The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  This first experience of American racial prejudice for Wong and his father was the result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The country’s first significant law restricting immigration, it put a moratorium on all Chinese laborer immigration and marked the first time an ethnic group was targeted by the U.S. government.

  After two weeks, Wong’s father was admitted to the United States, but he had to leave his son behind at Angel Island. Finally, after a month of detention, the boy was permitted to gather up his belongings and board the ferry. He was finally free, but life was not necessarily easier. Wong and his father lived in the Sacramento Chinese Community Center, and Wong attended the local elementary school. Finding his personal name, Gen Yeo, difficult to pronounce, one of his teachers changed it to Tyrus. He struggled at school, especially as he had to learn English along with his other subjects.

  After two years, his father moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of work, leaving Tyrus behind at the community center. The eleven-year-old found work in a grocery store, where he bought the ingredients to make his own dinner after his shift. At age fourteen he joined his father in Los Angeles, happy to no longer be alone and finding a tenuous balance between school and work. At night, after dinner, his father would train him in Chinese calligraphy. With no money for ink or paper, they would dip their brushes in water and paint on old newspaper. For a few moments the beautiful words were visible, but then they would evaporate, vanishing into the air.

  A career in the arts seemed as elusive as those disappearing words until one summer, while still in junior high school, Tyrus learned he had received a partial scholarship to the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Despite the significant financial strain it would entail, he was determined to attend. He found comfort in unexpected places at Otis, not only in his classes on life drawing, painting, and illustration but in the cafeteria where he worked as a busboy and where an elderly waitress insisted on feeding him leftovers. The school gave Tyrus paints and canvases and also helped him find work designing signs for local businesses. His father, looking at one design for which Tyrus had earned twenty-five dollars, told his son how proud he was of him. It would be the last words of artistic admiration Tyrus heard from his father, who would die shortly afterward, before Tyrus finished school.

  After graduation, like many other artists in the 1930s, Tyrus worked as a painter for the Works Progress Administration. At a restaurant where he waited tables, he met a young woman named Ruth Kim, and they were soon married. Now a husband and soon to become a father, Tyrus had to find a better-paying job and someplace to live. He looked for weeks for an apartment, but no landlord would rent to the young Chinese couple.

  A steady job was just as difficult to obtain. Applying to the Walt Disney Studios, Tyrus cited his education and exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum and the New York World’s Fair. Even with these impressive credentials, he was hired as only an inbetweener, not an animator. His first day on the job, he was referred to by a racial slur, and the work was tedious. But then he learned of the new picture the studio was making: Bambi.

  Tyrus read Salten’s book and was inspired by the writing. At night he began sketching, drawing in pastels the natural beauty of the forest, a lone deer the only animal visible. He brought the sketches to the art director on the film, who showed them to Walt. The reaction was immediately positive: “It looks like we put you in the wrong department,” the director said. Tyrus would soon be sitting in on story meetings, creating concept art that set the film’s style, making storyboards, and designing backgrounds. His art instilled Bambi with mysterious splendor—the light-dappled leaves in the forest, early-morning mists, shadowy thickets—and captured the poetry of Salten’s work.

  Tyrus was not the only Asian American working at the studio. Cy Young, born and raised in Hawaii, the child of Chinese immigrants, had joined the studio early on and by the early 1940s held an influential position as a special effects animator. There were also Bob Kuwahara, a story artist; Chris Ishii, an assistant animator; and James Tanaka, an animator, among others. Yet Tyrus was often mistaken for a busboy in the cafeteria, and at story meetings he was frequently quiet, preferring his work to speak for him. His studio file gave his height, weight, and marital status along with one short sentence summing up his strengths: “Good on inspirational sketches, but of an oriental variety with that type of treatment.”

