âFrozen,â âGet a Horse!â female directors mark firsts for Disney
In the 1937 promotional film âHow Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made,â an announcer describes some of the intricate work going into the studioâs first feature-length film, âSnow White and the Seven Dwarfs,â in a department called Inking and Painting.
âHere, hundreds of pretty girls in a comfortable building all their own, well-lighted, air-conditioned throughout, cover the drawings with sheets of transparent celluloid,â the announcer says, over images of white-gloved young women preparing male animatorsâ drawings for the screen. âThen they painstakingly trace every line....â
At Disney in the 1930s â as at just about every other workplace in America at the time â female employees had their place, making the creative work of men look good. (It helped if the women looked good, too.)
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Three-quarters of a century later, for the first time on a Disney animated feature, a womanâs place is in the directorâs chair. Jennifer Lee, a screenwriter, shares directing credit on âFrozenâ with animator Chris Buck.
At the same time, the Burbank studio is releasing the short film âGet a Horse!,â a retro-style Mickey Mouse short directed by Lauren MacMullan of âThe Simpsons,â marking the first time a woman has had solo directing credit on any Disney Animation movie.
The timing is purely coincidental, according to Disney Animation Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter. But the new era of female creative leadership at the studio is the product of decades of evolution in a slow-moving field popularized by Walt and his âNine Old Men.â
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âAnimation has been a male-dominated industry for a long time,â Lasseter said. âNot that itâs been an old boysâ club. There have been real superstars that were women. But now youâre seeing more women in supervisory and leadership roles, in story, in layout, in animation; in the production side thereâs a lot of very strong women. Itâs been growing.â
Both Lee and MacMullan seem discomfited by the attention theyâre getting for their gender. âAm I really the first woman to do something here by myself?â MacMullan said. âWe had to go check because it didnât really occur to us.â According to Lee, âIt wasnât my top concern in any way.â
The recent boom in animated movies â 11 will get a wide theatrical release this year â has meant more opportunity. But animation isnât much different from the wider community of Hollywood when it comes to the gender of directors. Women accounted for 9% of the directors on the top 250 domestic-grossing films in 2012, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
Essential perspective
Recently Lee, MacMullan and 12 other women who worked on âFrozenâ and âGet a Horse!â as animators, story artists, visual development artists and production managers gathered in a conference room at Disney to talk about their roles at the company and impact on their films, as well as on Disneyâs complicated legacy of female characters.
âThese are big animated movies,â MacMullan said. âThey cost a lot of money, and what everyone wants for their movie is to hit those four quadrants: You want men, women, little boys, little girls, and the best way to make those movies is with women involved in the making of them.â
A loose retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale âThe Snow Queen,â âFrozen,â which is due in wide release in theaters Wednesday, centers on the conflict between two royal sisters in a fictional Nordic kingdom: exuberant young Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell) and her remote older sibling Elsa (Idina Menzel).
Early reviews of the film have been positive, with critics noting that âFrozenâ manages to avoid the common pitfalls of female-led animated movies that are either hopelessly old-fashioned fairy tales or leaden you-go-girl polemics.
Lee, one of the writers on Disneyâs 2012 video game movie âWreck-It Ralph,â joined Buck, the director of âTarzanâ and âSurfâs Up,â on the film in 2012, four years after the long-gestating project was greenlighted. âEspecially because we have two female protagonists, it was great bringing Jen on,â Buck said last spring as the two were still tinkering with their story.
Lee quickly had an impact on the sister story line, which hadnât been in previous iterations of the film, according to visual development artist Brittney Lee. âAs soon as Jen came on, I suddenly saw my sister and I in the sisters,â Brittney Lee said. âI recognized these two are real girls. Once a female perspective was present in the writing, it was so much easier to get behind it.â
Jennifer Lee said she attempted to humanize Anna, who may be the first Disney princess to have gas, and to beef up, quite literally, the male characters. âI kept saying, âCan we give Hans thighs, âcause thatâs kind of appealing?â They were so little.â
As with âSnow White,â âCinderellaâ and the more recent Disney movie âTangled,â the protagonists of âFrozenâ are princesses. Disneyâs recurrent princesses are problematic for people who think they propagate a certain standard of slim-waisted, wide-eyed, girlie girlness.
âFrozenâ recently entered that debate when Lino DiSalvo, the male head of animation on the film, was quoted on a fan website describing the difficulty of animating female characters because âthey have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty.â The comment, which a representative for Disney said was ârecklessly taken out of context,â hit a nerve on the blogosphere, for the perceived implication that female characters must, like the âhundreds of pretty girlsâ in Waltâs old studio, be attractive.
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Jennifer Lee said the female characters on âFrozenâ were challenging to animate not because theyâre female, but because theyâre the leads, carrying the heaviest burden of expression in the story, while the males are supporting characters with simpler arcs. âElsa and Anna had to carry subtext, awkwardness, which is hard for animated characters,â she said.
Itâs common for animators to film themselves to capture the physics of a characterâs movement â on a movie with prominent female characters, it helped to also have prominent female artists.
âSometimes the male animators would say, âIâm trying to do this walk through the hallway and Iâm filming myself, and it just looks like a guy,ââ said animator Hyun-Min Lee. âI hope we could have helped make those two characters more believable and relatable.â
Redrawing the norms
Disney has a long history of employing female artists, such as Retta Scott, an animator on âBambi,â and Mary Blair, who drew concept art for âCinderella,â and created the character designs for Disneylandâs Itâs a Small World.
Brenda Chapman, who became the first female director of an animated movie at another studio, DreamWorks, with 1998âs âThe Prince of Egypt,â started out as a trainee in the story department at Disney on 1989âs âThe Little Mermaid.â At the time, Chapman said, an executive told her she was only hired because she was a token female.
âI didnât tell anybody because I was so ashamed,â Chapman said in a separate interview. âThe guys I worked with were incredibly welcoming. Once in a while someone would say, âHey, did you notice youâre the only woman in the room?ââ Chapman would go on to direct âBraveâ at Pixar, becoming that studioâs first female director. Lasseter, who also heads that studio, removed her over what he called âcreative differences,â but Chapman went on to collect the Oscar for animated feature together with âBraveâsâ new director, Mark Andrews.
âIâm rooting for Jennifer from afar,â Chapman said. âAt Disney, this is a huge deal.â
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More women are beginning to find the field of animation â when Chapman attended the California Institute of the Artsâ prestigious character animation program in 1987, she was one of five women out of a class of 34. This year there are 98 women enrolled in the same program out of a class of 161, according to the school.
Neither Jennifer Lee nor MacMullan rose through the traditional channels in feature animation, in which a director slowly works his way up from the animation department. Lee studied English at the University of New Hampshire and collected a masterâs in fine arts from Columbia University. She has sold multiple original screenplays, but none have yet been produced.
MacMullan worked primarily in television, directing on the animated shows âThe Simpsons,â âThe Criticâ and âKing of the Hill.â She brings a tart sense of humor to a studio known for its sometimes cloying sweetness.
Both women came to Disney under the wings of a male director, Rich Moore, and writer, Phil Johnston, whom they credit with setting a friendly tone on âWreck-It Ralph.â Four of the eight people in the story department on that film were female.
âOnce you hit this certain percentage of women in the story room, then everyone feels comfortable talking,â MacMullan said. âYou donât want a story room to be a frat house.â
Women have prominent roles on other planned Disney films; Kristina Reed will produce the studioâs 2014 feature, âBig Hero 6.â
âThe one downside of having as many women as we have here is that thereâs way too many cupcakes,â said MacMullan.
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