All day, Liz had been getting calls to bring her drawings down to the camera room. The requests had gone from urgent to insistent to desperate, and Liz was working as fast as she could. As Sleeping Beauty neared completion, she wasn’t concentrating only on birds and animals but also animating Prince Philip’s horse and the jester character. There was much to do, she was under heightened pressure, and Liz could feel the stress radiating off her hand as it gripped the pencil.
When she was done, she gathered up her heavy load of artwork to rush it over to the camera room for filming. Frustrated to find the elevator busy, she decided to use the stairs in order not to lose another minute. Women’s fashion in the 1950s was not well suited to dashing up and down stairwells at top speed. Liz had embraced the clothing of the era, as she believed that dressing like a stereotypical secretary would help her fit in and perhaps soften the impact of her silly antics at the studio. That day, she was wearing three-and-a-half-inch heels, a wide-skirted dress over layers of petticoats, and a belt that cinched her waist tight. She ran up the stairs, her hands so full of drawings that she could barely see what was in front of her. Just as she stepped out of the stairwell, Fess Parker Jr., the actor playing Davy Crockett for the Disneyland television series, came out of the makeup department and started rushing down the stairs to the back lot where the show was filmed.
The six-foot-seven actor and the six-foot-one animator collided and went tumbling. Liz’s skirts flew into the air while Parker’s coonskin cap soared down the stairs. With a ding, the elevator doors opened in the middle of the chaos and there was Walt, at first shocked by the scene. He stepped out of the elevator and saw three hundred drawings scattered about the open stairwell. It was too much for him; he started laughing uproariously. Liz looked up at him with apprehension—this was the first time she was meeting the boss—but she soon overcame her embarrassment and started chuckling too while they scouted the stairs to retrieve her drawings.
The women of Ink and Paint put the finishing touches on Sleeping Beauty, curling Princess Aurora’s eyelashes with expert, delicate strokes of their pens. Yet all the artistry of the department was about to disappear. This would be the last feature film at the studio to be graced by their work. Three intruders had entered their midst, and the women in the building eyed their robotic competitors uneasily. It was clear that everything was about to change.
In 1958, three Xerox machines were introduced to the Ink and Paint building. The technology was based on the electrophotography technique that inventor Chester Carlson had nearly given up on in 1942 after he was rejected by every corporation he applied to.
The technology took advantage of the fact that negatively and positively charged objects attract each other and that some objects conduct electricity when exposed to light. The machine works by exposing a document to be copied to a bright light, which casts a kind of electric shadow onto a charged cylindrical drum; the shadowed areas on the drum—the text of the document—are positively charged. Negatively charged toner, which adheres only to the dark, positively charged parts of the shadow, is then added. The negatively charged toner is transferred to a blank piece of paper and then heated so that the toner fuses to the page, creating a copy.
In 1946, the Haloid Photographic Company saw promise in Carlson’s patent and decided to refine the technology for commercial use. They invented the term xerography, the Latin roots of which loosely translate to “dry writing.” The Xerox photocopier was born and was ready to radically alter workplaces everywhere.
The challenge at the Walt Disney Studios was to find a way to photocopy not onto paper but onto plastic cels. Ub Iwerks traveled to the East Coast and began working directly with the Haloid Photographic Company on a way to alter its commercial copiers so the studio could use them. It was clear that the quality of the reproductions would worsen with Xerox machines, but significant financial savings balanced this loss.
While the earliest machines could copy only in black and white, the studio was already betting that in the future they would be able to copy in color. The technology could potentially eliminate the need for the Ink and Paint department by copying the animators’ drawings directly onto the cels. A single machine could churn out a thousand cels per day, easily putting an inker, who could produce only fifty cels a day, out of work. Ken Anderson, a longtime employee who bounced around from writing to animation to directing, brought Walt the financial verdict: if they eliminated Ink and Paint, they would save over half the cost of their pictures.
