The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Oskar Fischinger showed up to the studio that Friday much as he had every day for the past nine months. He was working as an animator on Fantasia, but he was also an experimental filmmaker whose animation employed stunning techniques such as stop-motion, time-lapse, and intricate collages of geometric patterns. For years, his avant-garde shorts had been shown all over Europe except in his native Germany, where they were met by fierce criticism from the Nazi Party; its members called his work “degenerate.” In the 1930s the Reich propaganda ministry had begun shutting down art schools, removing paintings from museums, burning books, and taking over film studios. After Fischinger defiantly criticized the Nazis in 1936, he fled his homeland and headed to America.

  Tensions were increasing in Asia as well. In the summer of 1939, one hundred thousand Japanese and Soviet troops clashed on the border of Mongolia and Manchuria. As August ended, the will of the Japanese forces gave out, and after massive losses, they conceded defeat. Following this show of power, the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with Germany on August 23, 1939. It was this alliance that spurred Hitler to storm Poland just one week later, on Friday, September 1, 1939. For many at the studio and in the city at large, it was just another weekday—but not for Fischinger. A swastika had been pinned to his office door by a few coworkers. Whether the gesture was meant as an act of aggression or a joke was unclear, but either way, the result was the same. It was the breaking point for a man who had once been questioned by the Gestapo for refusing to display that very symbol. The men who mocked Fischinger’s German heritage knew little about him, as he was frequently quiet in story meetings. They would never get to learn more. Fischinger quit the studio two months later.

  For those Walt Disney Studios employees who had ties to Europe and Asia, such as Fischinger, Sylvia, Bianca, and Gyo, the news abroad had become deeply unnerving, as had the public reaction to it. Isolationists in America consisted of both progressives and conservatives, and since memories of World War I losses and the squeeze of the Great Depression were still fresh, there were few in the United States who were willing to risk the costs of entanglement.

  And so, while hostilities were escalating across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the group at Walt Disney Studios continued their work and prepared for a move. Trucks were packed with furniture and boxes and festooned with signs proclaiming MICKEY MOUSE and NEW WALT DISNEY STUDIOS.

  The move was two years in the making, taking Walt and his now one thousand employees from their cramped quarters on Hyperion Avenue to the new, spacious, fifty-one-acre lot in Burbank. Not everyone was sure of the studio’s continued success, however. Walt’s father, Elias Disney, took his son aside after a tour of the new animation building and asked, “What can it be used for?” He was worried; how would Walt sell the gigantic space if the company went bankrupt and its assets needed to be liquidated? “Well, this would make a perfect hospital,” Walt replied. The building would henceforth be known as “the Hospital.”

  Elias Disney’s concerns for his son’s business seemed less silly after the studio’s move was completed in early 1940. The company, try as it might, could no longer ignore the effect war was having on its business. Even in the midst of terror, those Europeans who were still at liberty to do so were continuing to go to their neighborhood movie houses, happy to escape reality and sink into a theater seat that could drop them into a world of illusion. Micky Maus in Nazi Germany, Mickey la Souris in France, and Topolino in Italy received equally warm receptions, though in each case, the escapades of the character were bookended by very different newsreels and propaganda films.

  Despite Mickey’s continued popularity, the money from ticket sales was not being sent back to California. War had cut off payments from the studio’s distributors. And so Walt announced that they would have to slash one million dollars in expenses and fire three to four hundred employees. The cuts ate at Sylvia’s peace of mind. Walt had just given her a raise of twenty-five dollars a week, and her assistant, Ethel, had received a raise of ten dollars a week. The money she had fretted over requesting for months was now in her hand but her future in animation was more uncertain than ever.

  With violence escalating overseas, Walt decided that the world premiere of Fantasia would be a fund-raiser, with “music you can see and pictures you can hear,” held at New York City’s Broadway Theater. The event took place on November 13, 1940; tickets sold for ten dollars each—an astronomical price for a movie ticket at the time—and 100 percent of the profits raised went to the British War Relief Society.

  Fantasia was the second film the studio released in 1940, the first being Pinocchio in February. The reviews for Pinocchio were glowing; the New York Times declared, “Pinocchio… is every bit as fine as we had prayed it would be—if not finer.” But the box office did not agree. The film had cost twice as much to make as Snow White, more than two million dollars, but the returns were far smaller, only about one million by year’s end. It was a staggering deficit that made Walt pin his hopes on Fantasia’s release.

  At the Los Angeles premiere, held two months later at the Carthay Circle Theater, Sylvia walked down the red carpet with her daughter, Theo, now thirteen years old. The years of struggle and pain were finally giving way to deserved pride and celebration. She smiled as she watched Deems Taylor, the composer who acts as an emcee in the film, introduce the music for her work. “It’s a series of dances taken out of a full-length ballet called The Nutcracker,” Taylor explained. “It wasn’t much of a success and nobody performs it nowadays.”

  Sylvia’s only regret was that her family in England would not get to see her work—there were no plans for Fantasia to be distributed overseas. Even with this disappointment and the impending cuts, Sylvia felt her career was advancing. She had exciting new projects in the works, and Walt had just promised her a promotion and another raise, one that would finally give her the financial security she longed for.

