The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  Reymond wrote a sixty-page treatment that mirrored the book’s narrative. It was allegedly full of racial bias and stereotypes, including the dialects associated with slavery in the South. It was obvious to Walt that this would not do, so he decided to bring in another writer to help balance the final screenplay. But instead of hiring an African American, as might be expected, he hired Maurice Rapf, a Jewish man and avowed Communist living in New York City.

  Rapf was hired primarily because of his disgust for the project. He thought making the film was a mistake and that it would inevitably embrace overt racism. “That’s why I want someone like you to work on it,” Walt said to him. “You’re against the black stereotypes. Most of us, even if we have no racial bias, commit booboos that offend people all the time. Because you are sensitive to the problem, maybe you can avoid it.” The argument convinced Rapf, so he and Reymond spent the summer of 1944 bickering as they tried to write a screenplay.

  The world was slowly shifting and the stereotypical characters the studio had relied on in the past, such as Sunflower in Fantasia and Jim Crow and his gang in Dumbo, were no longer acceptable. In the fall of 1944, after the studio announced Song of the South as its next project, multiple leaders of the African American community as well as Joseph Breen, an official film censor, warned the studio’s executives that any adaptation of Uncle Remus would be met with protest given the book’s racist tone. In-house publicist Vern Caldwell alerted the film’s producer to this, writing, “The negro situation is a dangerous one. Between the negro haters and the negro lovers there are many chances to run afoul of situations that could run the gamut all the way from the nasty to the controversial.” Yet even with these substantial warnings, Walt pressed on, seemingly oblivious to what lay ahead.

  Before the screenplay was written, Mary was sent to Georgia for ten days to create concept art for the film. Her paintings illustrate the red-dirt roads and pink magnolia trees of the South. Yet amid the beauty in her work, there is darkness. In some aspects it is reminiscent of the suffering she captured in her watercolors of the dust-bowl era. Instead of the pure, sanitized happiness described in the Uncle Remus stories, tragedy tinges the lives of African Americans in Mary’s scenes. Beside a green field of blooming flowers, an African American woman and her child walk a red-dirt path to their home. In the background, dead trees are silhouetted against a yellow sky. In a cotton field, the fluffy white blossoms look as light and inviting as cotton candy, but they are juxtaposed against a dark thorny background, communicating a sense of inescapable sorrow as former slaves begin to harvest the crop.

  Even her paintings of Uncle Remus express unmistakable sadness. In one, he walks hunched over a cane, shadows lengthening around him over a flowery landscape. Behind him, separated from the bright splendor of summer, are the crops of the plantation laid out in rows as dark as death itself.

  But despite the profound contrasts Mary depicted, the animators on the film used only the cheerful imagery from her paintings—trees full of pink, shimmering blossoms; red-dirt roads; green, rolling hills—leaving behind all trace of tragedy. The choice to exclude all indications of injustice and hardship was evident throughout the film, in both its appearance and content.

  As Mary traveled through the South, the screenwriters were sinking deeper into disagreement. Rapf made changes both large and small, editing out pejorative terms and altering the characters and setting so it was clear that the story took place after the Civil War. He even inserted a date, 1870, to clarify that the African Americans in the film were not slaves. He attempted to indicate in the script that Brer Rabbit was an African American character, as defined in the oral tradition, and the opponents he was outsmarting were white. Unfortunately, most of these changes would be discarded. By the end of the summer, the two writers were at each other’s throats and Reymond insisted his cowriter be taken off the project.

  Walt put another progressive writer on Song of the South and assigned Rapf to work on Cinderella. Rapf was not sorry to leave the abysmal project behind, especially after he read through Bianca’s treatment of Cinderella. From her initial script and drawings, he began to create a character very different from the studio’s previous princess, Snow White. Perhaps it was his Communist beliefs that inspired him to model her as a worker. He wanted Cinderella to earn her rewards, to go out and get her prince instead of just passively waiting for him. He particularly liked Bianca’s touch of having the girl locked in a cellar by her stepmother, which meant Cinderella had to fight to overcome her oppressors. Rapf changed the setting, having her trapped in an attic after a violent rebellion against her stepfamily. The story department felt that was going too far and ultimately removed the violence, and yet the scene crystallized a key part of the main character’s motivation and cemented Bianca’s vision for the finale.

  Nonetheless, work on Cinderella was crawling in 1944. The war was still going on and the studio was now teetering on the brink of economic ruin. It was unclear whether the banks that held the studio’s debt would even allow the film to be made. Yet most of those in the story and animation departments longed for a return to feature-length animation. Even though so many of their previous efforts—Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi—had been commercial flops, the creative freedom they had enjoyed while working on them could not be matched by either the package films or the new live-action hybrids.

  The fight against fascism abroad cast a harsh light on the deep inequities in the United States. It was impossible to ignore the hypocrisy of a country fighting for freedom and equal rights overseas while it treated its own citizens shamefully. With this in mind, during World War II, the NAACP called for an end to discrimination in the armed forces. Walter White, executive secretary of the organization, made several trips to Europe in order to boost the troops’ morale. When back on American soil, he advocated for institutional changes, met with President Truman, and drafted Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the armed forces and abolished discrimination on the basis of race—although it wasn’t signed by the president until 1948.

