The Queens of Animation Read online

  Bianca studied composition, anatomy, and painting at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, then moved to New York City to take further classes in drawing and sculpture; after that, she pursued fashion assignments throughout Europe. She lived in Rome and Paris, but the glamorous life of fashion did little to pay the bills, and in 1929, disappointed in her hopes and a little lonely, she moved back to New York City and took a job as an art director and brochure designer for the J. C. Penney catalog.

  Bianca found the heat oppressive that first summer as she rode the streetcar lines that cut Manhattan Island into rectangles, as you would slice a sheet cake. With her bobbed hair and shift dresses, she was the epitome of the stylish flapper and she fit in perfectly with her new, fashionable friends at the department store’s offices. Yet Bianca, like nearly everyone else, was hardly prepared for where the country was headed.

  She was sitting at her desk, sketching women in dropped-waist dresses for Penney’s brochure, on October 29, 1929, when she heard a woman shout, “The stock market’s collapsed! Everyone’s in the street!” Bianca rushed to the window overlooking Sixth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street, but there was nothing out of the ordinary below, merely the usual cars and people out walking at that hour. “No, not here,” said one of the women who worked with her. “All the men are at Wall Street, trying to get their money back.” Bianca looked around and realized that, sure enough, their workplace was currently composed entirely of women. For the past week, news of the stock market’s impending collapse had been on everyone’s lips. The tense atmosphere made Bianca nervous, even though she didn’t own any stocks herself and couldn’t imagine that her family in Chicago would be affected by the events in a city nearly eight hundred miles away. A few days earlier, one of the men she worked with had quieted her nerves by telling her things were sure to improve and that the bankers were optimistic about the market’s recovery. Yet even with her incomplete knowledge of the financial system, she could tell, on this day that came to be known as Black Tuesday, that things were different.

  In the midst of the largest financial crisis the world had ever seen, a small number of entrepreneurs were able to climb out of the muck and find success. In 1929, one of them was Bianca’s former classmate Walt Disney. The year before, the character Mickey Mouse had made a smash hit in an eight-minute cartoon called Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse animated short to synchronize movement with sound. In other hands, accompanying the adventures of a hand-drawn mouse with music and sound effects might have been a clumsy endeavor, neither lifelike nor humorous, but Walt had an innate sense of how to integrate the soundtrack with the story. As Mickey and Minnie made music by cranking the tail of a goat, yanking the tails of nursing piglets, and tapping the teeth of a cow, the synchronized sound brought the scenes to life in a way that audiences had never experienced before.

  The cartoon was Thomas Edison’s dream realized. In the late 1800s, Edison had imagined integrating the sound of his phonograph with the moving pictures captured by his camera, but the technology eluded him. At the end of his life he would see it finally come to fruition with the advent of the talkies. Yet he was not as impressed with the results as one might expect. “I don’t think the talking moving picture will ever be successful in the United States,” Edison said to the newspaper Film Daily in 1927. “Americans prefer silent drama.” While silent pictures still dominated the box office, the world of movies was on the precipice of monumental change.

  The transformation began with the microphone. Before microphones made their appearance, at the end of the nineteenth century, the waves created by sound could travel only as far as a person could shout or an instrument could blare. The energy within those sound waves quickly dissipated. By using a magnetic field, the microphone took the energy created by sound and turned it into something more powerful: an electric current. Now that energy, instead of being lost, could be recorded and stored forever. By the 1920s, an innovative technique to store that energy was to record it on film. The electric current created by the microphone was boosted by an amplifier and then run through a light valve. The valve consisted of a thin piece of metal sitting between the lamp of a camera and a strip of film. The electricity caused the valve to vibrate according to the tempo and volume of the original sound, deflecting the light through the opening and thus converting sound into light. The light was then photographed onto the narrow edge of a filmstrip, giving permanence to what was once fleeting. When Walt Disney gave Mickey Mouse his high falsetto voice, speaking into an RCA 77 microphone in a recording studio in New York City, the sound was transformed into wiggly lines on film.