  While Tyrus was slowly breaking free of the studio’s biases and low expectations, Mary found her own ambitions still stymied. The projects she was working on were interesting, particularly a feature about a little girl named Penelope, a time traveler who explores the world. But unlike Tyrus, Mary had no creative control over her projects or the gratification of seeing her work on-screen. Her confidence was faltering, but she found Tyrus’s impressive work soothing. The hundreds of paintings he had produced as concept art for Bambi were in a completely different style from her own, yet she loved the soft brushstrokes of his backgrounds and the delicate forms of his deer. The two worked near each other on the third floor, and when they heard someone yell, “Man is in the forest,” a line from Bambi, they knew Walt was coming out of his office and heading their way. They hurriedly put their best sketches on top of the piles on their desks, eager to impress.

  Grace, like Mary, felt that her real purpose was elsewhere. In 1940 she was looking for a way to escape the studio and enter the world of aviation. She wrote to as many people as she could, searching for work. The rejection letters that flowed in were too numerous to count. Fortunately, her many hours in story meetings had taught her how to handle rejection. And so she simply kept her head down and kept sending inquiries. She joined the American Rocket Society and asked questions about jet propulsion and rocket ships. She wrote to famed engineer and physicist Dr. Robert Goddard, who told her about a group of students at the California Institute of Technology interested in rocketry, so Grace wrote to them as well. The students, known as the Suicide Squad, would become the forefathers of modern rocketry and space exploration, but these young men didn’t know what to make of a bold female pilot.

  She dreamed of seeing the curve of the Earth from above, writing of her hopes in her journal:

  I have realized that interplanetary travel will never be realized in my lifetime… So far, only twelve miles above the earth have actually been explored. We can guess what is higher, we can surmise by scientific conjecture, but until someone has been higher, all the supposed knowledge is only a guess. This exploration would not be useful just for the future of interplanetary travel. It would add to man’s knowledge… I can learn to handle a plane at high altitudes and in this way be of help to scientists and engineers who need some pilot to bring down actual data to them. In the future perhaps it will be a rocket ship or balloon that will bring down this important data, but the pilot of the contrivance, whatever it may be, is most apt to be chosen from the ranks of pilots who have had experience in the stratosphere. If I can build my experience and name, I might, slim as the chance is, be chosen.

  These dreams seeped into Grace’s work at the studio, where she was developing dialogue for Bambi. The story department grappled with how to convey the philosophical meaning of the book. Unlike Snow White and Pinocchio, there was no dramatic arc to guide the film. Instead, the narrative rose and fell like the life cycle of the forest itself. The department wanted to evoke emotion and mix in traces of humor but without the cheap gags the Mickey Mouse shorts relied upon.

  At story meetings Walt enumerated the many ideas their early research had dug up. From Bianca’s early notes, made after watching the birth of a fawn, he proposed animating the first shaky steps of a newborn. Some of his other ideas were not as charming. In a critical scene on the storyboard, Bambi’s father takes his son to see the dead bodies of human beings in order to show him that man did not have unlimited power over nature. Walt suggested showing the charred bodies of the hunters after they’d lost control of the fire they started in the forest. The story department dismissed the idea
, feeling that the imagery would be too intense for many adults, much less children. Ultimately, humans would never be shown at all, not even their shadows.

  Striking a balance between staying true to the novel and adapting it for young audiences was proving increasingly difficult. The story department was particularly concerned over the death of Bambi’s mother, a scene that stirred deep emotion for all who had read it in the novel. They discussed showing Bambi’s mother dead in the snow but decided it would be too much. Even without that image, the scene still worried Walt; he asked the team, “Do you think it’s too sad, too gripping?” They painstakingly went over each line spoken between Bambi and his father, everyone contributing ideas on how to shape the moment without oversentimentalizing it. They didn’t take it lightly—this would be the first death depicted in a Disney film. They finally decided Bambi’s father would say a single line: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

  “And as the stag goes off,” said Walt, standing in front of the storyboard, “why, this little guy is going along there, trying to be brave and going on off into this blizzard, followed by the big stag… and pretty soon, they have disappeared and there is nothing but this snow falling.”

