September 26, 2018 • 46 mins
In part two of this interview, Mindy busts some myths about women and their work in the Walt Disney Studio, and shares some stories of how new techniques were developed by color animators. The topic also turns to the 1941 labor strike at the Walt Disney Studios that forever changed the company.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we are serving up part two of my interview with
Mindy Johnson, the author of inc and Paint, the Women
(00:22):
of Walt Disney's animation, and she is so full of
information that we very easily filled two episodes with it,
and I think there are two episodes that both run
a little longer than our normal average. Back in part one,
Mindy busted some myths and there's more of that on
the way today, and that includes the idea that women
in the early days of animation were just tracers and
not accomplished artists in their own rights. So we will
(00:44):
jump right in. Will you talk a little bit about
what the hiring process was like for the women that
ended up in the inc and Paint department and then
what their day to day jobs were like. Yeah, and
it's important to note that there's a lot of material
out there that states that that was the only place
women could work. There's a crazy letter from the snow
(01:08):
White Days that circulates on the internet, and there are
a couple of things that need to be well. First
of all, placed in context about that, it was the
nineteen thirties that was the prevailing attitude. But the other
thing that's important to understand is this was a form
letter that was actually created in the late twenties because
(01:29):
by that time that Mickey many cartoons had become worldwide phenomenons,
and the little tiny studio on the Hyperion Avenue in
Las Vilas, California was getting inundated with fan mail and
people wanting to Oh, I want to work there, I've
got to do this. Plus it was the depression, so
it's that much. You know, any kind of job anywhere
(01:52):
was vital critical, but if you were working at Disney
Studios you were certainly they didn't feel the immediate effects
of the compression as other places did in the country.
It was a boon town and so they were getting
in inundated. People would literally show up at the front door.
I got a letter from you, you know, I'm I'm
(02:13):
ready to work, but yet there was no job because
they just said, thank you for sending it, but we're
not hiring at this time. So they changed that their
generic form letters to state you know, please, it's a
polite thank you, but please go away. They weren't paying
to have people come out, and certainly they were very
talented people. But again it was the nineties and the
(02:36):
men were doing the animation. It was a boys club
at that point, and women's roles were seen as secondary,
and as women, we tend to not talk about our work.
It was a man's world at that time, and so
women really were there. A poor secretary somewhere typed it
(02:57):
out saying women didn't do any of the creative work.
But yet this is a secretary who had no understanding
of what was going on over in that department, nor
was it in the general mindset to speak about that.
But it's also important to note that these were not
There was a myth going around that, oh they picked
women up off the street. My sister's cousin got in there.
(03:17):
Anybody could train. No, you had to come in, and
this was Hazel Seol establishing this Tuesday mornings. You had
to bring in your portfolio, and they were always on
scramble trying to find qualified talented personnel artists. They sent
out at various times uh postcards and did radio announcements.
(03:43):
We found the script for a radio broadcast to the
forties and fifties taking all women artists please come down.
So there was segregation in terms of roles in gender,
but they were seeking women artists their backt ads that
were placed girl artists wanted. So for women in the
(04:03):
nineteen thirties, if you've studied art in any way, shape
or form, and there were wonderful art schools and institutions,
this was a major plus. There were also in the
newspapers you had women columns for personnel and men columns
for personnel. So that's again why you have to look
at this from a contextualized manner, because it was very
(04:26):
different then. So Tuesday mornings, if people came at any
other point, show up Tuesday mornings, and that's when Hazel
and her teams would review applicants and take a look
at their portfolios. And more often than not, if you
had the talent, you were hired right on the spot,
and you had to begin by going through training. And
again Hazel Steel and her teams established training for the
(04:49):
women in these roles. So the misconception is that they
taught people how to hold a paint rush. That's what
the training was, and they painted by number. Nothing could
be further from the truth. They were brought in as artists.
They had to prove they were artists, and they were
trained in the specific artistry and tools and materials required
(05:12):
for working with syloid and the characterizations of what they
were trying to accomplish to achieve a unified filmic experience.
So therein is the difference in how the training was
laid out, and that was true for animators as well.
Walt also started animation and training, and animators could come in.
(05:34):
They could be the most brilliant fine artists, men or women,
and they still had to go through an animation training program.
Now it's in the thirties that women were funneled into
the income paient roles. But by the late thirties we
see change happening. Retta Scott's, Mildred Rossi ethel Coulsar their
(05:56):
Biola Anderson. There were a number of women who came
in in the late thirties of the success of Snow White. Again,
it's a boomtown at that little studio and it's just
mushrooming into productions and buildings and personnel, and the staff
grew so large that Walt grumbled about not being able
to say hello to everybody personally, because he couldn't take
(06:16):
the time to get to know everyone because there was
so much going on and so many people working here.
When you look at what it's the footage we have,
you see women. The numbers of women were always higher
than the national average for women in industry. Wherever those
numbers landed, Disney was always anywhere from three to five
(06:38):
or higher percent higher than the national industry of other
industries where women were so their presence was always there
from the very beginning. And as these various films are
expanding whilst seeing that there's a big wider range of
stories we can and should be telling in a feature
length forum. So right as Scott is often credited as
(07:01):
the first female animator, but we do have other women
in at the studio doing what was called color animation,
and there are great examples of that in Fantasia and
some elements in Panecche. But then were visibly present in Fantasia,
the Takata and few sequence you have sort of pastel
shapes and colors and forms moving on the screen. That's
(07:23):
all done by women. Mildred Rossi at the Cool Star
and the women of the Paint Lab developed a really
amazing technique where they could have adhere talk past self
to saluboid directly and the women were animating the color
directly on the sideline. No pencils. Yeah, and then you
(07:47):
get people like Retti Scott wielding a pencil, and that
woman had power in her drawings and so much so
they would put her drawings in the room and no
one could tell. And finally some of these gray who
did the Retta Retta Scott, she was sort of plucked
from Snard Art Institute. They saw the talent in her,
brought her in to do some story concept pieces, but
(08:10):
then moved her into animation and she ended up doing
one of the most powerful sequences in Bandy, the dog
fight sequence. For she was just a tremendous expert on
animals and just these ferocious dogs. I think she gues
estimated she did over thirty five thousand dog drawing to
get that sequence. That she had a little bit of
(08:32):
a learning curve, and there were a couple of other
male animators who stepped into kind of help her with timing,
But her drawings and her artistry is definitely there on
the screen. And she's also the first woman animator to
get a credit at Disney. We have other early women
animators in other shorts, but in terms of feature length animation,
(08:55):
she's first get a credit. So that's why happened. People
have presumed she's the one and only, but there were
many others working at around that time, and if we
count color animation, Mildred Rossi is more than likely the first.
But it's a color animation process, so you know, different
(09:15):
mediums but still the same thing. And we could even
go earlier to the women doing the blend technique on
snow white, because that again is early color animation. They're
moving that color across each cell, so it's, you know,
just as you would a pencil drawing. Right. You have
so many great stories about all of these women that
really did change things significantly and contributed in ways that
(09:38):
are not always recognized. But I wonder at what point
in your research was there a moment of revelation of
just how massive, um and vital the role of women
was to a lot of these films that have been
famous forever and aren't really thought of necessarily as being
the product of a of a female workforce. Yeah, that
(09:59):
was at my eight months breakdown where I panicked and
called my editor and went, oh my gosh, this is
it was almost like an avalanche. It just hit me.
And I even had some paradigms I had to undo
because this narrative, this logline, and and here's where it's
(10:21):
another part of what sort of when the avalanche hit,
I started playing out and I'm so grateful for the
volumes that are out there. Many by dear colleagues have
done extraordinary work. But I began to quickly go to
the index and start to you know, short change it
and and go, okay, let's see where the women are.
(10:42):
And you would find the same four or five women,
Lillian and Edmund Disney. And it was always Mr. The
Mrs Disney, that was always and his wife Lilian. No mention,
you know, the story of Lilian naming Mickey Mickey Mouse
is about it. No mention of the work that they
did on those early shorts, No mention at all. Willian
(11:05):
wouldn't cash your paychecks if they were going to run short,
not cash your paychecks so we can meet payroll. So
she was working for free, you know, at their kitchen
tables till the wee hours, trying to get these cells
blackened in on the first Mickey Hu, Mini, Lillian and
Edna were right there toe to toe from the very beginning,
(11:26):
and yet they would always get reduced down or if
they would be mentioned. So one of the other four
or five women that would be in the indexes of
a few books with most books would be Margaret Winkler.
