The Queens of Animation

by Nathalia Holt

  The look required the animators to be tidier in creating their art and to perform much of their own cleanup, getting rid of stray lines that they ordinarily would have left for the inbetweeners and Ink and Paint artists to handle. But despite the added effort, they were thrilled to see their own hand-drawn lines on a cel. Marc was happy with how his drawings looked directly under the camera lens, feeling that previously his art had always been “watered down.”

  Walt, however, was not so pleased. The styling, he believed, was reminiscent of what they’d made in the 1920s, when animation was in its infancy and crude lines were acceptable. For decades they had worked to get rid of any stray marks on the cel, and they’d improved their techniques until the dreaded outlines vanished into the colors around them. Inkers had used colored lines with great skill so that every feature was rendered lifelike. Now, thanks to the Xerox machines, the black lines were back and they were everywhere. Production had gone too far, and Walt had been distracted, but it was too late to start over now. Still, he had strong words for the future: “We’re never gonna have another one of these goddamned things,” he grumbled. “Ken’s never going to be an art director again.”

  The women who once reigned over Ink and Paint were similarly incensed, yelling at Anderson after he gave an interview about how Xerox would save the company money. Given the contentious environment, perhaps it’s not surprising that Anderson accepted Walt’s offer to take a break from feature films and design rides at Disneyland.

  While the studio was awash in a superfluity of photocopies, the artists who had left the company were finding new homes for their creative work. Many of them turned to children’s literature. Both Mary and Retta were working for Golden Books, producing a treasury of titles that would persist across generations.

  Gyo Fujikawa, who’d once lent her elegant style to Fantasia’s promotion and the accompanying book, was also making a name for herself in children’s publishing. Unlike Mary and Retta, however, she eschewed Golden Books. “They pay the artist only two hundred fifty dollars a book,” she complained. Most children’s book illustrators of the time received only a lump sum for their work; they didn’t get royalties. This seemed inherently unfair to Gyo, akin to giving her art away. She decided to hire a literary agent to better represent her interests. She illustrated a 1957 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and her work was so well regarded that her agent was able to insist on Gyo’s receiving royalties from then on.

  Emboldened by her new clout in the book world, Gyo took on a new project as both author and illustrator. It didn’t seem radical at first—she was only drawing babies. She sketched infants experiencing the sweetness of everyday life, from cuddling to sleeping. The perspective was that of a child delighted with having a new baby brother or sister in the house. The babies she drew reflected the range of ethnicities Gyo came in contact with in her life in New York City; in her words it was “an international set of babies—little Black babies, Asian babies, all kinds of babies.” Her images were soft, warm, and lovable, and the text was kept simple to appeal to preschoolers.

  When Gyo presented her book to her publisher, however, she received an unpleasant reaction. An executive was quick to criticize the diversity of the images and insisted that the African American babies be removed for fear that their inclusion would hurt sales. It was the early 1960s and only 6.7 percent of new children’s books in the United States depicted children of color, despite the social and cultural changes afoot. The Supreme Court had struck down “separate but equal” racial segregation in public schools, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was imminent, yet children’s libraries remained so homogenous that one editor referred to “the All-White World of Children’s Books.”

  Gyo was defiant. She would not allow the book to be published if the illustrations were not kept multicultural. Her resolve was rewarded; the book was finally published in 1963 and it became a bestseller, with more than a million and a half copies sold so far. “Children want facts,” Fujikawa once said. “I include them all in the art because I know children sit and look for them when the stories are read.” Gyo revealed sensitivity in her texts, an understanding that the images we present to children and the stories we tell them influence their perception in later years. It was an appreciation of the principles of inclusivity and individuality that the Walt Disney Studios desperately needed and that Mary Blair was about to bring back to them.

  Despite Walt’s displeasure and the discord among employees, One Hundred and One Dalmatians met with praise following its premiere on January 25, 1961. Time magazine said, “It is the wittiest, most charming, least pretentious cartoon feature Walt Disney has ever made,” while Variety was more modest in its compliments, writing, “While not as indelibly enchanting or inspired as some of the studio’s most unforgettable animated endeavors, this is nonetheless a painstaking creative effort.” Yet there was a distinct difference in how the film was assessed in comparison to Walt’s previous features. He was no longer the avant-garde artist making movies that defied expectations and crossed generations. The artist who once said, “We don’t actually make films for children, but we make films that children can enjoy along with their parents,” seemed to have lost his own pleasure in animated film. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was produced as children’s entertainment and made with profit in mind.

  On-screen credits may never have fully reflected the efforts of those working on the films, but in One Hundred and One Dalmatians the acknowledgments were unusually concise. Given that the studio now housed so few artists, the ones who remained had put in very long hours. Although many female assistant animators worked on the movie, none of them saw their names on-screen. They hadn’t expected to—they knew how the system worked. The only two women to receive credit for the movie were Sammie June Lanham on layout and Evelyn Kennedy as music editor.

