May 26, 2014 • 39 mins
Did you know an army of Disney "animation girls" helped bring its classic films to life? Cristen and Caroline highlight 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 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristens and I'm Caroline, and we're talking about women animators
at Disney today. And then the idea happened very much
(00:24):
by accident one evening on Twitter, when I had posted
on stuff Mom Never Told You dot tumbler dot com
our Tumbler account, this ninety eight rejection letter that has
been spread around the internet. A lot of you listening
have probably seen it. But it's this form letter that
Disney sent out to women who applied to be animators,
(00:47):
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 soon after I posted
it on Tumbler, got a tweet from a woman who
wrote her Masters on animation history, and she pointed out
(01:12):
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 about back in the
day of Bambi, Dumbo, sleeping Beauty snow white, and she
said that that was pretty much standard at animation studios
(01:33):
in the nineteen thirties period. And so I decided, 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 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
(01:57):
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, 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
(02:18):
of Hollywood eyebrows when she was giving this sort of
honorary speech for Emma Thompson in her work in Saving
Mister Banks, the recent film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney,
and you know, Disney kind of made it in in
a way to personify Walt Disney. But in the speech
that Meryl Streep is giving at the National Board of
(02:39):
Review Awards ceremony, she calls Walt Disney a gender bigot
and a lot of other things that aren't too kind.
And the evidence that she uses, though to back up
this claim is a quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball,
who allegedly said that Walt Disney didn't trust women or cats, right,
(03:03):
And she also cited that thirty rejection letter as her reasoning. Um,
but yeah, Disney's attitude. It's people a lot of people
on the internet, um, both scholarly and not, argue about
Disney's attitude, attitude towards women. You know, was he this
gender bigott, as Meryl Streep says? Was he just a
product of his times? You know? Was he just afraid
(03:26):
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
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 nineteen thirty eight Disney rejection letter.
(03:50):
What exactly did it say? So basically, this form letter
was telling the woman who had applied that, Okay, so
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
(04:11):
celluloid sheets with India inc. And filling in the tracings
on the reverse side with paint according to directions. So
how hard could that be? Right? But when we 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
(04:33):
of the movement, a lot of the in between things
between all the big action, showing what Goofy was doing
or showing what Bamby was doing. And like that Twitter
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
(04:57):
one of the first feature length animated films in nineteen six,
and it's called The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, and her
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 silhouettes that she
would move around on screen. And it was it was
(05:19):
insane what she was doing. And yet in the nineteen thirties,
oh no, no no, no, women, just no, you stick to
tracing and that's it, right. Yeah, It is interesting to
look at that nineteen six 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
(05:39):
awesome job at it. But we need to give you
some context. So let's do a brief riendown of like
a Disney timeline. So the Walt Disney 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
(06:01):
dudes as photos from the time a test. And two
years after that, in seven, we have the first of
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
(06:24):
in the mascot of all mascots, Mickey Mouse is born.
So fast forward to ninety 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
(06:46):
when you hear about Classic Disney, and you hear about
the animations a lot of times up until recently at least,
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
(07:06):
how the Supreme Court at the time was referred to,
I think by like FDR or something as the nine
Old Men, because hey, guess was nine 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
(07:32):
referred to as Waltz girls, who were doing all of
that in between her 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 these
(07:55):
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 got
(08:16):
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
(08:39):
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
(09:02):
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 in 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,
(09:26):
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
(09:51):
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,
(10:12):
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
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
and painting of celluloids 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 who
(11:18):
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 get
(11:39):
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,
(12:02):
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, while kind
of drew a line basically saying, hey, all you male
(12:22):
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
(12:44):
know if they'd smooched or not. It'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 competiti
are in there like materials to try to attract employees.
Even said that like, uh, you know, Disney Disney over
(13:07):
there with 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, 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
(13:29):
are 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,
(13:52):
back when like everybody was like cheers, everybody knew your name.
And well, Disney, though definitely has his controverse these involving
his thoughts on race, gender, et cetera. There are some
quotes that are typically trotted out in defense of his
position on women. So you know, we have to we
(14:12):
have to mention this. In 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 working on Dumbo.