She was the first female producer in the Producer's Guild.
She added a fictitious day to her name so she
could operate her business gender neutrals, so no one would
(11:47):
freak out that she was a woman. And she singlehandedly
changed animation and turned it into a standard part of
the theater going experience, so that audiences thought out the
animation and portions rather than so. She changed it from novelties.
She put Felix the Cat on the map and made
him a worldwide phenomenon. And she did the same with
(12:10):
Walt Disney. So the animation industry owes itself to Margaret Winkler,
and yet she's always reduced to just a sentence or
two in most books out there. She's one of the
handful of women at the early stages. And then, of
course Mary Blair, wonderful, amazing, extraordinary Mary Blair, but people
(12:30):
often thought that she was the only female artist, and
occasionally you'd get read of Scott in there. So you
get the same four or five women, and that would
be it. Aside from voice talents, that would be it.
And I thought, wait a second, there are far more
women out here. There has to be more. And so
(12:52):
thus began this five year odyssey to get the book done.
But the research still continued. So it's been seven years
or more and there are new discoveries every day. Yeah,
I'm doing some really deep digging into the earliest women
and it's incredible the work that they did in animation,
(13:14):
and yet no credit, no acknowledgement, nothing yet, And that's
gonna change. Mindy incidentally said that we could cut that
last sentence because she didn't want to come off as
to bragadocious in her own words. But I really wanted
to leave it in because, as we're going to see
(13:34):
in just a little while, her book project, which grew
from just a tiny kernel of information to become something huge,
really is changing how people look at Disney animation history.
But for right now, we are going to pause for
a quick sponsor break. We're going to jump right back
(13:56):
in with Mindy here because she made a really good
point while we were talking about why she wanted to
include firsthand accounts in her book. It was important in
working on the book to put it into as many
firsthand accounts as possible. This is their story, not my
story to be telling, but their story. And that was
vital because I knew there would be a lot of
(14:18):
people coming to challenge what I put across in the book,
and I'm like, look, these are the voices of the
women who were there. I do want to talk about
sort of a controversial time during Walt Disney Studios, which
was the strike that took place in nineteen forty one,
and I hope that you would talk a little bit
about the role of the women in the incompaient department
(14:39):
during that period and how that strike affected them going forward. Sure, well,
in the strike was a challenging time for the studio
and all overall. In fact, it lingered for decades, and
many of the women, either through their oral histories or
(15:00):
the families or through those who were still with us,
you could tell when I would ask about it it
was a tender still a very tender time caused major
it forever changed the industry, you know, and you think
what could have happened had things continued in the fracture
that that caused. You know, I think it's set things
(15:22):
back by a decade or more. Um even technologically it
set things back, but it caused riffs, long riffs. I
wrote about what I had and what I could find,
and what people could speak about. And I was pleased
to see when we went for final reviews on the
(15:43):
book that everything was retained. So this book holds probably
the There are other articles and other books about this era,
but this whole the largest amount of firsthand from the
women's perspective accounts, and it was it was a very
personal time for a lot of them in the incompaient department,
(16:05):
and we hadn't keep in mind that women were in
virtually every area. This is also the time where Walt
announces he's on record he began the animation training program
for women. World War had already broken out in Europe,
and he was seeing men leaving, and we sort of
read the signs of what was going on overseas and
(16:28):
began to prepare, recognizing that as men are going to
be leaving, we need to keep the systems moving. So
he began training some of his top anchors in the
campaign departments. Keep in mind that these women, the inkers
where the animators had eracers. Anchors went toe to toe
with everything the animators are doing and working in ink
(16:51):
without eracers. There's the great saying about ginger rogers did
everything Freda Stare did backwards and in high heels. These
women did everything the animators did on celluloid, which is
like skating on ice with ink pens, no eracers, and
in high heels. So these women were remarkable with what
(17:13):
they were doing, and Walt was exploring transitioning them into animating.
And so we have a training program that begins. And
that was part of some of the early riffs that
our Babid and others were sort of spouting about that,
you know, they're trying to train women to do our
jobs and they're gonna undercut them with pay so it'll
(17:35):
be cheaper. And isn't that terrible? And Walt delivers a
speech in February of nineteen forty one saying, look, if
a woman can do the job, she gets the pay. Now,
where is that stand today? Even where women are paid
eighty cents to a man's dollar right, that's very progressive
(17:57):
and very groundbreaking. And so the women continue to train
and then as World War we become involved in World
War two, as that breaks out, women then literally put
down their pens and brushes and trained and picked up
pencils and moved into animation. And even before the war,
um the anchors were in between directly the mail in
(18:19):
between ers with pencils and erasers. We're not able to
get the legs on the deers and vandy very clean.
They would wobble too much. The lines would wobble because
the girls would have to be matching what they were doing.
So they just said, you know, let us do it.
So they were in between ing directly. So when you watch,
basically again, keep an eye on those deer legs, they
(18:40):
don't move. And that's the women's work directly on themselves. Yeah,
that's amazing. So it's those kinds of things were in
the ether, that's what was happening. There was a lot
of confusion and mis communication, angry voices. As the drug
teams become organized, many of the women. In fact, one
(19:03):
of the corridor heads of ink and Paint and the
special effects team, there was a woman who was running
the airbrush department. She had over twenty men and women
working under her. Barbara with Baldwin, she took all of
her teams out. They all went out on strike um
and you know, again that was their prerogative, and so
(19:24):
it was a real bitter sweet time. Many people felt
a tremendous loyalty to Walton and he was trying to
put the money back in to the studio. He had
built this beautiful, state of the art studios that they
would have comfortable environments to be working in, and many
were a little frustrated with that. They liked on top
(19:46):
of each other hodgepodge of the Hyperion studios, but it
just wasn't going to work. So sadly, how streamlined things
became with the studio created some problems and distance and
confusion and labor issues. And keep in mind also that
the other studios in town, other animation studios, had gone
(20:07):
through similar rife years prior to Disney did. It was
one of the last to hold out and also sort
of the highest profile, So it's important to know that
there were other studios that had gone through that, and
there were some pretty strong armed thugs that were pulling
some things, but it did change things. Um, I tried
(20:29):
to be as balanced with what I could get to
show the fact that it was a difficult device as
time you had teams who stayed committed to Walton, who
were in trying to work, and it was also time
where men had to pick up pens and brushes to
help get those cells completed. So it was a real
(20:51):
blurring of the lines. Um it mandated the simplicity of Bumbo.
As supplies became, you know what, the war happening in Europe,
supplies became scarcer and colors. The palette is very simple
and basic because they couldn't get pigments, brushes. They were
(21:12):
importing sable brushes from overseas. German pigments they couldn't get.
So it had a pretty profound impact and they had
to sort of stay malleable and figure out how we're
going to work with what we can get and what
we can do. And so oftentimes it's rare to find
an actual production self from Dumbo because they were washed
(21:34):
off as in as they you know, so their women's
artistry went down the drain. Literally. Yeah, what a weird,
condensed time of just intense things happening all at once. Yeah,
and you know you had I think Ruthie Thompson talked
about you had roommates where one would drive the other
one in and drop she was on strike, and the
(21:57):
other one was chose to across the line. She'd drop
her off so she could go pick it and she'd
crossed the line and go in to go to work
and then at the end of the day pick her
up and go home. And you know, it was it
was a very strange time, sad time. It was. It
was difficult for those who went out on strike. Um
it lasted several months. You know, people lost their homes.
(22:21):
It was. It was very difficult. We may have already
touched on on ones that you would select, but I
wanted to ask you what you would say, are perhaps
the key three to four moments in the evolution of
roles for women at Disney Animation over the years. Mm hmm.
But that's a that's a tough one. I would say,
(22:42):
surprisingly had the very beginning. I was thrilled when I
had to sort of read think about it in Triple
Check it that the very first employee was a woman, um,
and that women had always been there, and what was
accomplished in that first ten years Hazel School. I think
it's probably one of the most unsung women in animation.