  While Walt had no trouble matching his voice to the action of his troublemaking mouse, the sixteen-piece orchestra hired for Steamboat Willie couldn’t keep up with the pace of the animation. To fix this for Walt, audio engineers developed the click track, a technique to keep the sound and effects timed to the film. Small holes were punched directly into the edge of the film, creating a tiny bouncing ball. The ball bounced to the tempo of the cartoon and served as a metronome that the conductor used to keep the orchestra synchronized with the action. It wasn’t easy to make thousands of hand-punched holes, but the perforations ensured that the music and pictures were coupled as closely as possible. The technique became known as Mickey-Mousing.

  Using the sound technology on Steamboat Willie, developed by a company called Powers Cinephone, took all of Walt’s savings and more. To come up with the $4,986.69 it cost, Walt had to mortgage his studio and his home, then sell his car, a 1926 Moon Roadster. The gamble, however, paid off. By the end of 1929, Walt was bringing in five hundred dollars a week and had officially formed Walt Disney Productions Ltd.

  Much of the success of Mickey Mouse lay in the character’s optimistic message during a time of despair. In a March 10, 1935, article titled “Mickey Mouse Emerges as an Economist” in the New York Times Magazine, the writer L. H. Robbins declared, “The fresh cheering is for Mickey the Big Business Man, the world’s super-salesman. He finds work for jobless folk. He lifts corporations out of bankruptcy. Wherever he scampers, here or overseas, the sun of prosperity breaks through the clouds.”

  One late afternoon in February 1934, Bianca walked along Seventh Avenue, the low winter sun illuminating the street so brightly that it made the Manhattan tenements as dark as silhouettes. As fortunate as she had felt over the past five years, especially when she considered how few people had steady paychecks, she was unsatisfied in her career and in her life. She was supposed to meet friends that evening, but she felt a sudden need for solitude. She ducked into a movie house and sat down to watch the newsreels.

  When they ended, people moved in and out of their seats as a cartoon started up. Bianca barely noticed what she was watching until she heard the roar of laughter. It struck her that it had been a while since she had heard an audience laugh with such abandon—certainly the news of the day didn’t inspire merriment. Then she saw a familiar name on the screen: A Walt Disney Comic. She had known about his success, of course, but sitting in the darkened theater, she was filled with awe at what he had created. Admiration and jealousy running together, she felt an urge to bring her own animated character into the world and imagined what it would be like to see her art on the screen, worshipped by millions. She went home and started sketching a comic strip about a young girl named Stella who was constantly on the hunt for a job. Thwarted by the Great Depression, a theme that it seemed no one could escape in either fantasy or reality, Stella found that something always went wrong in her search. Bianca printed the dialogue in speech bubbles, relying heavily on jokes made at Stella’s expense. Underlying the humor, Stella’s struggles had a theme, echoing Bianca’s own need, of finding somewhere to belong in a world gone adrift.

  On April 1, 1934, Bianca sent a letter to Walt Disney asking him to visit her in New York, telling him about her comic strip, and joking, “I’m five feet tall and don’t bite.” Although she doubted he would remember her and was not sure exactly what s
ort of guidance she expected from him, she couldn’t help but count the days before she might hear back. It took ten days for the letter to reach him in Hollywood and three more before he wrote a response. His answer was worth waiting for. It would change the course of her life.

  In his playful manner, Walt expressed regret that Bianca didn’t bite and then invited her to send him her comic strips so he could assist her.

  A correspondence began between them, and Bianca was touched by his warm, generous personality, even when his attempts to help her comic strip did not pan out. On New Year’s Day 1935, she made a resolution that she would leave Penney’s. She wanted to be an artist again, to rediscover the young, optimistic student she had once been. To spark her creativity, she planned a trip through China, Korea, and Japan, squirreling away her earnings, every dollar representing days of her freedom. By February, though, she had set those plans aside to travel to Los Angeles. She met Walt at one of his favorite spots, the Tam O’Shanter, which sat just outside Hollywood in a Tudor-style building. With its pitched roof, iron chandeliers, and stone fireplace, it looked more like a movie set than a restaurant.

