The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Much of Mickey Mouse’s early success was due to the pioneering sound of his cartoons, so perhaps it is not surprising that Walt was intrigued by the potential of combining music with animation. A few months before Snow White was released, Walt had bought the rights to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a popular concert piece written by Paul Dukas, a French composer, in 1897. Walt planned on using the music for Mickey Mouse’s first two-reel special, a twenty-two-minute piece of animation that would feature Mickey in a wizard’s hat.

  With this project in the back of his mind, Walt spotted famed conductor Leopold Stokowski sitting alone at a table at Chasen’s, a popular West Hollywood restaurant where Walt regularly ate, usually ordering chili. “Why don’t we sit together?” Walt asked. Stokowski joined him, and Walt began describing his plans to make Mickey Mouse come alive with classical music. Stokowski was so charmed that he offered to conduct the piece for free. As they later worked out the details, the short blossomed into its own feature film, and Walt promised Stokowski that in return for the conductor’s getting the Philadelphia Orchestra to work on the music immediately, Walt would put his “finest men” on the project.

  They would not all be men. Early on, Walt asked Bianca to shape the film. If the studio was going to make this a feature, Stokowski would need more than a single symphony to conduct. Walt wanted someone who could listen to music with its visual possibilities in mind, and so he sent his first female story artist in pursuit of a soundtrack.

  Thrilled with the prospects before her and always happy to be away from the studio, Bianca walked into a music store and asked to hear recordings of works by Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky, some of her favorite composers. The man behind the counter at first offered Bianca a meager selection, but when she explained that she worked for Walt Disney Studios, the records piled up in front of her, many more than she’d asked for.

  Bianca spent the afternoon in a back room of the music store, listening. Alone in the confined space, she closed her eyes and began to contemplate how each piece could be used, the notes running wildly through her imagination. As she walked to her Oldsmobile carrying a heavy load of Victor records, she decided that the music had awoken something within her. She felt profoundly different from when she had walked in. Her exhilaration followed her back to the studio, where she listened to her music, especially Tchaikovsky, over and over again.

  There was one Tchaikovsky record that she kept coming back to. It was from the 1892 ballet The Nutcracker. There wasn’t a recording of the work in its entirety, only The Nutcracker Suite, a twenty-minute-long selection from the original ballet, but Bianca found it thoroughly enchanting.

  Although the whole ballet was first performed outside of Russia in 1934, it had never been produced in the United States. The delights of the ballet’s score were therefore new, untasted, and Bianca relished hearing the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and the “Waltz of the Flowers.” When she tried to find the full ballet, however, she was out of luck. No vinyl recordings were commercially available. From relative obscurity, she had selected a remarkable piece of music, and she was already imagining the scenes that might form. She smiled to herself. She knew the men of the studio would not like the animation she was contemplating.

  When Bianca presented the music to Walt, he was similarly struck with its magnificence. He immediately assigned Bianca to work on The Nutcracker Suite. With music in hand, Walt now began to look for directors. Sylvia Holland’s outspokenness at story meetings and her eagerness to draw horses or whatever other animal Walt desired had made an impression on the boss. The result was that Walt decided to trust her with a role never before held by a woman at the studio. Sylvia was made story director of the “Waltz of the Flowers” sequence. As story director, she served as creative story lead, responsible for developing the characters and plotting the action. She was in charge of the storyboards and the final script. She also managed her team of story artists and worked closely with the director of the whole film. To accomplish all this, she needed an assistant, and a woman from Ink and Paint, Ethel Kulsar, was promoted to the job.

  Ethel and Sylvia had much in common—they both had young children and neither had a husband. Their shared experience as strong, single mothers made them unusual not only at the studio but in society in general, where a mere 8 percent of women with children under the age of ten participated in the U.S. labor force. Finding each other was a gift. In their friendship, they each uncovered the pleasure of creating art alongside a person who truly understood what struggles life could hold.