(23:03):
She took from basic blackening, crude basic blackening, and in
the span of under ten years, transformed, visually transformed the
visual experience of animation from black and white blackeners to
the Rembrandt desk quality of snow white in the Seven Doors.
(23:23):
And Walt gets the credit, and yes, understandably so because
he was pushing for that, But what Hazel and her
teams accomplished, I was stunned. When you look at that
and begin to sort of wrap your head around all
that's accomplished it it's mind blowing. And look at that
(23:43):
animation in that time traod where it progresses from and too,
so that's a key time trade. I would also say
the advent of zoography World War two is very big
with Rosie the Riveters. We have Rosie the Rivet, Rosie's
with pencil the advent of dereography, thinking was a very
costly These women were premium artists and far more than
(24:08):
what men were accomplishing with pencils, because pencils have eracers
and you had other artists coming in and cleaning up
your line. So the fine artistry of inking, which the
real zenith of that is Sleeping Beauty. And again if
you're watching that film looking for the line artistry and there,
it's again just mind blowing. But how pivotal that point
(24:32):
is when in order to save animation truly the advent
of gereography did in fact say that, but women moved
into those front lines. It changes the artistry, but women
were also there and working on those early zereography teams.
And then I would say probably the third and these
are overarching changes for animation in general, is that digital advent.
(24:55):
But it's important to note that women were right there
at that moment and part of those teams as animation
transforms into a digital art form. So just as the
pivotal point for animation, it's important to remember women have
always been there. Specifically for women, I would say those
early earliest years from about twenty seven to thirty seven
(25:18):
catl Seel and her teams, and this is also sort
of occurring at other studios, but Tad and Shoulders above
all else, Haitel Sewel and her accomplishments were remarkable. You
also have other independent women animators working at that time.
Women are moving into animation in the thirties, and that's critical.
(25:39):
The war had a very big impact in moving women
into positions. Sadly, at the end of the war, again
it was society that said, okay, back to the kitchens.
In fact, there were campaigns, the government issued campaigns about
being housewives again so that they would free up the
jobs for the men to come back and we could
(26:00):
get back to making babies. So that's the nineteen forties,
which is a real crazy, strange anomaly of a time period.
And then I would say for women, specifically the seventies,
the women's movement and getting women to wake up to
who they are and their own discoveries of what they're doing.
(26:22):
You see a tremendous rise in Interestingly enough, in the
nineteen forties in divorces, laws were very different. You had
to prove infidelity, but by the nineteen seventies and the
changes to that, you could divorce for irreconcilable differences rather
than proving infidelity or other issues. Um, that had a
(26:43):
tremendous impact in preeing up women. You also have birth control,
where women are changing and their lives are transitioning, and
suddenly they can stave off having their families, and we
see a tremendous rise in women getting their college degrees.
It's in the seventies and eighties where the number of
women enrolled in colleges evens out to men and in
(27:05):
some places surpasses the number of men studying in school.
So that's again why I've had to put everything into context.
You can understand where women are in terms of animation
and that industry and the advances that occur and the
opportunities occur for women. Society still had their whole it's
(27:25):
hold on where women were and what they could do,
and many ways we still have a lot of that
shake out of today. Coming up, we are going to
talk about some of the more recent and very exciting
developments for women in animation. But first we will pause
for a sponsor break. Now Disney while Disney Animation Studios
(27:50):
has its first woman chief creative Officer, which is pretty
exciting to me, very exciting like that. That announcement really
was emotional when I heard it. It was surprising to
me how deeply it moved me. I am emotional just
talking about these women, and I get people coming up
(28:10):
out of all ages, men and women emotional about how
come we don't know this and and then pointing out
that's still today. I did an event about a year
ago at the Motion Picture Academy and audible gaps from
the industry in the room going we had no idea
and the course of change that that's helped, you know,
(28:34):
the turning of the page helps to sort of flap
that page over big time, so that getting people to
sort of wake up from this unconscious bias, to realize
there is this need for change and we are so
unconscious and how we moved to this world about it
and realizing that we still have those instances today where
(28:56):
we have tremendous glass feelings. We have to break through.
We have to change that unconscious preset of defaulting to
the men and not thinking about, oh, well, where are
the women, and why don't we get women in? What
can we do to get women in here? Because we've
been missing out on half the sky. Bringing John Lennon
(29:16):
into this, you know, we have that we've we've missed
half of our human experience by not letting women come
to the table. We're not recognizing what women have already
brought to the table. That is one of the reasons
I love your book. Thank you. I mean, I like,
seriously to me, I think it is so important. I
think it should be part of college courses. I think
(29:38):
it is a vitally important piece of education for anyone
who is interested in animation, but for anyone who is
interested in looking at just sort of how culture has
been impacted and yet not acknowledged by women, which is fascinating,
Which is why I'm really excited about the next project
that you told me you're working on, well, the next generation.
(30:01):
Will you talk about that a little bit? Sure? Absolutely, Well,
a couple of things in terms of education. UM. So
we've just announced I'm teaching a class this fall at
cal Arts on the history of women and animation, the
first of its kind, and my book is the text.
(30:22):
See me, I get I get emotional about it too. Um.
And it's going to go, you know, beyond Dissey if
I'm doing deeper dives into the biographies of these women
as much as I can at this point. So it's
going to be ever changing because the research is ongoing. UM.
But I'm prepping for that right now, and it's we're
(30:43):
opening it up to faculty and all students. They don't
have to be animation students, they get priority, but they
asked if it would be okay to open that up,
and I said, absolutely, let's do it. So I'll be
speaking to um the history of women and other underrepresent
at groups within animation, primarily women and their advents, who
(31:07):
they are as people, taking a deeper dive into their accomplishments,
because some of the earliest women, it's so much even
beyond animation, it's it's mind blowing, and that leads me
to I'm currently working on a young reader's book called Pencils,
Pens and Brushes Great Girls of Disney Animation, and this
(31:27):
little treasured volume is a wonderful opportunity to go a
little further into some of these remarkable women, many of
which not only accomplished remarkable advancements within animation and their
roles within animation are so vital, but when you look
at their lives beyond animation, both before coming to Disney
(31:51):
Studios and beyond, it's incredible the caliber of these women.
A couple of examples. One woman, her name was Grace Huntington's.
She was the second woman to work in story at
Disney Studios in a late nineteen thirties and while she
(32:12):
was working there, sharp amazing young girl who worked hard
at coming in with new and fresh ideas and preparing
her pitches. And she learned she had to step right
in and the pitch sessions and the men would get
very you get up and act out the antics and things.
She couldn't be a waltflower. She had to get out
(32:33):
there and do it. Her brother was also a pilot,
and she was fascinated with this idea of flight. Now
this is in the you have to remember things that
move as lightning fast as they do today, and the
allure of Charles Lindberg's transatlantic flight was still a major thing,
and so aviation took off, no pun intended. It literally
(32:57):
just lawesomed and women were very excited about this new
form of transportation. So Grace was fascinated with it. And
her brother was getting his pilot license, and she thought, well,
I could do that while working into the studios. She
got her license. And she had always been fascinated as
(33:17):
a young girl with Jules Verne's trip to the Moon
and other you know, science fiction things. And this was
the late thirties. Had there been a space program, this
woman would have been part of it. In fact, she
sent correspondence to the military in Washington inquiring about high altitude.
(33:39):
She actually went on and trained full time. She left
as they and trained full time and broke a record
in high altitude flights for small aircraft and wanted to
continue doing this. And she made query to the military saying, look,
I just broke this record. Here's the newspaper and documentation,
(34:00):
and then we got my flight reported back everything. You know.
Would you like to sponsor me? I'm I'm here, let's
do more of this. No, thank you, you're a woman.
They wouldn't. Yes, she couldn't get work as a pilot's
because she was a woman. So she ended up training.
