Fawn bounced between animation studios before landing in the story department at the Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2011 to work on Frozen. Her hiring was no longer an exceptional event. Fawn was now just one of many women and immigrants brought into the studio.
Fawn began creating beatboards, a type of storyboard that gives a quick pitch of an idea that can fit within existing sequences. Her drawings depicted the mischievous antics of a young Anna and Elsa as they played in the snow and ice-skated with Olaf in the great hall of their palace. Her art captured the childhood wonder of the sisters, mesmerized by Elsa’s magic, before it all went awry. In the story room, the group turned the air-conditioning low and put the finishing touches on the “party is over” sequence, in which an adult Elsa finally reveals her powers to both Anna and a ballroom full of guests. It was Fawn who brought emotional nuance to the scene, tingeing Anna’s and Elsa’s reactions with sadness to illustrate this downturn in their sisterly relationship.
When the film was released in November 2013, no one was prepared for the response from audiences around the world. The reviews, as they so often are for Disney films, were mixed, with Variety criticizing the “generic nature of the main characters,” the New York Daily News declaring that the film lacked “memorable tunes,” and Slate decrying the soundtrack as “musically thin.” Other critics were more complimentary, calling the movie “a second renaissance” for the studio. The box office would have its own story to tell: just 101 days after its release, the movie had made more than one billion dollars and become the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
At the eighty-sixth Academy Awards, Jennifer Lee walked the red carpet with her sister, Amy, as a tribute to the inspiration that their sibling relationship had given the film. When Frozen won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, the celluloid ceiling shattered. It marked two dramatic firsts for women at the studio: the first time a female director from Walt Disney animation had received an Academy Award, and the first female director in history whose film earned over one billion dollars at the box office.
Two days later, Fawn cradled the coveted golden statue in her hands in the studio offices. It was a humbling experience to hold the award that she had helped make possible. She was intensely proud to be part of the team. With her name in the credits and the Academy Award (temporarily) in her grasp, she had a kind of recognition that for many decades had been denied female story artists.
New projects presented themselves. Both Jennifer and Fawn worked on Zootopia (2016), which features an ambitious female rabbit police officer and tackles larger themes of discrimination and tolerance. The film was well received by reviewers, with USA Today praising how the plot “subtly weaves in racial profiling, stereotypes and preconceived notions of others in a creative way.” Fawn also worked on the box-office success Moana (2016), which tells of a resilient Polynesian heroine chosen by the ocean herself to return balance to the natural world and rescue her people. She does so without the aid of any love interest whatsoever. Variety declared that the film “marks a return to the heights of the Disney Renaissance.”
No movie can be everything to everybody. Certainly none of the recent films from Walt Disney Animation Studios is perfect in its treatment of gender and race. While some are the subject of warm praise today, twenty years hence, audiences may find them lacking in needed perspective and sensitivity. Yet the new features coming from the studio signify change in the industry, and behind each one are real people committed to transforming the stories of childhood.
In 2018, Fawn was promoted to head of the story department. Standing on the shoulders of the many who came before her, she and her fellow story artists are using their creativity to help usher in a new era in the representation of female and multicultural characters, unhindered by previous stereotypes.
Struggles will persist, and not only in the technical aspects of three-dimensional animation. Women have long kept quiet about sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace. Only with the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017 did the shroud of silence begin lifting, across disciplines, but particularly in entertainment.
When John Lasseter, former chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, was put on a leave of absence in 2017 for his alleged repeated misconduct toward women, the surprise for those inside the studio was not necessarily what was being said about their boss’s behavior but that such a powerful man had finally been called to account. (Lasseter said his behavior was “unquestionably wrong,” and he has apologized for his actions.) Other such allegations from within the animation industry may come to light in the future, but every year fewer abuses will go unreported in an industry that seems to be evolving at last.
It is the kind of abuse that generations of women in animation have endured and many still persevere under. For all the creative freedom and influence of the early women of the Walt Disney Studios, the closest they ever came to a sister summit was during the story meetings that Sylvia Holland held for the Nutcracker sequence of Fantasia, when the women gathered to develop story lines that the men spurned as too feminine.
For these pioneering women, the idea that one day story meetings full of confident female artists could dominate the vision for a feature film would have been very welcome indeed. And yet, in the more than eighty years since Bianca Majolie began in the story department, is it enough?
Pete Docter doesn’t think so. In 2018, he and Jennifer Lee took over Lasseter’s position as chief creative officers of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, respectively. Both are intent on shifting the culture of the company. Docter also wants to ensure that the female pioneers of the studio are finally acknowledged. He started at Pixar in 1990 the day after he graduated from CalArts. From the beginning, he had a strong sense of how the history of animation influenced the present. In his directorial debut on Monsters, Inc. (2001), Docter found inspiration in Mary Blair’s color palette. In the much-acclaimed Up (2009), which he co-directed, he made the character Ellie, the beloved late wife of the main character, in Blair’s image. Ellie’s paintings in the film are a direct tribute to the legendary artist’s work. Her style would also be reflected in the colorful interiors of a young girl’s mind featured in Inside Out (2015), also directed by Docter.