  The appreciation for xerography, however, was clear. One Hundred and One Dalmatians had been made in record time, going from start to finish in a mere three years. Even more impressive, with a budget of $3.6 million, the movie made $6.2 million on its release. Xerox technology effectively saved animation at the Walt Disney Studios, whose future had been teetering since Sleeping Beauty. Yet the cost to the female workforce was unprecedented.

  Whereas women had once reigned in Ink and Paint, desks now sat empty. In story and animation, careers were stagnant, and there were few opportunities for women to advance. The departments might have survived, but Walt’s interest in future cartoon features had faded along with the demise of traditional hand-drawn animation. In order for women to strengthen their position within the studio, they would have to find a project outside its walls.

  Chapter 15

  It’s a Small World

  At the dinner table Mary was thinking about her boys. They were teenagers now and as different from one another as could be. Her elder boy, Donovan, seemed much like her and Lee with his interest in art and animation. Yet at times he displayed a wild streak that made her heart beat frantically in her chest. He was out with friends tonight and Mary told herself not to worry, he was fine. She looked over at Kevin, who was quiet, like her, but with very different interests. He loved talking about rockets, engineering, and space exploration. Tonight, though, no one seemed to be in the mood for conversation. With Donovan out, the little family of three sat quietly. Kevin was picking at his food with the finickiness of a child. He refused to even touch his salad, maintaining a strict space between it and the rest of the food on his plate.

  Mary noticed that her husband had been drinking, but this was not unusual—he did so every day. In her youth she had scanned her father’s face looking for signs that the drink had carried him away. Now she watched her husband with the same careful eye, trying to assess how inebriated he was. The alcohol gave Lee not an ounce of pleasure, but it had become a necessity. It seemed he could not function anymore unless he had a few drinks in him. A couple of vodkas led to a couple more, and by the end of the
day Lee was frequently so drunk that he passed out in a stupor.

  Tonight, Lee was still hours from this state of blissful (for Mary) unconsciousness and in fact seemed unusually alert to those at the dinner table. He watched his son with increasing anger. “Eat your dinner,” he said, and then added, “Eat your salad.” Kevin looked at his salad, then at his father. He didn’t want to touch the greens. He looked back down at his plate and stayed silent, hoping the moment would pass. But it didn’t. The tension at the table was building, and although Mary gently tried to calm him, Lee was soon yelling.

  Drunk and overflowing with anger, Lee picked up one of the dining-room chairs and smashed it over his son’s head. Kevin tried to catch the wooden rungs but was unable to protect himself from the blow. Mary’s mind spun in shock, and she began yelling unintelligibly as she hurled her body in front of the chair just as it came down for a second time. There was no curbing Lee’s rage and he struck his wife with the force intended for his son. When Mary looked up, her son was hunched over with deep wounds across his head, and what had once been a chair was shattered pieces of wood on the floor. She was so stunned that it took her minutes to realize that blood was running down her own face as well.

  Lee fell into a pattern of alcoholism and abuse that was punctuated by his inevitable apologies. Mary couldn’t bear to talk with anyone about what was happening. The idea of revealing her secrets to her extended family or friends was painful. Instead, she hid her anguish, being especially careful during her visits to California when she knew Walt was watching.

  During one such visit in 1963, designer Rolly Crump was sitting on top of a stepladder at a soundstage on the studio lot when he caught a glimpse of an elegant woman with cropped blond hair. Oh my God, he thought, I’m gonna meet Mary Blair. For him, being near Mary was like being in the presence of a movie star; her renown in the company was second only to Walt’s. Rolly smiled at her and she smiled back. He thought he might die of happiness.

  Rolly had started as an inbetweener at the studio in 1952. During Sleeping Beauty production, he moved up to the position of assistant animator, cleaning up the senior animators’ drawings. After the massive layoffs of 1959, he went over to WED Enterprises—a private company Walt had started in 1952 to manage Disneyland—to design attractions for the theme park. (WED came from Walt’s initials: Walter Elias Disney.)

  Rolly had just finished the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, the first attraction to include audio-animatronics. Animatronics were human or animal figures that could talk and move, using mechanisms hidden inside them to make them lifelike. On vacation with his family in 1949, Walt had been fascinated by the wide variety of wind-up toys he’d seen in Paris. As he watched the toys move, he marveled at the simple mechanism that propelled their action.

  With these toys in mind, in 1951 he asked several of his employees, including a machinist and a sculptor, to work on an assignment called Project Little Man. The goal was to make a nine-inch-tall mechanical person who could dance and talk. While it was never completed, Walt was intrigued by the idea of incorporating mechanical figures into Disneyland and decided to go bigger. He envisioned a life-size model of Confucius that offered words of wisdom and would be housed in a Chinese restaurant he had planned. Before the head of Confucius was finished, however, Walt changed his mind and proposed the group build a talking and gesturing Abraham Lincoln whom they could place in a proposed Hall of Presidents. In 1961 they started calling the moving and talking figures “audio-animatronics,” a term the studio trademarked in 1964. The technology required an intimate knowledge of movement and language. While Lincoln lingered in development, requiring a significant amount of time and money, in 1963 the animatronic birds of the Enchanted Tiki Room made their debut.

