The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  The film was called Brave and told the story of Merida, a strong-willed Scottish teenager. Her appearance was different from that of previous princesses; she had a strong, athletic body and unruly red hair. Her story was different too. Here was a princess who did not rely on a single male character. Shockingly, unlike Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas, this female heroine had a mother who was still alive. In fact, the story focuses on the complex mother-daughter relationship and how a magical curse ultimately heals it. Brenda made up a new business card: “Token Female Director.” Unfortunately, she did not last as long in the position as she should have. Before the film was released, Brenda left the studio due to creative differences. The experience was infuriating. “Sometimes women express an idea and are shot down,” she explained, “only to have a man express essentially the same idea and have it broadly embraced. Until there is a sufficient number of women executives in high places, this will continue to happen.”

  Brave faced other challenges. Many forecasters did not believe the movie would do well. Part of their cynicism was based on the reception to the studio’s last two princess movies, The Princess and the Frog (2009), which featured Tiana, the studio’s first African American princess, and Tangled (2010), which told the tale of Rapunzel and was loosely based on the German fairy tale published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Both films did moderately well at the box office. The Princess and the Frog earned $104.4 million in its first domestic run, but it also drew reproach for its portrayal of race; as the New York Times noted, “We finally get a black princess and she spends the majority of her time on screen as a frog?”

  Tangled fared somewhat better, receiving largely positive reviews and earning more than $200 million domestically in its first run. However, its success was dampened by its exorbitantly high production budget, a reported $260 million, making it the most expensive animated film of all time. Neither of the princess movies could compare with the string of Pixar hits that dominated the landscape, such as Finding Nemo (2003), which made $334 million in its first run, and Cars (2006), which brought in $244 million.

  With these precedents, some in the movie industry were ready to write off Brave as a “pretty standard princess movie,” likely to appeal only to female audiences. So it was a surprise when Brave, released on June 10, 2012, fiercely broke these boundaries. The film garnered largely glowing reviews and earned $237.3 million at the box office in its first domestic run.

  At the eighty-fifth Academy Awards, Brave was considered an underdog in the category of Best Animated Feature Film, so it shocked many in the industry when it won the Oscar. Brenda was the first woman to ever win the award. When she took the stage, she was quick to thank her inspiration: “My wonderful, strong, beautiful daughter, Emma.”

  As Brenda stood proudly with her golden statue, a torrent of women artists were coming to Burbank from all over the world, poised to transform moviemaking. Their triumphs would rest on the shoulders of Bianca, Sylvia, Retta, Mary, and all the other women of Disney’s golden age.

  Chapter 19

  For the First Time in Forever

  It was an ordinary afternoon in 2011 when Jennifer Lee received the phone call that would alter the course of her life. From the other side of the country, Phil Johnston, her good friend and former Columbia University classmate, asked, “Any chance you want to up and move to California… like… tomorrow?” Johnston, now a writer and producer at Walt Disney Feature Animation, wanted Lee to come out to Los Angeles for eight weeks to help on the studio’s feature Wreck-It Ralph.

  Johnston admired Jennifer as a brilliant writer, but she herself sometimes struggled to recognize her own self-worth. After graduating with a degree in English from the University of New Hampshire in 1992, she moved to New York City, where she found work as a graphic artist for Random House. It was just the beginning of her career in storytelling. At age thirty she sat staring at the Columbia Film School website. She was afraid to apply, yet she desperately wanted to attend. She summoned the courage and soon became one of the older students in the program. Seven years after graduation, she had won several awards and had two of her scripts optioned, but the projects lingered without the funding needed to bring them to fruition. Being hired as a cowriter on Wreck-It Ralph was exactly what her career needed next.

