November 2, 2019 • 42 mins
Did you know an army of Disney "animation girls" helped bring its classic films to life? This classic episode traces the evolution of women working in the early days of Disney and women in animation's continuing quest to shatter the celluloid ceiling.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie, and welcome to stuff. I've never
told you a protection of I heart radios how stuff works.
As I said a past episode ago, time very very
confused by time. Right now, Um, I am probably in
(00:29):
Disney World again as this drops. Yes, which I unfortunately
did not realize that. Um, we would be going for
work like barely two months ago. And also at the ride,
the new Star Wars ride will not be open, which
is one of the whole reasons I wanted to go.
(00:50):
You should be like run in protest with a protest line.
You think I should run with it. So I'm running
a race. Um well, and that's part of the problem.
Problem is that you have to sign up for those
races way in advance, right, And I think it was
supposed to be open, but it's not. I mean I'm
not I'm going to Disney. It's gonna be fun, but
(01:12):
there's a part of me that's just gonna be thinking
the ride, the cool ride that will be open like
less than a month from now. Um. But because of that,
because that is on my mind right now, we wanted
to talk about this classic episode that Kristen Caroline did
around the Women behind Disney. Yes, Um, which is something
(01:36):
when I was a kid, I really wanted, I actually
really want to do special effects specifically, but also animation. UM.
And then I discovered that my drawing capabilities, well they
were lacking. Yeah, I can't draw. Yeah, the US people
draw penguins. And then people were like, what's that? And
I'm like, okay, I can't draw penguins. Apparently, Well, I've
(01:58):
told the story on era I carved it. I was
supposed to be a horse, but my art teacher thought
it was a polar bear. And so I was like, yes,
a polar bear. And that's not to say, you know,
if your hard work and get you certainly further than
that level of talent that I displayed or that you displayed. UM.
(02:22):
And also what we're going to talk about are what
what this classic episode is going to look about, look
about look at let's look about um is other aspects
of of animating, because it's more than just drawing and
UM Disney's army of animation girls. So we hope you
(02:43):
enjoy this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told
You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm christ and I'm Caroline, and we're
talking about women animators at Disney today. And then the
(03:07):
idea happened very much by accident one evening on Twitter,
when I had posted on stuff mom never told you
dot tumbler dot com our Tumbler account this nineteen thirty
eight rejection letter that has been spread around the internet.
A lot of you listening have probably seen it. But
(03:27):
it's this form letter that Disney sent out to women
who applied to be animators, basically saying and we'll read
it verbatim in just a minute, but it basically says, uh, sorry,
women don't do really any of the creative work, so
good luck. Yeah, it was harsh, like if I had
received that letter, I would have been so disheartened. But
(03:48):
soon after I posted it on Tumbler, got a tweet
from a woman who wrote her Masters on animation history,
and she pointed out that while yes, this is clearly
a form letter that Disney actually sent out, there's a
lot of misconceptions about women's roles at Classic Disney, talking
(04:09):
about back in the day of Bambi, Dumbo, sleeping Beauty,
snow white, and she said that that was pretty much
standard at animation studios in the nineteen thirties period, and
so I decided, hey, you know what, this sounds like
pretty good podcast topic. It's a great podcast topic. I
was definitely interested in reading all about how these women
(04:33):
who were in the industry and the roles they play.
I mean, these women worked so hard, the women who
were actually hired by Disney who loved the idea of
working for Disney. People both men and women who worked
under him were just enamored of the the idea of
even working at Disney or Disney's as they called it,
(04:54):
like it was a department store. Yeah. Uh. And it's
actually good timing that we're talking about this, because not
too long ago, Meryl Streep raised a lot of Hollywood
eyebrows when she was giving this sort of honorary speech
for Emma Thompson in her work in Saving Mr. Banks,
the recent film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney, and
(05:17):
you know, Disney kind of made it in a way
to personify Walt Disney. But in the speech that Meryl
Streep is giving at the National Board of Review Awards ceremony,
she calls Walt Disney a gender bigot and a lot
of other things that are too kind, and the evidence
that she uses. Though, to back up this claim is
(05:38):
a quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball, who allegedly said
that Walt Disney quote didn't trust women or cats, right,
And she also cited that thirty rejection letter as her reasoning. Um,
but yeah, Disney's attitude. It's people a lot of people
(05:59):
on the internet, um, both scholarly and not, argue about
Disney's attitude, attitude towards women. You know, was he this
gender biggett, as Meryl Streep says, Was he just a
product of his times? You know? Was he just afraid
of losing his workforce to marriage and babies. There's a
whole lot of back and forth about it. So we
also just wanted to take a minute, though, to shine
a light on all of these women animators who rarely
(06:22):
get any credit for these classic Disney films that were
probably a part of a lot of our childhoods. So
let's start off with that ninety eight Disney rejection letter.
What exactly did it say? So basically, this form letter
was telling the woman who had applied that, Okay, so
(06:42):
you can't, um, you can't be a major animator. Girls
are not considered for the training school, and then it
went on to explain that the work that was open
to women specifically consisted of tracing the characters on clear
celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the trace
things on the reverse side with paint according to directions.
So how hard could that be? Right? But when we
(07:07):
were reading this Vanity Fair article about women at Disney
in the early days, I mean, these are women who
worked hours and hours and hours doing a lot of
the what was called in between our work, so a
lot of the movement, a lot of the in between
things between all the big action, showing what Goofy was doing,
or showing what Bambi was doing. And like that Twitter
(07:28):
follower pointed out this was standard policy at animation studios
at the time, which is a little bit nuts when
you consider that in the history of animation. It is
actually a woman named Lotty Rainager who's credited with directing
one of the first feature length animated films in ninety six,
and it's called The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, and her
(07:50):
animation is incredible. I mean she she actually uses rather
than drawing everything out as we would think of in
a Disney film, she actually cut out still a wets
that she would move around on screen and it was
it was insane what she was doing. And yet in
the nineteen thirties, oh no, no, no, women just know
(08:11):
you stick to tracing and that's it. Right. Yet, it
is interesting to look at that nine blip on the
overall timeline of animation because okay, well, so obviously women
are involved in this from the get go, and they're
interested in it, and they can do it and they
can do an awesome job at it. But we need
to give you some context. So let's do a brief
rundown of like a Disney timeline. So the Walt Disney
(08:33):
Company itself was started by brothers Walt and Roy in
nineteen three out in Los Angeles. Two years later Disney
opens their famous Hyperion Avenue studio location, and back then
it was all dudes as photos from the time a test.
And two years after that we have the first of
(08:54):
as Kristen pointed out, the Nine Old Men, which were
basically uh Disney's main animators. Les Clark hired on as
an in between er, and as we said, that's the
people who draw all the stuff that appears between the
normal action that is drawn by a lead animator, and
in the mascot of all mascots, Mickey Mouse is born.
(09:15):
So fast forward to seven and you have the release
of Disney's first full length animated feature, Snow White and
the Seven Dwarves, and all of the supervising animation is
being done by those nine Old Men. And usually when
you hear about Classic Disney, and you hear about the
animations a lot of times up until recently at least,
(09:37):
it's been the Nine Old Men who deservedly so get
a lot of credit for it. Um inside note the
reason why they were called the Nine Old Men. That
was Walt Disney's joking nickname reference to them, riffing on
how the Supreme Court at the time was referred to,
I think by like FDR or something as the nine
(09:58):
Old Men, because hey, gus was nine in nineties, and
of course there were no women in the Supreme Court.
Uh So, behind though that production of Snow White in
the Seven Dwarves, you have this almost army of these
women who were referred to as Waltz girls, who were
(10:20):
doing all of that in between our work, all the tracing,
all of the inking, a lot of the coloring and painting,
essentially taking these incredible drawings that the nine old men
would have been making and really bringing them to life
on those celluloids for the screen. Yeah, and I think
it's interesting the description of of why and how all
(10:40):
these women were recruited. I think it's interesting how it
kind of compares to World War Two when we hear
about women having to enter the workforce because there were
so many gaps left by men. I mean, obviously it's
not the same thing, but Walt Disney needed such a
big workforce to animate these these cutting edge knew never
before seeing types of films that he was like, we've
(11:02):
got to get some labor in here, and so he did.
