The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  It wasn’t until 1934 that political pressure brought authority to the Hays Code, also known as the Motion Picture Production Code. Finally, Hollywood had to take notice. Every feature script needed to be approved by an administrator before it was filmed. But the rules for animation were slightly blurry. No one needed to see the script prior to production, but the final film, like all others, had to be screened and approved by the trade association known as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America before it could be shown in theaters.

  The story department thought of these limitations not at all. Sketching the human body was as natural to the artists as twirling a pencil with their fingers. They had all studied drawing, either as part of a formal fine arts education or in the classes held at the studio, and so they were accustomed to sketching the curvature of the human form, typically with a live model in front of them.

  In many ways, the story department did not consider the concert feature as being for children; at least, not exclusively. Walt had made it clear that they were creating art, the classical music acting as their muse. The animated film they produced would make the symphony beloved by anyone, regardless of musical taste or age, who was willing to listen.

  Sylvia’s team in the story department kept this idea in mind as they filled the screen for The Nutcracker Suite movement. Having no preconceived notions of the ballet to interfere with their vision, they were free to draw fairy sprites with long, slender bodies, budding breasts, narrow hips, and wings that shimmered thanks to the magic of the multiplane camera. Their sprites’ dance sparks the awakening of nature and the change of the seasons. The fairies are gold, green, mauve, pink, and blue, but they wear not a stitch of clothing. Their nudity reflects their vulnerability and their pure, childlike innocence.

  Nearby, however, a different portrayal of female bodies was being created. While Sylvia’s predominantly female team in the story department worked on The Nutcracker Suite, there were six more teams developing animation for the other musical pieces. One of these was composed of the men who had spurned drawing fairies under Sylvia’s direction. Instead, they drew masculine centaurs and their female counterparts, creatures they called “centaurettes.” They set their story to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which gave the mythical beings a grand air worthy of the glories of ancient Greece. In time to the stately composition, the half-human, half-horse creatures perform an awkward mix of comedy and flirtatious antics. The style of the character animation offers entertainment but little artistic elevation.

  The centaurettes’ faces are evocative of pinup girls’, complete with batting eyelashes and coy smiles. From the waist up, they are nude, their movements both sensual and alluring. The pages drafted by the story department show the centaurettes preening in expectation of the men’s arrival. A gathering of rosy-cheeked cupids and at least one African American centaurette, named Sunflower, wait on them to help in their preparations. Sunflower, the first African American character to appear in a Walt Disney Studios feature, stands half as tall as the rest of the herd, being half donkey instead of half horse, and her role is servile—she braids flowers into the manes of the white centaurettes and polishes their hooves. Her character was shaped in a story meeting on a late afternoon in 1938 when one writer suggested, “One girl would put nail polish—red stuff—putting it on her hoofs, you know.” He mimed the action.

  “That blonde is a beautiful horse. How about making the little black one fit in?” an animator asked.

  “That could come during your chase—there’s a little laugh there,” Walt said, gesturing toward the storyboards. “Here are the girls going [through] and up comes the little black one with a watermelon—the girls are running like hell, or else the little guys have lost them, and they see their hoofs—ha-ha! They spring! And it’s the little black one with a watermelon. I think they’re very cute. We’re not limited on our comic touches.”

  Sylvia focused on The Nutcracker Suite, where her responsibilities lay as story director, but she still tried to improve the Pastoral Symphony. Her competing sketches of the female centaurs revealed, instead of sex puppets, strong female bodies, the muscular arms of the women bent around their children; both young and old lived together, and their skin colors reflected the rainbow, but without racial bias. However, her sketches were rejected for baser representations of gender and ethnicity.

  Sunflower is not a character in her own right but rather a crude amalgam of stereotypes meant to elicit laughter. Unfortunately, her subservient depiction was not unusual, as the animation of African American characters was almost universally demeaning and degrading in the Hollywood of the day.

  (A few years later, in 1942, Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would attempt to turn the tide by negotiating with Hollywood studio executives, who, as reported in Variety, “promised a more honest portrayal of the Negro henceforth, using them not only as red-caps, porters and in other menial roles, but in all the parts they play in the nation’s everyday life.” These pledges would never be completely honored. Instead, it was the rise of diverse filmmakers that ultimately led to more accurate representations of African Americans in film.)

  The men creating the sexy centaurettes and the servile Sunflower worked in a vacuum of their own homogeneity. Many would later criticize their work. Film critics of the era described the animation of the Pastoral Symphony as “the only unsatisfactory part of the picture”; historians have called the centaurs “Fantasia’s nadir,” and numerous animators have censured the sequence.

  Sunflower’s presence, in particular, caused deep embarrassment in the years ahead. Walt would scrub her from the Pastoral Symphony in 1963, and studio executives pretended for decades that she’d never existed. Yet from the moment pencil sketches first formed her image, through the hours of story meetings that followed, and over the months during which she was animated, outlined, colored, and filmed, no one at the studio was strong-minded enough to put a halt to the racist depiction of Sunflower. It would be ten years before the studio hired its first African American artist.