  The movie is a love sonnet to the arcade, telling the story of a video-game villain who wants to become the good guy and the friendship he forms with a young girl who is being kept from pursuing her ambitions. Jennifer adored the “beautifully damaged, lovable, original characters,” and she immersed herself in the project. The weeks passed quickly, and Phil asked Jennifer to stay a bit longer, just until the film wrapped up. While she was hanging around the studio, a new project caught her interest. The script and concept art she was looking at, however, needed a lot of work.

  The story of “The Snow Queen,” like so many projects before it, had long been in development at the studio. Mary Goodrich, the story artist who also worked on Fantasia and Dumbo, wrote the first treatment in 1938. The original tale, written in the 1840s by Hans Christian Andersen, was not an easy one to adapt, as it consisted of seven fragmented stories and lacked a clear narrative. Yet it was impossible not to be entranced by its repeated themes of the redemptive power of love and the triumph of vulnerable children over destructive adults. At the end of the story, the children escape the ice palace where they were being held captive, and the evocative last line reads “And they both sat there, grown up, yet children at heart; and it was summer, ––warm, beautiful summer.”

  In 1939, the project went into development as part of a planned biography of Hans Christian Andersen that would combine live action with animation. Ultimately, the hybrid film got no traction, but it remained in the studio’s consciousness. Andersen’s fairy tales were a favorite among the story artists, who often retold and reimagined them as they developed feature-film ideas. Few would make it to production anytime soon, as Sylvia learned while passionately promoting The Little Mermaid in 1940, yet the possibility that they had a future was a powerful motivation for the artists to keep working on them.

  In 1977, Marc Davis picked up “The Snow Queen” again. He had moved over in the company from animator to Imagineer and was helping design rides such as the Jungle Cruise, the Haunted Mansion, and the Pirates of the Caribbean. Now Marc was working on a new project. He imagined a chilly attraction, perfect for hot summer days at Disneyland. The ride would feature a snow princess with a long side-swept blond braid and a flowing, glittery gown. He sketched snowflake decorations and the aurora borealis lighting up the night sky. His enchanted snow palace was built of simulated ice with a long flight of steps and a wide balcony. Though his vision was beautiful, momentum to carry out the project was lacking, and the ride would never be made.

  However, good ideas have a way of resurfacing. In the mid-1990s, “The Snow Queen” was reimagined as an animated action-adventure film, one in which the villain, Elsa, freezes the heart of a poor peasant named Anna. The concept art showed an evil queen with blue skin, spiky hair, and a coat made from living weasels—an icy Cruella De Vil. Elsa’s motivations came from being stood up at the altar, after which she froze her own heart so that she would never have to feel the pain of unrequited love again.

  Jennifer, like many others at the studio, found the story tiresome; the women had scarcely any distinguishing characteristics. She sat watching an animatic, the filmed storyboards, which were open for any employee to view and give notes on. The practice had been in place for decades, with Walt frequently asking for feedback on proposed films. As she viewed the storyboards, Jennifer envisioned the film differently, as a musical in the vein of The Little Mermaid. Jennifer’s notes impressed the team, and even though she wasn’t yet finished with Wreck-It Ralph, Chris Buck, the director of the Snow Queen film, asked her to join them as a writer.

  Jennifer was soon working closely with the husband-and-wife songwriting team brought in for the film, Robe
rt Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez. The partnership deepened, resembling the immersive relationship the studio had with its musical team during the tenure of Menken and Ashman in the 1980s and with the Sherman brothers on Mary Poppins in the 1960s.

  As Jennifer wrestled with the villain, Elsa, the group began to have discussions about who she was as a character and how it felt to be alone with her powers. Lopez and Anderson-Lopez played a demo of a song they had written for her that explored these emotions. As the story team listened to the song “Let It Go,” Jennifer looked around the room. Tears were pricking her eyes and she realized that half the staff was crying. The song, which powerfully captured Elsa’s desire to truly be herself, needed not a single revision. Elsa’s character, however, required sweeping changes. “I have to rewrite the whole movie,” Jennifer said aloud.