He began recruiting these animation girls, many of whom had
not gone to college, but they were trained in sort
of animation classes. They sort of got, you know, trial
by fire when they were hired. And when you look
at the Disney animation system sort of at large, talking
about training, it was sort of almost like an apprentice
(11:25):
master set up going on um but for the women
where they would get kind of thrown in like, hey,
you look like you're young and healthy and can handle
long hours. Come on board and learn how to ink
and paint and watercolor. They might have gotten classes, but
they wouldn't have gotten the same types of classes that
the men got. And the reason why they were immediately
funneled into ink and paint was because the inking training
(11:47):
was sort of the base level that took half the
time of animation training. And in that Vanity Fair oral
history of the women working on Snow White and particular,
some said that, I mean, they would have to bring
in some examples of their artwork, but some of them
said that they were hired simply because they looked healthy,
(12:11):
because Walt knew that it was going to be such
a grueling process that they were going to need to
be able to work insane hours because when you think
about it, this animation process back then was so time consuming.
So for instance, one girl could do eight to ten
cells per hour. That means that one hundred of these
(12:36):
employees could produce about one minute of film every day.
That's how tedious this whole inking and painting process was. Yeah,
and so at the height of Snow White production, because
you have to think, I mean, the context of this
is that Snow White was the first thing of its kind,
the first animated feature that was more than an hour,
(12:57):
and then involved all sorts of techniques that they were
almost developing on the fly. How do we give her
a better blush to her cheeks? Developing different techniques like that,
and so um. These people, both men and women, were
working eight hour work weeks. There was one woman who
was describing her life during that time, and she would
go home after a long day, walk into the closet
(13:19):
to take her clothes off, and it would suddenly occur
to her, am I coming or going? Am I getting
dressed for work? Or am I coming home from work?
Sometimes they would just take pillows to work, not only
to soften the hard wooden chair they were sitting in,
but so that they could take naps. Yeah, and just
to give you a sense of what exactly they were doing.
A Disney employment brochure at the time said, all inking
(13:40):
and painting of cellul Lloyd's and all tracing done in
the studio is performed exclusively by a large staff of
girls known as the inkers and painters. This work, exacting
in character, calls for great skill in the handling of
pen and brush, And again it goes on to state,
this is the only department in the Disney studio open
to women artists, right and one and again another woman
(14:03):
who was interviewed in that Vanity fair piece was talking
about how I did not smoke or drink or bold
during this time because you couldn't have your hands shake.
But you also couldn't have your lovely and glora will
sweater drifting like pieces of fuzz anywhere. And so the
women started having to wear aprons and so they didn't
(14:24):
get finger smudges on anything. They had to wear these white,
these thin white gloves and just cut off the fingertips
of their drawing hand. So, as reports go from the time,
if you were to just wander into the inking and
painting section, you would be like, wow, look at all
these high class dames working with their pin and ink.
And it's because though there were so many very young,
(14:47):
usually well dressed, attractive women in the ink and paint
department that it became known as the Nunnery. Because down
the line, after the release of Snow White and when
Disney opened it's new, bigger and grander studios, Walt kind
of drew a line basically saying, hey, all you male
(15:07):
animators need to stay out of the Nunnery. There's too
much canoodling going on. Because these women would also talk
about how in the brief breaks that they would get
from these eighty five hour workweeks of inking and painting
and tracing, et cetera, they would all go out onto
the front lawn and they would sometimes meet up secretly
with their animator bows underneath trees and they I don't
(15:30):
know if they'd smooch or not. That's unscandalous for the time. Yeah,
the one one guy described it as being like high school,
where you would go out and a lot of There
were a lot of marriages that came out of the
Disney animation department, to the point where a competitor in
their like materials to try to attract employees even said
that like, uh, you know, Disney Disney over there with
(15:53):
all their office romances, they're not getting enough work done
because they were so famous for having all of these
people get married, which makes sense when you're spending too
many freaking intense hours with people. Well, and then there's
a question too of whether or not Walt Disney took
advantage of the fact that he had dozens upon dozens
of very young women working for him. And there are
(16:15):
some rumors that, yeah, absolutely, there would have been some canoodling.
I keep saying canoodling on Walt Disney's couch. But there
were other women who reported back, No, No, we always
thought of him as Uncle Walt. He was very professional.
We never would have crossed that line. Well, he married
an animator, I mean he married one of the one
of the girls quote unquote from the early days, back
(16:37):
when like everybody was like cheers, everybody knew your name.
And while Disney, though definitely has his controversies involving his
thoughts on race, gender, etcetera, there are some quotes that
are typically trotted out in defense of his position on women.
So you know, we have to we have to mention
(16:58):
this one. He said, if a woman can do the work, well,
she's worth as much as a man. The girl artists
have the right to expect the same chances for advancement
as men, and I honestly believe they may eventually, thank you,
contribute something to this business that men never could or would.
And this he was apparently saying to the male artists
(17:19):
working on Dumbo. And many years later, in nineteen fifty nine,
Walt was quoted as saying that women are the best
judges of anything. We turn out. Their taste is very important.
They are the theatergoers, They're the ones who dragged them
in in if the women like it, to heck with
the men, which sounds like you know, advertising strategy, baseline
(17:39):
advertising strategy today where people are like, if you target
the women who are control of the pocketbooks at home,
then the men will follow exactly. And that's what those
two quotes are. You know, a couple of reasons why
when Meryl Street made the comment about him being a
gender bigot, they took offense saying, well, no, he actually
was on record is saying that, you know, women could
(18:01):
be anything that they wanted to be in Disney, but
breaking through the celluloid ceiling was no joke. I mean,
you can say that it's a product of his time,
but nevertheless, it's still kind of on the mark that
there was a specific role that they were allowed to do,
and it was it was kind of limited to that point.
But it seems like once he saw the work that
(18:23):
these women were doing and he spotted some of the
talent among them, there were a few emphasis on a
few opportunities for advancement, particularly when World War two happens because,
just like in pretty much all other realms of employment
in the US, a bunch of men leave and that
(18:46):
opens up jobs for women. And so in in fact,
the inc and Paint department employees were invited to submit
Donald Duck drawings for an animation department consideration, and of
that three women were chosen to be trained as in
between ers and background artists during World War Two, and
there were a number of other women too who had
(19:08):
been working, for instance, on Snow White, who were put
on government funded Disney jobs. There was a lot of
Disney pro us propaganda that was coming out at the time,
and so there were these kind of top secret animation
missions that some of the women interviewed in Vanity Fair
(19:29):
were involved with, but a lot of it was very
shrouded in secrecy, and half the time they didn't really
know what they were working on. Anyway, Yeah, turned out
to be Donald Duck making fun of Hitler. Yeah, everybody
plays a part, I guess. So before we introduce you
to some of these celluloid shattering ladies who worked at Disney,
(19:50):
let's take a quick break. And so when we left off,
we had a laid the groundwork for what it was
like for women working at Disney in the nineteen thirties
and early nineteen forties, and essentially you were relegated to
the ink and paint department. But there were some notable
(20:13):
names who broke through that celluloid ceiling. Yeah, so we
have Bianca Majolie, who was Walt Disney's story departments first
female employee. She came up with the idea for Elmer Elephant,
which was sort of the precursor to Dumbo that was
(20:34):
back in nineteen thirty six, and it's sort of credited
as I mean, Walt Disney was totally enamored with the
idea of talking about how her story, all the humor
of her story was really grounded in this heartwarming, kind
of almost serious story, and that's what made the humor
not seem brittle or fragile, but actually heartwarming. Really Yeah, yeah,
(20:59):
and uh. In addition to the incon paint department, the
story department was another one where, even though it didn't
say so in the Disney brochure, there were more opportunities
for women to jump on board because what was surprise
kind of at Bianca's idea to humanize this elephant. It
(21:20):
was like an angle of storytelling that seemed particularly female
to him, like, oh, well, of course a woman will
go in and, you know, and and make something very
very tender and kind, and so that's that's a nice
element to add to these stories that we're trying to tell. Um.
