There is an infamous rejection letter that has been circling the internet for the last eight years. “Dear Miss Ford,” the 1938 letter to a would-be animation trainee begins. “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” The letter advises Miss Mary V. Ford that she can apply to Walt Disney Productions’ ink and paint department if she so desires. Under the original Flickr image of the letter, posted by Ford’s grandson in 2007, a bevy of commenters note that times have changed.
Prince of Egypt directors Steve Hickner, Brenda Chapman, and Simon Wells, 1998.
Dreamworks / Courtesy Everett Collection
And longtime animator Joanna Romersa agrees. She started as a Disney inker in 1954, and once felt lucky to avoid being fired after she was caught by Walt Disney himself while sneaking into the animation building, where ink and paint “girls” were not allowed. “It was keeping us in our place,” she said. Inkers and painters — those (nearly all women) who would hand-trace drawings from the animators and then hand-paint them on every frame of a film — were not respected as artists; Bill Hanna called them “lettuce pickers.” At Disney, senior staff also had a “Penthouse Club” where women were not allowed, a rule that stood until the 1970s.
Being barred from buildings was far from the worst of it for Romersa, though. “I wanted to progress and was literally told, ‘No, you cannot, because you’re a woman and you’ll get married and you’ll go away,’” the now-79-year-old told BuzzFeed News this spring, beginning to cry. “I just pushed on. I wouldn’t take no.” That perseverance did lead to a directing job — more than three decades later. “I saw many of my male colleagues advance a lot quicker than I did, just because they could bullshit with the boys,” she added.
Women and minorities were shut out from Disney in different and overlapping ways: Animation historian Tom Sito writes in Drawing the Line that the first black man to work as an animation artist at the studio started in 1948 and quietly left two months later; and wearing a pantsuit at Disney was considered a fireable offense for a female employee as late as 1958. But pantsuits are no longer frowned upon, and no one at Disney would send that type of rejection letter to “girls” applying today; times, indeed, have changed.
But exclusion is hardly a thing of the past: Women make up only 21% of working guild members in 2015, and out of the 584 members working as storyboarders, only 103 are women, according to the Animation Guild. One could point approvingly to animation schools as a harbinger of change — last fall, 71% of students in the California Institute of the Arts’ famed character animation program were female, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, that same school year in its Producers Show, which screens the “best” student work, more than two-thirds of the films shown were by male students, in a year when men made up less than one-third of students in the program. Furthermore, women outnumbered men in the program in 2012, 2013, and 2014 — and yet in each of those years, men still outnumbered women in the Producers Show.
While these revelations are in a sense no different from stories women in any industry would tell, the ramifications of their experiences show up on screen, particularly in movies and shows made for children.
Animation professionals interviewed for this article knew the conventional wisdom: “Boys' shows are general audience and girls' shows are niche,” parroted Sabrina Cotugno, a storyboard artist in her twenties, during a Skype interview. Following convention, when Cartoon Network announced its 14 new and returning original series for the 2015–2016 season, only three featured a female protagonist (this includes the two-girls-three-boys ensemble of Teen Titans Go!, despite the fact that Robin is, arguably, the main character), and only one of the network’s shows was created by a woman. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle: Boys see themselves as the heroes, which makes it that much easier to imagine themselves in charge; girls see themselves as the sidekicks, which makes it that much harder.
Sleeping Beauty, 1959.
Walt Disney Co. / Courtesy Everett Collection
At CalArts, which has long been something of a Disney feeder school, the students look to the greats for inspiration: in particular, studio films like the first full-length cel-animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. But the reverence for the past comes at a cost: “The further you go back in history, the less you're gonna see of gender representation, race representation,” said Cotugno, a former student. In classes, she added, “no one discusses gender.”
Many of these beautiful and technologically innovative films are the product of the so-called golden age of American animation, a period that stretched from the late 1920s through the ’50s. It was during this “golden age” that Mary V. Ford got her rejection letter; and it was later within that age that Romersa had to live with the indignity that her boyfriend could visit her in the ink and paint department while she was not allowed to visit him in the animation building. The “golden age” films are not separate from the politics of the time that produced them: In Snow White, the heroine’s categorical passivity is the source of her virtue; in 1941’s Dumbo, raucous black crows speak in jive; and in 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, the supposed heroine utters 263 words of dialogue — scarcely more than the number of words in these last two paragraphs.
Aside from Disney himself, the driving creative forces at the studio during the so-called golden age were the esteemed Disney animators known as the Nine Old Men. Eight of them began as in-betweeners — the very position Romersa was rejected from on the basis of her gender. There were, of course, no Old Women, because women were discouraged, if not forbidden, from competing for those jobs.
