Imaginary Worlds - Mary Blair: Coloring Outside the Lines at Disney

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

In honor of Women’s History Month we’re producing a two-part series about two artists who were visionaries and trailblazers. In part 2, we look at the career of Mary Blair. She changed the way Walt Disney wanted to make animation and brought modernist sophistication to his style. But not everyone at the studio was on board with Walt’s dream to “get Mary in the picture.” I talk with animation historians John Canemaker and Mindy Johnson about the influence of Mary Blair, and how we’ve experienced her work more than we’ve actually seen it. And I talk with author Gabrielle Stecher about the more complicated aspects of Blair’s legacy. Mindy Johnson’s book is Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney Animation. John Canemaker’s book is Magic Color Flair: The World of Mary Blair. Gabrielle Stecher’s article is “Examining The Legacy of Mary Blair.” This episode is sponsored by Audible and Remi. Go to audible.com/sunrise and listen to the highly anticipated new audiobook in the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins Go to shopremi.com/imaginary and use the code IMAGINARY to save up to 50% your first mouthguard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

With tons of free reality shows you are totally free to watch what you love on Pluto TV And for me that's dance moms bar rescue the challenge and Jersey Shore all totally free on Pluto TV Stream now pay never You're listening to imaginary worlds a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky This is part two of our two-part series on Mary Blair and Millicent Patrick. Their careers began on parallel tracks. They both went to the Chouinard Art Institute

in Los Angeles. They both worked for Disney during the Depression. They were each singled out for their talent early on, and then they left in 1941. At that point, their careers went in very different directions. But in their own way, they each had a significant impact on pop culture. Mindy Johnson is an author and historian of animation. She says Mary Blair and her husband, Lee, met in college. At that time, they were focusing on painting landscapes with watercolors.

And where she and her husband Lee had dreams of continuing as fine artists, that was their goal, it was quickly clear because of the depression that they would need a job. They would have to go out and get a J.O.B. John Canemaker is also an author and historian, and he wrote a book about Mary Blair. He says Lee got a job working at Disney before Mary did. She was skeptical. She said she really wasn't interested because she really wanted to go back and, you know, if she had to make a commercial life for herself, she wanted to do it in illustration. She didn't like taking orders from other people about draw this, make this for us, this sort of thing. She wanted to have control

of her talents. She finally gave in. Now most women at Disney began in the ink and paint department, which I discussed in my episode about Mills and Patrick. Their job was to trace over the animators' drawings using ink on transparent sheets of celluloid. Right away, Mary Blair was given a more creative job. She did concept art for upcoming films. I've seen the concept art that she did for Dumbo, and her style was still fairly conventional. She drew with ink and painted with muted watercolors.

In the final film, it looks like the animators and background artists followed her vision closely, down to the lighting and camera angles. They liked her, they liked what she was doing, but she wasn't happy. So she left. Her husband Lee was still at the studio. One day Lee came home saying,

well I'm going to be heading to South America while it's taking a group of artists on a Good Neighbor Tour. The Good Neighbor Policy was an effort by the Roosevelt administration to strengthen ties between the US and Latin America. Roosevelt worried that Nazi Germany was making inroads with their neighbors to the south, so the government enlisted Disney to make films that would portray Latin America in a positive light. That's why Lee was going on this research trip. And Mary thought, wait a minute, that's for me. So she went back to Walt and pretty much begged to say, please take me with, I got to go on this tour,

it'd be fantastic. Walt loved her work and brought her back. She was the only female artist on that particular trip. One of the films that came out of this trip was called The Three Caballeros. I had never heard of this movie until I was studying animation at CalArts and I have never heard anyone mention it since. But it always stuck with me because the animation is so much fun.

The premise is that a Mexican rooster and a Brazilian parrot are giving Donald Duck a whirlwind tour through Central and South America. And those actors were Mexican and Brazilian. The movie is like a total bird bromance. We're happy amigos, no matter where he goes. They're one, two, and three, because we're always together. There are also abstract sequences in the film, which I think are just as dazzling as anything in Fantasia. According to Mindy Johnson and John Canemaker, this trip

changed Mary Blair's life. And she was influenced by the culture that she was seeing there and the and the art that she was seeing, the colors and all that. She became Mary Blair, the Mary Blair that we know of today in terms of the style that she had that came out big time in South America. From that immersion emerges a remarkably different human being. Her sensibilities change, her tastes change, her fashions change. That was transformative for Mary and we see examples of her literally painting with her sketchbook and brushes or sketching even, you know, with children in the village where they're at. I refer to her work as sophisticated simplicity. There is sophistication in what appear to be seemingly simple forms. You start to see this

stripping away of deeper emotions and getting to the core of the joy of the piece and the joy of a simple form. There's one sequence that is pure Mary Blair. The Mexican character is explaining the custom of las pasadas at Christmas. The little ones carry images of the saints from house to house singing a plea for shelter or posada. In a montage we see Mary Blair's distinctively charming flat designs of children using bold colors that pop out at you. It's a radical departure from the realistic watercolors she was doing before. I have to admit, this topic interests me

not just because I used to work in animation and I love early Disney films. My grandmother was a painter. Her style was similar to Mary Blair but she didn't paint characters. My grandmother used flat geometric shapes with bold colors. And growing up, I saw firsthand

how the abstract nature of her work allowed my grandmother to express different emotions than she could with words. So when I look at artwork like that, it doesn't feel abstract to me, I feel it emotionally. Generations of artists have had similar feelings when they look at Mary Blair's work. And the first unofficial head of the Mary Blair fan club was Walt Disney himself. Until then, the style of the studio had been very cartoony

or it looked like a classical painting come to life. She inspired him to change course and make films for the age of modern art. Audible has an incredible selection of sci-fi fantasy audio books, from romanticists to space operas. And you might remember last year, I got to interview audiobook narrators. I really admire their craft

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Experience the worldwide bestselling series in a whole new way. Go to audible.com slash sunrise and listen with the world. Today, the Disney corporation is such a juggernaut. It's hard to imagine what a scrappy organization it was 80 years ago. Walt poured everything into the films. They weren't earning enough back. He spent the war years making films for the government.

