The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Something else could be found on-screen: Ellen’s name. Unlike so many of the women before her, Ellen was properly credited. With her work in the 1980s and 1990s, she became the first credited supervising animator and character animator in the studio’s history. Yet even with these stellar accomplishments, Ellen felt there were elements missing from her work.

  The female characters the studio created, delightful as they were, were sometimes lacking in agency or personality. Ellen had had trouble connecting with Ariel; she couldn’t imagine choosing her for a friend. Perhaps some of the difficulty lay in the limitations of her dialogue. In Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, roughly half the dialogue is spoken by female characters. In The Little Mermaid, featuring an often silenced albeit spunky Ariel, 68 percent of the dialogue is from male characters. In Beauty and the Beast, that number reaches 71 percent, and in Aladdin and The Lion King, it’s an unbelievable 90 percent. Only the return of female writers in the story department would right this one-sidedness.

  Chapter 18

  I’ll Make a Man Out of You

  Rita Hsiao held the greeting card in her hands, an image of the character Mulan surrounded by soft, pink cherry blossoms, a radiant smile on her face, on its cover. It was a birthday card from her mother, and printed inside were the words The greatest honor is having you for a daughter. It was a line Rita had written for the film Mulan, released in 1998, and one that held personal meaning for her. She could hardly believe that her dialogue was in a greeting card that had been handed to her by her own mother.

  The moment was precious to Rita, especially as her parents had not always been pleased with her choices. Rita grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her parents were not often outwardly affectionate, although she knew they loved her. They pushed her to excel in school and made their expectations for her future clear. The area was a hub for IBM, where Rita’s father worked as an engineer, and it was obvious that this industry was the field they envisioned for their daughter.

  With these sentiments in mind, Rita enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in artificial intelligence, a subject that seemed to combine her parents’ zeal for computers and her own interest in psychology. But the coursework did not captivate her, and she toiled through her classes for her family’s sake while wishing she could pursue her own passions.

  After graduation, she revealed to her mother and father that she wanted to become a screenwriter and announced that she’d taken a job answering phones at a television production company to get started in the field. Her parents’ faces fell and they couldn’t hide their fierce disappointment. Here was their daughter turning her back on a college education to take a low-level job. Her mother’s first question was “Will you have health insurance?”

  There might not have been benefits, but the position was just a springboard for Rita. She moved into television writing, working on the series The Wonder Years and then All-American Girl, an ABC sitcom starring Margaret Cho. After the series ended, she was hired at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where the group had already started on their next feature, Mulan.

  The screenplay for Mulan is based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan. It is unknown when the poem “The Ballad of Mulan” was written or who its author was, although its first documentation can be traced back to the sixth-century Chinese text Musical Records of Old and New. Over the centuries the poem grew in popularity, being passed along as a folk song. It tells the story of a daughter who takes her elderly father’s place when he is summoned to war, disguising her gender and bringing honor to her family. The short poem, less than a thousand words, is full of powerful imagery: “She gallops ten thousand miles for the war she has to honor… With wintry glow of icy hue, light glimmers on her armor.”

  Even with this beautiful language to guide them, the story department was struggling with Mulan’s character. Robert San Souci, a children’s book author with an avid interest in folktales, had originally brought the project to the studio. But the first story treatment for Mulan was wildly inconsistent with the poem. In the early adaptation, Mulan is an unhappy Chinese woman who leaves her native country after eloping with a British prince. She is gloomy and despondent over her future and there is no sense of the purpose of her journey—the theme of rescuing her father and protecting her family’s dignity is absent. Story meetings for the film were often disorganized. For the first time, pitches were made in both California and the animation studio in Florida. As ideas were passed back and forth across the country, it seemed the feature as a whole was losing its character. Missing was the brave warrior and in her place was a young woman tired of the traditions that trapped her and who required rescuing by a prince. The character the story team had created—self-serving and occasionally egotistical—was one the artists themselves sometimes didn’t like.

  Mulan was following on the heels of two recent female characters: Princess Jasmine from Aladdin and Pocahontas from the eponymous film. While Jasmine had raised the ire of some critics due to her Westernized appearance and harem-style clothing, the criticism of Pocahontas had little to do with her styling. She was the animation studio’s first American Indian character and the first woman of color to be given a lead role in a Walt Disney animated feature.

  Pocahontas got its start at a story meeting in 1991 when Mike Gabriel, director on the studio’s 1990 film The Rescuers Down Under, held up a picture of Tiger Lily, the American Indian woman in Peter Pan. Gabriel had drawn a buckskin dress over a copy of the drawing and above her head he’d written Walt Disney’s Pocahontas. The idea had come to him as he researched historic figures for inspiration, including Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill. His pitch was succinct; he described the plot as “an Indian princess who is torn between her father’s wishes to destroy the English settlers and her wishes to help them.” The project moved at an unheard-of pace; the pitch was accepted following the meeting and development began.

