Disney’s pool of animators at this time consisted entirely of men. But those tens of thousands of tiny cels made from the animators’ drawings, those sprang out of the Ink and Paint department, staffed entirely by women. This was a department where hundreds of women worked to, well, ink and paint these minuscule pieces of art. It was a rare place in the 1930s, a company where female artists could make a living.

  It was here that Milicent started work in early January 1939. The fifteen-minute drive from her home in Glendale, where she still lived with her family, to the Disney studios on Hyperion Avenue in Silver Lake, an East Los Angeles neighborhood, would have been a breeze. An easy commute, even by today’s standards.

  The Ink and Paint building was kept meticulously clean and quiet to ensure a dustless environment for the intricate art being created by the many women inside. Milicent and her colleagues worked at tables that Disney had custom built for the purpose, in a room filled with large windows to let in as much natural light as possible.

  Non-Ink-and-Paint-workers (men) were discouraged from entering, both to keep their filthy shoes and more importantly their filthy minds out of the clean rooms. Many of them weren’t thinking that it was a department full of talented artists trying to get some goddamn work done, they were thinking that it was a convenient place to look for dates. (Even without getting into the building, male artists and technicians sought to interact with the Ink and Paint women. It was at Disney that Milicent would meet her first husband, animator Paul Fitzpatrick, but more on that later.) If a guy made it into the building, he would have been disappointed anyway. The Inkers and Painters wore shapeless smocks over their clothes to cut down on dust, visors to keep their hair away from the cels, and gloves to keep their hands clean. There wasn’t a lot of skin being shown off.

  The way Ink and Paint work was regarded didn’t do much to disabuse male employees of this notion. Because it was a tedious and delicate process, cel inking and painting wasn’t thought of as artistry. It was merely women’s work, like stitching and sewing.50 The level of artistic skill required to translate animators’ drawings onto the tiny cels—without erasers!—was extraordinary. The reason that Disney was specially training his artists, including Inkers and Painters, at Chouinard was that he didn’t just need artists who could draw, he needed artists who could draw motion. Each piece of art needed to be imbued with a dramatic flair, a kinetic energy. Yet at the time, journalists would come in and talk about the beautiful girls “tracing” in the Ink and Paint department, which is a gross oversimplification of what the actual work was. They were not taken seriously as artists, not remotely as seriously as the male animators were taken.

  Milicent was originally hired for the paint department, but her flair for line work soon led her to be switched over to Ink. Inkers required a delicate skill. The artists here needed to be loose and relaxed. Remember, this wasn’t on paper. This ink was applied to pieces of slippery celluloid, the link between the animators’ paper drawings and seeing the image on the silver screen. Drawing the characters on these clear sheets made it possible to create a scene without drawing a new background for each frame.

  The work needed to be perfectly accurate to the original drawings, with all lines at the correct width and with exactly tapered ends. The lines ran in thickness from fine to heavy, something difficult (for the untrained eye) to discern on a drawing the size of a quarter. Even mixing the ink was an art, since the lines couldn’t be made with ink that was too watery or it would become translucent. This work required nearly surgical precision for hours and hours on end, staring in one spot that was lit underneath by a light box.51

  For work that was looked down on, it was physically demanding. Sore shoulders, headaches, eye strain were all a regular part of the job for the women of Ink and Paint. There were morning and afternoon breaks, with lunch at noon, but inking was a strenuous job. These morning and afternoon breaks were fifteen minutes long and called, in an adorably Disney way, Teatime. Teatime was available only for the women. Painters could have coffee, but Inkers could have only tea, in case caffeine jitters screwed up those perfect lines.

  Once the cels were finished, they needed to be dried, stacked and passed on to a supervisor to be checked for accuracy and of course, to make sure they were in the correct order. Next, they would be checked against the background drawing. Then they went off to the painting department, where a group of women armed with an array of brushes and an extensive variety of colors (that they mixed themselves) painted the underneath of the inked cels.

  When the paint was dried, the cels were sent to shadow painters,52 airbrushers if airbrushing was needed for effects on images like clouds or glass, and then got one last check from a final supervisor. If they passed, they were ready for their close-ups, literally! They were ready to be filmed.

  As far as first jobs go, working as an artist at Disney Studios might be one of the best. Milicent was working in film, helping to make movies alongside hundreds of other artists. She woke up in the morning and headed to a bustling studio where she was surrounded by fellow creative women. These were happy times for Milicent. Even though she was still living with her family, being a gainfully employed adult afforded her a little more personal freedom. Milicent was finally able to express herself with fashion. She started wearing makeup, stylish heels and more form-fitting dresses. The dresses were hidden under her big white smock, but I bet it was wonderful for her to have a choice about how she looked.

