72 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
person responsible for conceiving the
over-all action and feel of a piece.
Moberly-Holland relied on Majolie’s
sketches of fairies flitting from flower
to flower, which some men at the stu-
dio were reluctant to draw, deeming the
task too girly. But Disney was enchanted,
and said that the sequence was “like
something you see with your eyes half-
closed. You almost imagine them. The
leaves begin to look like they’re danc-
ing, and the blossoms floating on the
water begin to look like ballet girls in
skirts.” In 1940, though, Majolie, who
had grown depressed at work, took a
vacation to recuperate; when she came
back, she was fired.
Two of Holt’s other subjects had
similarly brief careers at Disney. Grace
Huntington was hired in the story de-
partment in 1936, and was gutsy as all
getout—as an amateur aviator, she set
altitude records. But she doesn’t seem
to have left a profound mark at the stu-
dio. Retta Scott grew up in rural Wash-
ington State and moved to Los Ange-
les with a scholarship to attend art
school. She proved particularly adept at
drawing animals. In 1942, she became
the first woman to receive a screen credit
as an animator on a Disney film: she
did storyboards for “Bambi” and drew
the hunting dogs that menace the deer
and his mate.
By and large, Disney in the thirties
and forties seems to have been a fairly
rewarding place for women to work.
True, there was a male-only penthouse
club at Disney’s Burbank studios that
featured, along with a stupefying mural
of naked and half-naked women, a
restaurant, a barbershop, a bar, a gym,
and a section where men could sun-
bathe in the nude. It couldn’t have been
easy to be a woman of that era trying
to assert her ideas—especially, perhaps,
if you were young and pretty, like Hun-
tington. Holt includes two wonderfully
evocative pencil sketches made by Hun-
tington. In one, she depicts herself strid-
ing past male colleagues into a story
meeting wearing full armor, and in the
other, a two-panel drawing, a bloated
Mickey Mouse looms over her desk, de-
claring “I luv you!” while she recoils, hair
standing on end. “Grace’s desire to flee
was represented in the next frame,” Holt
writes, “where all that was left of her
was a cloud of dust and the word Zip!”
On the other hand, the studio’s Ink
and Paint Department—where the an-
imators’ character drawings were pains-
takingly copied onto clear plastic sheets,
or cels, then colored in—was made up
almost entirely of women. The basis for
that arrangement may not have been
uplifting; women were thought to be
delicate and precise, rather than bold
and creative. But the job did have its ar-
tistic satisfactions, and it paid a decent
wage. The women from Ink and Paint
got to see their work (if not their names)
onscreen, preserved in beloved movies,
and their camaraderie was palpable.
Mindy Johnson’s unusually informative
coffee-table book, “Ink & Paint: The
Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,”
features delightful photographs of the
women at work and on their breaks,
lounging on the lawn in the California
sunshine, laughing and goofing around
for the camera, sipping tea from cups
and saucers. (At breaks, tea, not coffee,
was the norm for inkers—too much
caffeine made your lines shaky.) The
department, which was headed by Walt
Disney’s sister-in-law Hazel Sewell,
gave clever women an ambit for their
ingenuity: they devised airbrushing
techniques that made it easier for the
films to evoke effects such as smoke or
fog or moon glow; invented celluloid-
friendly tools, such as a wax pencil that
could bring a soft blush to Snow White’s
cheek; and established an on-site lab to
concoct and test new paint colors.
By the end of 1940, Walt Disney had
inaugurated a program that would train
women from Ink and Paint so that they
could be promoted into animation,
where the original drawing was done.
After male employees grumbled, Dis-
ney called a meeting in which he justified
the new policy. It was intended partly,
he said, as a hedge against losing male
staff to the military should America
enter the war. But there was another
important rationale: “The girl artists
have the right to expect the same chances
for advancement as men, and I honestly
believe that they may eventually con-
tribute something to this business that
men never would or could.” Don Peri,
a historian of Disney Studios who has
conducted oral histories of many of the
employees from that era, told me, “Walt
Disney was a product of his time,” but
“I think he cared about the women whoworked for him, especially the women
in the Ink and Paint Department. He
was a very moral person, and I am sure
the women who worked for him appre-
ciated that.”O
f the five women Holt writes about,
the one who left the strongest im-
print on animation in general, and on
me, was Mary Blair. She worked for
Disney for more than a decade, longer
than the other four women Holt
profiles, generating concept art for such
classic films as “Cinderella,” “Peter Pan,”
and “Alice in Wonderland,” as well as
for the Disneyland ride It’s a Small
World. (Don’t blame her for the ear-
worm of a song, though.) Blair was an
exuberantly imaginative artist with a
trippy color palette, rich in pinks and
violets and teal blues, and a cool
mid-century aesthetic. Walt Disney
loved her work, at one point telling her
that she “knew about colors he had
never heard of before.” She could evoke
the childlike whimsy and nostalgic,
folk-art-inspired Americana that he
craved, combining them with some-
thing chic and modern—evident both
in her personal style and in her art—
that struck him as highly valuable.
John Canemaker’s earlier book “The
Art and Flair of Mary Blair” is better
when it comes to what makes Blair’s
work distinctive, but “The Queens of
Animation” fills in more of her personal
life. Blair was married to another well-re-
garded Disney artist, Lee Blair, whom
she had met in art school. Both Blairs
drank to excess, and Lee was sometimes
verbally and physically abusive. The
couple had two sons, the elder of whom
was ultimately institutionalized with
what may have been schizophrenia. As
Holt says, few people knew that Mary
Blair’s joyful art was created in domes-
tic circumstances that were often dark
and dispiriting.
Holt suggests that the jealousy of
male colleagues made it hard for Blair’s
concept art to reach the screen in any-
thing like its original form—she was a
favorite of Walt’s and a woman, and
some of them resented her. After Walt
died, in 1966, her work at the company
dried up almost entirely. “Perhaps if he
had loved her less,” Holt writes, “she
might have been more readily employed
after his death.” Canemaker emphasizes