle in a kitchen decorating a cake. It was the kind of editorial change that made Linda lean over and literally bang her head on the wooden table before her in exasperation.

  Woolverton had grown up just an hour outside Disneyland, in Long Beach, California. She’d earned a bachelor of fine arts in theater in 1973 and then a master’s in children’s theater. By the 1980s she was working as a writer on children’s television shows such as My Little Pony and simultaneously writing young adult novels. In 1987 she took a copy of her second novel, Running with the Wind, and walked into Walt Disney Feature Animation at its modest quarters on Flower Street. There were, to her surprise, no guards or gates or anything to stop her. When she reached the front desk, she handed the book to the receptionist and said, “Maybe someone here wants to read this.”

  It turns out someone did. Shortly afterward, Woolverton was hired by the story department. There she caught the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who promoted her to be one of the lead writers for Beauty and the Beast. “They didn’t know what they were dealing with when they brought me on,” she later said, referring to her ambition to push boundaries and create female characters that didn’t need to be saved. Woolverton was working closely with Menken and Ashman, who had become instant legends at the studio for their roles in The Little Mermaid. Roy E. Disney was so impressed by Ashman’s talent that he called the lyricist “another Walt.”

  Ashman, too, had a vision for the future of animation at the studio. In 1988, before The Little Mermaid was even released, he proposed a new feature project. The movie treatment he wrote was Aladdin, based
on “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” from One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk stories compiled by a European translator in the eighteenth century. As a teenager, Ashman had played the role of Aladdin in a production at a community theater. With this inspiration, his story treatment stayed close to the original tale about a boy who finds a magic oil lamp containing a genie who can grant wishes. Ashman began working in earnest on the project, writing three songs with Menken and drawing concept art, but the studio soon shelved it. This was a disappointment, but the team hoped it might resurface in the future. However, even without Aladdin, there was plenty to keep Ashman and Menken busy. Katzenberg urgently needed their help on the studio’s foundering next feature.

  Beauty and the Beast, like so many other projects, was initiated during the studio’s creative overflow of the 1940s. This time, however, no story treatments or concept art remained to guide the later artists, so they turned to the original text, “La Belle et la Bête,” the 1740 French fairy tale. The adaptation at the studio was not going well. In 1989, Katzenberg scrapped their entire script and storyboards, feeling that the film required an entirely new direction. He decided to make it a musical and knew that he needed the Ashman/Menken magic.

  Unfortunately, Howard Ashman was ill. In 1988, while working on The Little Mermaid, he had been diagnosed with HIV. It would be seven more years before highly active antiretroviral therapy was developed, drug cocktails that would save the lives of millions living with the virus. While the drug AZT had been approved in 1987, the virus was becoming resistant to it. Patients with HIV had very few options.

  When Ashman’s immune system weakened critically and his illness progressed to AIDS, the lyricist became unable to travel to the West Coast, so Woolverton, the other writers and animators, and even some executives traveled to Ashman’s home in Fishkill, New York, frequently staying at the town’s Residence Inn. They also spent time in New York City, where Woolverton and Ashman slowly strolled the streets as they discussed ideas.

  Woolverton had invented an endearing character, a little teacup named Chip, who added humor and sweetness to the plot. She was also holding fast to her image of Belle—she wouldn’t let them turn the heroine into a baker. The story department agreed to make Belle a voracious reader, and to address concerns among the writers that the activity was too slow-paced, they had Belle walk around town while keeping her nose in her book.

  Woolverton did have one ally in the story department who embraced her vision for Belle wholeheartedly. Brenda Chapman, fresh from The Little Mermaid, was now working on Beauty and the Beast. As they created storyboards for one scene in which Belle cleans and bandages the Beast’s paw and he growls menacingly at her in pain, Brenda cringed at Belle’s passive dialogue. If someone yells at me when I’m trying to help them, Brenda thought, I would yell back at them. She decided to bring out Belle’s anger and had her shout at the Beast, “If you’d hold still, it wouldn’t hurt as much!” It was the first time a Disney princess had ever yelled at her prince.

  For his part, Ashman was infusing his personal experiences into the songs that would help tell Belle’s story. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Kill the Beast,” which is sung when the villagers decide to arm themselves and destroy the creature whose hope of breaking the curse is withering with each petal that falls from an enchanted rose. Ashman poured his hatred for the disease and the stigma surrounding it into the lyrics. “We don’t like what we don’t understand and in fact it scares us,” the villain Gaston sings. The words could just as easily apply to AIDS and the fear it caused in the 1980s and 1990s, a time when many Americans were afraid to even hug people infected with the virus. AIDS had already stolen the lives of many of Ashman’s friends, and now he was entering the final stages of the disease himself.

  At St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York City, a group of animators came to visit Ashman. He weighed eighty pounds and was suffering from AIDS-related dementia. He could no longer see and could barely speak above a whisper. He was just forty years old.

