THE QUEENS OF ANIMATION, very much a factual and tendentious read

THE QUEENS OF ANIMATION: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History
NATHALIA HOLT
Little, Brown
$29.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In The Queens of Animation, bestselling author Nathalia Holt recounts the dramatic stories of an incredibly influential group of women who have slipped under the radar for decades but have touched all our lives. These women infiltrated the all-male domain of Disney Studios and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and iconic storylines that would reach millions of viewers across generations. Over the decades—while battling sexism, domestic abuse, and workplace harassment—these women also fought to influence the way female characters are depicted to young audiences.

Based on extensive interviews and exclusive access to archival and personal documents, The Queens of Animation tells the story of their vital contribution to Disney's golden age and their continued impact on animated filmmaking, culminating in the record-shattering Frozen, Disney's first female-directed full-length feature film.

I RECEIVED THIS LOVELY HARDCOVER AS A GIFT FROM A LADY OF MY ACQUAINTANCE. THANKS, NORA!

My Review: I didn't start this book as a Walt Disney cultist. In fact, quite the opposite...I know about his obnoxious labor practices and frankly was unsurprised at his appalling gender politics, both generationally as well as personally...but WOW. The details of what happened to Bianca Majolie are, in a word, repugnant. (And it's really played to the hilt for nastiness in the book...there's no certainty that it happened as written because it's not from the horse's mouth, as it were.)

And yet he hired Mary Blair, an extraordinarily gifted artist; he hired Majolie (though apparently fired her so fast she figures in the bulk of the narrative not at all), and Grace Huntington, Retta Scott, Sylvia Holland...all of them who were guilty of Working While Woman in the Disney snakepit of the 1930s and 1940s, at least were working. Most wouldn't have been considered in other animation studios, and all needed the paychecks. Quite a lot of deadbeat dads through the generations. Single moms will work for less because "this is beneath me and you're not paying me enough" means nothing to a hungry kid.

One area where Author Holt did her subjects proud was the mind-bendingly complicated process of animating a feature-length film. She stints not in the telling and retelling, through memories of the women she's interviewed, the pre-computer days and the zillions of tiny steps required for the simplest movements to come to life; the brain-meltingly detail-oriented task of creating and assuring continuity of backgrounds; compositing, editing, oh my Muse of Painting, and Dance, and Epic Poetry, the lists and lists and it really is all necessary for you to know! It is! And not paying attention isn't gonna work because you will be so lost without it, this detailed information....

What the women who worked on Fantasia and Pinocchio and Bambi all did is quite incredible. These classics are what they are, and have the impact they all have, because all or most of the women Author Holt tells us of were doing the work of many men. The men who, when tasked with creating fairies or flowery bowers, whined that this was girls' work so give it to the girls. The upside to their childish idiocy is that the scenes are stunningly beautiful and now, at long last, we know who really did the hard, tedious, and ultimately gorgeous work of bringing sensitivity and glorious beauty to the screen.

There are moments when this "at last we know" technique gets used against one of the women. Mary Blair, a white lady, comes in for some finger-wagging because she failed to stop The Song of the South from being the appallingly racist and stereotype-churning horror that it is. Um...Author Holt...one lone woman, already fighting at home and at work to survive and get to the next paycheck, is kinda sorta gettin' a pass for not adding Civil Rights Campaigner to her resume. At least from me she is.

And what was the reward for this work, absent the credit they merited? A fat paycheck? Oh hell no, Disney was a cheap bastard (which is one big reason his labor force wanted to unionize and even forced a studio shutdown!) with everyone except himself. And the women were underpaid accordingly. Yeah, they had jobs; no, they had no respect or credit; and then, on payday, they got less than the men around them did. It's enough to make you into a wold-eyed revolutionary with a taste for capitalist-bastard blood!

It did me, anyway.

Author Holt has a Ph. D. You've read one of her other best-selling books, most likely: Cured: The People who Defeated HIV and Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. She's written for every major outlet for science news and popularizations of complicated non-fictional topics: The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, Popular Science. This is one helluva resume to bring to the topic of women's lives and work. You'd be excused for expecting the organization of the material in this book to be faultless. But it isn't.

Bianca Majolie, mentioned above, gets one (possibly sensationalized) passage; some passing mentions for her music selections and their, um, responses; and a closing anecdote about how she found out she was fired. None of those things were close to each other, none were made much of, and now I'm left wondering who the lady was. I know the most about Mary Blair, because she had serious horsepower and a steely inner something that made it impossible for her to go unheard forever. She is, however, the character...the others are a collection of one-off stories and the occasional halftone photo. (There is a modest glossy photo insert. Given what these women did, surely there had to be some not-copyrighted-by-Disney something to show other than personal photos and an ID card issued by Disney! I think there were three artistic-ish photos. This is, however, pretty minor hence the parenthesis.)

I alluded above to the details Author Holt included about animation and its labor-intensive nature; the role of technology in creating animated films is astounding as a story of development. The 1930s labor movement wasn't wrong, in this case, to holler about machines taking people's jobs. And Author Holt, science popularizer that she is, does not downplay the personal consequences of automation in animation. Nor does she neglect the beauty that the animation freed artists to create, or the benefits to production schedules and thus to our childhoods' aesthetic development. You might not think of it, unless prompted, but a large part of what seems beautiful to you is probably down to one or more Disney films seen in childhood.

Honestly, I find that chilling...but Mary Blair and her fellow animators, while not paragons of socialist virtue, were at least fine artists and possessed of enough soul to make the worst of Disney's early excesses less awful than they could have been. Author Holt is a fair and reasonable guide to the ins and outs, the ups and downs, and the sheer astounding virtuosity and verve that Disney, at its height, gifted the world with. That the people involved in creating it were flawed is undeniable, despite decades of denial.

One of the most tendentious passages in the book is also one with which I am in complete agreement:

The rise of women in the workplace, no matter what side of the world it occurred on, was frightening to some men, and they approached the perceived threat much as toddlers would a monster under the bed—by crying about it.

It's a bitter, nasty sentence. It's uttered with the unattributed authority of A Truism. And it is, by all that's unholy, inarguable on any evidence I am aware of.