  It was Tyrus’s art that showed the story department how to trim their script. Ultimately the movie would have a mere one thousand words of dialogue, less than a fifth of Pinocchio’s script. Tyrus’s paintings, not words, conveyed the emotional resonance of the story. For some, the scenes in the final film would prove overwhelmingly emotional. When Walt’s nine-year-old daughter, Diane, saw the completed feature, she cried and asked her dad, “Why did you have to kill Bambi’s mother?”

  The long-pushed-aside feature was finally getting the attention it deserved. At the studio, the sweet smell of hay filled an entire soundstage, where two young orphaned fawns, shipped by train all the way from Maine to Hollywood, nestled on the ground. The deer, named Bambi and Faline, slept while more than a dozen artists sat around on folding chairs and benches, sketching them. An instructor in animal anatomy, Rico Lebrun, was on hand to assist the group. Their goal was to create a lifelike image of the deer, starkly different from the cartoon animals drawn for Snow White. Retta was frequently the only woman sketching with the men. They all took turns feeding the orphaned deer, giving them baby bottles filled with cow’s milk.

  Even those who weren’t nursing fawns had baby animals taking over their sketch pads. Sylvia was designing a sequence set to a song called “Little April Shower.” She drew not only the deer but also rabbits, quail, squirrels, skunks, and birds, all scurrying through the woods. The piece had been written by Frank Churchill, already well regarded at the studio for his ability to write music based on a simple story idea. His original score for Snow White—which included “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh-Ho,” and “Someday My Prince Will Come”—had been nominated for an Academy Award. Sylvia was immediately drawn to the rhythm of “Little April Shower,” which evoked the feeling of being caught in a storm. The staccato sound of the wind instruments was reminiscent of the beating of raindrops. Between the orchestral sounds, the song was punctuated by real thunderclaps. To create the howl of the wind, Churchill composed a section inspired by Gregorian chants; it had no discernible words, merely the rise and fall of the choir’s voices.

  Sylvia strove to give the sequence a genuine look, showing how a rainstorm moves through the forest. She and her team aspired to a spiritual interpretation of nature that captured the very essence of Salten’s writing but without using any words. For this to work, she needed a lot of action occurring in a small amount of time. She used quick edits to move from one animal to another: the quail rushing through the brush, the squirrels and mice hurrying to their homes, and Bambi and his mother nestled together in the thicket. Sylvia kept the tempo of the action consistent with the music, choosing camera angles to highlight both the beauty of the forest and the drama of the storm. Working on Fantasia had taught her the power music could have in telling a story.

  Accuracy in representing the physical world was key to communicating its splendor. Sylvia, together with the special effects department, made sure each raindrop adhered to physical laws. They fell as elongated spheres and splashed into the water, making ripples. To achieve this effect, the group photographed water falling in the dark with a spotlight trained on the cascade. They enlarged the images so that each splash was frozen in time and then traced over the photograph, rendering the drops in all their intricacy. The ripples created by the falling water were made, not with ink, but with lacquer layered in rings directly on the cels. These were subtle details that Sylvia didn’t expect the audience to fully see and appreciate, but combined, they lent realism.

  There were moments of excitement too. With each lightning strike, the team used an X-ray effect, making the forest momentarily glow and highlighting the veins of the leaves on the trees. The final result was striking. Story direction, story research, script writing, art direction, and scene timing—it seemed there was nothing Sylvia couldn’t do.

  Retta, however, was still learning. While most animators had inbetweeners to perform the menial task of creating the transitional sketches that form the action of each character, Retta had only herself to rely on. She had been assigned no assistants. She didn’t even have a proper desk of her own yet and was working in one of the secretary rooms.

  Like any new animator, she leaned on the seasoned artists around her, and they helped her refine her skills. She put in long hours creating hundreds of sketches of her evil dogs. The creatures seem to pile up on one another as they move ferociously up the slippery cliff where Faline stands frightened. They attack with the flow of an ocean wave over the rocks and then engulf Bambi, biting his neck and legs. The only woman in the animators’ room had created the fiercest creatures in the forest.