(34:20):
She had to become a flight instructor, and the aviation
out that that helped her train said okay, you know,
we'll keep you on. So here she had she brought
this record and still couldn't get work because she was
a woman. But she was part of the earliest inklings
(34:40):
of the space race, and yet I shouldn't do anything
with it, and began working at Disney Studio. That's such
a great story. It is I want gas or there's
so much more. And to continue with aviation, we have
the first woman to get her pilot's license in Connecticut
(35:04):
with a woman by the name of Mary good Rich,
and she went on and became the first person to
fly solo of Cuba and was the first person to
have a syndicated aviation column. She was the first woman
reporter at her local newspaper and then got a syndicated
aviation column because they said, oh, we need someone to
(35:25):
write this. If you get your pilots license, maybe you
could do that. So she did, and sadly then when
her eyesight went bad, she ended up moving making her
way out to California and got a job. She established
the first story research department at the Disney Studios in
(35:45):
and in my lectures, I'll say, well, that was the
Internet of the nineties. What she and her team did
they would use these really amazing things called books, and
they would research and find out, you know, well, what's
the dear's habits hat looked like? And for a pinecchio,
what what would it look like inside of a whale?
(36:05):
And how would you you know, answering those questions so
that the artists could create these worlds and characters that
we know and love. So she was pretty remarkable in
her own right and the advent to fight. She also
flew on the Hindenburg made one of the one of
the Transatlantic passages on the Hindenburgh. I think it was
(36:27):
the the before it, like one or two of the
passages before it blew up. Yeah, So there's really I mean,
these women were right there at these Mary Costa are
wonderful voice of Princess Aroa went on and had She
was one of the leading matso sopranos an opera, the
grand world of opera, and performed on every opera stage
(36:48):
in the world. And yet no one knows that unless
you're an opera fan, and the upper fans don't know
about her work in animation because I didn't know that
about her. And it does strike being sort of hilarious
when you watch somebody who knows one part of her
career and someone knows the other meet each other and
they're like, no, she was a singer, and it's like never, No,
is it a different Mary Costa? No right, because again,
(37:14):
nothing had been put down in word. There was no
place to go to to get the sort of the
definitive answer on it. And and realized too as big
and monstrous as that book is, and it had to be.
It still is scratching a rich, incredible, cavernous surface to
who these women were, what they accomplished, the epic saga
(37:39):
of a hundred years of our animated collective animated past,
and women have always been there. So it's it's at
least to go to place. It's a reference, it's a
deep dive. It's a light magazine read. It's a textbook.
So I'll be using that my book as sort of
the text for the cal arts class, little teaching and
(38:01):
uh and sort of. I'm currently working on war material
a little more involved on women, not only at Disney
but beyond Disney. But the records are hard to find
because again history is preserved writ about recorded an archived
from a male perspective. So it's one paragraph here and
two sentences there, you know, contacting someone's relatives and their
(38:27):
accounts and digging under beds and into closets and bankers
boxes too, pieces together, and it really was on the
cusp of I kept thinking, Oh, had I started a
year sooner, how many more women I could have gotten to.
(38:47):
So it is it's it's a puzzle that still has
many pieces missing, but they're coming together and finally we
have a framework, we have a platform, we have a
place to go to to begin to understand this, and
the research continues. So I'm I'm, I'm at it. So
(39:08):
any funding or resources are a little hard to come by,
but if if I may make an open call out,
if anybody knows or has a relative, or can think
of anything, please find me. My website is Mindy Johnson
Creative dot com and you can find me there. I'm
on Facebook and that has worked. I've actually had since
(39:29):
the book the first printing were now in a second
printing and reaching towards the third printing. UM. Since the
first printing came out, a couple of families reached out
and said, that's my mother who's unidentified on this page,
and they are now identified in the subsequent printing. Yeah,
and new discoveries all lot. Will make sure we include
(39:51):
your website address in the show notes as well, so
easily click through and get it. UM. I feel like
it's so wonderful that this book, which would easily be
for someone the culmination of their work, is in fact
for you. Just a jumping off point. I love it
so much. That became very that was also part of
(40:13):
that avalanche. This is never going to stop, which is great.
I'm now jealous of all the students at cal Arts
a little bit because I think that course sounds amazing. Um, Mindy,
thank you so much. I'm just I feel so lucky
to get to spend this time learning from you. Thank
you well. It's joy And a big part of this
(40:35):
has been getting the message out and helping to change
this narrative about women and their roles in the presence
that they've had and a contribution to our animated and
collective entertainment past. It changes things to the point where
we think today, where we are at today is vital
(40:56):
and important. But what's important to understand is that we
have this rich, amazing path, too incredible shoulders to stand on,
and we don't have to get out there and reinvent
the wheel. We don't have to blaze as many trails
as we thought we had to. A large part of
the lifting has been done. We failed in recognizing that collectively,
(41:19):
men and women, we failed at that, and we can
change that now. So that's what's important here is that
as we move forward, as we've changed the mindset of
studios and executives and audiences to look for the stories
that women can bring to our world. It's also on
(41:42):
us to keep moving forward, keep this documented, keep it recorded,
keep it balanced so that we don't lose this history.
That we keep it moving forward. And as we move
into a digital age, we don't have those pieces of
paper to randomly f that are tucked under beds, so
(42:02):
it's important to keep the documentation fresh, restored, and placed
within a balanced context. I remain so delighted and I
think it is so incredibly cool that Mindy's work has
now led to a new class at cal Arts. I
think it's fabulous that people are going to learn this
part of the story that has not always been common
(42:23):
knowledge at all, even among people who love animation and
have studied its history. My sinse serious. Thanks to Mindy
for taking almost two hours to share her vast and
incredible knowledge and passion with me. I know she has
some new stuff on the horizon. We will keep you
posted as those things get announced. Yeah, you can find
Mindy online at Mindy Johnson Creative dot com. That's Mindy
(42:44):
M I N D Y. Will we start to include
that link in the show notes as well. Do you
have some listener mails takes out I do. Our last
listener mail was a continuation of the discussion of rare Bit.
We're kind of doing a similar thing on this one,
and that it is a continuing sh of the discussion
of the Georgia Gold Rush. Uh. This is from our
listener Terry, who wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I greatly
(43:08):
enjoy the show and I've been listening for several years.
I grew up in Cobb County, Georgia, and we had
Georgia history in the sixth grade, and we did talk
about the Delanaga Gold Rush as well as the Trail
of Tears. Two things I wanted to add about the episode. One,
the Georgia Capitol Building in Atlanta is covered in gold
leaf from Delanaga and Lumpkin County. I knew that, but
did not include it in the episode because then it
(43:28):
got into a whole other story. That dome was first
gilded in the nineteen fifties and was regilded in the
nineteen seventies. For that reason, the Capitol Building is referred
to as the Gold Dome. Reporters have long referred to
legislation and politics in Georgia as happening under the gold dome. Uh. Yeah,
that's just like an interesting part of like local cultural
history and goings on that people may not know if
(43:50):
they have never been to Atlanta. If you drive through Atlanta,
you see that building with the big gold dome that
is in fact the Capitol building. Um. Terry says, I
currently live in Villa Rica, Georgia, and there was a
modest gold rush in Villa Rica prior to Delannaga and
White County, the other rival for the title. Villa Rica
has its own gold rush museum and festival, and there
(44:12):
are still people who pay for gold in the area,
but they do not turn up as much as in
the Delanaga area. And then Terry gave us some show suggestions, so, um,
thank you so much, Terry. I wanted to mention this
because I didn't mention the Capitol really and that is
fascinating landmark. And also I did not know about Villarica
having had a minor gold rush, so they were happening everywhere.
(44:33):
We didn't even know it. Yeah. We've also gotten a
couple of like tweets about whether the gold find we
talked about in North Carolina should be framed as like
an earlier gold rush. Um. Don't know who sets the
rule for what's the rush and what isn't. Yeah, I
don't either. I presume it's a volume thing, and it
also becomes a matter of like is the rush based
(44:54):
on the amount of gold or the amount of people
that freak out about it, because that's a whole other thing.
I did not see anything. And again, this could just
be like a gap in in places I looked that
suggested that the North Carolina finds we're considered a rush.
Perhaps people local to that area would consider them so,
(45:15):
but yeah, I don't. Usually the Delanaga one is kind
of listed as the first one in the country, the
first true gold rush, whatever that means. Again, we know
we're in slippery not always clearly defined territory, but then
they all got overshadowed by California. Anyway. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. You can
(45:36):
also find us everywhere on social media under the handle
missed in History and Missed in History dot Com is
also where you will find the show and all of
its archives and show notes. Uh. If you would like
to subscribe to us, we highly encourage you to do so.