  Another woman was joining their group for The Nutcracker Suite. Her name was Mary Goodrich, and, like Grace, she was an amateur aviator and a member of the Ninety-Nines, an organization for women pilots. Mary also had a love of words. In 1927, at twenty years old, Goodrich walked into the city room of the Hartford Courant newspaper and asked for a job as a reporter. The editor laughed at the ludicrous idea of hiring a woman but when Goodrich mentioned that she was taking flying lessons, he was struck by an idea. “If you can get the first pilot’s license given to a woman in Connecticut,” he told her, “I’ll hire you.” Mary accepted the challenge and got her license just a few months later. When she returned to the paper, the editor hired her, although he didn’t intend to keep her on the payroll long. However, interest in aviation was growing, and when Goodrich suggested that she begin a daily aviation column, the editor agreed. The young reporter subsequently became the paper’s first aviation editor.

  While holding down her job at the newspaper, Goodrich kept pushing herself in the air. At twenty-six, she completed the first female solo flight to Cuba. Yet the accomplishment was marred by a terrifying realization: her perception of distance was faltering. One day as she came down for a landing, she misjudged the distance badly, believing that she should be hitting the runway when she was still fourteen feet off the ground. Even with corrective lenses she knew she wasn’t going to pass the physical required to renew her pilot’s license, and without that license, the Courant would not continue to pay her as its aviation editor. In one year, she lost the two occupations she held most dear: flying and writing.

  She decided to make a fresh start; she moved to California, where she applied for a job at the Walt Disney Studios. The thirty-year-old was hired to work in story research in 1938. She was assigned to the concert feature, and she dived into it passionately. Writing a treatment for The Nutcracker sequence, she used her reportorial skills to sort through the storyboards and cut the sections that weren’t working. “I sort of had to do this to get started,” she wrote as a note in the beginning of her treatment. “I took the whole Nutcracker Suite in my hot little hand and picked out the meats one by one.” Together, the group members sorted through the ballet and found a vision that matched their ambitions as female artists. They had no constraints placed on them; they were not told to mirror the story of the original ballet, and they were not required to include any specific characters. They had the whole twenty-three minutes of The Nutcracker Suite to do with as they wished.

  In this atmosphere of friendship, Bianca found her struggles easing. Three years earlier she had proposed an animated short called Flower Ballet. She had sketched gleeful snapdragons and twirling thistles, but like so much of her work at the studio, the proposal had never made the leap from concept to production. Here was her chance to bring the graceful flowers to life and, even more exciting, to create new characters.

  As Bianca listened to The Nutcracker Suite, she saw fairies dancing to the music. Under her pencil, their shining figures went flitting from flower to flower, weaving spiderwebs whose gleaming lattices, dripping with morning dew, reflected the stars in the night sky. She loved the drawings, but she knew the men of the story department would hate them; they were scared of fairies. The only exception was the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio, who was a fully formed woman.

  Most of the studio’s male artists refused to draw fairies. A few men tried, but their pixie sketches brought such a deluge of teas
ing and harassment that, one by one, they all gave up. Bianca rolled her eyes at their thin skins, and Sylvia was frustrated by the small-mindedness that made her colleagues abandon what she considered a bold artistic endeavor. Yet because of the men’s skittishness, the fairies of the concert feature began to embody the best of the female talent at the studio.

  Not all men found these sequences threatening. George Balanchine, for instance, the Russian choreographer who had just cofounded the School of American Ballet in New York City and was now living a stone’s throw from Hollywood Boulevard, working with his ballet company to choreograph dance moves for film, saw Sylvia’s storyboards and was delighted with them.