  Bianca did not attend the premiere, and she would never see the completed film. Even as some of her best and most inspired artwork was finally reaching the silver screen, she was falling into a depression. She began to isolate herself even more profoundly from her coworkers, many of whom, particularly the men, were envious of her portfolio. In the quiet solitude of her new office, she got into the habit of drinking port wine by the bottle, the telltale smell of the sweet alcohol filling the small room. The alcohol stole away not only her pain but also her consciousness, leaving her in a hazy gloom. And in the distance, the darkness that was spreading in 1940 was coming for all of them.

  Chapter 5

  Little April Shower

  The artists working on Bambi gathered around a pile of sketches. No one knew where the drawings had come from, but all agreed that they were terrifying. The hunting dogs seemed to leap off the page with thick, muscular bodies and arresting eyes. In the sketches, the snarling beasts corner the doe Faline. Bambi then charges in, using his antlers to fend off the vicious animals in scenes that burst with action; the dogs’ backs arch in pain and Bambi’s antlers are framed perfectly in each shot to highlight their strength. The artists looked at one another and asked, “Who did this? Whose drawings are these?” The animators all assumed that the mystery artist was a man. But no one took credit. It seemed as though the sketches had fallen from the sky. Then Retta Scott walked in. Here was their culprit—not a man at all but a young woman with blond curls piled on top of her head and a host of ideas on how to make the attacking animals even more frightening.

  Walt Disney Studios had just moved into its new home in Burbank, and for Retta, the move had come not a moment too soon. The story group working on Bambi back on Hyperion Avenue had been relegated to a small outbuilding on Seward Street that they called, not affectionately, “Termite Terrace,” as its walls had started curving inward; the place was literally crumbling. The Burbank studio, in contrast, with its three-story streamline moderne design, was like a palace. Walt had personally worked on the architectural plans, helping to create th
e massive eight-wing building that was formed from two side-by-side H-shaped structures with plenty of windows so that natural light flowed into the offices. The animators and concept artists were on the ground floor; directors, background, and layout artists were on the second; and the story department and Walt’s office were on the third.

  If you took a private elevator up to the roof, you entered an entirely different world. Getting off the lift, one was confronted by a mural of fourteen nude women surrounding a single man. Known as the Penthouse Club, the space offered a bar and restaurant, a barbershop, a massage table, a gym, steam baths, beds, and billiard and card tables, as well as a large uncovered area popular for nude sunbathing. The exclusively male club required substantial dues, and there was a strict selection process to join. An employee had to make more than two hundred dollars a week, an amount attained by only a small number of animators. It was a new era of elitism at the studio, one that rankled many of the artists, who had previously viewed their group, crammed together in ramshackle buildings on Hyperion Avenue, as a family.

  Retta worked on the third floor in the story department, creating her sketches for Bambi. Walt was finally turning his attention back to the forest feature; he’d confessed, “I haven’t felt that Bambi was one of our productions.” Four years earlier, when Bianca had first started writing story treatments for the film based on the novel, she had noted the book’s message of peace and the beauty inherent in its descriptions of the natural world. But it also had a political message that was even more necessary now that war was escalating in Europe and Asia.

  Devastation was spreading across the globe in 1940, but the United States was shutting its eyes. Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, had always been conscious of surrounding danger. Born in 1869, Salten was the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi. When he was only a month old, his family, seeking tolerance of their Jewish faith, moved from what is today Budapest, Hungary, to Vienna, Austria. Following the Enlightenment that had pervaded eighteenth-century Europe, in 1867 the city had begun granting citizenship to its Jewish residents, something many European cities refused to do. This sparked a mass migration of Jews to Vienna in search of social and economic opportunities.

  As a young artist, Salten was a passionate Zionist, writing articles and giving speeches advocating a homeland for Jews in Palestine. When the Nazis banned Bambi in 1936, they declared the work “a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Germany.” They were only partially correct; the meaning of Salten’s work goes far deeper.

  In Bambi: A Life in the Woods, Salten illustrates the dangers of cultural assimilation. Several animals in the book advocate saving themselves from humans by bending to their will and joining forces with them. For the animals who submit to the cruel hunters, however, things do not work out well. Gobo, a sickly young buck, tells Bambi, “I don’t need to be afraid of them anymore. I’m good friends with them now.” Gobo believes that the halter he wears will keep him safe, but when he naively approaches a hunter in a meadow, the man shoots him dead. Even the vicious dogs that Retta sketched with such skill play complex roles in Salten’s book, as animal collaborators with the very hunters they despise. Bambi’s father describes their beliefs this way: “They pass their lives in fear, they hate [Man] and themselves and yet they’d die for His sake.” It was no coincidence that Bambi was finally coming together at the studio in 1940. The story was a response to the rise of fascism, a tale that those employees who closely followed events abroad felt fervent about telling.