  In this atmospheric location, Walt launched into the story of Snow White. He described the wicked queen, the loyal dwarfs, and the handsome prince vividly. The fairy tale was familiar, at least in the blurry way of half-forgotten childhood memories, but his narration was fresh. Walt loved telling the story of Snow White and repeated it often to almost anyone who would listen. Soon, though, he brought the conversation back to what Bianca had traveled across the country for: her art career.

  Bianca gingerly placed her portfolio on the table. Neatly organized inside were her sketches and story ideas. In anticipation of Walt’s seeing them, she had rearranged them countless times. She needn’t have worried—when he cracked open the oversize binder, he was instantly overwhelmed by her talent. Her delicate lines forming softly colored flowers were unlike anything he had seen come out of his studio. She had never studied cartooning and had no desire to be an animator, but her story ideas were remarkable. Although his story artists were all men, he believed so strongly in her skill that he offered her a six-month apprenticeship in the story department.

  Bianca hesitated. She hadn’t been expecting her life to change so quickly, yet it was what she desperately wanted: to work for her passion, not just for money, and see the result of her hard work reflected in the smiling faces of an audience. She said she’d think about it. The next day was Valentine’s Day, and she decided not to wait any longer to give Walt her answer. She wrote to him in a playful manner, referencing an inside joke between them: “You are everything and much more than I visualized, and the really amazing thing is that you haven’t changed, in spite of the terrifying eyebrow lift, that succeeds only in arousing my merriment.” She accepted his offer and said she would start as soon as possible.

  Their letters reveal a mutual respect and a lighthearted friendship but not a romance. In 1925, Walt had married a woman named Lillian Bounds who worked for him in the Ink and Paint department. In her letters, Bianca congratulated him on finding a spouse and laughed at herself for being an old maid at the age of thirty-five. She had no interest in marriage. She wanted the freedom to work, and Walt viewed her independence as an asset.

  With no prior experience in entertainment, Bianca had had only a basic understanding of the inner workings of a Hollywood production before she started at Walt Disney Studios. She was surprised when she saw the Ink and Paint department packed with women, roughly a hundred of them hunched over their desks. Most were under the age of twenty-five. After the animators sketched each scene of the movie, every second of film requiring twenty to thirty drawings, the women of Ink and Paint traced their lines using india ink on transparent sheets of cellulose, or cels. After the ink dried, they flipped each delicate sheet over and colored inside the lines, using every paint tint imaginable. In the studio, the Ink and Paint women were focused, but during their breaks, they often sprawled companionably across the grass under the palm trees that stood outside the small complex of one- and two-story buildings. They seemed so young and carefree to Bianca. The story department where she worked had a very different atmosphere. There, she had the distinct feeling that her coworkers were looking for any weakness they could find.

  The story department was located in a timeworn L-shaped building on Hyperion Avenue in Hollywood, and the quarters were cramped. Before she received her private office, a mark of seniority, Bianca had been penned in next to Joseph Roy Williams, known as “Big Roy,” and Walter Kelly, two men with big personalities who delighted in teasing their new female coworker and passing a football in front of her nose as she tried to concentrate on her sketches. Although the three had similar responsibilities, Bianca was paid far less than her male counterparts. She started at eighteen dollars a week while most of the men around her made seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a week. Some employees earned even more. Art Babbitt, a young animator who joined Disney in 1932, took home a lavish $288 a week.

  For a time, Babbitt held drawing sessions in his bachelor pad, hiring women to model nude for the Disney animators to sketch. When Walt found out, he insisted they transfer the extracurricular activity to the studio, initiating what would become an enduring tradition: the Disney life-drawing class. Bianca loved the classes. They were reminiscent of her days at art school in Chicago. As she sketched models in all the glory of their naked forms, she was reminded that at its heart, this business was about putting pencil to paper.