  Sunflower was drawn in an undignified manner, but she was an imaginary character; Hattie Noel, an African American stage and screen performer, suffered real humiliation. As part of the “Dance of the Hours” sequence for the concert feature, animators had the actress wear a skintight ballet costume, her stomach uncomfortably bulging out over a tutu. Using the woman as a model, the group of men drew hippos dancing in tutus in time to the ballet music. They snapped pictures and sketched her body and then chuckled at her “fat flesh hanging out.”

  One of the men callously laughing at the performer was Lee Blair, a new hire at the studio. He was as unconcerned with his position as animator as he was about the dignity of Hattie Noel. The job was merely a way to pay the bills. He was a newlywed—he had just married Mary Robinson, whom he’d met when the two were students at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles.

  Mary Robinson was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, in 1911. Hers was a family of strong women. The house she grew up in belonged to Mary’s grandmother and was home not only to Mary, her mother, father, and two sisters but also to Mary’s two aunts. Women were the backbone of the family both physically and emotionally; they took care of the home and the children, and they brought in the income. Mary’s father, by contrast, was an alcoholic who was frequently unemployed.

  Even as a young child, Mary placed the highest value on artistic expression. The family moved from Oklahoma to Texas before finally settling in the tiny town of Morgan Hill, California, when Mary was twelve. When her mother told her they couldn’t spend what little money they had on painting supplies, Mary shook her head, held out her hand, and said, “Dad will just drink it up anyway.” In high school, Mary was class vice president and assistant editor of the school newspaper, and she graduated at the top of her class. She was the kind of person poised to leap at the throat of opportunity. In her valedictorian speech, she spoke about
“self-destiny,” a prescient theme, given her own complicated journey to come.

  After attending San Jose State College, Mary received a full scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute. At the end of her first year at art school, she won first prize in a nationwide contest for Cannon Mills, a textile company; it earned her a hundred dollars and the pride of seeing her design, a Trojan horse rendered in bright blues and yellows, emblazoned on towels and mats. Wherever she went, renown seemed to be waiting for her.

  It wasn’t just art critics who fell for her. A classmate named Lee Blair found Mary irresistible. Lee, like Mary, was a scholarship student at Chouinard, and he was just beginning to reveal exceptional talent. At the 1932 Summer Olympics, held in Los Angeles, Lee was awarded a gold medal in the drawing and watercolors category (the arts continued to be part of the Olympics until 1948).

  The couple was passionate about art and their deepening relationship. “We are artists dear,” Mary wrote to Lee, “and in love with art and each other. We must make these loves coincide and melt into a beautiful, happy & rich life. That is our future and is real. We’ll live to be happy and paint to express our happiness.” But in 1938 neither Mary nor Lee was happily pursuing the art they both loved. After graduating from art school, they made just fifteen dollars a week from selling their paintings, and they were forced to bend to commercial pressures. Fortunately they lived in Los Angeles, a city perpetually eager for artists willing to compromise their purism for money.

  The newlyweds bounced from one animation studio to another. Lee was hired as an animator while Mary, in spite of her identical education and experience, was brought on as an inker. At Walt Disney Studios, Lee was assigned to work on the complex color schemes of the concert feature; Mary stayed at the Harman-Ising Studio across town, working on Porky Pig and Looney Tunes. She was promoted to art director, the position her husband had just left, and the men sang her praises and declared, “She’s better than he is!”

  On the weekends, Mary pushed the cartoons out of her mind and pursued her own work. She painted feverishly, her body tense as she dipped her brushes from water to paint to rag paper. One afternoon, she created dark, foreboding clouds descending on a rural landscape. Her brush captured the somber beauty of her native Oklahoma. Every artist may face struggle, but few will know suffering like an Oklahoman woman of the 1930s. As she painted, she found inspiration in the matriarchs of her family, women who labored, carrying burdens both domestic and financial, but who received little thanks or encouragement and had no chance of breaking free of their prescribed roles. Mary might have been born in Oklahoma but she didn’t want to be trapped there or anywhere. It was this past that Mary was breaking free from as her brushes flew across the canvas.

  Below the storm clouds, she painted a single person standing in the open doorway of a farmhouse, the form silhouetted against the incandescent light of the room inside. She called the painting End of the Day. The light of the painting catches the eye, but it is the portent of darkness that needs watching.

  End of the Day by Mary Blair, 1938 (Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair)

  Most story meetings for the concert feature were dynamic, even argumentative, but meetings for the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” were comparatively peaceful—at least at first. In rooms that were usually host to shouting, cartoon falsettos, and playacting, the story artists sat in silence, hands on their laps, listening intently to the music playing. A secretary sat with them, as was the custom, to record the meeting notes in speedy shorthand, but now her fingers were idle, as no transcript could record their inner responses to the Tchaikovsky score.

  Although most men of the story department still rebuffed fairies, a few had finally consented to work under Sylvia’s direction, and these men sat quietly, for the first time outnumbered by the women in the room. Sylvia sat back in her chair, eyes on the ceiling as the music played. Beside her, Walt was still listening to the ethereal, undulating arpeggios of the harp and the bell-like celesta, a keyboard instrument not typically heard in symphonies but used extensively in the third movement of The Nutcracker. They did not sketch during the meetings, nor did they present story material. All of that would come later. For now, they just listened. The score was so striking that talk became unnecessary—the music spoke for them.