Mary Blair’s art is the latest to come out of hiding, although few who are inspired by the themes of innocence and joy that run through her work know that it was created under circumstances that were sometimes painful and often abusive. As Mary’s art is given new attention and continues influencing new projects, so should the legacies of all the great underestimated women artists of her era be revived.
Their inspiration is needed now more than ever. While the lack of female representation in the sciences is often lamented and organizations strive to bring more women into STEM fields, women have an even smaller presence in filmmaking. Although 60 percent of all students studying animation in art schools across the United States are women, they make up only 23 percent of all animators in Hollywood. Women make up only 10 percent of all writers and 8 percent of all directors working on the top one hundred highest-grossing films. A 2018 research report published by San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film found that when there is a female director, the effect trickles down to the crew, where more women are employed as writers, editors, cinematographers, and composers. These statistics are similar for movies made across the world, from Canada to France to Japan.
Women are often missing on-screen as well; fewer than 24 percent of protagonists in the top one hundred highest-grossing domestic films are female. In animated features in 2017, this fraction was shockingly low: only 4 percent. The Bechdel test, sometimes called the Bechdel-Wallace test, was conceived in the 1980s by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and although originally proposed in jest, it has now become a common method of evaluating how women are portrayed in entertainment. To pass the Bechdel test, a work must have three characteristics. First, there must be at l
east two women in it. Second, the women must speak to each other. Third, they have to talk about something other than men. The films that fail to meet these three simple requirements are surprisingly numerous. Of 1,794 Hollywood films made between 1970 and 2013, only 53 percent passed the test.
For many children, movies represent their first glimpse of their culture and the roles of men and women in that realm. In the impressionable minds of this audience, our future world is being shaped, and it is one that could only benefit from greater equality.
Bianca ran out of the story meeting in terror, leaving the ripped scraps of her work on the floor behind her. As she fled down the hall that fateful afternoon in 1937, she hated being the only woman in the story department. Her isolation was her purest agony. If only the current women of Walt Disney animation could hold out their hands to the artist, crossing the boundaries of time and space, they would surely reassure her that things would eventually get better. “It’s okay,” they would tell her. “You can slow down now.”
Epilogue
Happily Ever After
I stand with my five-year-old daughter in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland in front of two massive murals that face each other. “Why are you looking at those paintings, Mama?” my daughter Eleanor asks as throngs of visitors move around us. “Is it because you like space?” I do love images of outer space, especially the planets, as my daughter well knows. But this isn’t why I’m staring at the long, curved walls, each one stretching fifty-four feet.
“An artist named Mary Blair made beautiful tile murals of children playing right there,” I say to Eleanor, pointing at the walls, “but we can’t see them anymore.” “They’re just hiding, right, Mama?” Eleanor asks, and she looks a little sad now as we stare at the current murals, which, despite the planets and spacecraft, seem bland and lifeless. I nod my head yes, but the answer is only partially true. One was chipped away in 1986, but the other Mary Blair mural, created in 1967, is likely still there, its images hopefully intact and entombed under layers of plaster. The mural, like Mary’s rich legacy, remains hidden despite being right in front of us.
To cheer both of us up, I take Eleanor on the It’s a Small World ride. The boat rocks along its canal as we enter the cavernous interior, whose brilliance and gaiety soon have us smiling. “Do you see that doll up there by the Eiffel Tower?” I lean in and ask my daughter as she whips her head from side to side, trying to see everything and exclaiming so enthusiastically that at first I’m not sure she heard me. “The one holding the red balloon?” she cries excitedly. “Yes, that one, with the short blond hair,” I say. “That’s Mary Blair. She made this ride.” Eleanor turns her face to me and grins. “I love it.”
She is hardly alone. Although Disneyland was designed by Walt to be in a constant state of flux, old attractions making way for new ones, the It’s a Small World ride remains popular and has earned a permanent home in the park; it’s still here more than forty years after its designer passed away, on July 26, 1978, of a cerebral hemorrhage. The Walt Disney Studio’s weekly newsletter announced Mary’s passing in a short paragraph buried in the middle of its pages. On the front of the newsletter was a photo and lengthy article memorializing a company tax accountant who had passed away that same month.
In her last years, Mary found peace within her family circle; she delighted in her nieces and frequently painted. Her sense of color, in decline during her last years, returned at the end, and she painted scenes as vibrant and joyful as those that marked the height of her career. Her ashes were scattered at sea after a sparsely attended funeral service at the Episcopalian church in Capitola, California. In 1991, Mary was named a Disney Legend, a high honor. Lee Blair, still jealous of her, said to a friend, “Why are they giving it to Mary? She’s dead.” He chose not to attend the ceremony.