  Bianca had arrived at an auspicious moment in the studio’s history. In February 1936, after numerous delays, the animators at Disney had finally begun working on the first full-length animated movie: Snow White. The movie had burst into their lives at the end of a workday back in February 1934; Walt had stopped all of his most trusted staff members as they left for home, gave them each fifty cents to buy dinner, and told them to hurry back. When the team of artists and animators returned at seven thirty, they found the soundstage dark except for a single spotlight. None of them were quite sure what to expect, so they sat down nervously, speculating about what their boss was up to this time. Walt took the stage and not only told the story of Snow White but also acted it out. His voice became as high-pitched as a child’s as he pranced in front of them playing the princess, then turned deep and rumbling as he emulated the witch’s evil laugh. At the end of his performance, the audience members were mesmerized. They had seen their future and it would be the story of a young princess.

  Walt’s performance became legendary at the studios. For decades, the animators present that night would recount how he had captivated them with the tale of Snow White. Bianca had not yet joined the studio on that magical evening, but she too had felt entranced by Walt’s tale during their meeting at the Tam O’Shanter, and she got there just as work on the feature had begun in earnest.

  Less romantic than the film’s origin, however, was the day-to-day work on the movie. The meetings of the story department were long and intense, with every detail of the script being revised and debated. Just a single scene of the proposed film, in which frogs jumped into a pair of shoes and chased Dopey the dwarf, prompted five long meetings over the course of three weeks, only to be cut in the end. Some of the script changes Bianca participated in were large, conceptual shifts, such as Walt’s idea of making the woods come alive around Snow White in a terrifying frenzy. The branches transform into hands that grab at the princess as she runs through the forest, while the wind blows her to and fro, giving the unsettling sensation that the natural world has turned against her. Other times, the writers argued over minute details; for instance, going over and over Dopey’s precise movements as he runs down a flight of stairs.

  As the team worked on Snow White, Bianca learned about a brand-new technique called storyboarding. Ted Sears, the head of the story department, had helped invent it. Bianca mostly liked Ted, who had occupied his supervisor position since 1931. He was one of the best gagmen at the studio,
perfectly suited to writing jokes and sketching comedy routines, although he couldn’t draw to save his life. But with Bianca’s respect, there was also fear; Ted could be brutal in his criticism, and she often heard his jeers rise loudly above the crowd at meetings.

  Ted’s voice reached peak intensity at one particular story meeting in which the staff debated what clothes Snow White should wear. It was just one of twenty-five story meetings the staff held to discuss her dress. These were frequently held in the evenings, around seven o’clock, and on this occasion the room was packed with writers and animators, everyone jumping in with ideas while Walt sat quietly on the side. Animator Myron “Grim” Natwick tacked a few sketches of the princess on the corkboard. Under his pencil, Snow White had grown long, dark eyelashes; she held up her dress to reveal a shapely calf, and her lips formed a deep red pout. From the beginning, Walt had said he envisioned Snow White as an innocent child, so to see her depicted as a sexy, sophisticated woman was jarring. The staffers yelled about her provocative pose until poor Natwick took the sketches down. Eventually they would decide to make one of her outfits a peasant dress, patches visible near the hem, paired with simple brown clogs. By giving her modest clothing and a demure demeanor, they had made Snow White the epitome of wholesomeness.

  At Walt Disney Studios, as at other cartoon studios of the era, writers developed the story ideas while working closely with animators creating preliminary sketches. Many writers, like Bianca, found a background in art essential as they made the first rough drafts of the characters and scenes. Once the story began to gain traction, the writers and animators would produce an explosion of sketches to capture all their ideas for the project, the bad along with the good. The sheer amount of paper frustrated Ted; it was impossible to assess the flow of the action when there were so many sketches floating around. Working on the animated short Three Little Pigs in 1933, Ted couldn’t keep the characters and their developing personalities straight. One of the story men, Webb Smith, grabbed a handful of pushpins and started to tack the scenes and dialogue in order on the wall. When he was finished, they could view the progression of the entire cartoon. This made it far easier to shuffle the scenes and assess what needed to be cut or added. With Snow White, storyboards became crucial, as the artists were working with thousands of sketches.