But then there's also Sylvia Moberley Holland, who first was
working as a sketch artist at Universal and then joined
(21:42):
on at Disney in Night, and she eventually led the
story team for the Waltz of the Flowers in Fantasia,
And that was something that was interesting for me to
learn that I didn't realize about the animation process. Is
that a lot of unlike a film with people in it,
where you have this actress playing the role of this
(22:06):
throughout the film. When it comes to animation, the animators
are credited with, you know, maybe specific characters, but also
just sequences in the film. It's not like you have
one person doing one major thing throughout the entire movie.
So it might not sound like a big deal that
Mobilely Holland just led the story team for this Waltz
(22:27):
of the Flowers, but that was very significant. I mean,
Phantasia was a massive undertaking for them as well absolutely,
I mean it is pretty intense. I mean Fantasia might
have Moda scared me as a kid. I did not
get Fantasia as a child. I was like, this is
if I had known what trippy meant. I was thinking,
this is really trippy, like Mommy is a bad dream. Okay,
(22:49):
Well then you have Redda Scott who I think, um,
I like. I like her her pluck, I guess because
she was assumed to be She's very tiny, tiny person, blonde,
curly hair, freckles, very happy with a glint in her eye.
People said she was the one who was responsible for
(23:11):
the scary, vicious hunting dogs in Bamby. And when some
of the dude animators saw these dogs, they were like,
there's no way it. Chick did this, Like I'm sure
it was some burly man over the animation department. Nope,
it was smiley little Retta. Yeah. And it was those
hunting dogs that got their attention and eventually got her
(23:32):
the promotion into animation because she was first hired on
with Disney again in the story department in Night, but
in Bamby, she became Disney's first credited female animator on
a feature film, and so whenever you hear about women
at Disney, the history of women in animation at Disney,
(23:54):
Redda Scott comes up over and over again. I mean,
she is the one that you hear really breaking through
that celluloid feeling because she was up there with, I mean,
alongside those nine old men animating, not just doing the
in between work, not just doing the inking and painting.
So we also have Mary Blair, who, along with her
husband Lee, worked at Disney. She started in nineteen forty
(24:18):
and did some art for Dumbo and then moved on
to serving as art supervisor and color stylist for the
film's Salutos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland,
and Peter Pan. Yeah. I mean Mary Blair, probably of
all the women of this time and I mean and
even up to contemporary Disney, has been one of, if
(24:40):
not the most influential because it was really her art
aesthetic that put Disney like, gave Disney animation a little
bit more of a modernist flair. And through September, the
Walt Disney Museum is honoring her with an exhibit called
Magic Color Flair. The World of Mary Blair and the
(25:02):
Museum explains that quote of all his artists, this female
artist was Walt's favorite, and he allowed her to have
as significant an impact on postwar Disney style as Albert
heard her had in the nineteen thirties, and they go
on to talk about how her concept paintings inspired and
influenced the look and style of all of the South
(25:22):
American film She had actually traveled to South America with
Walt Um as part of sort of a propaganda mission
via FDR's Good Neighbor Policy UM. So it was sort
of like visual sourcing to go down there, and so
that influenced the movies like Slutos Amigos and The Three
Caballeros um. But it was also her aesthetic that she
(25:44):
brought into Cinderella. Alison wonder Land and Peter Panaman think
about those movies, how distinctive they look, and that is
Mary Blair. And isn't she the one who Walt made
the comment about Mary knows colors that I've never even
thought of, Like she she has a different eye from
the rest of us. And it was that same aesthetic
(26:06):
that ended up influencing Say what you will about this,
but it's a small world for the nine sixty five
New York's World Fair. I'm sorry. I know the song
isn't everyone's head now, but when you think about Disney attractions,
even though yes, that song is oh god, yeah, and
it is now in my head, um, but as an attraction,
(26:27):
it's almost timeless, like we still associate it so much
with Disney, although I don't know, maybe it's all Pirates
of the Caribbean now, yeah, I I would have no idea.
I don't like crowds, and I don't like sticky things,
and I feel like everything at theme parks is sticky,
too much juice and cotton candy. But okay, so we
(26:50):
are talking a lot about Disney, and I think we
we can move forward now into the modern day animation
landscape bea US. I feel like it's getting better, even
though there still is a huge gender gap and kind
of a gap in a perception about what women can do. Yeah.
(27:10):
One of the most challenging aspects of this podcast topic
was that finding sources on women and animation were surprisingly sparse,
even though if you look at cal Arts, which is
the premier animation school in the US, like, if you
want to be an animator, you go to CAL arts
and the animation students are you know, as fifty women
(27:34):
men and yet if you look at the Animation Guild
only of its members are female. But that might have
something to do with women, at least according to Linda Semenski,
who was Cartoon Networks VP of Original Animation. According to her,
women are likelier to pursue independent rather than big studio animation. Yeah,
(27:57):
and I mean part of that, if I had to guess,
would have to do with the fact that a lot
of women traditionally haven't been in the higher ranks of
animation studios from the get go, as we've seen. And
so when you have a setup like that in any industry,
I feel like people who are generally marginalized are more
likely to go sort of that independent kokie creative route. Yeah.
(28:19):
And before I forget, I just want to mention that
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently,
Professor blast Off, and they were interviewing animator Sarah Pocock,
who if you are a fan of Cosmos hosted by
Neil de grass Tyson, she does all of the animation
for that and I thought of her when I was
(28:42):
looking at the animation from the episode of Cosmos in
which he highlights, you know, unsung women in science, and
I thought of Sarah Pocock and the fact that this
was a woman in animation doing these animations about unsung women,
and how you know, it was just kind of all time.
Then your headaches floated with joy into the cosmos. Yes,
(29:03):
it is true. Um. But Marge Dean, who's the co
president of Women in Animation, was recently talking about this
issue in two thousand thirteen and and the question was,
you know, is their gender gap in animation? Is there
a lack of women at the top, And she basically said, yes,
absolutely there is. And the reason she gave for it
(29:25):
is she says, I think it comes partly from cultural
assumptions that have been passed down that think women are
not creative, smart or funny, or because women aren't encouraged
to take the artistic lead. Or maybe it's because the
folks in charge don't try to find women to fill
creative roles. It's not a priority for them to rectify
the imbalance. It's any and all of those things. So
(29:48):
it sounds like we still have a lot of nineteen
thirties Disney mentality still afloat in the industry, but there's
definitely progress being made despite hiccu, like the two thousand
eleven incident with Brenda Chapman and the movie Brave. Right,
so we all know Brave with the amazing redheaded lead
(30:10):
character Merita Um. But yeah, Brenda Chapman was the first
woman to serve as head of story on a Disney film,
which was The Lion King, and she spent eight years
at DreamWorks Animation, where she was one of three directors
on the Prince of Egypt before moving to Pixar. But
when she was working on Brave, she ended up getting
(30:31):
fired from directing it, and which is kind of a
bummer considering that Brave was an idea that she had
been working on for about six years and it was
inspired by her daughter, so it seemed like a very
personal project. Maybe it was so personal that it got
in the way of the work, who knows, But her
getting pushed off to the side definitely cause sparked a
(30:54):
lot of conversation about the state of women and animation
in Big Hollywood, even though she still received a co
directing credit. So when they got the Oscar, she also
got an Oscar. But it certainly you know it didn't
make animation or Pixar particularly look any better because Pixar
had also gotten some flak for it's under representation of
(31:17):
just strong female characters in general on screen, and also
the roles of women behind the camera as well. Yeah,
we'll speaking more about Pixar. The same thing happened to
Jan Pinkava, who was directing Rattatui, which came out in
two thousand and seven before Brad Bird came in and
took it over and ended up winning an Oscar. Yeah,
I didn't know that about Rattatui, and I love that
(31:37):
film and it's very cute, a little a little bit
of a bummer, but as I mean, another reason why
we are talking about women in animation right now is
because Jennifer Lee, who directed Frozen, is getting so much
press right now because Frozen is now the first movie
animated or not directed by a woman to earn one
(32:02):
billion dollars. So essentially everybody's saying, hey, look, Jennifer Lee
did it with Frozen of film that is starring like
two female protagonists, starring as though they're real women. Um,
but although I'm sure they are very real to a
lot of girls who watched the film. But essentially they're
they're saying that, hey, okay, Jennifer Lee can do this
(32:24):
then and and make a billion with a B dollars
off this movie, then the sky can be the limit
surely for women in animation. And she's also not the
first woman to make her mark in terms of box
office returns on an animated film. That's right. Back in eleven,
(32:44):
Jennifer you Nelson was in charge of Kung Fu Panda two, which,
after making six hundred forty five million dollars worldwide, was
until Jennifer Lee came along, the highest grossing movie to
be directed by a woman, and in an interview, Nelson
was talking about how like, yeah, I'm a woman in animation.