  The NAACP and many other black organizations’ leaders were calling for change in civilian workplaces as well. The representation of African Americans in film was among the many areas targeted for radical upheaval. The NAACP had long opposed racial stereotyping in film and had staged massive protests when The Birth of a Nation, a blatantly racist movie that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, premiered in 1915. In 1937, White had written personally to David O. Selznick, offering to send the producer research papers that refuted the version of the Reconstruction South described by author Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind. He suggested that Selznick hire “a person, preferably a Negro, who is qualified to check on possible errors of fact or interpretation.”

  In 1942, White and influential politician Wendell Willkie had met with studio heads at Twentieth Century Fox to insist on an end to the typecast subservient roles played by black actors, and for years, there had been concerted efforts to fight racism. Nonetheless, roles for African Americans had not significantly expanded since the minstrel shows that dominated American entertainment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cinema had been segregated, both in studios and on-screen, since its inception, with only a few filmmakers, such as Oscar Micheaux, depicting the complexity of life in the African American community. With Uncle Remus in the spotlight, it was clear that the time for action was now.

  In 1945 the studio turned its attention from Uncle Remus to focus on world events. On May 8, 1945, the front page of the Los Angeles Times declared, “Full Victory in Europe.” After the news broke, celebrations erupted in the streets. The city even launched a 445-foot “victory ship” from the harbor of the Port of Los Angeles.

  Inside the studio, the mood was euphoric. There was much to celebrate. For many employees, their first thoughts were of their loved ones in the military and the hope that they’d be coming home soon. Still, for many on the West Coast, the events of the Pacific theater were equally as urgent
as those of Europe, if not more so. It wasn’t until August 14, after nuclear bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Japan surrendered and World War II effectively came to an end. It was the first and only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict, and it killed hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians. The aftermath of this decision would have far-reaching consequences for decades to come. But with the devastating war finally at an end, many around the globe were able to start rebuilding.

  In Burbank, prospects seemed to brighten. The artists were excited about the potential for new projects in their future. For the past four years, 90 percent of their work had been government- and military-related. They were all ready to move on. But other worries were now emerging—for instance, female employees were concerned about their jobs. The number of women working in the animation department had shot up even before the war began, but women knew that the men coming home from war would expect their jobs back. From comments made by supervisors, they believed it was likely that the end of the war would also mean the end of their employment at the studio.

  Most service members returning home were hoping to find some normalcy in the day-to-day life they remembered from before the fighting began. Yet for African American servicemen and -women, the world they were returning to was a little too familiar. Attitudes on race had not changed in the United States, and in the South, even those African Americans in military uniforms were denied entry to restaurants that German prisoners of war would have been welcome to eat in. Other injustices persisted; African American veterans received unequal access to the benefits of the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, particularly the ability to obtain low-interest home loans.

  In his 1943 poem “Beaumont to Detroit,” Langston Hughes passionately expresses this inequity and the experience of fighting a war on two fronts: against Hitler and against Jim Crow. In 1946, Nazi Germany had been defeated, and the fight against racial segregation was finally gaining momentum.

  On November 12, 1946, James Baskett, the first African American to star in a Walt Disney production, appeared on-screen singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The song was inspired by the slavery-era folk song “Zip Coon” and in 1947 won an Academy Award for best original song. Baskett, who also voiced Brer Rabbit for the film, later received an honorary Oscar for his role as Uncle Remus, the first African American male actor to win an Academy Award.

  For the Song of the South premiere, however, Baskett was deliberately excluded, as was one of his costars, Academy Award winner Hattie McDaniel. Because the premiere was held at the Atlanta Fox Theatre in the segregated South, neither actor could attend. On the marquee that night, the words WORLD PREMIERE WALT DISNEY’S “SONG OF THE SOUTH” IN COLOR glowed, and below that were the names of the film’s stars—except for its African American actors. Under this banner of racism, an all-white audience streamed through the theater’s front doors.

  In Eatonton, Georgia, coincidentally where the author of Uncle Remus hailed from, a young Alice Walker went to see the movie based on childhood stories passed down through generations. Sitting in the colored section, along with seemingly her whole town, she found no enjoyment, only grief. In a 1981 talk to the Atlanta Historical Society, later published in a book of essays, she described the effect of Walt’s movie: “In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all our children, the stories that they would have heard from their own people and not Walt Disney.”

  Black leaders organized protests of the film, surrounding theaters in California and New York and carrying signs that read WE WANT FILMS ON DEMOCRACY, NOT SLAVERY; DON’T PREJUDICE CHILDREN’S MINDS WITH FILMS LIKE THIS; and WE FOUGHT FOR UNCLE SAM NOT UNCLE TOM. The California Eagle, an African American newspaper, played a key role in organizing protests in Los Angeles. The paper was owned and operated by Charlotta Bass, a woman committed to using her power in publishing to promote civil rights activism. When describing the reasons for the planned protest, the newspaper reported, “The dialect for Uncle Remus could not even be read by the actors who saw the script.”

