by Beth Keating
Review
DisneyBizJournal.com
March 30, 2024
By Nathalia Holt (Oct 22, 2019)
Little, Brown and Company. (401 pages)
While I was searching for a new book to read earlier this month, I pulled The Queens of Animation off our shelf at home. It was a book that had come well-recommended to us several years ago, and we’d purchased it, but it never made it beyond the shelf in our library. It was named “A Best Book of 2019” by both the Library Journal (Arts) and Christian Science Monitor (Non Fiction), and has a rating of 4.7 stars (out of 5) on Amazon. It seemed like March’s Women’s History Month might be a good time to dust off this previously acquired tome.
Nathalia Holt is also the bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls. This time around, she is detailing the story of a group of the first women at Walt Disney Studios. These are the pioneering ladies who had a guiding hand in creating the early films that brought Disney to the forefront of animation – though, in fact, you probably won’t recognize most of their names. And that is exactly the point of Holt’s book.
The book is eminently readable, told in a narrative format, and is based on a great deal of background research. My main quibble with the format was Holt’s retelling of certain conversations in quotation construct, a decision which makes me uncomfortable any time an author uses it, particularly with subjects who are long since deceased and have no way of refuting what they said. This “fly on the wall” approach attributes direct conversations to people who may, or may not, have said exactly what’s being attributed to them. And in a book that digs as far back into the history books as this one does, it can be problematic. Giving concrete words to real people is a far different thing than paraphrasing a remembered encounter decades after the occurrence. Holt does give end notes for each chapter at the back of the book to indicate where her material was taken from, but it means some flipping back and forth for the reader… and a bit of “faith and trust” that the information is as she says it is, since while sources are given, the location of the quotes in the endnotes isn’t exact, in case you personally wanted to trace the information back. (Sorry, that’s the literature major in me coming out!)
Be that as it may, Holt does dive deeply into the creation of Disney’s early iconic films, but she also leads us right up through the advent of the Frozen franchise. While, as a Disney fan, I was familiar with the work of Disney Legends like Mary Blair, there were quite a few women whose names I’d never heard before. And you might not have, either, because by and large, these women were left off the credits of many of the films they’d worked so hard on, unrecognized publicly for their efforts.
While there is a great deal to unpack in Holt’s work, you will, at times, be very uncomfortable with some of the recollections. This isn’t a puffy, cheerleading piece for the Golden Days of Disney. The men at the Studios could be relentlessly ruthless, and the women were, by Holt’s retelling, often treated very poorly by their colleagues. It’s hard seeing these titans of the company portrayed as darkly as they sometimes are. You will cringe when reading details of how even Walt mercilessly ripped up animator’s artwork in front of the whole group. But you will also be cheered when Walt, ahead of the times and swimming upstream culturally, gave these women a chance when other studios put up walls to women in the industry. While they got a shot, these women were still doing ground-breaking work, and Holt shows just how difficult it was for them to break into the men’s world.
The Queens of Animation brings you stories you’ve never heard before; some of which are shocking, and some of which are downright inspiring. Remember that this was the 1930s. And as sometimes difficult as it is to hear the rough stories, including the ones involving Walt himself, the reader is cautioned to remember that this was a vastly different era, and these women were pioneers in the field. Be forewarned, though, that a bit of the pixie dust that Disney fans often sprinkle over the Disney company’s illustrious beginnings will be scattered in the wind with these retellings.
It is tempting to forget that these entrees into animation were occurring nearly a century ago, and to read the stories through the lens of the modern day workplace. But if you resist that urge, you’ll gain an even greater insight into the women’s struggle to fit in, despite their talent. Filmmaking and animation were themselves fledging efforts, and the Walt Disney Company would go on to invent many of the technologies we take for granted today. Holt recounts how much of this innovation came about, even while weaving the women’s roles into the process. These chapters are the stories of the women who were there on the front lines while this revolution was happening.
The early part of the book introduces us to the first women admitted into the hallowed halls of the studio, a true glass ceiling where not only had no woman dared to tread before, but they hadn’t even been invited. Newspaper employment ads of the time specified that the company was seeking “men” for the animation department.