  Milicent Patrick and Retta Scott, two of Disney’s first female animators. They’re ready to kick ass, take names and not drink any caffeine. (Family collection)

  In early 1940, after a year of working in the world of Ink and Paint, a twenty-four-year-old Milicent was transferred into Animation and Effects alongside another female artist named Marcia James. Marcia and Milicent were not the first two women in animation at Disney; a few women had already been training in the department to be assistant animators and inbetweeners. Being an inbetweener is exactly what it sounds like. After the key animators53 draw the key frames (the main poses in a scene), inbetweeners draw the frames in between them, usually the frames that give the illusion of motion. Despite her claims later in life, Milicent was one of the first female animators at Disney, but not the first. At this point, though, no one had seen their work on the big screen yet. That was about to change. The animation studio was working on its most ambitious project yet—Fantasia.

  Milicent was promoted to Animation during the time Disney was moving shop from the older, smaller offices on Hyperion Avenue to a new studio in Burbank. The company was doing well and it was time to expand to a bigger, better space. Like a college campus, there were on-site restaurants and cafés, gymnasium—mens’ only—and masseurs, dry cleaners, even a barber. The Ink and Paint women got to eat in their own cafeteria.

  Walt helped design the buildings himself; he wanted the space to achieve as much creative flow as possible. The complex was revolutionary in design—a studio built to fit the needs of artists. The buildings were laid out in the succession of the animated film process and all the workspaces were situated to get the best possible light, especially for the animators. The twenty-five buildings were crossed with spacious hallways and large, air-conditioned rooms. It was a beautiful place to work.

  Not only was Milicent adjusting to a new job, she was doing it in a brand-new environment that was three times the size of her old work space. She went from being in a women-only building to being among the mostly male employees in the animation and special effects departments. Of the hundreds of artists working there, only a handful were women. Disney had released a memo reminding all the male employees to act appropriately and politely to make sure the environment was one where women could be comfortable. But this was still the 1940s. It was a time when a prime question of etiquette when a man hit on you was how to let him down gently.

  At this point in animation history, every film Disney Studios released was groundbreaking in some way. In order to achieve Walt’s new visions for his artistic masterpieces, new techniques needed to be invented and employed, especially in regard to color. Each segment in Fantasia is a smorgasbord of color in every possible shade, from the fiery hues in the Rite of Spring segment, where you see the primordial earth heaving and breaking and forming a land where dinosaurs roam, all the way to the deep darkness of shadows and stark white of bones and ghosts in the Night on Bald Mountain segment.

  Not only did the range of hues need to be revolutionized, but so did the way that the colors were used. Some of the scenes in Fantasia required such delicacy and intricacy that they couldn’t be done with the usual pens and ink. For them, the special effects department developed something called the Pastel Effect. Pastel itself was useless for animation: it was too smeary compared to paint. Disney wanted the style of pastel, the softness and subtlety of it. The Pastel Effect was a way of using brushes and diluting the paint to make the piece look like it was done with a chunk of chalky pastel. This look was something never seen in film before and part of what made Fantasia so striking.

  By creating sequential color drawings with this technique, Milicent and Marcia were animating with just color. Neither of them—nor any of the other women in the department—were key animators. (Women in the department worked only as inbetweeners and assistant animators on Fantasia.) They were color animators. The term color animating is confusing because on Fantasia, it was considered a special effects technique. But it was animation, doing the work of key animators, only using color instead of pencil drawings.

  Milicent and Marcia’s color animation was used in four of the eight segments of the film, including creating Chernabog54 in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence55 in the final segment. Milicent helped bring what is arguably the most famous animated monster in all of cinema history to the screen.

  By the end of the year, more women had been promoted to the animation team. Walt Disney started a program to train artists from the Ink and Paint department as animators so they could make the same jump that Milicent did. She went from working on effects to working fully on animating as an inbetweener. Now a third of the company’s employees were female. No other animation company had anything close to that number. No other production company did, for that matter. If you were a female artist, Disney was probably one of the best places that you could work.

  Fantasia was released to critical acclaim and the animation team went back to work. Disney was bustling. There were various short films being made, Bambi was in development and a strange movie called The Reluctant Dragon was in the works. It was a live-action anthology film, in which Robert Benchley, a famous humorist and Hollywood personality of the day, stars as himself wandering around the Disney studio lot, trying to find Walt Disney so he can pitch him an idea for a project. It brought audiences on a behind-the-scenes tour of how animated films were made and the live-action scenes were intercut with animated shorts.

  The film wasn’t shot in the actual animation department or the Ink and Paint building—that would have stopped the workflow there. The crew created a set version of the studio rooms and cast actual Disney artists as background characters. Early on in the film, Robert Benchley stumbles into a sketching class as a bunch of artists (male and female) draw an elephant56 and Milicent, in her first on-screen role, is one of them.

  The Reluctant Dragon released later that summer in 1941 and didn’t do very well at the box office. This was the same month that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, so there were a lot of people who understandably weren’t in the mood to go to the movies. Plus, a lot of moviegoers and critics were hoping for a full-length animated feature and were disappointed by the mishmash of short animated films with what was essentially a giant live-action commercial for Disney animation studios.

  It didn’t help that The Reluctant Dragon was released at the height of a massive animators’ strike. Throughout the film industry, workers had been trying to unionize for the past year. Employees at other studios began to strike. They argued for better wages, hours and working conditions. Disney executives started to feel the pressure.