(33:06):
I just puttered along doing my thing, and I didn't
really pay any heed to the gender imbalanced thing. Yeah,
and at the time too, she also became the first
woman to ever direct an animated feature for a major
studio by herself, So unlike, for instance, Chapman co directing
Prince of Egypt, this was Jennifer you Nelson on her own,
(33:27):
and she had worked on Kung Fu Panda one Part
one and the head of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg actually hand
picked her out of that crew to lead up Kung
Fu Panda too, because apparently Katzenberg loves quote working with
strong women like he is all about having women at
(33:47):
the top in DreamWorks Animation. It's sort of um. He
actually called out Disney in a quote to The Hollywood
Reporter on a story about how eight ferent of DreamWorks
animation producers or women in and a lot of their
sea level leadership also women. He said, historically the animation
industry was completely dominated by men, Disney, the Nine Old Men.
(34:10):
It was a male world until recently the whole field
of engineering software technology was also dominated by men. It's changing,
and it's changing rapidly, especially at our place, where almost
every director of our films as a woman, and all
the female directors directed at dream Works. Oh and excuse me,
that was him talking to the l a times. Nonetheless,
(34:31):
a pretty incredible quote to hear from someone at that level,
basically calling out Disney and the Nine Old Men and saying, hey,
you know what I'm doing a little differently, and then
he drops the mic for the inking pen. But I wonder, though,
whether the environment for women working at Disney is different
than women working at DreamWorks. Whether that trickles down to
(34:52):
the day to day process at all, I couldn't find.
And maybe it's just because Disney, I'm sure, is very
good with their communications and sort of their their message
public messaging about what it's like to work inside the company.
I didn't find any insider reports on how much the
(35:14):
company had progressed from the days when women would have
been relegated to the nunnery of ink and paint, Whether
they're are, whether they are a lot more gender blind
than they used to be. I'm sure they are at
least somewhat. It has to be somewhat better. Yeah, but um,
you know, I know we should never read the comments ever,
(35:36):
but I was reading the comments under some of these
stories about women in animation today and there were a
lot of people who were saying, like, what is so
important about the push to get women animators up in
front of young girls? Like who cares? And I'm like, really,
I feel like you you know how to answer this
question if you think about it, and it's it's going
(35:58):
to take people like Jeffrey Atsenburg and like high powered,
top tier directors like Jennifer you Nelson getting up in
front of people being successful, being famous and doing it
to show girls that they can do it too. But
also more importantly or not than that, is showing people
who are in the box office, who are in charge
(36:19):
of raking in the dough from all of these films,
that women can successfully make a high grossing movie. Yeah.
I mean it's money that matters. Yeah, it's money that matters.
And and it just seems like Jeffrey Catsenberg is willing
to put his money where his mouth is. Yeah. And
I mean even going back though to those early days
of Disney with snow White. You mentioned earlier in the
(36:41):
podcast the blush coloring on snow White's rosy cheeks. That
was the little brain child of one of the women
in InCom Paint, I believe, who said, Oh, she looks
so pale. She needs a little bit of blushing her cheeks.
Sounds like my mother. You look so pale, you need
(37:02):
blush her you needs she needs a little bit of blusher.
But that's why, in a way, to diversity is a
good thing, because you bring in different perspectives and hopefully
offer a better rounded story for your audience. That is
a noble goal, as is a good flush on the cheeks. Exactly.
You need a good flush on because that's hey, that's
how people got hired at Disney back in the day.
(37:24):
So yeah, I mean, and and if anything, I hope
that we've done our part a little bit to shine
some light on those women, so many of them who
helped bring those early Disney stories to life, because it's
such a massive undertaking. And while yeah, the nine old men,
(37:45):
what did a cool cracker jack group of men, but
there were you know, a hundred women behind them, inking
and filling in and tracing and painting and hoping that
they're Angora sweater fluff didn't get on any of the cells, right,
which that did? Yeah, I mean, that happened. So now,
I'm sure there are some Disney buffs listening who have
(38:07):
a lot of history to fill us in on, because this,
by no means was a history of Disney, nor was
it intended to be. But if you have some pertinent
Disney insights to give us who want to hear from you. Also,
women animators listening, I know there are some of you
out there who are listening right now, let us know
what it's like for you. Is there still this uh,
(38:29):
do you sense a gender gap at all? In the profession.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot Com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. So I
(38:52):
gotta let her hear from Amy about our military spouses episode.
She writes, I'm a huge fan of the podcast and
as an army y of three years, your latest episode
about military spouses was particularly interesting. You nailed it when
discussing spouses being un or under employed. When I got
my teaching degree, I never thought that finding a job
(39:12):
would be an issue because everybody needs teachers, right But
after moving to our latest post, it's been a struggle.
I actually found a job that I love, working for
a university, but it's only part time and offers no
room for growth. So I'm still sending out resumes and
going on interviews hoping to find a job as a teacher,
even though the job market is hyper saturated. Here. Also,
I wanted to add that I'm thankful you included information
(39:33):
about reintegration the time after deployment when soldiers return home.
After my husband's first deployment, we really struggled. Everyone else
sees the joyful tears of a homecoming and think it's
happily ever after for those in the marriage. That happy
ever after takes a lot of work. We had vastly
different life experiences and learning to just be took time.
Throw in two moves in less than a year, time
(39:55):
apart for field training, in schools and the usual unpredictable
challenges of life, and it was ugly. We finally got
into a rhythm and my husband was sent back to
Afghanistan in February of this year. The upside is that
when he comes home this time, I'll have a better
idea of what to expect. Thanks so much for delicately
handling a potentially loaded topic. This episode was chock full
(40:15):
of good stuff and really respectful. So thanks Amy, and
good luck with your husband's deployment. Best wishes for his
safe return home. And I have a letter here from
Anne who says I was a military spouse down in
Fort Stuart, Georgia for about twelve years. My husband got
out of the military and we moved back to South Dakota.
We have had to deal with numerous deployments overseas, three
(40:38):
times to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. Just about everything
you spoke about rang true to me. I also had
to deal with alienation from many of the spouses as
well because I was one of the few who had
no children. Most activities are centered around the children, so
when you don't have any, you don't get invited to
anything except for maybe once or twice a year. The
rules were that everyone was supposed to be included in things,
(40:58):
but this rarely happened. The health care benefits and financial
aid in the military were extremely helpful many times, especially
for a newlywed couple just starting out on their own.
It could provide stability, learning, responsibility, and independence from family.
For those things I was grateful. Due to the constant
danger of him being deployed kept me from wanting to
have children in case anything happened. I lost a parent
(41:18):
at a young age and didn't wish for my child
to go through that. Luckily, we got through everything and
he is safe and we are expecting our first child,
a daughter, in August. One of the things that got
me through the last few deployments was the numerous podcasts
at how staff Works. Thank you, guys, all of you
so much for helping keep my mind busy and from
stressing out too much, So thank you and and I'm
(41:39):
glad you guys are doing well, and congratulations on your baby,
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff
at Discovery dot com is our email address, and to
find links to all of our social media's, videos, podcasts,
and blogs, there's one place to go, and it's stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For are on this
(42:00):
and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot
com
Hey, this is Annie, and welcome to stuff. I've never
told you a protection of I heart radios how stuff works.