(14:36):
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 theater goers. They are the ones who dragged the
men in. If the women like it, to heck with
the men, which sounds like, you know, advertising strategy, baseline
advertising strategy today where people are like, if you target
(14:57):
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 as saying that, you know, women could
be anything that they wanted to be in Disney, but
(15:18):
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
these women were doing, and he spotted some of the
(15:41):
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 and leave and that
opens up jobs for women, and so in in fact,
(16:05):
the inc and Paint Department employees were invited to submit
Donald Duck drawings for an animation department consideration, and out
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 been working, for instance, on snow White, who were
(16:26):
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 were involved with, but a lot of it
was very shrouded in secrecy, and half the time they
(16:48):
didn't really know what they were working on. Anyway, it
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. Let's take a quick break, and so when
(17:11):
we left off, we had 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 names who broke through that cellu Lloyd ceiling. Yeah,
(17:32):
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 back in nineteen thirty six, and it's
sort of credited as I mean, Walt Disney was totally
(17:53):
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, and uh. In addition to the incan
(18:14):
pain 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 was like an angle of storytelling that
(18:35):
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 on at Disney in and
(18:58):
she eventually led the story tom for The Waltz of
the Flowers and 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
(19:18):
playing the role of this 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
(19:39):
story team for this Waltz 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 tripp like Mommy is a
(20:01):
bad dream. Okay, Well then you have Retta 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
(20:23):
who was responsible for the scary, vicious hunting dogs in Bamby.
And when some of the dude animators saw these dogs,
they were like, ah, 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
(20:45):
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,
(21:08):
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 ninety and
(21:31):
did some art for Dumbo and then moved on to
serving as art supervisor and color stylist for the film
Salutos Amigos, the Three caballeras Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and
Peter Pan. Yeah, I mean, Mary Blair probably of all
the women of this time, I mean, and even up
to contemporary Disney, has been one of, if not the
(21:54):
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 museum explains
(22:16):
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 American film
(22:36):
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 Sluts, Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Um.
But it was also her aesthetic that she brought into Cinderella,
(23:00):
Alison wonder Land and Peter Pan. I mean, 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 that ended
(23:20):
up influencing Say what you will about this, but it's
a small world for the sixty five New York's World Fair.
I'm sorry. I know the song is in 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, it's almost timeless,
(23:43):
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 andy. But okay, so we are talking a lot
(24:05):
about Disney, and I think we we can move forward
now into the modern day animation landscape because 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. One of the
most challenging aspects of this podcast topic was that finding
(24:29):
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, it's fifty percent women men.
And yet if you look at the Animation Guild, only
(24:50):
sevent of its members are female. But that might have
something to do with women, at least according to Linda Saminski,
who was Cartoon Networks VP of Original Animation. According to her,
women are likelier to pursue independent rather than big studio animation. Yeah,
(25:10):
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, kookie creative route. Yeah.
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
looking at the animation from the episode of Cosmos Us
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 times in your head exploded with joy into
the cosmos. Yes, it's true, um. But Marge Dean, who's
(26:19):
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 is she says, I think it
(26:40):
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
(27:00):
of those things. So 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 hiccups
like the two thousand eleven incident with Brenda Chapman and
the movie Brave. Right, so we all know Brave with
(27:20):
the amazing redheaded lead character Merida 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's working on Brave,
(27:43):
she ended up getting 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
pers sinal that it got in the way of the work,
who knows, but her getting pushed off to the side
(28:05):
definitely cause sparked a 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's certainly,
you know, it didn't make animation or Pixar particularly look
any better because Pixar had also gotten some flak for
(28:28):
it's under representation of 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,
(28:50):
and I love that film. 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
(29:13):
to earn one 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
(29:34):
they're they're saying that, hey, okay, Jennifer Lee can do
this then and and make a billion with a B
dollars office 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,
(29:58):
Jennifer you Nelson will us in charge of Kung Fu
Panda two, which, after making six hundred and 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. I just puttered along doing
(30:21):
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 and she had worked
(30:41):
on Kung Fu Panda one Part one, and the head
of dream Works 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 how being women at the top
in DreamWorks animation it's sort of um. He actually called
(31:04):
out Disney in a quote to The Hollywood Reporter on
a story about how cent of DreamWorks animation producers or women,
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. It was a male world until recently.