  Balanchine had been touring the studio with Igor Stravinsky, the composer whose ballet The Rite of Spring was serving as the inspiration for a movement of the concert feature. The Russian composer and conductor was not impressed with how the studio had transformed his ballet into a telling of the story of evolution. The piece began in darkness, then depicted the big bang, the expansion of the universe, and the creation of Earth itself as viewed from space, a perspective that was decades away from being captured by real-life cameras. Creatures emerged from the oceans, the dinosaurs rose and fell, and ultimately humankind appeared. The human sequence would later be cut as a sop to religious creationists, most of whom would still thoroughly dislike the piece of animation that disseminated the science of evolution. Stravinsky was not fond of it either, although his dislike was founded in the artistic interpretation of his work and had no religious basis. However, he was too polite to share his real opinion with Walt. It was only later that he would call the studio’s work “an unresisting imbecility.”

  Balanchine was having a far more pleasurable experience on the studio tour. He delighted in the fairies, who moved with the grace and fluidity of prima ballerinas in toe shoes to the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” As he gazed at Sylvia’s storyboards, he recognized an untapped allure in The Nutcracker—its appeal to children. The images brought forth his own memories of dancing in the ballet as a youth in St. Petersburg. He saw clearly what Sylvia and the group of artists were attempting. They had taken a Russian ballet that no one in the United States had seen and fashioned it into a manifestation of beauty and glee.

  This childlike wonder and inspiration stayed with Balanchine. Fifteen years later, on December 11, 1954, he would debut The Nutcracker in the brand-new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. His choreography was starkly different from that of his Russian predecessors, as he made the main characters ten-year-old children instead of adults, dampening the romantic aspects of the original plot but imparting the ebullience of youth. Thanks to Balanchine’s vision, The Nutcracker dominates American theaters every December, drawing countless children and adults into the beauty of the ballet. And yet America’s cultural obsession with The Nutcracker would never have occurred without the women of the Walt Disney Studios.

  While the tin-can quality of an old phonograph was good enough for the studio artists in Hollywood to work with, far more attention was being paid to the creation of the official music for the concert feature in Philadelphia. Walt was not content with a mere soundtrack. As he pondered a storyboard for “Flight of the Bumblebees,” one of the proposed movements, he thought how wonderful it would be if the audience could feel the buzzing of the creatures around them. He imagined making the sound so realistic that men, women, and children would swat at their ears. The idea caught his fancy to such an extent that at one point, Walt considered adding smell to the mix, making the moviegoing experience so immersive that it would blur the lines between fantasy and reality.

  Walt and his team of engineers called it Fantasound. Using multiple channels of optical recording—converting sound into light—on two cameras using 35 mm film, they were able to catch the signal from thirty-three microphones placed all around the orchestra, including a lonely one in the hall, listening for distant reverberations. The emphasis on recording was just half the equation, however. In order for the orchestra to be truly appreciated, Walt argued, the sound system of the theater also needed to be enhanced. The engineers determined they needed three loudspeakers behind the screen and surround-sound speakers on the walls and rear of the theater. While other films had incorporated multichannel sound, this would be the first application of true surround sound. To facilitate this, Fantasia would travel as a road show, with the equipment packed up in large boxes and shipped by rail to movie houses across the country. There was no denying the significant financial investment required for this new sound system, but how else could sound be made to fly across a room?

  Sound engineers, musicians, and conductors experimented with the recordings, but every note relied on the story department. Each time the melody whipped around the room, it had to be tied to the action happening on-screen. Each technical advance in surround sound had to be rooted in a furthering of the story itself. The music had first inspired the story artists listening to the records at the studio. The storyboards they created then influenced the arrangement of the music chosen. After the orchestra in Philadelphia recorded the final soundtrack, each gesture in the animation was refined to ensure it matched perfectly. The art informed the technology, and the technology shaped the art, the two acting on each other in a constant, fluid exchange of innovation.

  Sylvia was working closely with Bill Garity, the inventor already admired at the studio for his work developing the click track and the multiplane camera. Together they plotted each twirl of her dancing flowers. They carefully determined how the placement of the speakers in the theater would bounce each note from the viola’s strings from side to side in time with a glowing trail of pixie dust on-screen, seemingly brushed over the audience’s bewildered heads.