You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify,
or pretty much anywhere you get podcasts, so we'll hope
(45:56):
to see you there. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and today
we are serving up part two of my interview with
Mindy Johnson, the author of inc and Paint, the Women
(00:22):
of Walt Disney's animation, and she is so full of
information that we very easily filled two episodes with it,
and I think there are two episodes that both run
a little longer than our normal average. Back in part one,
Mindy busted some myths and there's more of that on
the way today, and that includes the idea that women
in the early days of animation were just tracers and
not accomplished artists in their own rights. So we will
(00:44):
jump right in. Will you talk a little bit about
what the hiring process was like for the women that
ended up in the inc and Paint department and then
what their day to day jobs were like. Yeah, and
it's important to note that there's a lot of material
out there that states that that was the only place
women could work. There's a crazy letter from the snow
(01:08):
White Days that circulates on the internet, and there are
a couple of things that need to be well. First
of all, placed in context about that, it was the
nineteen thirties that was the prevailing attitude. But the other
thing that's important to understand is this was a form
letter that was actually created in the late twenties because
(01:29):
by that time that Mickey many cartoons had become worldwide phenomenons,
and the little tiny studio on the Hyperion Avenue in
Las Vilas, California was getting inundated with fan mail and
people wanting to Oh, I want to work there, I've
got to do this. Plus it was the depression, so
it's that much. You know, any kind of job anywhere
(01:52):
was vital critical, but if you were working at Disney
Studios you were certainly they didn't feel the immediate effects
of the compression as other places did in the country.
It was a boon town and so they were getting
in inundated. People would literally show up at the front door.
I got a letter from you, you know, I'm I'm
(02:13):
ready to work, but yet there was no job because
they just said, thank you for sending it, but we're
not hiring at this time. So they changed that their
generic form letters to state you know, please, it's a
polite thank you, but please go away. They weren't paying
to have people come out, and certainly they were very
talented people. But again it was the nineties and the
(02:36):
men were doing the animation. It was a boys club
at that point, and women's roles were seen as secondary,
and as women, we tend to not talk about our work.
It was a man's world at that time, and so
women really were there. A poor secretary somewhere typed it
(02:57):
out saying women didn't do any of the creative work.
But yet this is a secretary who had no understanding
of what was going on over in that department, nor
was it in the general mindset to speak about that.
But it's also important to note that these were not
There was a myth going around that, oh they picked
women up off the street. My sister's cousin got in there.
(03:17):
Anybody could train. No, you had to come in, and
this was Hazel Seol establishing this Tuesday mornings. You had
to bring in your portfolio, and they were always on
scramble trying to find qualified talented personnel artists. They sent
out at various times uh postcards and did radio announcements.
(03:43):
We found the script for a radio broadcast to the
forties and fifties taking all women artists please come down.
So there was segregation in terms of roles in gender,
but they were seeking women artists their backt ads that
were placed girl artists wanted. So for women in the
(04:03):
nineteen thirties, if you've studied art in any way, shape
or form, and there were wonderful art schools and institutions,
this was a major plus. There were also in the
newspapers you had women columns for personnel and men columns
for personnel. So that's again why you have to look
at this from a contextualized manner, because it was very
(04:26):
different then. So Tuesday mornings, if people came at any
other point, show up Tuesday mornings, and that's when Hazel
and her teams would review applicants and take a look
at their portfolios. And more often than not, if you
had the talent, you were hired right on the spot,
and you had to begin by going through training. And
again Hazel Steel and her teams established training for the
(04:49):
women in these roles. So the misconception is that they
taught people how to hold a paint rush. That's what
the training was, and they painted by number. Nothing could
be further from the truth. They were brought in as artists.
They had to prove they were artists, and they were
trained in the specific artistry and tools and materials required
(05:12):
for working with syloid and the characterizations of what they
were trying to accomplish to achieve a unified filmic experience.
So therein is the difference in how the training was
laid out, and that was true for animators as well.
Walt also started animation and training, and animators could come in.
(05:34):
They could be the most brilliant fine artists, men or women,
and they still had to go through an animation training program.
Now it's in the thirties that women were funneled into
the income paient roles. But by the late thirties we
see change happening. Retta Scott's, Mildred Rossi ethel Coulsar their
(05:56):
Biola Anderson. There were a number of women who came
in in the late thirties of the success of Snow White. Again,
it's a boomtown at that little studio and it's just
mushrooming into productions and buildings and personnel, and the staff
grew so large that Walt grumbled about not being able
to say hello to everybody personally, because he couldn't take
(06:16):
the time to get to know everyone because there was
so much going on and so many people working here.
When you look at what it's the footage we have,
you see women. The numbers of women were always higher
than the national average for women in industry. Wherever those
numbers landed, Disney was always anywhere from three to five
(06:38):
or higher percent higher than the national industry of other
industries where women were so their presence was always there
from the very beginning. And as these various films are
expanding whilst seeing that there's a big wider range of
stories we can and should be telling in a feature
length forum. So right as Scott is often credited as
(07:01):
the first female animator, but we do have other women
in at the studio doing what was called color animation,
and there are great examples of that in Fantasia and
some elements in Panecche. But then were visibly present in Fantasia,
the Takata and few sequence you have sort of pastel
shapes and colors and forms moving on the screen. That's
(07:23):
all done by women. Mildred Rossi at the Cool Star
and the women of the Paint Lab developed a really
amazing technique where they could have adhere talk past self
to saluboid directly and the women were animating the color
directly on the sideline. No pencils. Yeah, and then you
(07:47):
get people like Retti Scott wielding a pencil, and that
woman had power in her drawings and so much so
they would put her drawings in the room and no
one could tell. And finally some of these gray who
did the Retta Retta Scott, she was sort of plucked
from Snard Art Institute. They saw the talent in her,
brought her in to do some story concept pieces, but
(08:10):
then moved her into animation and she ended up doing
one of the most powerful sequences in Bandy, the dog
fight sequence. For she was just a tremendous expert on
animals and just these ferocious dogs. I think she gues
estimated she did over thirty five thousand dog drawing to
get that sequence. That she had a little bit of
(08:32):
a learning curve, and there were a couple of other
male animators who stepped into kind of help her with timing,
But her drawings and her artistry is definitely there on
the screen. And she's also the first woman animator to
get a credit at Disney. We have other early women
animators in other shorts, but in terms of feature length animation,
(08:55):
she's first get a credit. So that's why happened. People
have presumed she's the one and only, but there were
many others working at around that time, and if we
count color animation, Mildred Rossi is more than likely the first.
But it's a color animation process, so you know, different
(09:15):
mediums but still the same thing. And we could even
go earlier to the women doing the blend technique on
snow white, because that again is early color animation. They're
moving that color across each cell, so it's, you know,
just as you would a pencil drawing. Right. You have
so many great stories about all of these women that
really did change things significantly and contributed in ways that
(09:38):
are not always recognized. But I wonder at what point
in your research was there a moment of revelation of
just how massive, um and vital the role of women
was to a lot of these films that have been
famous forever and aren't really thought of necessarily as being
the product of a of a female workforce. Yeah, that
(09:59):
was at my eight months breakdown where I panicked and
called my editor and went, oh my gosh, this is
it was almost like an avalanche. It just hit me.
And I even had some paradigms I had to undo
because this narrative, this logline, and and here's where it's
(10:21):
another part of what sort of when the avalanche hit,
I started playing out and I'm so grateful for the
volumes that are out there. Many by dear colleagues have
done extraordinary work. But I began to quickly go to
the index and start to you know, short change it
and and go, okay, let's see where the women are.
(10:42):
And you would find the same four or five women,
Lillian and Edmund Disney. And it was always Mr. The
Mrs Disney, that was always and his wife Lilian. No mention,
you know, the story of Lilian naming Mickey Mickey Mouse
is about it. No mention of the work that they
did on those early shorts, No mention at all. Willian
(11:05):
wouldn't cash your paychecks if they were going to run short,
not cash your paychecks so we can meet payroll. So
she was working for free, you know, at their kitchen
tables till the wee hours, trying to get these cells
blackened in on the first Mickey Hu, Mini, Lillian and
Edna were right there toe to toe from the very beginning,
(11:26):
and yet they would always get reduced down or if
they would be mentioned. So one of the other four
or five women that would be in the indexes of
a few books with most books would be Margaret Winkler.