  When Walt saw Retta’s sketches for Bambi, made as part of her work developing the script, he was so overwhelmed by her talent that he decided to do something unprecedented: he made Retta an animator. She was the first woman to join that elite group. If the story department was “the heart of the organization,” as Walt said, then the animators were the lifeblood coursing through it, each artist handpicked by Walt. Being promoted to animator was no minor accomplishment. Many men and some women worked as “inbetweeners,” cleaning up the animators’ drawings and making the repetitive sketches that linked together their work and gave the characters movement. It was a job that someone might occupy for years before becoming an assistant animator and, eventually, a character animator. Even those who made it to the top had to consistently perform in order to maintain their position. Retta knew that her prowess in the story department had steered her into a spot only a select few occupied.

  An in-house write-up of Retta’s promotion read jokingly, “The Animators had always hoped that their pleasurable existence wouldn’t be marred by the entrance of a mere girl into their working lives.” Retta reported to her new department to find that her male colleagues had mockingly decorated the space for her, hanging ruffled, feminine curtains and placing a lace doily on her chair.

  Retta was not working solely on Bambi; she was pitching in wherever help was needed. She began animating the centaurettes for Fantasia, her precise hands drawing the lines already dictated by her male colleagues. The Pastoral Symphony sequence was past the point of redemption, and all Retta could do was bring her own skill to the flawed scenes before her.

  In 1940, opportunities were expanding for women at the Walt Disney Studios. Retta was the beacon, lighting the path to the animation floor that other women hoped to follow. There were only five other women working as inbetweeners and assistant animators at the time; one of them was artist Mildred Fulvia di Rossi, “Millie” to her friends.

  Millie had created terrifying sketches of Chernabog, a monster in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia. In drawing the winged creature in hues of cobalt, with white glowing eyes and long claws, she found an affection for the beast. Millie and Retta, the women of the animation department, were creating the studio’s most terrifying monsters. And more were coming.

  With women carving a permanent place for themselves in animation, a memo was circulated in the department asking men to watch their language and stating that “it has always been Walt’s hope that the studio could be a place where girls can be employed without fear of embarrassment or humiliation.” An influx of women was similarly arriving in the effects and story departments. Of the 1,023 total employees working for the studio, 308 of them were women. Most of them were still confined to Ink and Paint, but more than a hundred were spread out over other departments. In the proportion of women employed, Walt Disney Studios outperformed any other major Hollywood studio and even most American workplaces of the time, where, on average, a quarter of the workforce was female. Walt was determined to grow these numbers further and started to take steps to do so. The other men at the studio, however, observed Walt’s new hiring practices with trepidation.

  One of the women hired in 1940 was Mary Blair. After three and a half years, she was fleeing the Harman-Ising Studio, where she felt that one of her coworkers, Joe Barbera (later a founder of Hanna-Barbera Productions), wouldn’t leave her alone. He allegedly made passes at her and often wrapped his arms around her waist and refused to let go, even in the middle of the office. Mary hated the daily harassment and begged her husband, Lee, to find her a job at Walt Disney Studios, where he had been working for the past two years.

  Lee got her a job in the character-model department, where artists made three-dimensional figurines of characters to aid the story artists and animators. It was an odd fit for the painter who preferred to work in watercolor. When Mary’s talents were finally recognized, she was sent over to the story department. They were working on a new project tentatively titled Lady, and Mary started sketches of a puppy with floppy brown ears for the canine coming-of-age story.

  When Mary entered her new workspace, her mouth fell open. There were women everywhere. It couldn’t be more different from Harman-Ising. Even her boss, Sylvia Holland, was a woman. While Bianca found Sylvia to be somewhat overwhelming and called her a “mother hen,” Mary saw in Sylvia the soul of a sympathetic artist. Under Sylvia’s direction, Mary began working on “Baby Ballet,” part of a proposed Fantasia sequel. The men consi
dered drawing babies as unmanly as animating fairies, and they refused to work on it. The women were unafraid and so designed the sequence together. Mary and Sylvia created a multicultural group of infants who emerged from a large shared bed to dance playfully together. There was pleasure in the work, but not nearly enough freedom. While her husband enjoyed artistic liberty at the studio, Mary felt stifled in her more modest role.

  Working alongside Mary, a male artist named Tyrus Wong shared her feelings of being underestimated. Tyrus had been born Wong Gen Yeo in a small fishing village in China. In 1919, at age nine, Wong left China with his father and set out for San Francisco, which promised more stability and economic opportunity. Wong said goodbye to his mother and sister tenderly. He would never see either of them again.

  When immigrants arrived in San Francisco, they were separated by nationality. Wong watched wide-eyed as Europeans and those traveling first class were allowed immediate entry into the city. He and his father, as well as other Asians, some Russians, and those arriving from Central and South America, were shipped over to the Angel Island immigration center, between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge.

  In 1922, the commissioner-general of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration declared Angel Island to be filthy and unfit for human habitation, describing “the conglomeration of ramshackle buildings which are nothing but firetraps.” He wrote, “The sanitary arrangements are awful. If a private individual had such an establishment he would be arrested by the local health authorities.” Angel Island was originally envisioned as “the Ellis Island of the West,” but at Ellis Island, only 2 percent of those seeking refuge were barred from entering, and most were admitted to the United States within a few hours of landing, whereas at Angel Island, roughly 30 percent of immigrants were turned away, often after they’d spent months as detainees.