As I said a past episode ago, time very very
confused by time. Right now, Um, I am probably in
(00:29):
Disney World again as this drops. Yes, which I unfortunately
did not realize that. Um, we would be going for
work like barely two months ago. And also at the ride,
the new Star Wars ride will not be open, which
is one of the whole reasons I wanted to go.
(00:50):
You should be like run in protest with a protest line.
You think I should run with it. So I'm running
a race. Um well, and that's part of the problem.
Problem is that you have to sign up for those
races way in advance, right, And I think it was
supposed to be open, but it's not. I mean I'm
not I'm going to Disney. It's gonna be fun, but
(01:12):
there's a part of me that's just gonna be thinking
the ride, the cool ride that will be open like
less than a month from now. Um. But because of that,
because that is on my mind right now, we wanted
to talk about this classic episode that Kristen Caroline did
around the Women behind Disney. Yes, Um, which is something
(01:36):
when I was a kid, I really wanted, I actually
really want to do special effects specifically, but also animation. UM.
And then I discovered that my drawing capabilities, well they
were lacking. Yeah, I can't draw. Yeah, the US people
draw penguins. And then people were like, what's that? And
I'm like, okay, I can't draw penguins. Apparently, Well, I've
(01:58):
told the story on era I carved it. I was
supposed to be a horse, but my art teacher thought
it was a polar bear. And so I was like, yes,
a polar bear. And that's not to say, you know,
if your hard work and get you certainly further than
that level of talent that I displayed or that you displayed. UM.
(02:22):
And also what we're going to talk about are what
what this classic episode is going to look about, look
about look at let's look about um is other aspects
of of animating, because it's more than just drawing and
UM Disney's army of animation girls. So we hope you
(02:43):
enjoy this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told
You from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm christ and I'm Caroline, and we're
talking about women animators at Disney today. And then the
(03:07):
idea happened very much by accident one evening on Twitter,
when I had posted on stuff mom never told you
dot tumbler dot com our Tumbler account this nineteen thirty
eight rejection letter that has been spread around the internet.
A lot of you listening have probably seen it. But
(03:27):
it's this form letter that Disney sent out to women
who applied to be animators, basically saying and we'll read
it verbatim in just a minute, but it basically says, uh, sorry,
women don't do really any of the creative work, so
good luck. Yeah, it was harsh, like if I had
received that letter, I would have been so disheartened. But
(03:48):
soon after I posted it on Tumbler, got a tweet
from a woman who wrote her Masters on animation history,
and she pointed out that while yes, this is clearly
a form letter that Disney actually sent out, there's a
lot of misconceptions about women's roles at Classic Disney, talking
(04:09):
about back in the day of Bambi, Dumbo, sleeping Beauty,
snow white, and she said that that was pretty much
standard at animation studios in the nineteen thirties period, and
so I decided, hey, you know what, this sounds like
pretty good podcast topic. It's a great podcast topic. I
was definitely interested in reading all about how these women
(04:33):
who were in the industry and the roles they play.
I mean, these women worked so hard, the women who
were actually hired by Disney who loved the idea of
working for Disney. People both men and women who worked
under him were just enamored of the the idea of
even working at Disney or Disney's as they called it,
(04:54):
like it was a department store. Yeah. Uh. And it's
actually good timing that we're talking about this, because not
too long ago, Meryl Streep raised a lot of Hollywood
eyebrows when she was giving this sort of honorary speech
for Emma Thompson in her work in Saving Mr. Banks,
the recent film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney, and
(05:17):
you know, Disney kind of made it in a way
to personify Walt Disney. But in the speech that Meryl
Streep is giving at the National Board of Review Awards ceremony,
she calls Walt Disney a gender bigot and a lot
of other things that are too kind, and the evidence
that she uses. Though, to back up this claim is
(05:38):
a quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball, who allegedly said
that Walt Disney quote didn't trust women or cats, right,
And she also cited that thirty rejection letter as her reasoning. Um,
but yeah, Disney's attitude. It's people a lot of people
(05:59):
on the internet, um, both scholarly and not, argue about
Disney's attitude, attitude towards women. You know, was he this
gender biggett, as Meryl Streep says, Was he just a
product of his times? You know? Was he just afraid
of losing his workforce to marriage and babies. There's a
whole lot of back and forth about it. So we
also just wanted to take a minute, though, to shine
a light on all of these women animators who rarely
(06:22):
get any credit for these classic Disney films that were
probably a part of a lot of our childhoods. So
let's start off with that ninety eight Disney rejection letter.
What exactly did it say? So basically, this form letter
was telling the woman who had applied that, Okay, so
(06:42):
you can't, um, you can't be a major animator. Girls
are not considered for the training school, and then it
went on to explain that the work that was open
to women specifically consisted of tracing the characters on clear
celluloid sheets with India ink and filling in the trace
things on the reverse side with paint according to directions.
So how hard could that be? Right? But when we
(07:07):
were reading this Vanity Fair article about women at Disney
in the early days, I mean, these are women who
worked hours and hours and hours doing a lot of
the what was called in between our work, so a
lot of the movement, a lot of the in between
things between all the big action, showing what Goofy was doing,
or showing what Bambi was doing. And like that Twitter
(07:28):
follower pointed out this was standard policy at animation studios
at the time, which is a little bit nuts when
you consider that in the history of animation. It is
actually a woman named Lotty Rainager who's credited with directing
one of the first feature length animated films in ninety six,
and it's called The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, and her
(07:50):
animation is incredible. I mean she she actually uses rather
than drawing everything out as we would think of in
a Disney film, she actually cut out still a wets
that she would move around on screen and it was
it was insane what she was doing. And yet in
the nineteen thirties, oh no, no, no, women just know
(08:11):
you stick to tracing and that's it. Right. Yet, it
is interesting to look at that nine blip on the
overall timeline of animation because okay, well, so obviously women
are involved in this from the get go, and they're
interested in it, and they can do it and they
can do an awesome job at it. But we need
to give you some context. So let's do a brief
rundown of like a Disney timeline. So the Walt Disney
(08:33):
Company itself was started by brothers Walt and Roy in
nineteen three out in Los Angeles. Two years later Disney
opens their famous Hyperion Avenue studio location, and back then
it was all dudes as photos from the time a test.
And two years after that we have the first of
(08:54):
as Kristen pointed out, the Nine Old Men, which were
basically uh Disney's main animators. Les Clark hired on as
an in between er, and as we said, that's the
people who draw all the stuff that appears between the
normal action that is drawn by a lead animator, and
in the mascot of all mascots, Mickey Mouse is born.
(09:15):
So fast forward to seven and you have the release
of Disney's first full length animated feature, Snow White and
the Seven Dwarves, and all of the supervising animation is
being done by those nine Old Men. And usually when
you hear about Classic Disney, and you hear about the
animations a lot of times up until recently at least,
(09:37):
it's been the Nine Old Men who deservedly so get
a lot of credit for it. Um inside note the
reason why they were called the Nine Old Men. That
was Walt Disney's joking nickname reference to them, riffing on
how the Supreme Court at the time was referred to,
I think by like FDR or something as the nine
(09:58):
Old Men, because hey, gus was nine in nineties, and
of course there were no women in the Supreme Court.
Uh So, behind though that production of Snow White in
the Seven Dwarves, you have this almost army of these
women who were referred to as Waltz girls, who were
(10:20):
doing all of that in between our work, all the tracing,
all of the inking, a lot of the coloring and painting,
essentially taking these incredible drawings that the nine old men
would have been making and really bringing them to life
on those celluloids for the screen. Yeah, and I think
it's interesting the description of of why and how all
(10:40):
these women were recruited. I think it's interesting how it
kind of compares to World War Two when we hear
about women having to enter the workforce because there were
so many gaps left by men. I mean, obviously it's
not the same thing, but Walt Disney needed such a
big workforce to animate these these cutting edge knew never
before seeing types of films that he was like, we've
(11:02):
got to get some labor in here, and so he did.