Mary’s dear friend Retta Scott similarly found peace and satisfaction late in life. In the 1980s, Retta Scott made a triumphant return to animation, working on The Plague Dogs for a company that would later be bought out by the Pixar Animation Studios and freelancing on animated shorts and other commercial endeavors. She told her son Benjamin, “You can’t draw anything if you don’t understand it.” The words were spoken from the depths of her experience. Retta suffered a stroke in December 1985 that left her weak and unable to communicate. She died on August 26, 1990, at age seventy-four, her passing nearly concurrent with the death of hand-drawn animation itself.
Grace Huntington distinguished herself in aviation, holding numerous speed and altitude records. She passed away from tuberculosis in 1948 at the age of thirty-five, leaving behind her husband and a five-year-old son. Her husband felt that Grace died not only of the bacterial infection, incurable in the 1940s, but also of a broken heart, never having been able to overcome the prejudice that existed against women in aviation. Shortly after she became ill, the military put out a call for woman pilots who were willing to ferry aircraft. It was the opportunity that she had long dreamed of, but it arrived too late.
Sylvia Holland worked for MGM Studios after being laid off from Walt Disney Studios in 1946. She then became a children’s book illustrator and, later, a greeting-card designer. She put her long-neglected architectural skills to use in the 1950s, building two houses of her own design, then started picking up new hobbies. Her love of felines, once expressed by feeding and petting the strays of the Walt Disney Studios, inspired her to develop a new breed of Siamese cat, the Balinese, gaining her an international reputation. The breed continues to thrive today, as do the cats that wander about the studio in Burbank. In her old age, arthritis began to take over her limbs, and yet she insisted on drawing despite the debilitating pain. She hoped to write her memoirs one day but, sadly, never had an opportunity to do so. She died of a stroke in 1974.
Bianca Majolie got the last laugh. The first woman to be hired at the story department lived far longer than most of her 1930s contemporaries. After leaving the studio, Bianca married fellow artist Carl Heilborn. The two opened the Heilborn Studio Gallery, where Bianca frequently exhibited her work. The gallery was located on Hyperion Avenue, just down the street from where her career in animation started. In Bianca’s declining years, her eyesight worsened and it became difficult for her to sketch and paint. “I don’t think that I shall ever be touching paint again,” she said, “but if it should happen, I shall place my fingers in a paint pot and work like a child. It might be a wonderful experience to start life all over again, as a child.” Bianca passed away at age ninety-seven on September 6, 1997.
As obscured as an entombed mural in Disneyland, the work of these female artists surrounds us, even though many of their names have faded from our consciousness, often replaced by those of the men they worked with. They have shaped the evolution of female characters in film, advanced our technology, and broken down gender barriers in order to give us the empowering story lines we have begun to see in film and animation today. In the shadow of their artistry, millions of childhoods have been shaped, with an untold number yet to come.
Bianca Majolie in Italy, 1929. Courtesy John Canemaker.
Bianca Majolie, 1938. Courtesy John Canemaker.
Grace Huntington’s identification card at the studio, 1936. Courtesy Berkeley Brandt.
Grace Huntington alongside the airplane “Black Beauty” in 1940. Courtesy Berkeley Brandt.
Painting by Bianca Majolie for an unpublished children’s book. Courtesy John Canemaker.
Sketch by Grace Huntington displaying the overwhelming nature of work at the studio. Courtesy Berkeley Brandt.
Sylvia Holland at Idyllwild Nature Center, 1939. Courtesy Theo Halladay.
Ethel Kulsar in front of the cabin she called the “summer studio” at Idyllwild Nature Center, 1939. Courtesy Theo Halladay.
Sylvia Holland (right) and her daughter attending the Fantasia premiere. Courtesy Theo Halladay.
Grace Huntington’s wedding portrait, 1941. Courtesy Berkeley Brandt.
Mary Blair painting in South America. Cou
rtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Mary and Lee Blair sketching in Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Portrait of Retta Scott working on Bambi. Courtesy Ben Worcester.
Sketch by Sylvia Holland. Courtesy Theo Halladay.
Gyo Fujikawa visiting Donovan Blair. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
The Blair family with sons Donovan and Kevin. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Mary Blair (left) and Retta Scott Worcester on vacation in France, 1956. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Mary Blair (right) and Retta Scott Worcester in Europe, 1956. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Portrait of Mary Blair. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Mary Blair (left) and Retta Scott Worcester in the 1970s.Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
Walt Disney presenting Mary Blair with a doll in her image to commemorate her work on the It’s a Small World ride. Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair.
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