  She didn’t have much time to do so, as she had been brought in with a strict seventeen-month deadline. The team already knew they wanted the film to end with Anna sacrificing her life for Elsa’s, yet they had no idea how to get to this point. Ed Catmull was giving the new hire complete freedom. In 2006, after the Pixar acquisition, Catmull was made president of both Walt Disney Feature Animation and Pixar Animation Studios. As the studios were separated by over three hundred miles, Catmull flew back and forth, usually spending two days a week to help guide the group in Glendale. Accordingly, he told Jennifer, “You can do whatever you need to do on the film, anything you want, but you’re earning that moment,” a reference to the proposed ending. Then he added, “And if you do, it will be fantastic. And if you don’t, the movie will suck.”

  The film’s direction was still up in the air when someone said the magic word: sisters. Up until that instant, Elsa and Anna were not related in any way. For Jennifer, it was a singular moment, and suddenly the film meant everything to her. She began to work harder than ever to bring an emotional connection into the script. As she contemplated how it felt to be shut out by a sibling, she drew on her own relationship with her older sister.

  Jennifer had grown up in East Providence, Rhode Island, in a houseful of women. From an early age she adored reading and drawing. As a child she was infatuated with Cinderella, watching the 1950 classic on VHS some fifty times until every second of the film was permanently etched in her memory. Back then, as she listened to the song “So This Is Love,” Jennifer had no inkling that the woman who served as art director on the film, Mary Blair, would one day influence her own career.

  The theme of “happily ever after” presented in the fairy tale was blatantly missing from the reality she witnessed between her own mother and father. Following her parents’ divorce, Jennifer and her older sister, Amy, were close, yet as they grew up, the two drifted apart. For Jennifer, it felt as though their connection had been lost. It wasn’t until she was a twenty-year-old college student studying English at the University of New Hampshire that tragedy brought the sisters back together. Jennifer’s boyfriend died in an accidental drowning, and Amy was uncompromisingly there for her in the difficult period afterward. As adults, the two were able to forge a new relationship. “And then from that moment on,” Jennifer would later say, “she was like my champion.”

  It was these experiences that Jennifer now infused into her work. Acknowledging her passionate devotion to the project and with only a year left for the team to finish the movie, producer Peter Del Vecho asked Jennifer to become the studio’s first feature-length female director, a position she would share with director Chris Buck.

  Now as co-director, Jennifer felt strongly that she and the team needed to bring authenticity to the familial relationship that was central to the film. With this in mind, they did something that had never been done before—they organized a “sister summit.” The idea was retro in some ways, a throwback to the large story meetings that had once dominated the studio, although never had so many hundreds of women attended those.

  The summit gathered women from all departments of the Walt Disney Animation Studios (as it was renamed in 2007). Taking turns sharing their experiences, the participants discussed what it meant to be women and sisters. Some topics were petty, such as fighting over clothes, while others were profound, such as how you helped a sister who was in trouble.

  Taking place over several days, the sister summit sparked new inspiration for the writers and story artists. From the themes of exclusion, loneliness, and the resiliency of sisterly bonds, a delicate balance was born between the characters Elsa and Anna. They crafted Anna as the little sister that so many of the women remembered, the one who begs for a playmate, as Anna does in the song “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” The group had previously cut the song, feeling it was too poignant, but now it allowed them to show the heart of the girls’ relationship, as Anna pleads with her sister to tell her why they can’t be friends anymore. The piece would also end up having personal significance, as Jennifer’s daughter and the Lopezes’ daughter each sang part of the song in the final film.

  Jennifer also felt strongly about humanizing their female cast—she didn’t want to depict unflawed princesses. Whereas typically only male characters benefited from bathroom humor, Jennifer decided to make Princess Anna gassy. In story meetings, they chuckled over her burps. Bigger themes also emerged. With Jennifer’s guidance, the central concept of the film moved to the bigger premise of love vanquishing fear.