He began recruiting these animation girls, many of whom had
not gone to college, but they were trained in sort
of animation classes. They sort of got, you know, trial
by fire when they were hired. And when you look
at the Disney animation system sort of at large, talking
about training, it was sort of almost like an apprentice
(11:25):
master set up going on um but for the women
where they would get kind of thrown in like, hey,
you look like you're young and healthy and can handle
long hours. Come on board and learn how to ink
and paint and watercolor. They might have gotten classes, but
they wouldn't have gotten the same types of classes that
the men got. And the reason why they were immediately
funneled into ink and paint was because the inking training
(11:47):
was sort of the base level that took half the
time of animation training. And in that Vanity Fair oral
history of the women working on Snow White and particular,
some said that, I mean, they would have to bring
in some examples of their artwork, but some of them
said that they were hired simply because they looked healthy,
(12:11):
because Walt knew that it was going to be such
a grueling process that they were going to need to
be able to work insane hours because when you think
about it, this animation process back then was so time consuming.
So for instance, one girl could do eight to ten
cells per hour. That means that one hundred of these
(12:36):
employees could produce about one minute of film every day.
That's how tedious this whole inking and painting process was. Yeah,
and so at the height of Snow White production, because
you have to think, I mean, the context of this
is that Snow White was the first thing of its kind,
the first animated feature that was more than an hour,
(12:57):
and then involved all sorts of techniques that they were
almost developing on the fly. How do we give her
a better blush to her cheeks? Developing different techniques like that,
and so um. These people, both men and women, were
working eight hour work weeks. There was one woman who
was describing her life during that time, and she would
go home after a long day, walk into the closet
(13:19):
to take her clothes off, and it would suddenly occur
to her, am I coming or going? Am I getting
dressed for work? Or am I coming home from work?
Sometimes they would just take pillows to work, not only
to soften the hard wooden chair they were sitting in,
but so that they could take naps. Yeah, and just
to give you a sense of what exactly they were doing.
A Disney employment brochure at the time said, all inking
(13:40):
and painting of cellul Lloyd's and all tracing done in
the studio is performed exclusively by a large staff of
girls known as the inkers and painters. This work, exacting
in character, calls for great skill in the handling of
pen and brush, And again it goes on to state,
this is the only department in the Disney studio open
to women artists, right and one and again another woman
(14:03):
who was interviewed in that Vanity fair piece was talking
about how I did not smoke or drink or bold
during this time because you couldn't have your hands shake.
But you also couldn't have your lovely and glora will
sweater drifting like pieces of fuzz anywhere. And so the
women started having to wear aprons and so they didn't
(14:24):
get finger smudges on anything. They had to wear these white,
these thin white gloves and just cut off the fingertips
of their drawing hand. So, as reports go from the time,
if you were to just wander into the inking and
painting section, you would be like, wow, look at all
these high class dames working with their pin and ink.
And it's because though there were so many very young,
(14:47):
usually well dressed, attractive women in the ink and paint
department that it became known as the Nunnery. Because down
the line, after the release of Snow White and when
Disney opened it's new, bigger and grander studios, Walt kind
of drew a line basically saying, hey, all you male
(15:07):
animators need to stay out of the Nunnery. There's too
much canoodling going on. Because these women would also talk
about how in the brief breaks that they would get
from these eighty five hour workweeks of inking and painting
and tracing, et cetera, they would all go out onto
the front lawn and they would sometimes meet up secretly
with their animator bows underneath trees and they I don't
(15:30):
know if they'd smooch or not. That's unscandalous for the time. Yeah,
the one one guy described it as being like high school,
where you would go out and a lot of There
were a lot of marriages that came out of the
Disney animation department, to the point where a competitor in
their like materials to try to attract employees even said
that like, uh, you know, Disney Disney over there with
(15:53):
all their office romances, they're not getting enough work done
because they were so famous for having all of these
people get married, which makes sense when you're spending too
many freaking intense hours with people. Well, and then there's
a question too of whether or not Walt Disney took
advantage of the fact that he had dozens upon dozens
of very young women working for him. And there are
(16:15):
some rumors that, yeah, absolutely, there would have been some canoodling.
I keep saying canoodling on Walt Disney's couch. But there
were other women who reported back, No, No, we always
thought of him as Uncle Walt. He was very professional.
We never would have crossed that line. Well, he married
an animator, I mean he married one of the one
of the girls quote unquote from the early days, back
(16:37):
when like everybody was like cheers, everybody knew your name.
And while Disney, though definitely has his controversies involving his
thoughts on race, gender, etcetera, there are some quotes that
are typically trotted out in defense of his position on women.
So you know, we have to we have to mention
(16:58):
this one. He said, if a woman can do the work, well,
she's worth as much as a man. The girl artists
have the right to expect the same chances for advancement
as men, and I honestly believe they may eventually, thank you,
contribute something to this business that men never could or would.
And this he was apparently saying to the male artists
(17:19):
working on Dumbo. And many years later, in nineteen fifty nine,
Walt was quoted as saying that women are the best
judges of anything. We turn out. Their taste is very important.
They are the theatergoers, They're the ones who dragged them
in in if the women like it, to heck with
the men, which sounds like you know, advertising strategy, baseline
(17:39):
advertising strategy today where people are like, if you target
the women who are control of the pocketbooks at home,
then the men will follow exactly. And that's what those
two quotes are. You know, a couple of reasons why
when Meryl Street made the comment about him being a
gender bigot, they took offense saying, well, no, he actually
was on record is saying that, you know, women could
(18:01):
be anything that they wanted to be in Disney, but
breaking through the celluloid ceiling was no joke. I mean,
you can say that it's a product of his time,
but nevertheless, it's still kind of on the mark that
there was a specific role that they were allowed to do,
and it was it was kind of limited to that point.
But it seems like once he saw the work that
(18:23):
these women were doing and he spotted some of the
talent among them, there were a few emphasis on a
few opportunities for advancement, particularly when World War two happens because,
just like in pretty much all other realms of employment
in the US, a bunch of men leave and that
(18:46):
opens up jobs for women. And so in in fact,
the inc and Paint department employees were invited to submit
Donald Duck drawings for an animation department consideration, and of
that three women were chosen to be trained as in
between ers and background artists during World War Two, and
there were a number of other women too who had
(19:08):
been working, for instance, on Snow White, who were put
on government funded Disney jobs. There was a lot of
Disney pro us propaganda that was coming out at the time,
and so there were these kind of top secret animation
missions that some of the women interviewed in Vanity Fair
(19:29):
were involved with, but a lot of it was very
shrouded in secrecy, and half the time they didn't really
know what they were working on. Anyway, Yeah, turned out
to be Donald Duck making fun of Hitler. Yeah, everybody
plays a part, I guess. So before we introduce you
to some of these celluloid shattering ladies who worked at Disney,
(19:50):
let's take a quick break. And so when we left off,
we had a laid the groundwork for what it was
like for women working at Disney in the nineteen thirties
and early nineteen forties, and essentially you were relegated to
the ink and paint department. But there were some notable
(20:13):
names who broke through that celluloid ceiling. Yeah, so we
have Bianca Majolie, who was Walt Disney's story departments first
female employee. She came up with the idea for Elmer Elephant,
which was sort of the precursor to Dumbo that was
(20:34):
back in nineteen thirty six, and it's sort of credited
as I mean, Walt Disney was totally enamored with the
idea of talking about how her story, all the humor
of her story was really grounded in this heartwarming, kind
of almost serious story, and that's what made the humor
not seem brittle or fragile, but actually heartwarming. Really Yeah, yeah,
(20:59):
and uh. In addition to the incon paint department, the
story department was another one where, even though it didn't
say so in the Disney brochure, there were more opportunities
for women to jump on board because what was surprise
kind of at Bianca's idea to humanize this elephant. It
(21:20):
was like an angle of storytelling that seemed particularly female
to him, like, oh, well, of course a woman will
go in and, you know, and and make something very
very tender and kind, and so that's that's a nice
element to add to these stories that we're trying to tell. Um.