(31:25):
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, a pretty incredible quote to hear
(31:46):
from someone at that level basically calling out Disney and
the Nine Old Men and say, hey, you know what
I'm doing it 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
the day to day process at all. I couldn't find.
(32:09):
And maybe it's just because Disney. I'm sure it 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 company had progressed from the days when women
(32:30):
would have been relegated to the nunnery of ink and paint,
Whether there 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. But um,
you know, I know we should never read the comments ever,
but I was reading the comments under some of these
(32:51):
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
to take people like Jeffrey Katzenberg and like high powered,
(33:16):
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 of
raking in the dough from all of these films, that
women can successfully make a high grossing movie. Yeah. I
(33:41):
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 podcast,
the blush coloring on snow White's rosy cheek. That was
(34:01):
the little brain child of one of the women in
incon Paint, I believe, who said, oh, she looks so pale,
she needs a little bit of blushing. Her sounds like
my mother, You look so pale, you need blush, her
you need she needs a little bit of blusher. But
that's why, in a way, to diversity is a good thing,
(34:23):
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 need
a good flush on because that's hey, that's how people
got hired at Disney back in the day. So yeah,
I mean, And and if anything, I hope that we've
done our part a little bit to shine some light
(34:44):
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 what
at a cool old cracker jack group of men, but
there were you know, a hundred women behind them, inking
(35:05):
and filling in and tracing and painting and hoping that
they're Angora sweater fluff didn't get on any of the cells,
which that did. Yeah, I mean, that happened, yea. So
now I'm sure there are some Disney buffs listening who
have a lot of history to fill us in on,
because this, by no means was a history of Disney,
(35:25):
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? Do you sense a gender gap at
all in the profession? Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
(35:48):
is where you can email us. You can also tweet
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(37:34):
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Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristens and I'm Caroline, and we're talking about women animators
at Disney today. And then the idea happened very much
(00:24):
by accident one evening on Twitter, when I had posted
on stuff Mom Never Told You dot tumbler dot com
our Tumbler account, this ninety eight rejection letter that has
been spread around the internet. A lot of you listening
have probably seen it. But it's this form letter that
Disney sent out to women who applied to be animators,
(00:47):
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 soon after I posted
it on Tumbler, got a tweet from a woman who
wrote her Masters on animation history, and she pointed out
(01:12):
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 about back in the
day of Bambi, Dumbo, sleeping Beauty snow white, and she
said that that was pretty much standard at animation studios
(01:33):
in the nineteen thirties period. And so I decided, 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 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
(01:57):
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, 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
(02:18):
of Hollywood eyebrows when she was giving this sort of
honorary speech for Emma Thompson in her work in Saving
Mister Banks, the recent film about Mary Poppins and Walt Disney,
and you know, Disney kind of made it in in
a way to personify Walt Disney. But in the speech
that Meryl Streep is giving at the National Board of
(02:39):
Review Awards ceremony, she calls Walt Disney a gender bigot
and a lot of other things that aren't too kind.
And the evidence that she uses, though to back up
this claim is a quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball,
who allegedly said that Walt Disney didn't trust women or cats, right,
(03:03):
And she also cited that thirty rejection letter as her reasoning. Um,
but yeah, Disney's attitude. It's people a lot of people
on the internet, um, both scholarly and not, argue about
Disney's attitude, attitude towards women. You know, was he this
gender bigott, as Meryl Streep says? Was he just a
product of his times? You know? Was he just afraid
(03:26):
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
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 nineteen thirty eight Disney rejection letter.