  The mechanical birds weren’t confined to the Enchanted Tiki Room; they spread throughout the studio. In 1964, a realistic-looking audio-animatronic robin landed in the studio’s newest feature, Mary Poppins. That film, like so many others, had been conceived in the late 1930s, but getting permission to produce it had proved challenging. P. L. Travers, author of the 1934 novel of the same title and its seven sequels, was resolutely against giving Walt the rights to make it into a film. It wasn’t until 1961, when Walt flew Travers to Los Angeles and offered her a hundred thousand dollars, 5 percent of the profits, and script approval, that she finally gave in to Walt’s persistence.

  Production started immediately. The film was planned as a live-action/animation crossover. The live-action format would considerably reduce costs, while the group could add in segments of animation to boost the whimsical nature of the story. To accomplish this, Walt hired Petro Vlahos, an engineer skilled in Hollywood special effects.

  Vlahos was known in Hollywood for his work on blue-screen technology, a technique similar to the modern green screen popular among television meteorologists. It involved filming a scene in front of a specific color screen, then removing the color, using a filter in the negative processing, in order to isolate the actors from the background. The result was a negative that showed the actors in front of a transparent background, ideal for Walt to fill in with animation using the optical printer. Blue was originally chosen as the background color because that hue is generally absent from skin tone. However, this meant that all clothing and set items had to be devoid of the color blue.

  Vlahos thought they could do better. He developed a new process in which the actors were filmed in front of a white background and the set was lit with strong sodium-vapor lights. Sodium gas emits light at a specific wavelength—589 nanometers—so Vlahos created a prism that filtered light only at that wavelength. Unlike blue-screen technology, where the color had to be filtered from the negatives, the prism was placed inside the camera itself, simplifying the process. The system also meant that the scenes could incorporate any color, as only a single wavelength was being removed. It was a stunning advance in special effects and would later earn Vlahos an Academy Award in the field. For now, it was technology that the studio owned exclusively. Vlahos had made only a single prism and Walt had it.

  The new technology was complex, but the script seemed simple. Unlike books such as Alice in Wonderland, which had been a challenge to adapt, Mary Poppins and its 1935 sequel, Mary Poppins Comes Back, lent themselves to adaptation.

  As in his dealings with Roald Dahl, however, Walt would find that Travers’s requirement for script approval complicated matters. A 1963 letter from the author to the studio head began with “Dear Walt, Don’t be frightened by the size of the enclosed letter…” What followed were pages of detailed criticism and demands for character and dialogue revisions punctuated by occasional pleading. When discussing Mrs. Banks, the children’s mother, Travers wrote, “I beg, beg, BEG you to give her a more sympathetic, more Edwardian name…” Travers would win that battle, and the character’s name was changed from Cynthia to Winifred, although much of the script would ultimately go against her wishes.

  Walt wrestled with Travers’s letters, but a songwriting duo known as the Sherman brothers would deal with the author in person. Walt had hired Richard and Robert Sherman in 1960 after one of their songs, “Tall Paul,” became a chart-topping hit for former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. For Mary Poppins, the songwriters embedded themselves in the story department, working closely with the writers to create a host of songs that advanced the narrative arc with memorable musical themes. Yet while Walt and the department gushed over their original creations, from “A Spoonful of Sugar” to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” Travers remained unimpressed, repeating, “No, no, no.”

  One decision Travers approved of was the casting of Julie Andrews in the role of Mary Poppins. In the early 1960s Andrews was well known for her work onstage in plays such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, but she had never been in a feature film. After seeing her on Broadway in 1962, Walt decided Andrews was perfect for the lead role and offered it to her. Andrews declined, explaining that she was three months pregnant. This wasn’t a problem for Wa
lt, who told her, “We’ll wait for you.” Six months after the birth of Andrews’s daughter, production started up, with the live-action portions filming during the summer of 1963.

  Julie Andrews also entranced Retta. Working from her Washington, DC, home, Retta was drawing the actress every day from photographs of the nearly finished film. She was now working at a small animation studio while continuing to freelance as a children’s book illustrator. She had just signed with Walt to complete illustrations for a promotional item called The Story and Songs of Mary Poppins, which included an illustrated picture book packaged with a vinyl record of the soundtrack.

  Retta was drawing scenes of the upcoming movie in her bold style, sending Mary Poppins, the chimney sweep Bert, and the children flying through the air on brightly colored carousel horses. Not all of her paintings would make it into the book, and the face of Julie Andrews would later be altered due to a legal permissions issue, but each scene captured the adventure and excitement of the film. As she replicated the magical joy of childhood in gouache paint, Retta was also witnessing it in real life. With two young boys, Retta, now forty-eight, was often the oldest mother at the elementary-school playground, but she had a distinct advantage the other parents lacked. Her drawings could give the children a peek at the upcoming Walt Disney movie.