But then there's also Sylvia Moberley Holland, who first was
working as a sketch artist at Universal and then joined
(21:42):
on at Disney in Night, and she eventually led the
story team for the Waltz of the Flowers in Fantasia,
And that was something that was interesting for me to
learn that I didn't realize about the animation process. Is
that a lot of unlike a film with people in it,
where you have this actress playing the role of this
(22:06):
throughout the film. When it comes to animation, the animators
are credited with, you know, maybe specific characters, but also
just sequences in the film. It's not like you have
one person doing one major thing throughout the entire movie.
So it might not sound like a big deal that
Mobilely Holland just led the story team for this Waltz
(22:27):
of the Flowers, but that was very significant. I mean,
Phantasia was a massive undertaking for them as well absolutely,
I mean it is pretty intense. I mean Fantasia might
have Moda scared me as a kid. I did not
get Fantasia as a child. I was like, this is
if I had known what trippy meant. I was thinking,
this is really trippy, like Mommy is a bad dream. Okay,
(22:49):
Well then you have Redda Scott who I think, um,
I like. I like her her pluck, I guess because
she was assumed to be She's very tiny, tiny person, blonde,
curly hair, freckles, very happy with a glint in her eye.
People said she was the one who was responsible for
(23:11):
the scary, vicious hunting dogs in Bamby. And when some
of the dude animators saw these dogs, they were like,
there's no way it. Chick did this, Like I'm sure
it was some burly man over the animation department. Nope,
it was smiley little Retta. Yeah. And it was those
hunting dogs that got their attention and eventually got her
(23:32):
the promotion into animation because she was first hired on
with Disney again in the story department in Night, but
in Bamby, she became Disney's first credited female animator on
a feature film, and so whenever you hear about women
at Disney, the history of women in animation at Disney,
(23:54):
Redda Scott comes up over and over again. I mean,
she is the one that you hear really breaking through
that celluloid feeling because she was up there with, I mean,
alongside those nine old men animating, not just doing the
in between work, not just doing the inking and painting.
So we also have Mary Blair, who, along with her
husband Lee, worked at Disney. She started in nineteen forty
(24:18):
and did some art for Dumbo and then moved on
to serving as art supervisor and color stylist for the
film's Salutos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland,
and Peter Pan. Yeah. I mean Mary Blair, probably of
all the women of this time and I mean and
even up to contemporary Disney, has been one of, if
(24:40):
not the most influential because it was really her art
aesthetic that put Disney like, gave Disney animation a little
bit more of a modernist flair. And through September, the
Walt Disney Museum is honoring her with an exhibit called
Magic Color Flair. The World of Mary Blair and the
(25:02):
Museum explains that quote of all his artists, this female
artist was Walt's favorite, and he allowed her to have
as significant an impact on postwar Disney style as Albert
heard her had in the nineteen thirties, and they go
on to talk about how her concept paintings inspired and
influenced the look and style of all of the South
(25:22):
American film She had actually traveled to South America with
Walt Um as part of sort of a propaganda mission
via FDR's Good Neighbor Policy UM. So it was sort
of like visual sourcing to go down there, and so
that influenced the movies like Slutos Amigos and The Three
Caballeros um. But it was also her aesthetic that she
(25:44):
brought into Cinderella. Alison wonder Land and Peter Panaman think
about those movies, how distinctive they look, and that is
Mary Blair. And isn't she the one who Walt made
the comment about Mary knows colors that I've never even
thought of, Like she she has a different eye from
the rest of us. And it was that same aesthetic
(26:06):
that ended up influencing Say what you will about this,
but it's a small world for the nine sixty five
New York's World Fair. I'm sorry. I know the song
isn't everyone's head now, but when you think about Disney attractions,
even though yes, that song is oh god, yeah, and
it is now in my head, um, but as an attraction,
(26:27):
it's almost timeless, like we still associate it so much
with Disney, although I don't know, maybe it's all Pirates
of the Caribbean now, yeah, I I would have no idea.
I don't like crowds, and I don't like sticky things,
and I feel like everything at theme parks is sticky,
too much juice and cotton candy. But okay, so we
(26:50):
are talking a lot about Disney, and I think we
we can move forward now into the modern day animation
landscape bea US. I feel like it's getting better, even
though there still is a huge gender gap and kind
of a gap in a perception about what women can do. Yeah.
(27:10):
One of the most challenging aspects of this podcast topic
was that finding sources on women and animation were surprisingly sparse,
even though if you look at cal Arts, which is
the premier animation school in the US, like, if you
want to be an animator, you go to CAL arts
and the animation students are you know, as fifty women
(27:34):
men and yet if you look at the Animation Guild
only of its members are female. But that might have
something to do with women, at least according to Linda Semenski,
who was Cartoon Networks VP of Original Animation. According to her,
women are likelier to pursue independent rather than big studio animation. Yeah,
(27:57):
and I mean part of that, if I had to guess,
would have to do with the fact that a lot
of women traditionally haven't been in the higher ranks of
animation studios from the get go, as we've seen. And
so when you have a setup like that in any industry,
I feel like people who are generally marginalized are more
likely to go sort of that independent kokie creative route. Yeah.
(28:19):
And before I forget, I just want to mention that
I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts recently,
Professor blast Off, and they were interviewing animator Sarah Pocock,
who if you are a fan of Cosmos hosted by
Neil de grass Tyson, she does all of the animation
for that and I thought of her when I was
(28:42):
looking at the animation from the episode of Cosmos in
which he highlights, you know, unsung women in science, and
I thought of Sarah Pocock and the fact that this
was a woman in animation doing these animations about unsung women,
and how you know, it was just kind of all time.
Then your headaches floated with joy into the cosmos. Yes,
(29:03):
it is true. Um. But Marge Dean, who's the co
president of Women in Animation, was recently talking about this
issue in two thousand thirteen and and the question was,
you know, is their gender gap in animation? Is there
a lack of women at the top, And she basically said, yes,
absolutely there is. And the reason she gave for it
(29:25):
is she says, I think it comes partly from cultural
assumptions that have been passed down that think women are
not creative, smart or funny, or because women aren't encouraged
to take the artistic lead. Or maybe it's because the
folks in charge don't try to find women to fill
creative roles. It's not a priority for them to rectify
the imbalance. It's any and all of those things. So
(29:48):
it sounds like we still have a lot of nineteen
thirties Disney mentality still afloat in the industry, but there's
definitely progress being made despite hiccu, like the two thousand
eleven incident with Brenda Chapman and the movie Brave. Right,
so we all know Brave with the amazing redheaded lead
(30:10):
character Merita Um. But yeah, Brenda Chapman was the first
woman to serve as head of story on a Disney film,
which was The Lion King, and she spent eight years
at DreamWorks Animation, where she was one of three directors
on the Prince of Egypt before moving to Pixar. But
when she was working on Brave, she ended up getting
(30:31):
fired from directing it, and which is kind of a
bummer considering that Brave was an idea that she had
been working on for about six years and it was
inspired by her daughter, so it seemed like a very
personal project. Maybe it was so personal that it got
in the way of the work, who knows, But her
getting pushed off to the side definitely cause sparked a
(30:54):
lot of conversation about the state of women and animation
in Big Hollywood, even though she still received a co
directing credit. So when they got the Oscar, she also
got an Oscar. But it certainly you know it didn't
make animation or Pixar particularly look any better because Pixar
had also gotten some flak for it's under representation of
(31:17):
just strong female characters in general on screen, and also
the roles of women behind the camera as well. Yeah,
we'll speaking more about Pixar. The same thing happened to
Jan Pinkava, who was directing Rattatui, which came out in
two thousand and seven before Brad Bird came in and
took it over and ended up winning an Oscar. Yeah,
I didn't know that about Rattatui, and I love that
(31:37):
film and it's very cute, a little a little bit
of a bummer, but as I mean, another reason why
we are talking about women in animation right now is
because Jennifer Lee, who directed Frozen, is getting so much
press right now because Frozen is now the first movie
animated or not directed by a woman to earn one
(32:02):
billion dollars. So essentially everybody's saying, hey, look, Jennifer Lee
did it with Frozen of film that is starring like
two female protagonists, starring as though they're real women. Um,
but although I'm sure they are very real to a
lot of girls who watched the film. But essentially they're
they're saying that, hey, okay, Jennifer Lee can do this
(32:24):
then and and make a billion with a B dollars
off this movie, then the sky can be the limit
surely for women in animation. And she's also not the
first woman to make her mark in terms of box
office returns on an animated film. That's right. Back in eleven,
(32:44):
Jennifer you Nelson was in charge of Kung Fu Panda two, which,
after making six hundred forty five million dollars worldwide, was
until Jennifer Lee came along, the highest grossing movie to
be directed by a woman, and in an interview, Nelson
was talking about how like, yeah, I'm a woman in animation.