  Before the strike hit, while the momentum and frustration was building, Disney was working on their fourth animated feature, Dumbo, a story about a young circus elephant who is ridiculed for his extremely large ears and eventually figures out that he can use them to fly.

  Milicent was an inbetweener on the Dumbo animation team. All those flying elephants and gallivanting circus animals—Milicent helped bring that fantastical movement to the big screen. This was the kind of work where that special training from Chouinard made you shine.

  Between the ongoing tensions and World War II, it was not an easy time to be making films. Finances, supplies and work forces were low. Dumbo had to be produced quickly, cheaply and efficiently, three words that an artist never wants to hear. These challenging working conditions made it so Dumbo didn’t look as lush and detailed as the Disney movies that were released before it. The atmosphere in the studio during this time was tense and stressful, overshadowing some of the joy Milicent might have been feeling.

  On top of that, because Fantasia was such an expensive, intensive film to make, there was pressure on Dumbo to be financially successful. The combined effect of all these pressures probably explains why Dumbo is one of Disney’s shortest animated movies, coming in at only an hour and four minutes long.

  It wasn’t all stress, though. Just like in The Reluctant Dragon, to get the look of the circus animals right, the animation supervisors would bring in real animals for the artists to sketch. It’s hard to have a bad day when you’re hanging out with an elephant. Milicent, having grown up around the zoo at Hearst Castle, was probably far less impressed than her colleagues.

  On May 29, 1941, union tensions came to a head at the studio and more than two hundred Disney staff members walked out on strike right in the middle of production. Many female artists walked out, but Milicent was not among the striking animators. She never liked to get involved in anything political and was intensely averse to conflict. Milicent always wanted everyone to get along. She stayed on at the studio to help finish Dumbo. Paul Fitzpatrick, the man Milicent would marry in a few years, was one of the strikers.

  The strike lasted for only five weeks,57 ending in July after much negotiation. Walt Disney signed the contract making it a union studio. This sounds like it would be good news for the artists and technicians employed by Disney, but the cost of paying union rates threw a wrench into the studio finances over the following months. There was a massive restructuring of jobs and countless layoffs, right in the middle of production of the studio’s fifth feature film, Bambi.

  Lots of artists left or were forced to leave Disney that fall, including Milicent and the animator she had begun covertly dating, Paul Fitzpatrick. Paul and Milicent ended up leaving Disney on exactly the same day: September 12, 1941. It’s impossible for me to say if they both left because of the layoffs, or the fact that someone caught on to their relationship (dating coworkers was frowned upon), or a combination of the two. Some artists returned once things settled down, but not Milicent. While all this outside turmoil was seething around her, Milicent was having her own problems with her work. The antagonist was her own brain.

  Milicent suffered from migraines. I don’t mean that she was one of those people in migraine pill commercials that put their hands to their heads and look dolefully out the window. I mean the kind of migraines that force the sufferer to be sequestered in a dark bedroom for days at a time. The light boxes Milicent had to stare at for hours on end as part of her job as an animator were wreaking havoc on her physically. Between the migraines and all the other problems at Disney, it was a good time for her to leave. She worked at the studio for only two years. She left a month before Dumbo would premiere in the United States.

  On résumés and in interviews for the rest of her life, Milicent would sometimes say that she was the first female animator at Disney. This is a claim that has been, strangely, both hard to prove and hard to disprove. Retta Scott is the first woman to ever be credited as an animator at Disney, for her work on Bambi,58 which was released in 1942. Retta Scott was hired during March 1939 in the story department, two months after Milicent was hired at the Ink and Paint department. Both women were Chouinard graduates. There is a photo of the two of them, side by side in their Disney artist smocks, both wearing genuine smiles. Retta Scott is also an extra in The Reluctant Dragon, sitting right next to Milicent.

  Milicent was color animating on Fantasia in 1940, but that was alongside Marcia James. Finding individual credits for Disney films back then is hazy at best, impossible at worst. There are so many steps to traditional, hand-drawn animation and when you are creating an animated feature film, steps are happening concurrently. Plus, it sometimes takes years to create a feature and Disney was developing and producing multiple projects at a time. A sequence for one film might be animated before a sequence in another film, but for various reasons, the second film might be released first. What did Milicent mean by first? First hired? First to animate a full sequence? First to see her work on the big screen? There is no definitive moment that I can point to that says that Milicent was the first, nor a definite moment for Marcia James or Retta Scott.

  Because color animation was soon phased out after Fantasia, the term isn’t well understood or widely known. Many claim that it doesn’t count as animation at all. I have, on multiple occasions, watched male historians actually roll their eyes when faced with the term. I don’t doubt that the fact color animation was done by women has a substantial amount to do with why it isn’t considered “real animation” by these guys. There is a history at Disney of the work being done by women not being taken seriously. But by the actual definition of animating—creating successive drawings that give the illusion of movement when shown in sequence—Milicent and Marcia were animating.

 

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