The copiers got their first try at making movie magic at the end of Sleeping Beauty, where a crowd of people walk across a bridge toward the castle. It was the sort of scene that required long hours of work, with each face needing detailed outlining. The machines did their job, and because the scene was shown from a wide angle, no difference in detail could be detected. The animators challenged the Xerox again, this time on the drawings of Maleficent as a dragon in the film’s climax. Once again the machines performed well, with the dark shading that characterizes the scene mostly unhampered by the mechanical process, although the animators noted that the black lines produced by the Xerox were not as smooth as those drawn by hand. The copiers hummed with activity, working far more hours a day than a single person ever could, and their human operators came and went in shifts. While a portion of the women of Ink and Paint copied on the Xerox, most continued their work as they always had, but now with the premonition that their days at the studio were coming to a close.
After nearly eight years in production, Sleeping Beauty premiered at the Fox Wilshire Theater in Los Angeles on January 29, 1959. The film was the most expensive animated feature of its time, costing roughly six million dollars to make, twice as much as either Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland. The Sleeping Beauty Castle, built from brick and mortar at the center of Disneyland, had been completed four years earlier and was still awaiting its princess.
The critical response to the film was mostly positive, although some reviewers noted the elements borrowed from previous films, particularly Snow White. Yet, with the film’s modern midcentury look, it could not help but stand out as significantly different from anything the studio had made previously. That wasn’t enough to sell tickets, however, and the film earned just $5.3 million at the box office, far short of Cinderella’s $8 million. By the end of its first run, the film had lost over a million dollars.
In contrast was Disney’s The Shaggy Dog, a movie loosely based on the 1923 novel The Hound of Florence by Felix Salten, author of Bambi. It tells the story of a teenage boy who is transformed into a dog and was the first live-action comedy film produced by Walt Disney Studios. It cost a mere one million dollars to make, and it was one of the top-grossing films of 1959, pulling in over eight million dollars. The lesson to studio executives was clear: Hand-drawn animation could not sustain itself. The studio needed to clean house.
The letters went out alphabetically; if your last name began with an A, then you were one of the first to find out you were cut. Liz, with the last name Zwicker, knew the envelope was coming long before the words were typed. As she waited for her letter to arrive, she watched as artists who had worked for the studio for decades were fired. It was a hopeless feeling, as if you were standing on the bow of a ship about to sink into the ocean and could only watch your torturously slow progress into the waters below. In the winter of 1959, Liz received the news she dreaded: she was being laid off as an animator. The studio offered her a job in layout, this time for more money, but she turned it down. If she wasn’t in animation, she’d rather not work on movies at all.
Liz certainly wasn’t alone; the studio fired all but seventy-five of its five hundred and fifty artists and animators. Even the jobs of those select few men and women who remained were under threat. Walt’s brother Roy suggested that they do away with the animation department altogether, as both their animated feature films and animated shorts were losing money. He implored Walt to focus his efforts where the profits were: on live-action television and feature films.
Walt wasn’t ready to let go, so the animation department survived, but at a fraction of its previous size. It was the Nine Old Men who went through the records of the animation department and decided which lucky artists could stay and which had to leave. While Liz turned down the opportunity to work in layout, other women were not so fastidious. Men had dominated that department since its inception, as it played a coveted role in production. The layout artists were responsible for staging every shot and plotting the action of the characters in each scene.
Two of the women advancing into openings in layout from their positions in Ink and Paint and animation were Sylvia Roemer and Sammie June Lanham. A benefit of the massive layoffs, if one wanted to look on the bright side, was all the extra space. No longer were they crammed into small offices and meeting rooms. The women spread out their pencils and paper in the capacious 2C wing, previously used only by directing animators.
Along with the exodus of talented animators was the near dissolution of the Ink and Paint department at the studio. Ink and Paint, the division that hired more women than any other, was slowly being stripped clean. Painters held on to their jobs for the moment, as the studio’s copiers were not yet able to reproduce in color, but they all knew their time was coming. The company line was that people weren’t losing their jobs; they were merely being retrained as Xerox technicians. The reality was more painful. A small number worked with the machines, and some found their way into other departments, but many left altogether. Of the once vital crew of inkers, at one time totaling more than forty, just two members remained. In the departed workers’ place stood massive hunks of plastic, glass, and metal. Many women from all over the studio watched the rooms empty with tears in their eyes.