  The animators told Ashman that the first screening for Beauty and the Beast had been a success. It was just the beginning of the near universal acclaim the movie would receive, with Janet Maslin of the New York Times describing Ashman in her glowing review as “an outstandingly nimble lyricist.” Ashman would never have the opportunity to read her words. He died eight months before the film’s release, one of 29,850 people in the United States to succumb to AIDS in 1991. When the screen fades to black at the end of Beauty and the Beast, these words appear: To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful. Howard Ashman 1950–1991.

  Just one month after Ashman’s death, Katzenberg resurrected the lyricist’s work on Aladdin. Katzenberg had decided to release the film in a mere twenty months, and so the script needed a speedy rewrite. Linda Woolverton pitched in, making some story additions based on the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad and including a villain named Jafar.

  Some elements didn’t need to change. Menken and Ashman had written multiple songs for the film, and three made the final cut: “Arabian Nights,” “Friend Like Me,” and “Prince Ali.” But they still needed a few more songs. Katzenberg brought in Tim Rice, the celebrated English lyricist, to work with Menken in completing the score. Aladdin was released on November 25, 1992. The film did exceptionally well financially, becoming one of the top-grossing films of the year and pulling in over two hundred million dollars at the box office. The critical reaction to the movie was also highly favorable, with many reviewers mentioning Robin Williams’s exceptional performance as the genie.

  Not long after the film’s release, however, part of the soundtrack was criticized as racist, specifically lyrics in the Menken/Ashman song “Arabian Nights”: “Where they cut off your ear / if they don’t like your face. / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.” In response to criticism from the Los Angeles chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the studio changed the line in 1993 to “Where it’s flat and immense / and the heat is intense. / It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”

  With their recent string of hit movies, the team at Walt Disney Feature Animation began gearing up for their next project, originally called King of the Jungle but now titled The Lion King. Ellen Woodbury had played a key role in the studio’s past four films, working as a character animator for both The Little Mermaid and the following year’s The Rescuers Down Under as well as animating Belle’s father, Maurice, in Beauty and the Beast and the monkey Abu in Aladdin. Now she was ready for her next challenge.

  So was Brenda Chapman. Just four years after she was told she was being hired on a six-week trial basis, she was now in a momentous position. Roger Allers, director of their next feature, asked if she wanted to be head of the story department. It was a job that no woman had ever previously held. Brenda hesitated—she wasn’t certain that she wanted the position, though it wasn’t for lack of affection for the department. Unlike Bianca, who’d experienced exclusion as the only female story artist, Brenda felt listened to among her male coworkers and she cherished the creative freedom their group was afforded. No one was violently breaking down her door. In fact, they worked comfortably together creating dialogue and storyboards, with one of the men occasionally leaning over and saying, “Hey, do you realize you’re the only woman in the room?” Brenda would shrug and they would all laugh.

  Still, Brenda knew the kind of movies she wanted to make: fairy tales with strong female characters. She had hoped their next film would be a retelling of Tchaikovsky’s 1877 ballet Swan Lake. It was the sort of project that the women of Walt Disney’s past, particularly Bianca and Sylvia, would have drooled over. Unfortunately, this film was stuck in “development hell,” the period of prolonged limbo before a project went into production. The studio executives decided to move ahead with The Lion King. The plot was inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the story of an uncle’s betrayal and a young prince’s pursuit of revenge a
nd the throne that is rightfully his. The studio’s version was set in the African savanna with lions as the main characters.

  Brenda had no affection for talking animals, but she knew that she couldn’t say no to the job. She might never get this chance again. The only woman in the story department was now running the show. She wouldn’t be alone for long. As had happened so many years earlier, the promotion of one woman was poised to draw in many others.

  There were women outside the story department as well. In the animation department, 37 percent of the staff working on the film were now women. Yet most of these female employees were working as assistant animators. For The Lion King, Ellen was initially offered the job of animating Sarabi, mother of the lion cub Simba. It was a coveted position and many animators would have jumped at the opportunity to completely shape a critical character in the film. However, Ellen wasn’t so sure. She didn’t have any children herself and didn’t particularly want any. As she considered the character, she felt she would have difficulty connecting with the motivations of a mother. She turned it down.

  The decision was a tough one, especially since she didn’t know if she’d be offered another character. As the weeks passed, she wondered if she’d made the right call. Then the animation director offered her the bird Zazu, a red-billed hornbill and adviser to the king. She was delighted. Here was a character she could do justice to. Ellen was soon consumed with researching hornbills, understanding their anatomy, their behavior, and how they fly through the sky. She spent hours researching Rowan Atkinson, the voice actor for the character. She watched every episode of Mr. Bean and Black Adder to get a sense of his acting style and mannerisms. The sassy character was starting to take shape.

  Yet his form wouldn’t really come together until she brought her hand-drawn sketches into CAPS. Only on the computer could she create the fluffy texture of Zazu’s feathers, the airbrush-style color pattern of his beak, and the crisp blues of his body. When she saw the final creation on-screen, despite the maddening lag-time effect, the result was as satisfying as any hand-drawn animation she had ever done.