She was the first female producer in the Producer's Guild.
She added a fictitious day to her name so she
could operate her business gender neutrals, so no one would
(11:47):
freak out that she was a woman. And she singlehandedly
changed animation and turned it into a standard part of
the theater going experience, so that audiences thought out the
animation and portions rather than so. She changed it from novelties.
She put Felix the Cat on the map and made
him a worldwide phenomenon. And she did the same with
(12:10):
Walt Disney. So the animation industry owes itself to Margaret Winkler,
and yet she's always reduced to just a sentence or
two in most books out there. She's one of the
handful of women at the early stages. And then, of
course Mary Blair, wonderful, amazing, extraordinary Mary Blair, but people
(12:30):
often thought that she was the only female artist, and
occasionally you'd get read of Scott in there. So you
get the same four or five women, and that would
be it. Aside from voice talents, that would be it.
And I thought, wait a second, there are far more
women out here. There has to be more. And so
(12:52):
thus began this five year odyssey to get the book done.
But the research still continued. So it's been seven years
or more and there are new discoveries every day. Yeah,
I'm doing some really deep digging into the earliest women
and it's incredible the work that they did in animation,
(13:14):
and yet no credit, no acknowledgement, nothing yet, And that's
gonna change. Mindy incidentally said that we could cut that
last sentence because she didn't want to come off as
to bragadocious in her own words. But I really wanted
to leave it in because, as we're going to see
(13:34):
in just a little while, her book project, which grew
from just a tiny kernel of information to become something huge,
really is changing how people look at Disney animation history.
But for right now, we are going to pause for
a quick sponsor break. We're going to jump right back
(13:56):
in with Mindy here because she made a really good
point while we were talking about why she wanted to
include firsthand accounts in her book. It was important in
working on the book to put it into as many
firsthand accounts as possible. This is their story, not my
story to be telling, but their story. And that was
vital because I knew there would be a lot of
(14:18):
people coming to challenge what I put across in the book,
and I'm like, look, these are the voices of the
women who were there. I do want to talk about
sort of a controversial time during Walt Disney Studios, which
was the strike that took place in nineteen forty one,
and I hope that you would talk a little bit
about the role of the women in the incompaient department
(14:39):
during that period and how that strike affected them going forward. Sure, well,
in the strike was a challenging time for the studio
and all overall. In fact, it lingered for decades, and
many of the women, either through their oral histories or
(15:00):
the families or through those who were still with us,
you could tell when I would ask about it it
was a tender still a very tender time caused major
it forever changed the industry, you know, and you think
what could have happened had things continued in the fracture
that that caused. You know, I think it's set things
(15:22):
back by a decade or more. Um even technologically it
set things back, but it caused riffs, long riffs. I
wrote about what I had and what I could find,
and what people could speak about. And I was pleased
to see when we went for final reviews on the
(15:43):
book that everything was retained. So this book holds probably
the There are other articles and other books about this era,
but this whole the largest amount of firsthand from the
women's perspective accounts, and it was it was a very
personal time for a lot of them in the incompaient department,
(16:05):
and we hadn't keep in mind that women were in
virtually every area. This is also the time where Walt
announces he's on record he began the animation training program
for women. World War had already broken out in Europe,
and he was seeing men leaving, and we sort of
read the signs of what was going on overseas and
(16:28):
began to prepare, recognizing that as men are going to
be leaving, we need to keep the systems moving. So
he began training some of his top anchors in the
campaign departments. Keep in mind that these women, the inkers
where the animators had eracers. Anchors went toe to toe
with everything the animators are doing and working in ink
(16:51):
without eracers. There's the great saying about ginger rogers did
everything Freda Stare did backwards and in high heels. These
women did everything the animators did on celluloid, which is
like skating on ice with ink pens, no eracers, and
in high heels. So these women were remarkable with what
(17:13):
they were doing, and Walt was exploring transitioning them into animating.
And so we have a training program that begins. And
that was part of some of the early riffs that
our Babid and others were sort of spouting about that,
you know, they're trying to train women to do our
jobs and they're gonna undercut them with pay so it'll
(17:35):
be cheaper. And isn't that terrible? And Walt delivers a
speech in February of nineteen forty one saying, look, if
a woman can do the job, she gets the pay. Now,
where is that stand today? Even where women are paid
eighty cents to a man's dollar right, that's very progressive
(17:57):
and very groundbreaking. And so the women continue to train
and then as World War we become involved in World
War two, as that breaks out, women then literally put
down their pens and brushes and trained and picked up
pencils and moved into animation. And even before the war,
um the anchors were in between directly the mail in
(18:19):
between ers with pencils and erasers. We're not able to
get the legs on the deers and vandy very clean.
They would wobble too much. The lines would wobble because
the girls would have to be matching what they were doing.
So they just said, you know, let us do it.
So they were in between ing directly. So when you watch,
basically again, keep an eye on those deer legs, they
(18:40):
don't move. And that's the women's work directly on themselves. Yeah,
that's amazing. So it's those kinds of things were in
the ether, that's what was happening. There was a lot
of confusion and mis communication, angry voices. As the drug
teams become organized, many of the women. In fact, one
(19:03):
of the corridor heads of ink and Paint and the
special effects team, there was a woman who was running
the airbrush department. She had over twenty men and women
working under her. Barbara with Baldwin, she took all of
her teams out. They all went out on strike um
and you know, again that was their prerogative, and so
(19:24):
it was a real bitter sweet time. Many people felt
a tremendous loyalty to Walton and he was trying to
put the money back in to the studio. He had
built this beautiful, state of the art studios that they
would have comfortable environments to be working in, and many
were a little frustrated with that. They liked on top
(19:46):
of each other hodgepodge of the Hyperion studios, but it
just wasn't going to work. So sadly, how streamlined things
became with the studio created some problems and distance and
confusion and labor issues. And keep in mind also that
the other studios in town, other animation studios, had gone
(20:07):
through similar rife years prior to Disney did. It was
one of the last to hold out and also sort
of the highest profile, So it's important to know that
there were other studios that had gone through that, and
there were some pretty strong armed thugs that were pulling
some things, but it did change things. Um, I tried
(20:29):
to be as balanced with what I could get to
show the fact that it was a difficult device as
time you had teams who stayed committed to Walton, who
were in trying to work, and it was also time
where men had to pick up pens and brushes to
help get those cells completed. So it was a real
(20:51):
blurring of the lines. Um it mandated the simplicity of Bumbo.
As supplies became, you know what, the war happening in Europe,
supplies became scarcer and colors. The palette is very simple
and basic because they couldn't get pigments, brushes. They were
(21:12):
importing sable brushes from overseas. German pigments they couldn't get.
So it had a pretty profound impact and they had
to sort of stay malleable and figure out how we're
going to work with what we can get and what
we can do. And so oftentimes it's rare to find
an actual production self from Dumbo because they were washed
(21:34):
off as in as they you know, so their women's
artistry went down the drain. Literally. Yeah, what a weird,
condensed time of just intense things happening all at once. Yeah,
and you know you had I think Ruthie Thompson talked
about you had roommates where one would drive the other
one in and drop she was on strike, and the
(21:57):
other one was chose to across the line. She'd drop
her off so she could go pick it and she'd
crossed the line and go in to go to work
and then at the end of the day pick her
up and go home. And you know, it was it
was a very strange time, sad time. It was. It
was difficult for those who went out on strike. Um
it lasted several months. You know, people lost their homes.
(22:21):
It was. It was very difficult. We may have already
touched on on ones that you would select, but I
wanted to ask you what you would say, are perhaps
the key three to four moments in the evolution of
roles for women at Disney Animation over the years. Mm hmm.
But that's a that's a tough one. I would say,
(22:42):
surprisingly had the very beginning. I was thrilled when I
had to sort of read think about it in Triple
Check it that the very first employee was a woman, um,
and that women had always been there, and what was
accomplished in that first ten years Hazel School. I think
it's probably one of the most unsung women in animation.
(23:03):
She took from basic blackening, crude basic blackening, and in
the span of under ten years, transformed, visually transformed the
visual experience of animation from black and white blackeners to
the Rembrandt desk quality of snow white in the Seven Doors.