  Without the benefit of pixie dust, Grace was returning home after attending her grandfather’s funeral in Connecticut. Her spirits were depressed not only because of the occasion but also due to a deep-seated discontent common among twenty-five-year-olds. She felt herself growing older and yet seemed no closer to her ambition of becoming a professional pilot.

  In some respects Grace was advancing. In 1939, in the midst of production on the concert feature, she managed to take vacation time in order to obtain her commercial pilot’s license. Grace flew to Madison, Wisconsin, so she could take the test with an old friend who had moved there and become a civil aeronautics inspector. Even though she had to fly alone across half the country to get to him, Grace figured she would be less nervous taking the test with someone she knew.

  The trip itself was arduous. This was before modern air traffic control, so Grace had to rely on radio range stations. These low-frequency transmitters emitted a broadcast of two Morse code letters, a dot-dash for A and a dash-dot for N. While these signals helped pilots understand when they were close to an airfield, they didn’t give any other information, such as what direction to go. Because of this, many pilots at the time found themselves lost in the air, and Grace was no exception. At one desperate juncture she even landed at an airfield and had to ask the embarrassing question “Where am I?” Grace was surprised to find she was in Pennsylvania instead of Wisconsin. She passed the test and received her commercial license, but although she was immensely proud of the small paper certificate, she still had little hope about what opportunities it would afford her.

  Even though Grace had a commercial pilot’s license, no one in aviation would hire her, and no flight school would take her for additional training. When she asked Bianca for advice, exposing her fears and insecurities, the response was warm, if muddled: “It isn’t so important to be doing things, dear—if only you are happy.”

  With her nose pressed against the chilly Plexiglas window on her Pan American return flight from Connecticut, Grace considered what made her happy. Thousands of miles below, Los Angeles looked like a fairyland, a dream of twinkling lights stretching for miles, bordered by the dark waters of the Pacific. She imagined that she was alone, flying to chase the sun, adjusting
the throttle and then piercing the limits of altitude, the stars becoming clearer up ahead.

  It was 1938 and not even the most powerful rockets of the age could break free of Earth’s atmosphere, yet Grace believed that one day planes would not only leave Earth but propel humans into space. How lucky to be one of those few, she thought, then wondered how they would select pilots to operate these marvels of the future. Surely any person chosen would need experience flying as high as possible. Wouldn’t it be natural to pick pilots who had already proven themselves by breaking altitude records? Up in the clouds above Los Angeles, Grace hatched a plan. I could be that record holder, she thought. I could be the one headed into space. As her plane descended to the runway, part of her imagination remained in the air.

  The story department was crowded with artists sketching naked women. They worked at their desks, in the hallways, or out on the lawn, where the wind whipped the edges of their paper. Many of the characters they were developing for the concert feature were nude, from the fairies of The Nutcracker to the centaurs of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. For artists it was essential to keep in practice drawing the human form, yet in the films Hollywood produced, under the newly applied censorship laws, nudity was prohibited.

  Sex and vulgarity in early 1930s films had sparked outrage. Audiences were particularly upset by the depiction of promiscuous women, such as Claudette Colbert naked in a bathtub in Cleopatra (1934) and a brazen Mae West in She Done Him Wrong (1933) slinking up to Cary Grant’s character with the suggestive line “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?”

  From 1929 to 1934, the pre-code era, Hollywood movies had few gatekeepers to rein in the licentiousness of their plots, and a host of strong-minded female characters showed a startling openness in their sexuality. For guidance, filmmakers could turn to a list of thirty-six Don’ts and Be Carefuls that were envisioned by a Quaker, drafted by a Jesuit priest, and ultimately compiled by former postmaster general Will Hays. The list was based in Catholic theology and aimed to restrict scenes involving nudity, illegal drugs, profanity, sex, crime, and other moral outrages, such as ridicule of the clergy. Yet the constraints were toothless; filmmakers could ignore them without penalty.