  These silent story meetings produced some of the most beautiful storyboards ever created at the studio. The sketches were not the work of a few hurried months but instead drew on years of ideas that had long been rejected, as Sylvia adapted Bianca’s early concepts of dancing flowers and fairies. Bianca and Ethel spent hours outside on the studio lot, sketching the weeds growing through the concrete and trying to mimic on the page the way the wind blew them to and fro.

  The artists aimed to saturate the on-screen world they were creating with as much natural movement as possible; they studied snowflakes swirling in the winter wind and leaves falling to the ground. Walt was so enchanted with the story Sylvia and her team had created that he insisted it deserved enhanced animation. “It’s like something you see with your eyes half closed,” he said during one story meeting. “You almost imagine them. The leaves begin to look like they’re dancing, and the blossoms floating on the water begin to look like ballet girls in skirts.” He asked the visual effects department to create a look worthy of such dreamlike imagery, acknowledging that the abstractions they were proposing would need technical prowess to translate to film.

  Sylvia worked closely with the visual effects department, eager to shape The Nutcracker Suite into an exquisite rendering of art and nature. To this end, she brought her small group of story artists and Herman Schultheis, a member of the special effects department, to the Idyllwild Nature Center in the San Jacinto Mountains east of Los Angeles. They spent so much time at the nature center, even renting a cabin there, that they called it their “summer studio.”

  Spread out on a hillside, the artists observed hardy leaves quiver in the breeze, wildflowers just beginning to bud, seedpods ready to burst, and dainty mushrooms clustered together in the damp earth. While the artists stuck to their pencils, Herman Schultheis used an assortment of cameras to shoot close-ups of thistles, poppies, and pine needles.

  As they watched dewdrops reflecting sunlight in the park, the members of the group considered how they could create the same effect on film. Back at the studio, the visual effects department took a hexagonal wooden stand in the shape of a spiderweb and at its center placed a pastel drawing of leaves and webs on a black background. They photographed this and then took another shot, this time with the leaves and webs constructed from minuscule metal shavings. When eight lights were placed at angles around the stand and turned on one by one, it caused the shavings to illuminate in sequence. Once the second exposure was superimposed on the first, it looked as if a fairy was lighting up one dewdrop at a time.

  The challenges of effects animation were only just beginning. The animators and the women of the Ink and Paint department were struggling to draw and color the arrival of winter. In her role as director, Sylvia met with special effects, where she found a man named Leonard Pickley willing to tackle the problem. The tricky scene involved dozens of fairy ballerinas wearing shining snowflake tutus and twirling across the dark indigo of a winter night sky. The animators needed to somehow create a detailed ballerina costume that looked and moved like a real snowflake. The solution lay in an innovative stop-motion technique.

  In Ink and Paint, the women traced pictures of real snowflakes. They worked from photostats, an early type of photocopy obtained from a camera connected to a microscope. The setup was placed outdoors in a snowstorm many miles from Los Angeles, where a photographer put individual flakes, one at a time, onto a glass slide, slipped it under the microscope lens, then hastily snapped a picture. The inkers marveled at the exceptional detail as they traced the outlines onto cels and then painted each stroke in luminous white. Carefully, they cut the snowflakes from the plastic. They then fastened each one onto a spool that revolved
independently while sliding on an S-shaped steel track that was covered in black velvet to hide the mechanics from the camera. Frame by frame, the special effects department shot the snowflakes as they moved down the track, spinning closer and closer to the camera. The resulting images were as close to the perfection of ephemeral snow crystals as had ever been filmed outside an actual snowstorm.

  The snowflakes might have been complete, but they still lacked the fairies that ushered in winter. To add these to the scene, photostats of the snowflakes were given to the animators, who drew tiny fairies at the center of each flake. They then used a wash-relief technique, in which the image was transferred to a cel photographically. An optical printer, a device that allows filmmakers to rephotograph strips of film, was then employed to merge the willowy fairies with the stop-motion snowflakes. Each cel, which accounted for a mere fraction of a second of the final film, took hours of painstakingly precise work. It was worth it. The final result transcended anything that hand-drawn animation had previously been able to accomplish and ended the “Waltz of the Flowers” with a stunning flourish.

  Retta Scott left Hollywood Hills and the apartment she shared with a friend in Laurel Canyon and drove down through the San Fernando Valley, then up past dry, grassy hills and twisting oak trees. The town of Thousand Oaks was tiny, a mere dot in the greater Los Angeles landscape, but it had a large draw for those in the movie industry: Goebel’s Wild Animal Farm. The farm was home to a host of exotic animals, many of which were recognizable from films of the era; Leo the Lion, mascot of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, lived there. Retta wasn’t interested in the animals’ cinematic potential, however. She spent hours at Goebel’s with her sketch pad and pencils, drawing them as they slept, stretched, or roamed their cages. They were captive, these beasts, and yet in Retta’s drawings, they were unshackled, in the open, and free to run.