To gain access to the creative desks, you needed to be brought on board by Walt himself. Walt’s company was in its infancy, and operating on a shoestring (or very often, in the red). There was a fear that after investing all the time and money into training a female animator, they would up and get married, opting to then stay home and raise a family, as many women of the era were wont to do. It would thus be wasting the company’s investment to take that leap and bring on a female animator who might not go the distance. Finally, Walt was willing to take a chance, going so far as to think a step ahead, offering some the possibility of working from home later on.
Holt’s narrative looks behind the closed doors into what these women’s lives were like at the Disney studios, but included in the book are also the backstories of who these women were in their lives outside the animation walls. There are examples like Mary Goodrich, the first woman to pilot solo to Cuba (p. 63), who joined Disney to do story research. (Mary did the first story treatment for The Snow Queen back in 1938…. It would, more than half a century later, morph into 2013’s Frozen, following various fits and starts.) Holt gives the ladies a full, fleshed out life, not just as some stock figure in the Disney history books, but as living, breathing people with ambitions of their own.
Interspersed with historical information about what was happening in the world outside the studios, the book also details some of the technical aspects that plagued the filmmaking process, and how the women of Disney helped solve some of the issues.
The plot hole in Holt’s story, if you will, is that Holt presents the male-female dichotomy in the company as if it was a “Disney” problem, and that the sometimes cruel and aggressive co-workers were the ones roadblocking the women, when in reality, the bias against women in the workplace was a wider cultural and societal issue of the times. While Holt’s book often reads as if the Disney company was forcing women out of the studios, it is important to remember what was happening outside the doors of the Burbank facility as well.
Have you ever heard the phrase “History repeats itself,” or Churchill’s “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it?” Reading Holt’s book, I was often struck by the repeating patterns of decision making from Disney’s early days, to current 2024 dilemmas. Golden Age decisions about animation vs. live action adaptations, and the “back-burnering” of films that had already spent lengthy amounts of time (and money) in production could just as easily be ripped from the minutes of today’s board meetings.
One of the aspects of the book that I found most intriguing was the connection between many of today’s films, and the fingerprints that the first female animators left on them. There were a good number of projects that were given early treatments of film concepts, but never gained enough traction to make it to the big screen.
Think films like The Little Mermaid, Frozen, and other contemporary movies were dreamed up during the Disney Renaissance or later? No, indeed, Holt points out that many of those films got as far as storyboard efforts, with their own unique artwork, back in the day, but for various reasons, they were shelved in “the morgue” until they were rediscovered decades later. For example, The Little Mermaid had scripts written in the 1940s by Sylvia Holland and Ethel Kulsar before getting filed away (p.284), only to come up for air in 1989. Pocahontas (1995) was influenced by artwork Retta Scott had done in the 1940s (p. 298). Mary Goodrich’s 1938 treatment of The Snow Queen (p. 308) would resurface in 1977 with Imagineer Marc Davis (who was looking at ride ideas for Disneyland at the time), only to melt away until the 1990s when a more evil version of Elsa would start to emerge. But once again, the studio would “Let It Go.”
Eventually, years later, Frozen would find itself in the hands of director (and writer) Jennifer Lee. Following yet more revisions and reimaginings, Frozen would finally explode into box office history in 2013, nearly 75 years after it first touched Mary Goodrich’s desk. Woven into the underlying fabric of the multiple treatments of the 1844 Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale was the influence of Mary Blair’s artwork. When Frozen later won the Oscar for “Best Animated Feature Film,” it was the “first time in forever” that a female director from Walt Disney Animation had been handed an Academy Award. In fact, Lee was the very first female director of a Walt Disney Animation Studios full-length feature film. As Holt points out of today’s animators and female leaders, “Their triumphs would rest on the shoulders of Bianca, Sylvia, Retta, Mary, and all the other women of Disney’s golden age.” (p. 306)
Holt’s book is an interesting read for Disney fans, obviously, but it will also open a whole world for history buffs, film historians, and those who are delving into women’s history, even if it’s not Women’s History Month. The book is currently available on Amazon in Kindle format ($14.99) or in print (paperback $17.89, or hardcover for $22.78; print copy prices fluctuate).
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Beth Keating is a theme parks, restaurant and entertainment reporter for DisneyBizJournal.
Get The Disney Planner: The TO DO List Solution by Ray Keating. More information at