(23:23):
And Walt gets the credit, and yes, understandably so because
he was pushing for that, But what Hazel and her
teams accomplished, I was stunned. When you look at that
and begin to sort of wrap your head around all
that's accomplished it it's mind blowing. And look at that
(23:43):
animation in that time traod where it progresses from and too,
so that's a key time trade. I would also say
the advent of zoography World War two is very big
with Rosie the Riveters. We have Rosie the Rivet, Rosie's
with pencil the advent of dereography, thinking was a very
costly These women were premium artists and far more than
(24:08):
what men were accomplishing with pencils, because pencils have eracers
and you had other artists coming in and cleaning up
your line. So the fine artistry of inking, which the
real zenith of that is Sleeping Beauty. And again if
you're watching that film looking for the line artistry and there,
it's again just mind blowing. But how pivotal that point
(24:32):
is when in order to save animation truly the advent
of gereography did in fact say that, but women moved
into those front lines. It changes the artistry, but women
were also there and working on those early zereography teams.
And then I would say probably the third and these
are overarching changes for animation in general, is that digital advent.
(24:55):
But it's important to note that women were right there
at that moment and part of those teams as animation
transforms into a digital art form. So just as the
pivotal point for animation, it's important to remember women have
always been there. Specifically for women, I would say those
early earliest years from about twenty seven to thirty seven
(25:18):
catl Seel and her teams, and this is also sort
of occurring at other studios, but Tad and Shoulders above
all else, Haitel Sewel and her accomplishments were remarkable. You
also have other independent women animators working at that time.
Women are moving into animation in the thirties, and that's critical.
(25:39):
The war had a very big impact in moving women
into positions. Sadly, at the end of the war, again
it was society that said, okay, back to the kitchens.
In fact, there were campaigns, the government issued campaigns about
being housewives again so that they would free up the
jobs for the men to come back and we could
(26:00):
get back to making babies. So that's the nineteen forties,
which is a real crazy, strange anomaly of a time period.
And then I would say for women, specifically the seventies,
the women's movement and getting women to wake up to
who they are and their own discoveries of what they're doing.
(26:22):
You see a tremendous rise in Interestingly enough, in the
nineteen forties in divorces, laws were very different. You had
to prove infidelity, but by the nineteen seventies and the
changes to that, you could divorce for irreconcilable differences rather
than proving infidelity or other issues. Um, that had a
(26:43):
tremendous impact in preeing up women. You also have birth control,
where women are changing and their lives are transitioning, and
suddenly they can stave off having their families, and we
see a tremendous rise in women getting their college degrees.
It's in the seventies and eighties where the number of
women enrolled in colleges evens out to men and in
(27:05):
some places surpasses the number of men studying in school.
So that's again why I've had to put everything into context.
You can understand where women are in terms of animation
and that industry and the advances that occur and the
opportunities occur for women. Society still had their whole it's
(27:25):
hold on where women were and what they could do,
and many ways we still have a lot of that
shake out of today. Coming up, we are going to
talk about some of the more recent and very exciting
developments for women in animation. But first we will pause
for a sponsor break. Now Disney while Disney Animation Studios
(27:50):
has its first woman chief creative Officer, which is pretty
exciting to me, very exciting like that. That announcement really
was emotional when I heard it. It was surprising to
me how deeply it moved me. I am emotional just
talking about these women, and I get people coming up
(28:10):
out of all ages, men and women emotional about how
come we don't know this and and then pointing out
that's still today. I did an event about a year
ago at the Motion Picture Academy and audible gaps from
the industry in the room going we had no idea
and the course of change that that's helped, you know,
(28:34):
the turning of the page helps to sort of flap
that page over big time, so that getting people to
sort of wake up from this unconscious bias, to realize
there is this need for change and we are so
unconscious and how we moved to this world about it
and realizing that we still have those instances today where
(28:56):
we have tremendous glass feelings. We have to break through.
We have to change that unconscious preset of defaulting to
the men and not thinking about, oh, well, where are
the women, and why don't we get women in? What
can we do to get women in here? Because we've
been missing out on half the sky. Bringing John Lennon
(29:16):
into this, you know, we have that we've we've missed
half of our human experience by not letting women come
to the table. We're not recognizing what women have already
brought to the table. That is one of the reasons
I love your book. Thank you. I mean, I like,
seriously to me, I think it is so important. I
think it should be part of college courses. I think
(29:38):
it is a vitally important piece of education for anyone
who is interested in animation, but for anyone who is
interested in looking at just sort of how culture has
been impacted and yet not acknowledged by women, which is fascinating,
Which is why I'm really excited about the next project
that you told me you're working on, well, the next generation.
(30:01):
Will you talk about that a little bit? Sure? Absolutely, Well,
a couple of things in terms of education. UM. So
we've just announced I'm teaching a class this fall at
cal Arts on the history of women and animation, the
first of its kind, and my book is the text.
(30:22):
See me, I get I get emotional about it too. Um.
And it's going to go, you know, beyond Dissey if
I'm doing deeper dives into the biographies of these women
as much as I can at this point. So it's
going to be ever changing because the research is ongoing. UM.
But I'm prepping for that right now, and it's we're
(30:43):
opening it up to faculty and all students. They don't
have to be animation students, they get priority, but they
asked if it would be okay to open that up,
and I said, absolutely, let's do it. So I'll be
speaking to um the history of women and other underrepresent
at groups within animation, primarily women and their advents, who
(31:07):
they are as people, taking a deeper dive into their accomplishments,
because some of the earliest women, it's so much even
beyond animation, it's it's mind blowing, and that leads me
to I'm currently working on a young reader's book called Pencils,
Pens and Brushes Great Girls of Disney Animation, and this
(31:27):
little treasured volume is a wonderful opportunity to go a
little further into some of these remarkable women, many of
which not only accomplished remarkable advancements within animation and their
roles within animation are so vital, but when you look
at their lives beyond animation, both before coming to Disney
(31:51):
Studios and beyond, it's incredible the caliber of these women.
A couple of examples. One woman, her name was Grace Huntington's.
She was the second woman to work in story at
Disney Studios in a late nineteen thirties and while she
(32:12):
was working there, sharp amazing young girl who worked hard
at coming in with new and fresh ideas and preparing
her pitches. And she learned she had to step right
in and the pitch sessions and the men would get
very you get up and act out the antics and things.
She couldn't be a waltflower. She had to get out
(32:33):
there and do it. Her brother was also a pilot,
and she was fascinated with this idea of flight. Now
this is in the you have to remember things that
move as lightning fast as they do today, and the
allure of Charles Lindberg's transatlantic flight was still a major thing,
and so aviation took off, no pun intended. It literally
(32:57):
just lawesomed and women were very excited about this new
form of transportation. So Grace was fascinated with it. And
her brother was getting his pilot license, and she thought, well,
I could do that while working into the studios. She
got her license. And she had always been fascinated as
(33:17):
a young girl with Jules Verne's trip to the Moon
and other you know, science fiction things. And this was
the late thirties. Had there been a space program, this
woman would have been part of it. In fact, she
sent correspondence to the military in Washington inquiring about high altitude.
(33:39):
She actually went on and trained full time. She left
as they and trained full time and broke a record
in high altitude flights for small aircraft and wanted to
continue doing this. And she made query to the military saying, look,
I just broke this record. Here's the newspaper and documentation,
(34:00):
and then we got my flight reported back everything. You know.
Would you like to sponsor me? I'm I'm here, let's
do more of this. No, thank you, you're a woman.
They wouldn't. Yes, she couldn't get work as a pilot's
because she was a woman. So she ended up training.
(34:20):
She had to become a flight instructor, and the aviation
out that that helped her train said okay, you know,
we'll keep you on. So here she had she brought
this record and still couldn't get work because she was
a woman. But she was part of the earliest inklings
(34:40):
of the space race, and yet I shouldn't do anything
with it, and began working at Disney Studio. That's such
a great story. It is I want gas or there's
so much more. And to continue with aviation, we have
the first woman to get her pilot's license in Connecticut
(35:04):
with a woman by the name of Mary good Rich,
and she went on and became the first person to
fly solo of Cuba and was the first person to
have a syndicated aviation column. She was the first woman
reporter at her local newspaper and then got a syndicated
aviation column because they said, oh, we need someone to
(35:25):
write this. If you get your pilots license, maybe you
could do that. So she did, and sadly then when
her eyesight went bad, she ended up moving making her
way out to California and got a job. She established
the first story research department at the Disney Studios in
(35:45):
and in my lectures, I'll say, well, that was the
Internet of the nineties. What she and her team did
they would use these really amazing things called books, and
they would research and find out, you know, well, what's
the dear's habits hat looked like? And for a pinecchio,
what what would it look like inside of a whale?