As if brought in on purpose to cheer the forlorn staff, the studio was suddenly full of black-and-white-spotted puppies. They ran around the studio wildly, played in the halls, and sometimes just napped quietly under the animators’ desks. There were adult dogs too for the artists to admire, their coats shiny and their tongues hanging out in pure canine contentment. Walt was smitten with a book called The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. This time the studio was not adapting a fairy tale that had been retold over thousands of years but a novel published in 1956. It included modern elements they had never incorporated into their movies before, such as television, neon lights, and contemporary music. The story felt refreshing to the artists; it was just the change they needed and ideal for adaptation.
There was a reason the book felt tailored to them. Dodie Smith had written the text with animation in mind, hoping the Walt Disney Studios might pick it up. She made the plot tight, in a slim volume of just 199 pages full of personality, animals, and a villain that was suitably horrible. Yet despite the story’s advantages, the studio could not even have contemplated making the film just five years earlier. It would have been astronomically expensive for animators to draw ninety-nine puppies over and over again, each one carefully inked. Now the new Xerox machines made such concerns vanish; nothing could be simpler than making copies of drawings of black-and-white puppies.
The story department no longer housed rooms of writers and artists eager to debate the merits and faults of each scene. Where forty men and women had once ripped into a book eagerly, this time the manuscript was handed to a single artist who had worked at the studio since 1937, Bill Peet. Without the collaborative story meetings that had previously characterized script development, Peet had only himself to consult. He did it all, constructing storyboards and writing the script without either harsh criticism or the stimulation of new ideas. Wisely, Peet stayed close to the book’s narrative; he recognized the power of its simplicity and made few changes.
In animation, the path was unusually smooth. Marc Davis, the master of female villains, was able to copy Cruella De Vil’s inimitable style directly from the book, from her hair (half black and half white) to the smoke from her malodorous cigarettes to her long fur coats. Where Marc’s genius shone was in the subtleties of her appearance—he made Cruella’s face skeletal and her eyes wild with rage.
Those designing the look of the film were highly influenced by the Xerox technology. Eyvind Earle was not among those designers; he had left the studio a year previously, before Sleeping Beauty was even released. He left voluntarily, but his departure was likely encouraged due to the expense of his detailed backgrounds, and his attitude, which many coworkers felt was arrogant, probably didn’t help either. Before leaving the studio, he described his work there as “not Walt Disney. It was one hundred percent me.”
Instead of the lush, romantic look that defined Sleeping Beauty and many of the studio’s earlier films, the designers were going with a rough, pencil-sketch appearance that played to the strengths of the Xerox. The machine couldn’t hide the lines the animators made while drawing the film and that had previously been carefully traced and inked by female employees. With this in mind, production designer Ken Anderson decided to embrace the lines, giving the film a raggedy look in comparison to previous features. For the first time, they would show the pencil marks of the animators directly on-screen.
The look required the animators to be tidier in creating their art and to perform much of their own cleanup, getting rid of stray lines that they ordinarily would have left for the inbetweeners and Ink and Paint artists to handle. But despite the added effort, they were thrilled to see their own hand-drawn lines on a cel. Marc was happy with how his drawings looked directly under the camera lens, feeling that previously his art had always been “watered down.”
Walt, however, was not so pleased. The styling, he believed, was reminiscent of what they’d made in the 1920s, when animation was in its infancy and crude lines were acceptable. For decades they had worked to get rid of any stray marks on the cel, and they’d improved their techniques until the dreaded outlines vanished into the colors around them. Inkers had used colored lines with great skill so that every feature was rendered lifelike. Now, thanks to the Xerox machines, the black lines were back and they were everywhere. Production had gone too far, and Walt had been distracted, but it was too late to start over now. Still, he had strong words for the future: “We’re never gonna have another one of these goddamned things,” he grumbled. “Ken’s never going to be an art director again.”
The women who once reigned over Ink and Paint were similarly incensed, yelling at Anderson after he gave an interview about how Xerox would save the company money. Given the contentious environment, perhaps it’s not surprising that Anderson accepted Walt’s offer to take a break from feature films and design rides at Disneyland.
While the studio was awash in a superfluity of photocopies, the artists who had left the company were finding new homes for their creative work. Many of them turned to children’s literature. Both Mary and Retta were working for Golden Books, producing a treasury of titles that would persist across generations.