  Retta drew her sketches with paper and pencil before she traced them in india ink. Once finished, she gave them to the Ink and Paint department, where the women traced her work with quill pens that were incredibly sensitive. When walking down the corridor outside their rooms, the Ink and Paint artists shuffled their feet rather than lifting them and putting them down so that nary a vibration would cause the pens to quiver. The cels they were tracing the sketches onto had traditionally been made of cellulose nitrate. The long chains of sugar molecules that make up the compound cellulose form all plant-cell walls, everything from the trunks of trees to the fluffy buds that bloom across cotton fields. When cellulose nitrate is mixed with camphor, it results in a clear, flexible plastic, ideal for the animator’s pen. Unfortunately, it is also highly flammable; it has even been known to spontaneously combust. Walt was always eager to adopt new technology, and the Disney studio was one of the first to switch to a new and more stable plastic: cellulose acetate.

  Performing both the animator and inbetweener work was exhausting but also superlative training for Retta. With her eagerness to learn and her guileless personality, she was quick to make friends among the animators. On weekends she often went out to sketch with Marc Davis and Mel Shaw, two other young animators.

  She was making friends elsewhere in the studio too. Retta and Mary Blair quickly went from being casual acquaintances to best friends. They had much in common; both young women were art-school graduates who’d felt apprehensive about using their considerable talents to draw cartoons. Retta had made peace with this decision and had found satisfaction in her work, but Mary was still unsure. She sometimes felt she didn’t belong there. Mary frequently invited Retta over to her house, where they talked about their motivations and desires. Nestled in the Hollywood hills, the one-bedroom home Mary shared with Lee was snug and peaceful. It was only five rooms, but it had glass walls that opened up to a forest, making it feel much bigger. A small, detached studio was the perfect place to paint, a haven for Mary.

  Mary and Lee’s house might have been small, but that didn’t stop them from entertaining. Their parties were legendary, packed with friends from the studio and the art
world standing around the oversize fireplace or out on the terrace, the lights of Tinseltown twinkling below them. Lee made pitchers of martinis as he complained about the cloying cuteness of Bambi, then passed around cocktails with stacked olives. Mary and Retta formed a close bond on these nights, drinking, laughing, and smoking cigarettes in the cool evening air. Retta was outgoing and fun-loving, telling stories and teasing her coworkers. Mary was quieter, more serious. She remained aloof from the crowd, modesty shrouding her feelings and ambitions. Their differences drew them together.

  The artists working on Bambi were more relaxed than usual. In story meetings, Walt made clear that they were in no rush. He encouraged all the artists to focus on the refinement of what they were creating, saying, “The main thing is the slower pace. Move it with a sure, steady pace rather than hurrying it so we get into messes and [compromise] on quality.” The film had already been in production so long that more time seemed inconsequential. Particularly when Walt had just decided on another feature—and this one would have the muscle of an elephant.

  Chapter 6

  Baby Mine

  A twisting gray trunk reaches out from between the bars of the cage to rock a lonesome elephant baby. The eyes and ears of the mother are obscured but everything you need to know about her emotional state is conveyed in the way she holds her little one, in the twitch of her muscles, and the distraught bend of her trunk. Mary Blair watched Walt looking at her sketches with a flutter of anxiety. He didn’t have to say a word. If Walt merely raised an eyebrow, she knew she was in trouble. But instead, a smile formed on his lips.

  The pace of Bambi’s production had been glacial, but the feature Dumbo was moving swiftly and surely. The writers and artists were working with a slim volume, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. The children’s book was a mere thirty-six pages and printed as a roll-a-book, an uncommon format in which the words and illustrations were printed on a scroll of paper in a box. The scroll was then unrolled by the reader using a small wheel. There was scant material to work with, but the story department managed to turn the minimal lines of text into a treatment of over a hundred pages. None of it would have been possible without Bianca.