(03:50):
What exactly did it say? So basically, this form letter
was telling the woman who had applied that, Okay, so
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
(04:11):
celluloid sheets with India inc. And filling in the tracings
on the reverse side with paint according to directions. So
how hard could that be? Right? But when we 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
(04:33):
of the movement, a lot of the in between things
between all the big action, showing what Goofy was doing
or showing what Bamby was doing. And like that Twitter
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
(04:57):
one of the first feature length animated films in nineteen six,
and it's called The Adventures of Prince Ahmed, and her
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 silhouettes that she
would move around on screen. And it was it was
(05:19):
insane what she was doing. And yet in the nineteen thirties,
oh no, no no, no, women, just no, you stick to
tracing and that's it, right. Yeah, It is interesting to
look at that nineteen six 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
(05:39):
awesome job at it. But we need to give you
some context. So let's do a brief riendown of like
a Disney timeline. So the Walt Disney 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
(06:01):
dudes as photos from the time a test. And two
years after that, in seven, we have the first of
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
(06:24):
in the mascot of all mascots, Mickey Mouse is born.
So fast forward to ninety 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
(06:46):
when you hear about Classic Disney, and you hear about
the animations a lot of times up until recently at least,
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
(07:06):
how the Supreme Court at the time was referred to,
I think by like FDR or something as the nine
Old Men, because hey, guess was nine 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
(07:32):
referred to as Waltz girls, who were doing all of
that in between her 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 these
(07:55):
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 got
(08:16):
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
(08:39):
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
(09:02):
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 in 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,
(09:26):
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
(09:51):
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,
(10:12):
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
(10:34):
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
(10:54):
and painting of celluloids 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 who
(11:18):
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 get
(11:39):
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,
(12:02):
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, while kind
of drew a line basically saying, hey, all you male
(12:22):
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
(12:44):
know if they'd smooched or not. It'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 competiti
are in there like materials to try to attract employees.
Even said that like, uh, you know, Disney Disney over
(13:07):
there with 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, 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
(13:29):
are 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,
(13:52):
back when like everybody was like cheers, everybody knew your name.
And well, Disney, though definitely has his controverse these involving
his thoughts on race, gender, et cetera. There are some
quotes that are typically trotted out in defense of his
position on women. So you know, we have to we
(14:12):
have to mention this. In 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 working on Dumbo.
(14:36):
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 theater goers. They are the ones who dragged the
men in. If the women like it, to heck with
the men, which sounds like, you know, advertising strategy, baseline
advertising strategy today where people are like, if you target
(14:57):
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 as saying that, you know, women could
be anything that they wanted to be in Disney, but
(15:18):
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
these women were doing, and he spotted some of the
(15:41):
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 and leave and that
opens up jobs for women, and so in in fact,
(16:05):
the inc and Paint Department employees were invited to submit
Donald Duck drawings for an animation department consideration, and out
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 been working, for instance, on snow White, who were
(16:26):
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 were involved with, but a lot of it
was very shrouded in secrecy, and half the time they
(16:48):
didn't really know what they were working on. Anyway, it
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. Let's take a quick break, and so when
(17:11):
we left off, we had 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 names who broke through that cellu Lloyd ceiling. Yeah,
(17:32):
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 back in nineteen thirty six, and it's
sort of credited as I mean, Walt Disney was totally
(17:53):
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, and uh. In addition to the incan
(18:14):
pain 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 was like an angle of storytelling that
(18:35):
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 on at Disney in and
(18:58):
she eventually led the story tom for The Waltz of
the Flowers and 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
(19:18):
playing the role of this 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
(19:39):
story team for this Waltz 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 tripp like Mommy is a
(20:01):
bad dream. Okay, Well then you have Retta 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
(20:23):
who was responsible for the scary, vicious hunting dogs in Bamby.
And when some of the dude animators saw these dogs,
they were like, ah, 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
(20:45):
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,
(21:08):
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 ninety and
(21:31):
did some art for Dumbo and then moved on to
serving as art supervisor and color stylist for the film
Salutos Amigos, the Three caballeras Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and
Peter Pan. Yeah, I mean, Mary Blair probably of all
the women of this time, I mean, and even up
to contemporary Disney, has been one of, if not the
(21:54):
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 museum explains
(22:16):
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 American film
(22:36):
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 Sluts, Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Um.
But it was also her aesthetic that she brought into Cinderella,
(23:00):
Alison wonder Land and Peter Pan. I mean, 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 that ended
(23:20):
up influencing Say what you will about this, but it's
a small world for the sixty five New York's World Fair.