  As the sister summit wound down, Michael Giaimo stepped into the room to listen (men weren’t allowed to speak at the summit). He knew he was witnessing a singular moment in the studio’s history; “Disney energy at its best,” he would later call it. Giaimo had spent decades at the studio and held a multitude of different positions, but his passion for Mary Blair’s work had only grown in intensity. For Frozen, he was occupying Mary’s role, that of art director, and he brought the lessons he had learned from the female pioneer to his styling on the film. He revisited Mary’s work on a 1954 animated short called Once Upon a Wintertime. In Mary’s depictions of ice and snow, Giaimo was particularly struck by her use of color to suggest the varied temperatures of emotion. The icy forms of the film are not a single shade of white but instead reflect the sky, the characters, and the action of each scene.

  Michael brought these principles into his color palette, finding a way to infuse color as an emotional subtext to the film. When Elsa stalks angrily around her ice palace, the walls turn a striking cool red. During moments of calm, a frosty blue overtakes the scene. Michael selected bright magentas pooling in the snow to reflect the aurora borealis overhead and found a role for the color yellow. When he first mentioned using that shade, executives were concerned: “Not yellow snow?” they asked. Yet Michael found a way to bend the color to the narrative, using yellow as a warning light that signified the rising tension of the scene before it went red.

  Michael’s work on Frozen is indicative of an earlier age, when concept art was unafraid to be daring. He credits Mary as his muse, saying, “What she did went beyond the project into a pure art form. It became art. It became a statement unto itself.”

  It wasn’t just the story that sparkled in Frozen—the effects animation was the most advanced the studio had yet pursued. The eighty animators on the film created over two thousand unique snowflakes. To produce the copious quantities of snow required for Frozen, the group turned to a computer-generated tool called Material Point Method, developed by researchers at the University of Missouri. The simulation-based technique enables scientists to predict how fire and explosions will affect structures, which allows improvement of construction design and building materials. At the Walt Disney Animation Studios, the group took the same algorithm and altered it to determine how snowballs smashed and ice palaces shattered.

  Creating Elsa’s detailed ice palace was the most technically difficult part of the film. The sequence showing the long steps of the castle’s grand foyer, with its exquisite glacial walls and detailed balcony, proved a strain on the four thousand computers—double the number of machines required for 2013�
�s Monsters University—rendering the film one frame at a time. A single frame, the one in which Elsa steps onto the balcony of her ice palace, took more than five days for the thousands of computers to render, far longer than other contemporaneous films. For comparison, it took eleven hours to render a single frame of Cars 2 and twenty-nine hours for a frame in Monsters University. It was a testament to the care with which each detail of the scene was conceived, and now the artists finally had enough computing muscle to power through.

  During the production of Frozen, the studio brought in a live reindeer for the animators to sketch. As the group sat around the majestic animal with its soft, velvety antlers, the scene was reminiscent of the studio more than seventy years earlier, when Walt had brought in two fawns for his artists to sketch for Bambi. At that time, only one woman, Retta Scott, sat in the circle drawing the deer. Now a dozen female animators were working on the film.

  The beauty in the story and art of Frozen would never have been possible without the resurgence of women in the story and animation departments at Walt Disney Animation Studios. These departments, which in the 1970s and 1980s had been practically emptied of female artists, were now bursting with new talent. The new generation, including Claire Keane and Jean Gillmore, both visual-development artists with roles akin to those of Bianca and Sylvia, brought a diversity of experiences to their work.

  Prasansook Veerasunthorn, known as Fawn to her friends and colleagues, was also a story artist on the feature. Born and raised in the Chonburi province of Thailand, Fawn watched Dumbo repeatedly as a child and cried at the scene, designed by Mary Blair, of the mother elephant cradling her baby with her trunk. Fawn moved to the United States on a student visa at age nineteen and attended art school in Ohio. At first she felt uncomfortable with English. Her conversational grasp of the language was clumsy, so she found the visual medium of film intensely appealing. There, she could communicate without words.