Mindy Johnson, author of the forthcoming book Ink and Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation, said women were in-betweening directly on cels for Bambi, they just weren't getting credit for it. (And they still aren’t: History books — largely written by men — barely mention inkers and painters.) With World War II and an exodus of young men in sight, Disney announced that he would train women for animating positions, to the chagrin of male employees, who, Johnson said, complained that women would drive down salaries.
Despite the undisguised inequity, Disney defenders are quick to point to exceptions, like Retta Scott, the first credited female animator at the studio, a “Disney Legend” who is posthumously hailed in a mini-biography as a pioneer. What the mini-biography elides may be unsurprising: There is no mention that Scott was the first credited female animator for the sole reason that women were discouraged from even applying to the animation department when she started working there in the 1930s. Mary Blair is another Disney Legend exception — a concept artist and designer hired in the 1940s who, her niece told BuzzFeed News, was so unrivaled that she made the only piece of art by a Disney artist that Walt displayed in his home. She was an undeniably outstanding talent, which raises questions about the mediocrity of men who held similar positions.
Walt Disney Co. / Courtesy Everett Collection
At the time, men openly justified their discriminatory hiring practices by saying it wasn’t worth training a person who would just leave the job to marry and have children — Romersa was informed by her supervisors in the mid-’50s that this was the reason her advancement was impossible. She did eventually leave her job at Disney to take care of her children, and she worked as an inker from home, where she’d rock her child’s bassinet with her foot while she drew.
The late Disney animator Heidi Guedel wrote in her autobiography that Wolfgang Reitherman, an Old Man, was “quite outspoken” in his attempt to avoid working with female animators. She began working at Disney in the 1970s, and also described an office where a male colleague had covered the walls in nude photos of women. Worse, a respected assistant animator who had worked at the studio for decades would give her back rubs and grope her breasts in the office, she wrote, describing it as an “awkward and embarrassing experience” that she was too intimidated to confront him about.
Romersa reported similar interactions at Hanna-Barbera: She said her career really took off after she was promoted to head of the assistant animation department there, explaining that a female colleague advocated for her to get the position after the studio fired a man whose sexual harassment of a woman who worked there had escalated to stalking. And when Romersa was working at the studio of animation pioneer Ralph Bakshi as a secretary and production manager in the ’70s, she “used to think Ralph was mad at me if he didn’t pat my butt or pinch my boob. … Bakshi was a bastard.” In 2013, Bakshi, who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for a comment, was described by Entertainment Weekly as a “maverick cartoonist and filmmaker.”
A second artist who worked at Bakshi’s studio in the ’70s and ’80s did not remember him physically touching his female employees, but did say he frequently made remarks to her “that would be considered sexual harassment now.” The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said Bakshi would offer to have sex with her in his office, and when she would decline, he would laugh it off as if it were a joke. “It made you wonder who actually did take him up,” she said, adding that whenever a woman got a promotion or a desirable credit on a project, other artists would assume that woman had performed sexual favors for Bakshi. She left the studio, and did some freelance work for him in the late ’80s. The last time she saw him, the same treatment she endured while working at the studio continued, in the presence of her toddler. Still, she said she was grateful for the opportunity: Bakshi was one of the few studio heads who would hire women at all.
Krysta and Magi Lune in FernGully: The Last Rainforest, 1992.
20th Century Fox / Courtesy Everett Collection
Though they came up through the ranks at a time with less open hostility to women, animators Sari Gennis and Bronwen Barry, who met more than 20 years ago working on FernGully: The Last Rainforest, disagreed on whether things had actually gotten better or worse for women in the workplace; it’s a clash that hinges on whether they prefer their discrimination subtle or straight-up. Gennis, who works primarily in visual effects — an even more technical, male-dominated field than regular animation — was frustrated with the subtlety. After Barry said many men appear resentful when they lose a job to a woman, she asked her friend if she agreed. “No,” Gennis answered. “Because I never see that happen.”
At a recent job, Gennis said, she was the first person to be laid off, despite being the only trained animator on her team. Her supervisor “said he wanted to keep his ‘guys’ working,” she said, using air quotes. “If a guy had my résumé,” Gennis noted, gesturing to the extensive two-page document she was carrying around in her bag to drive the point home, “they would be bowing down in his path.”
Sari Gennis in the 1990s, working on James and the Giant Peach.
Courtesy of Sari Gennis