(33:06):
I just puttered along doing my thing, and I didn't
really pay any heed to the gender imbalanced thing. Yeah,
and at the time too, she also became the first
woman to ever direct an animated feature for a major
studio by herself, So unlike, for instance, Chapman co directing
Prince of Egypt, this was Jennifer you Nelson on her own,
(33:27):
and she had worked on Kung Fu Panda one Part
one and the head of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg actually hand
picked her out of that crew to lead up Kung
Fu Panda too, because apparently Katzenberg loves quote working with
strong women like he is all about having women at
(33:47):
the top in DreamWorks Animation. It's sort of um. He
actually called out Disney in a quote to The Hollywood
Reporter on a story about how eight ferent of DreamWorks
animation producers or women in and a lot of their
sea level leadership also women. He said, historically the animation
industry was completely dominated by men, Disney, the Nine Old Men.
(34:10):
It was a male world until recently the whole field
of engineering software technology was also dominated by men. It's changing,
and it's changing rapidly, especially at our place, where almost
every director of our films as a woman, and all
the female directors directed at dream Works. Oh and excuse me,
that was him talking to the l a times. Nonetheless,
(34:31):
a pretty incredible quote to hear from someone at that level,
basically calling out Disney and the Nine Old Men and saying, hey,
you know what I'm doing a little differently, and then
he drops the mic for the inking pen. But I wonder, though,
whether the environment for women working at Disney is different
than women working at DreamWorks. Whether that trickles down to
(34:52):
the day to day process at all, I couldn't find.
And maybe it's just because Disney, I'm sure, is very
good with their communications and sort of their their message
public messaging about what it's like to work inside the company.
I didn't find any insider reports on how much the
(35:14):
company had progressed from the days when women would have
been relegated to the nunnery of ink and paint, Whether
they're are, whether they are a lot more gender blind
than they used to be. I'm sure they are at
least somewhat. It has to be somewhat better. Yeah, but um,
you know, I know we should never read the comments ever,
(35:36):
but I was reading the comments under some of these
stories about women in animation today and there were a
lot of people who were saying, like, what is so
important about the push to get women animators up in
front of young girls? Like who cares? And I'm like, really,
I feel like you you know how to answer this
question if you think about it, and it's it's going
(35:58):
to take people like Jeffrey Atsenburg and like high powered,
top tier directors like Jennifer you Nelson getting up in
front of people being successful, being famous and doing it
to show girls that they can do it too. But
also more importantly or not than that, is showing people
who are in the box office, who are in charge
(36:19):
of raking in the dough from all of these films,
that women can successfully make a high grossing movie. Yeah.
I mean it's money that matters. Yeah, it's money that matters.
And and it just seems like Jeffrey Catsenberg is willing
to put his money where his mouth is. Yeah. And
I mean even going back though to those early days
of Disney with snow White. You mentioned earlier in the
(36:41):
podcast the blush coloring on snow White's rosy cheeks. That
was the little brain child of one of the women
in InCom Paint, I believe, who said, Oh, she looks
so pale. She needs a little bit of blushing her cheeks.
Sounds like my mother. You look so pale, you need
(37:02):
blush her you needs she needs a little bit of blusher.
But that's why, in a way, to diversity is a
good thing, because you bring in different perspectives and hopefully
offer a better rounded story for your audience. That is
a noble goal, as is a good flush on the cheeks. Exactly.
You need a good flush on because that's hey, that's
how people got hired at Disney back in the day.
(37:24):
So yeah, I mean, and and if anything, I hope
that we've done our part a little bit to shine
some light on those women, so many of them who
helped bring those early Disney stories to life, because it's
such a massive undertaking. And while yeah, the nine old men,
(37:45):
what did a cool cracker jack group of men, but
there were you know, a hundred women behind them, inking
and filling in and tracing and painting and hoping that
they're Angora sweater fluff didn't get on any of the cells, right,
which that did? Yeah, I mean, that happened. So now,
I'm sure there are some Disney buffs listening who have
(38:07):
a lot of history to fill us in on, because this,
by no means was a history of Disney, nor was
it intended to be. But if you have some pertinent
Disney insights to give us who want to hear from you. Also,
women animators listening, I know there are some of you
out there who are listening right now, let us know
what it's like for you. Is there still this uh,
(38:29):
do you sense a gender gap at all? In the profession.
Mom Stuff at Discovery dot Com is where you can
email us. You can also tweet us at mom Stuff
podcast or messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple
of messages to share with you right now. So I
(38:52):
gotta let her hear from Amy about our military spouses episode.
She writes, I'm a huge fan of the podcast and
as an army y of three years, your latest episode
about military spouses was particularly interesting. You nailed it when
discussing spouses being un or under employed. When I got
my teaching degree, I never thought that finding a job
(39:12):
would be an issue because everybody needs teachers, right But
after moving to our latest post, it's been a struggle.
I actually found a job that I love, working for
a university, but it's only part time and offers no
room for growth. So I'm still sending out resumes and
going on interviews hoping to find a job as a teacher,
even though the job market is hyper saturated. Here. Also,
I wanted to add that I'm thankful you included information
(39:33):
about reintegration the time after deployment when soldiers return home.
After my husband's first deployment, we really struggled. Everyone else
sees the joyful tears of a homecoming and think it's
happily ever after for those in the marriage. That happy
ever after takes a lot of work. We had vastly
different life experiences and learning to just be took time.
Throw in two moves in less than a year, time
(39:55):
apart for field training, in schools and the usual unpredictable
challenges of life, and it was ugly. We finally got
into a rhythm and my husband was sent back to
Afghanistan in February of this year. The upside is that
when he comes home this time, I'll have a better
idea of what to expect. Thanks so much for delicately
handling a potentially loaded topic. This episode was chock full
(40:15):
of good stuff and really respectful. So thanks Amy, and
good luck with your husband's deployment. Best wishes for his
safe return home. And I have a letter here from
Anne who says I was a military spouse down in
Fort Stuart, Georgia for about twelve years. My husband got
out of the military and we moved back to South Dakota.
We have had to deal with numerous deployments overseas, three
(40:38):
times to Iraq and twice to Afghanistan. Just about everything
you spoke about rang true to me. I also had
to deal with alienation from many of the spouses as
well because I was one of the few who had
no children. Most activities are centered around the children, so
when you don't have any, you don't get invited to
anything except for maybe once or twice a year. The
rules were that everyone was supposed to be included in things,
(40:58):
but this rarely happened. The health care benefits and financial
aid in the military were extremely helpful many times, especially
for a newlywed couple just starting out on their own.
It could provide stability, learning, responsibility, and independence from family.
For those things I was grateful. Due to the constant
danger of him being deployed kept me from wanting to
have children in case anything happened. I lost a parent
(41:18):
at a young age and didn't wish for my child
to go through that. Luckily, we got through everything and
he is safe and we are expecting our first child,
a daughter, in August. One of the things that got
me through the last few deployments was the numerous podcasts
at how staff Works. Thank you, guys, all of you
so much for helping keep my mind busy and from
stressing out too much, So thank you and and I'm
(41:39):
glad you guys are doing well, and congratulations on your baby,
and thanks to everybody who's written into us. Mom Stuff
at Discovery dot com is our email address, and to
find links to all of our social media's, videos, podcasts,
and blogs, there's one place to go, and it's stuff
Mom Never Told You dot com. For are on this
(42:00):
and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot
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