  Ebony ran a photo editorial calling the film “lily-white propaganda” that “disrupted peaceful race relations.” Other critics of the era agreed, and a review titled “Spanking Disney” in the New York Times addressed Walt directly: “For no matter how much one argues that it’s all childish fiction, anyhow, the master-and-slave relation is so lovingly regarded in your yarn, with the Negroes bowing and scraping and singing spirituals in the night, that one might almost imagine that you figure Abe Lincoln made a mistake. Put down that mint julep, Mr. Disney! It doesn’t become your youthful face.”

  Walt Disney Studios couldn’t say it hadn’t been warned. Walt had known for years that the film’s release would provoke an immediate and powerful response. Even Maurice Rapf, credited as a writer on the film, joined in the criticism, perhaps hoping to distance himself from the project he had once attempted to improve. The film would earn money but not enough to significantly ease the studio’s financial distress. As a result of the loud protests surrounding it, Song of the South would die a quiet death, never to be released in any video format in the United States.

  At a shareholder meeting in 2010, Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, called the film “antiquated” and “fairly offensive” and dismissed the possibility of a DVD release in the near future. Yet others view the film in a different light. During her 2017 induction as a Disney Legend—an honor recognizing individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to the Walt Disney Company—actress Whoopi Goldberg urged the studio to rerelease Song of the South. “I’m trying to find a way to get people to start having conversations about bringing Song of the South back,” Goldberg said in an interview, “so we can talk about what it was and where it came from and why it came out.”

  Mary Blair’s sensitivity toward race in the segregated South shines through in her concept art for the film, although her nuanced depictions were not ultimately used by the animators. And yet, Mary could have tried to do more. At story meetings when racist depictions were discussed, she sat completely silent. During a discussion of the tar-baby sequence, a part of the film that relied on racist stereotypes and later raised justifiable indignation in theaters, Walt asked, “Could it be a thing where he says ‘Get the fire going good… get the tar good and hot,’ etc., singing about what they’re doing? The bear could interrupt for some of the dialogue, but he’s singing about what he’s doing. That’s a typical negro thing.” Mary did not comment. At the next meeting, Walt asked the room, “You feel the tar-baby thing works all right?” and she again said nothing.

  Early in her career, Mary had created a piece titled Sick Call. In the drawing, an African American man lies on a cot unconscious while an elderly white doctor leans over him. A second African American stands behind the doctor, terror contorting his face. The work is poignant, the two black characters drawn with a tender sympathy that makes the viewer wonder what events preceded the melancholy scene. If Mary had brought this sense of humanity to the story meetings in addition to her Song of the South concept art, might she have swayed Walt? We’ll never know.

  Sick Call by Mary Blair, circa 1930s (Courtesy the estate of Mary Blair)

  Even though there was a gradually shifting perspective on the use of stereotypes in film, the lack of diversity in both the story and animation departments was hindering not only Song of the South but also the future of animation at the studio. There was no relief in sight. In 1948, two years after Song of the South was released, Walt Disney Studios hired its first African American animator, a man named Frank Braxton. He was brought in as an inbetweener, a job with an exceedingly high turnover rate. Like many of his cohorts, Braxton decided not to stay in the position, leaving for unknown reasons after only two months to look for work in animation elsewhere.

  Soon afterward, Braxton befriended Benny Washam, a Bugs Bunny animator who worked at
Warner Brothers Cartoons. Washam decided to advocate for his friend; he walked into the office of Johnny Burton, the production manager, and said, “I hear Warner Brothers has a racist policy and refuses to hire blacks.” Burton spun around and yelled, “Whoever said that is a liar! It’s not true.” “Well, then,” Washam replied, “there’s a young black animator outside who’s looking for a job. Guess he’s come to the right place.” Braxton quickly became a valued animator in director Chuck Jones’s group, and in 1960, he was elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Screen Cartoonists’ Guild.

  Chapter 10

  So This Is Love

  “The Greek word Muses means the Mindful Ones,” Sylvia wrote in her notebook. She filled pages documenting her research on the nine muses and their domains: Calliope, the muse of epic poetry; Clio, history; Euterpe, lyric poetry and music; Erato, love poetry; Polyhymnia, sacred song; Melpomene, tragedy; Thalia, comedy; Terpsichore, dance; and Urania, astronomy. By 1946 she had written numerous treatments and scripts for a feature about the Greek muses and was determined to find a home for it at the studio. The nine muses consumed her days and nights as she played with how to use them most effectively as narrators in the short films the studio was working on.

  As a rule, Sylvia hated the shorts, and for the most part, she had little respect for the writers and animators who created them. She called their brand of comedy “sadistic,” as it relied on violence and hateful stereotypes to elicit laughter. It simply wasn’t her style, nor was it the type of comedy the studio wanted in its feature films. Sylvia threw herself into her current project, coloring her muses in bold shades of black and red and adding intricate architectural details in the backgrounds that no other artist at the studio would have conceived of.