  Part of the enthusiasm from executives was due to the fact that the film echoed themes from Romeo and Juliet, a project already under consideration at the studio. However, those in the story department were wary. This was the first time they were creating a character based on a real person, one whose real-life narrative did not resemble a fairy tale in the slightest.

  Creatively, the film benefited from Michael Giaimo, who served as art director. Working with lyricist Stephen Schwartz and composer Alan Menken, he developed dramatic sequences for the musical pieces of the film. With his research in the studio’s morgue, Giaimo was able to bring inspiration from the women of Disney’s past. He sorted through concept art from discarded features depicting American Indians, including On the Trail and The Song of Hiawatha, both of which Retta had worked on in the 1940s. Most of all, though, he kept Mary Blair close, especially as he selected a palette that revealed emotional resonance for the song “Colors of the Wind.” “I always carry her in my heart,” he explained, “even though I’ve never met her.”

  Released in 1995 just as Rita was starting at the studio, Pocahontas told a fictionalized account of the meeting between the Powhatan woman and an Englishman named John Smith in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia. The film made a profit at the box office, but a relatively modest one, especially in comparison to The Lion King, released a year earlier, which earned $763 million in its first run and was ranked as the second-highest-grossing movie of all time. While many reviewers praised Pocahontas for its animation and story line promoting racial tolerance and environmental stewardship, others harshly criticized the work as “generic,” and one reviewer called the main character “Poca-Barbie.” The most damning criticism, however, did not come from a newspaper or magazine but from the Powhatan Renape Nation, whose leaders wrote in a statement, “The film distorts history beyond recognition… and perpetuates a dishonest and self-serving myth at the expense of the Powhatan Nation.”

  Certainly, no writer at Walt Disney Feature Animation could claim the screenplay was histo
rically accurate. Rather than falling in love with John Smith, as the heroine does in the movie, the seventeen- year-old Pocahontas was taken prisoner by Jamestown colonists and forced to marry a man named John Rolfe. She died in London at twenty-one years old. The story department didn’t feel these facts would be appropriate for children, and yet, in stripping away reality, they left the character Pocahontas bland, without a driving passion or personality.

  With Pocahontas still under scrutiny and Mulan stumbling in the storyboards, Rita was brought into the story department. She immediately felt that she could draw on her own experiences as a young woman to make Mulan’s character more sympathetic. She could relate to the conflict Mulan feels between wanting to forge her own identity and honoring her family. It was a perspective that the story department was sorely missing. Brenda Chapman had left the studio for DreamWorks Animation, a new venture formed by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and David Geffen. Not a single woman of color had worked on Pocahontas, and of the more than fifteen people in the story department, there was only one female writer.

  The Mulan team began spending long hours together both in and out of the studio, taking trips and hanging out on weekends and obsessively talking about their characters. While development was initiated on both coasts, this was the first film to be written and animated primarily in Florida. In many ways they were functioning at the level of intensity and passion that the story department had enjoyed decades previously. The Mulan who began to emerge was a young woman who considered what was expected of her and came to the realization that her life as a soldier was not only about rescuing her father but also about discovering her true self. When someone pitched the idea that the film should end with Mulan kissing her love interest, the team pushed back hard, not wanting the character to be reliant on the tropes that defined previous female protagonists. “Let’s not end it on that,” Rita said. She pointed out that Mulan had just saved China. “The kissing can come later.”

  While Rita and her team were creating an unprecedented Disney female protagonist in an innovative story line, the technology they were working with was woefully inferior to that of their competition. This was immediately clear to Rita as she watched Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film, created by Pixar and released in 1995. Four years earlier, Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, had called Ed Catmull at Pixar and offered to finance and distribute Pixar’s first three feature films. It was the first time the Walt Disney Company had ever done such a thing, and the proposal was a powerful compliment to the promise of both Pixar’s technology and its artistic vision. While the offer was for three feature films, it was also contingent on the first being a success.

  For Walt Disney Feature Animation, it was a gamble worth taking. The studio had a string of recent box-office triumphs but substandard technology. The group was still using CAPS, which was nearly ten years old and all but archaic, at least in comparison to the three-dimensional computer animation that was being developed at Pixar.

  It had been a long road. Ed Catmull had been working doggedly toward this goal for two decades. His tireless engineers at Pixar had built the hardware for it and then refined the graphics language needed to execute it. In 1987 they called one of their programs RenderMan, a nod to a favorite product of the era, the Sony Walkman.

  RenderMan was the latest product in a long line of invention. Its great-grandfather was Sketchpad, the 1963 software created by Catmull’s graduate adviser that drew shapes on a computer screen, the first interactive animation. Next came the first 3-D computer graphics on film—Catmull’s digitized human hand created in 1972—and then CAPS, the digital ink-and-paint system.

  Just as Catmull had been able to cover his animated hand with realistic-looking skin, RenderMan could create photorealistic images on top of either two-dimensional or three-dimensional models. Called “bump and texture mapping,” the program could create green, scaly skin for Rex, the toy dinosaur in Toy Story, while giving Buzz Lightyear, the figurine space ranger, a retractable transparent helmet. It worked like a pastry chef decorating a dessert: the artist still had to bake the cake, but the program would apply the frosting.