I'm sorry. I know the song is in 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, it's almost timeless,
(23:43):
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 andy. But okay, so we are talking a lot
(24:05):
about Disney, and I think we we can move forward
now into the modern day animation landscape because 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. One of the
most challenging aspects of this podcast topic was that finding
(24:29):
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, it's fifty percent women men.
And yet if you look at the Animation Guild, only
(24:50):
sevent of its members are female. But that might have
something to do with women, at least according to Linda Saminski,
who was Cartoon Networks VP of Original Animation. According to her,
women are likelier to pursue independent rather than big studio animation. Yeah,
(25:10):
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, kookie creative route. Yeah.
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
looking at the animation from the episode of Cosmos Us
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 times in your head exploded with joy into
the cosmos. Yes, it's true, um. But Marge Dean, who's
(26:19):
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 is she says, I think it
(26:40):
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
(27:00):
of those things. So 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 hiccups
like the two thousand eleven incident with Brenda Chapman and
the movie Brave. Right, so we all know Brave with
(27:20):
the amazing redheaded lead character Merida 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's working on Brave,
(27:43):
she ended up getting 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
pers sinal that it got in the way of the work,
who knows, but her getting pushed off to the side
(28:05):
definitely cause sparked a 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's certainly,
you know, it didn't make animation or Pixar particularly look
any better because Pixar had also gotten some flak for
(28:28):
it's under representation of 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,
(28:50):
and I love that film. 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
(29:13):
to earn one 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
(29:34):
they're they're saying that, hey, okay, Jennifer Lee can do
this then and and make a billion with a B
dollars office 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,
(29:58):
Jennifer you Nelson will us in charge of Kung Fu
Panda two, which, after making six hundred and 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. I just puttered along doing
(30:21):
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 and she had worked
(30:41):
on Kung Fu Panda one Part one, and the head
of dream Works 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 how being women at the top
in DreamWorks animation it's sort of um. He actually called
(31:04):
out Disney in a quote to The Hollywood Reporter on
a story about how cent of DreamWorks animation producers or women,
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. It was a male world until recently.
(31:25):
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, a pretty incredible quote to hear
(31:46):
from someone at that level basically calling out Disney and
the Nine Old Men and say, hey, you know what
I'm doing it 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
the day to day process at all. I couldn't find.
(32:09):
And maybe it's just because Disney. I'm sure it 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 company had progressed from the days when women
(32:30):
would have been relegated to the nunnery of ink and paint,
Whether there 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. But um,
you know, I know we should never read the comments ever,
but I was reading the comments under some of these
(32:51):
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
to take people like Jeffrey Katzenberg and like high powered,
(33:16):
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 of
raking in the dough from all of these films, that
women can successfully make a high grossing movie. Yeah. I
(33:41):
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 podcast,
the blush coloring on snow White's rosy cheek. That was
(34:01):
the little brain child of one of the women in
incon Paint, I believe, who said, oh, she looks so pale,
she needs a little bit of blushing. Her sounds like
my mother, You look so pale, you need blush, her
you need she needs a little bit of blusher. But
that's why, in a way, to diversity is a good thing,
(34:23):
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 need
a good flush on because that's hey, that's how people
got hired at Disney back in the day. So yeah,
I mean, And and if anything, I hope that we've
done our part a little bit to shine some light
(34:44):
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 what
at a cool old cracker jack group of men, but
there were you know, a hundred women behind them, inking
(35:05):
and filling in and tracing and painting and hoping that
they're Angora sweater fluff didn't get on any of the cells,
which that did. Yeah, I mean, that happened, yea. So
now I'm sure there are some Disney buffs listening who
have a lot of history to fill us in on,
because this, by no means was a history of Disney,
(35:25):
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? Do you sense a gender gap at
all in the profession? Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
(35:48):
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. Soga let her here from Amy about our
military spouses episodes. She writes, I'm a huge fan of
the podcast and as an army wife of three years,
(36:10):
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 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
(36:31):
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
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
(36:52):
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
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
(37:13):
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
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
(37:34):
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
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,
(37:56):
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, 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
(38:16):
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 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
(38:38):
the last few deployments was the numerous podcasts at how
Stuff 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 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,
(39:02):
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