(36:05):
And how would you you know, answering those questions so
that the artists could create these worlds and characters that
we know and love. So she was pretty remarkable in
her own right and the advent to fight. She also
flew on the Hindenburg made one of the one of
the Transatlantic passages on the Hindenburgh. I think it was
(36:27):
the the before it, like one or two of the
passages before it blew up. Yeah, So there's really I mean,
these women were right there at these Mary Costa are
wonderful voice of Princess Aroa went on and had She
was one of the leading matso sopranos an opera, the
grand world of opera, and performed on every opera stage
(36:48):
in the world. And yet no one knows that unless
you're an opera fan, and the upper fans don't know
about her work in animation because I didn't know that
about her. And it does strike being sort of hilarious
when you watch somebody who knows one part of her
career and someone knows the other meet each other and
they're like, no, she was a singer, and it's like never, No,
is it a different Mary Costa? No right, because again,
(37:14):
nothing had been put down in word. There was no
place to go to to get the sort of the
definitive answer on it. And and realized too as big
and monstrous as that book is, and it had to be.
It still is scratching a rich, incredible, cavernous surface to
who these women were, what they accomplished, the epic saga
(37:39):
of a hundred years of our animated collective animated past,
and women have always been there. So it's it's at
least to go to place. It's a reference, it's a
deep dive. It's a light magazine read. It's a textbook.
So I'll be using that my book as sort of
the text for the cal arts class, little teaching and
(38:01):
uh and sort of. I'm currently working on war material
a little more involved on women, not only at Disney
but beyond Disney. But the records are hard to find
because again history is preserved writ about recorded an archived
from a male perspective. So it's one paragraph here and
two sentences there, you know, contacting someone's relatives and their
(38:27):
accounts and digging under beds and into closets and bankers
boxes too, pieces together, and it really was on the
cusp of I kept thinking, Oh, had I started a
year sooner, how many more women I could have gotten to.
(38:47):
So it is it's it's a puzzle that still has
many pieces missing, but they're coming together and finally we
have a framework, we have a platform, we have a
place to go to to begin to understand this, and
the research continues. So I'm I'm, I'm at it. So
(39:08):
any funding or resources are a little hard to come by,
but if if I may make an open call out,
if anybody knows or has a relative, or can think
of anything, please find me. My website is Mindy Johnson
Creative dot com and you can find me there. I'm
on Facebook and that has worked. I've actually had since
(39:29):
the book the first printing were now in a second
printing and reaching towards the third printing. UM. Since the
first printing came out, a couple of families reached out
and said, that's my mother who's unidentified on this page,
and they are now identified in the subsequent printing. Yeah,
and new discoveries all lot. Will make sure we include
(39:51):
your website address in the show notes as well, so
easily click through and get it. UM. I feel like
it's so wonderful that this book, which would easily be
for someone the culmination of their work, is in fact
for you. Just a jumping off point. I love it
so much. That became very that was also part of
(40:13):
that avalanche. This is never going to stop, which is great.
I'm now jealous of all the students at cal Arts
a little bit because I think that course sounds amazing. Um, Mindy,
thank you so much. I'm just I feel so lucky
to get to spend this time learning from you. Thank
you well. It's joy And a big part of this
(40:35):
has been getting the message out and helping to change
this narrative about women and their roles in the presence
that they've had and a contribution to our animated and
collective entertainment past. It changes things to the point where
we think today, where we are at today is vital
(40:56):
and important. But what's important to understand is that we
have this rich, amazing path, too incredible shoulders to stand on,
and we don't have to get out there and reinvent
the wheel. We don't have to blaze as many trails
as we thought we had to. A large part of
the lifting has been done. We failed in recognizing that collectively,
(41:19):
men and women, we failed at that, and we can
change that now. So that's what's important here is that
as we move forward, as we've changed the mindset of
studios and executives and audiences to look for the stories
that women can bring to our world. It's also on
(41:42):
us to keep moving forward, keep this documented, keep it recorded,
keep it balanced so that we don't lose this history.
That we keep it moving forward. And as we move
into a digital age, we don't have those pieces of
paper to randomly f that are tucked under beds, so
(42:02):
it's important to keep the documentation fresh, restored, and placed
within a balanced context. I remain so delighted and I
think it is so incredibly cool that Mindy's work has
now led to a new class at cal Arts. I
think it's fabulous that people are going to learn this
part of the story that has not always been common
(42:23):
knowledge at all, even among people who love animation and
have studied its history. My sinse serious. Thanks to Mindy
for taking almost two hours to share her vast and
incredible knowledge and passion with me. I know she has
some new stuff on the horizon. We will keep you
posted as those things get announced. Yeah, you can find
Mindy online at Mindy Johnson Creative dot com. That's Mindy
(42:44):
M I N D Y. Will we start to include
that link in the show notes as well. Do you
have some listener mails takes out I do. Our last
listener mail was a continuation of the discussion of rare Bit.
We're kind of doing a similar thing on this one,
and that it is a continuing sh of the discussion
of the Georgia Gold Rush. Uh. This is from our
listener Terry, who wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly. I greatly
(43:08):
enjoy the show and I've been listening for several years.
I grew up in Cobb County, Georgia, and we had
Georgia history in the sixth grade, and we did talk
about the Delanaga Gold Rush as well as the Trail
of Tears. Two things I wanted to add about the episode. One,
the Georgia Capitol Building in Atlanta is covered in gold
leaf from Delanaga and Lumpkin County. I knew that, but
did not include it in the episode because then it
(43:28):
got into a whole other story. That dome was first
gilded in the nineteen fifties and was regilded in the
nineteen seventies. For that reason, the Capitol Building is referred
to as the Gold Dome. Reporters have long referred to
legislation and politics in Georgia as happening under the gold dome. Uh. Yeah,
that's just like an interesting part of like local cultural
history and goings on that people may not know if
(43:50):
they have never been to Atlanta. If you drive through Atlanta,
you see that building with the big gold dome that
is in fact the Capitol building. Um. Terry says, I
currently live in Villa Rica, Georgia, and there was a
modest gold rush in Villa Rica prior to Delannaga and
White County, the other rival for the title. Villa Rica
has its own gold rush museum and festival, and there
(44:12):
are still people who pay for gold in the area,
but they do not turn up as much as in
the Delanaga area. And then Terry gave us some show suggestions, so, um,
thank you so much, Terry. I wanted to mention this
because I didn't mention the Capitol really and that is
fascinating landmark. And also I did not know about Villarica
having had a minor gold rush, so they were happening everywhere.
(44:33):
We didn't even know it. Yeah. We've also gotten a
couple of like tweets about whether the gold find we
talked about in North Carolina should be framed as like
an earlier gold rush. Um. Don't know who sets the
rule for what's the rush and what isn't. Yeah, I
don't either. I presume it's a volume thing, and it
also becomes a matter of like is the rush based
(44:54):
on the amount of gold or the amount of people
that freak out about it, because that's a whole other thing.
I did not see anything. And again, this could just
be like a gap in in places I looked that
suggested that the North Carolina finds we're considered a rush.
Perhaps people local to that area would consider them so,
(45:15):
but yeah, I don't. Usually the Delanaga one is kind
of listed as the first one in the country, the
first true gold rush, whatever that means. Again, we know
we're in slippery not always clearly defined territory, but then
they all got overshadowed by California. Anyway. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com. You can
(45:36):
also find us everywhere on social media under the handle
missed in History and Missed in History dot Com is
also where you will find the show and all of
its archives and show notes. Uh. If you would like
to subscribe to us, we highly encourage you to do so.
You can do that on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify,
or pretty much anywhere you get podcasts, so we'll hope
(45:56):
to see you there. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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