  The frosting was proving a beautiful, if burdensome, confection. Pixar’s animation projects had started out small, with animated shorts and commercials for other companies. Yet even these modest endeavors were challenging, as the time it took to render each scene was painfully long. Their computer hardware simply couldn’t power through the animators’ software needs. The group was so hampered by their lack of computing power that when creating a two-minute animated short called Luxo Jr., about a playful desk lamp (which would later form the corporate logo), they couldn’t even give the sequence a background. John Lasseter, a former animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation and an early member of Pixar, spent five days animating twelve and a half seconds of film using their computer system, twice as long as it would have taken him with hand-drawn animation. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that processing speed, memory, and hard-drive space began to catch up with the animators’ ambitions.

  Now it was Walt Disney Feature Animation that was plugging along with decade-old Pixar Image Computers while computer engineers at Pixar were creating Toy Story on silicon graphics workstations and then rendering—generating the images automatically—in an area known as the sunroom because it contained racks of SPARCstation 20 computers that ran twenty-four hours a day. It took four years to make Toy Story. The seventy-seven-minute film needed no inkers, painters, inbetweeners, or traditional animators. It relied on a staff of just a hundred and ten people, including twenty-eight animators and thirty technical directors, and eight hundred thousand machine hours.

  Toy Story was an immediate success, and not only because of the innovative technology it used. With a budget of only $30 million, the film earned $191.8 million in its first domestic run and was the top-grossing film of 1995, far outstripping Pocahontas. It was also nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay, the first animated film to be so honored. The simplicity of the film’s story resonated with audiences, who found a movie told from a toy’s point of view refreshing. But in the tender connection between a boy and his toys that the film represented, there was one element missing: significant female characters.

  The same could not be said for Walt Disney Feature Animation. In 1998, the studio released Mulan. It was an exciting moment for Rita, who had played a crucial role in crafting the studio’s first Chinese princess. Although the reviews were mostly positive, the film did suffer some criticism; Time magazine said, “Its lure is the image of girls kicking ass, being boylike. But how well does it prepare them to be adults in a complex world?” The film did moderately well at the box office, earning $120 million in its first domestic run. Yet Rita could see that the future of animation lay not at the studio in Florida but in the revolutionary technology at Pixar. She eventually moved to that company to begin work on Toy Story 3.

  Filmmaker Brenda Chapman carried a business card that jokingly listed her title as “Token Female Pixar Story Artist” when she moved to that company in 2003. She explained the discrepancy between the two studios. “At the start of my career, I was the only woman in the story department at Disney, but at that time we were working on ‘princess movies’ with strong female leads, so at the time there didn’t seem to be any need to strengthen other female roles… Most of the funny characters were guys,” she said. “But now I’m at Pixar, and their films are very much for the boys. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing, I just think they’re making films they want to see… Joe Ranft asked me to come up to Pixar to work on the female character in Cars to make her ring more ‘true.’ Pixar is something of a ‘boys’ club,’ and little thought seems to have been given to female characters, even when it would have fit naturally. For example, why couldn’t the Slinky or the T-Rex in Toy Story have been women?”

  The differences Brenda noticed between Pixar and Walt Disney Feat
ure Animation were about to shift considerably. In 2006, the company that had spurned Ed Catmull on numerous occasions finally bought Pixar, an acquisition worth $7.4 billion. The move was made possible by Roy E. Disney, who once again had decided to shake up leadership at the Walt Disney Company, resulting in Michael Eisner leaving and Robert Iger taking the helm as CEO in 2005. The animation studios, although now merged financially, were still separate creatively, with Pixar headquartered in Emeryville and the Walt Disney animation studios remaining in Glendale. Yet with the merging of the two companies, Brenda Chapman found herself once again under the roof of the House of Mouse, nearly twenty years after she first began at the Walt Disney Company.

  The role of female characters in film had new importance for Brenda. She saw the princesses of the Disney renaissance era—Ariel, Belle, Pocahontas, and Jasmine—as stepping-stones between the heroines of the 1940s and 1950s and the future animated women she wanted to create. The women of Pixar’s present—Boo in Monsters, Inc., Dory in Finding Nemo, Colette in Ratatouille, the robot Eve in WALL•E, and Atta in A Bug’s Life—were lovely but lacking in dimension. Brenda was now making movies not just for herself and her employers but also for her daughter.

  Motherhood was a whirlwind of responsibility and fatigue, especially during the morning rush when Brenda was trying to drop her three-year-old, Emma, off at preschool before heading to work. It seemed her toddler was a mini-teenager, unwilling to eat breakfast, get dressed, and put on shoes no matter how insistently Brenda urged her. Every day, when Brenda arrived at Pixar, her head was still full of the morning’s tussle, and she wondered what the years to come would look like. How would her relationship with Emma change when her daughter actually became a teenager? From these questions, a movie began to take shape.