Gyo Fujikawa, who’d once lent her elegant style to Fantasia’s promotion and the accompanying book, was also making a name for herself in children’s publishing. Unlike Mary and Retta, however, she eschewed Golden Books. “They pay the artist only two hundred fifty dollars a book,” she complained. Most children’s book illustrators of the time received only a lump sum for their work; they didn’t get royalties. This seemed inherently unfair to Gyo, akin to giving her art away. She decided to hire a literary agent to better represent her interests. She illustrated a 1957 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and her work was so well regarded that her agent was able to insist on Gyo’s receiving royalties from then on.
Emboldened by her new clout in the book world, Gyo took on a new project as both author and illustrator. It didn’t seem radical at first—she was only drawing babies. She sketched infants experiencing the sweetness of everyday life, from cuddling to sleeping. The perspective was that of a child delighted with having a new baby brother or sister in the house. The babies she drew reflected the range of ethnicities Gyo came in contact with in her life in New York City; in her words it was “an international set of babies—little Black babies, Asian babies, all kinds of babies.” Her images were soft, warm, and lovable, and the text was kept simple to appeal to preschoolers.
When Gyo presented her book to her publisher, however, she received an unpleasant reaction. An executive was quick to criticize the diversity of the images and insisted that the African American babies be removed for fear that their inclusion would hurt sales. It was the early 1960s and only 6.7 percent of new children’s books in the United States depicted children of color, despite the social and cultural changes afoot. The Supreme Court had struck down “separate but equal” racial segregation in public schools, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was imminent, yet children’s libraries remained so homogenous that one editor referred to “the All-White World of Children’s Books.”
Gyo was defiant. She would not allow the book to be published if the illustrations were not kept multicultural. Her resolve was rewarded; the book was finally published in 1963 and it became a bestseller, with more than a million and a half copies sold so far. “Children want facts,” Fujikawa once said. “I include them all in the art because I know children sit and look for them when the stories are read.” Gyo revealed sensitivity in her texts, an understanding that the images we present to children and the stories we tell them influence their perception in later years. It was an appreciation of the principles of inclusivity and individuality that the Walt Disney Studios desperately needed and that Mary Blair was about to bring back to them.
Despite Walt’s displeasure and the discord among employees, One Hundred and One Dalmatians met with praise following its premiere on January 25, 1961. Time magazine said, “It is the wittiest, most charming, least pretentious cartoon feature Walt Disney has ever made,” while Variety was more modest in its compliments, writing, “While not as indelibly enchanting or inspired as some of the studio’s most unforgettable animated endeavors, this is nonetheless a painstaking creative effort.” Yet there was a distinct difference in how the film was assessed in comparison to Walt’s previous features. He was no longer the avant-garde artist making movies that defied expectations and crossed generations. The artist who once said, “We don’t actually make films for children, but we make films that children can enjoy along with their parents,” seemed to have lost his own pleasure in animated film. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was produced as children’s entertainment and made with profit in mind.
On-screen credits may never have fully reflected the efforts of those working on the films, but in One Hundred and One Dalmatians the acknowledgments were unusually concise. Given that the studio now housed so few artists, the ones who remained had put in very long hours. Although many female assistant animators worked on the movie, none of them saw their names on-screen. They hadn’t expected to—they knew how the system worked. The only two women to receive credit for the movie were Sammie June Lanham on layout and Evelyn Kennedy as music editor.
The appreciation for xerography, however, was clear. One Hundred and One Dalmatians had been made in record time, going from start to finish in a mere three years. Even more impressive, with a budget of $3.6 million, the movie made $6.2 million on its release. Xerox technology effectively saved animation at the Walt Disney Studios, whose future had been teetering since Sleeping Beauty. Yet the cost to the female workforce was unprecedented.
Whereas women had once reigned in Ink and Paint, desks now sat empty. In story and animation, careers were stagnant, and there were few opportunities for women to advance. The departments might have survived, but Walt’s interest in future cartoon features had faded along with the demise of traditional hand-drawn animation. In order for women to strengthen their position within the studio, they would have to find a project outside its walls.