By the late 40s, Mindy says the studio was in dire straits. Walt and his brother Roy decided, We need another over the top hit. We need another lightning strike like Snow White and Seven Dwarfs. It's Cinderella is chosen. It's a classic fairy tale with a heroine. Everyone can root for lots of great side characters

for comedy and it's a classic story everyone knows. So it's a surefire hit, but to ensure the visual success of that film, Walt brings her in as art director on this particular film. You see her influence when you look at her conceptual designs, which are brilliant. Her color work is apparent everywhere

and she carefully worked in the paint labs with the artists there to ensure the colors were all working as she intended. Those beautiful pinks and blues that are a huge part of the palette set against like the darker burgundies and the muddier colors we see in the home, the greens with the stepsisters, that's all Mary Blair. Isn't it lovely? Do you like it? Do you think it will do?

You also see in the staging and the art direction, the settings in that film in Mary's conceptual design pieces on Cinderella, we get a sense of how displaced Cinderella is by just by the way she's placed in each frame, the size and scope of the halls of the palace, where you have a little tiny Cinderella, or even in her own home. That's all Mary. When I met with John Canemaker, he showed me a framed, original Mary Blair concept piece from Cinderella. The background is a wisp of purple, black, and aqua clouds.

Cinderella and the prince are dancing, but their bodies are made of geometric shapes. The dress looked like a dandelion. There are two giant ornate doors from the palace, balancing in midair. Previously, her concept art looked like a blueprint for the final film. This is supposed to give the artists a feeling, an emotion to inspire them to go in a certain direction. You see that in many many of Mary Blair's concept pieces. They're putting you in the place of who the character is, their personalities. That's what also appealed to Walt and also appealed to the animators.

They said, yeah, this is a great idea. Let's do it from this camera angle, the way Mary did it. Let's do it this way. And she was generating ideas, so she was happy to do that. She felt a part of it all. She was frustrated when it didn't turn out to be completely what she envisioned, but that was the compromise. Walt may have run the studio that he named after himself,

but he couldn't make his employees see Mary Blair's work the same way that he did. There was a lot of resistance to it with a wisp of a dry brush. She gave you the path of Tinkerbell's darting flight or a sense of a mood or tone, the very angular designs of the wicked stepmother in Cinderella.

I mean, she's almost triangular in her form. She ran into conflicts with the animators. The characters are flat, and we do rounded characters. Donald Duck, you know, is made of circles. Mickey Mouse is definitely all made of circles. It's a form that's close to human form in terms of the structure of the character. So it appeals to people. Walt Disney did champion her, but his championing her was a limited thing because he didn't

want to lose his audience. And yet he kept goading his animators. They said, I want you to get Mary in this. Get Mary. What did that mean? He couldn't explain it to them. In terms of the roundness though, it wasn't just that, oh, this is what we do. We just do roundness.

That in terms of a turn, you know, what they call a turnaround, that you have to design a character so that you can see the character 360 degrees. That a flat character may look really great, and then you turn on its side, and it doesn't make any sense anymore. That's exactly what Ken Anderson, who was an art director that worked with her, said, I love Mary's stuff, but you know, if you turned it, it wouldn't be giving you the charm and the interesting look that it's supposed to have. They did do a couple of films in which her style prevailed, and one of them was called Once Upon a Wintertime.

It was a short from one of the Omnibus features. The art director for that, or the person Ken O'Connor was his name, he was an Australian, he said to me, I was determined to get Mary in this, into this film and I was, and the animators were fighting me on it. And he said, we're going to do it, we're going to get Mary in this. And so if you see that film, you see the backgrounds are definitely Mary Blair, but then the characters are slightly stylized so that there's a flatness about them, but it's charming and it's full animation, so it could be done. So one of the things I think is so interesting

is that Disney's style was so classical, you know? I mean, you think of Snow White, you think of Pinocchio. She's such a modernist. Why was he so taken with her style? Well, that's a very good question. There are certain things about it that Mary's style can look primitive, art brute, you know, that sort of naive style. It can have a futuristic quality. He sort of was interested

in all these different things and he liked that she told stories in a wonderful way, in a colorful way. Her color was the first thing that really hits you. And he said that she showed him colors that he had never seen before. If you look at the concept art that she did for Peter Pan, Cinderella, and Alice in Wonderland, her color palette is bolder than what ended up on film, but it's the same basic colors. Her characters may be flat and stylized, but they're recognizable as the characters that ended up on screen. It almost looks like an artist today watched the movies, then afterward they painted their own unique interpretation rather than the other way around.

John says there's one sequence where very little got lost in translation. Well, the purest in Alice in Wonderland is the March of the Cards, in which they have these flat cards that are twisting around and shuffling themselves literally. And the colors change and it's all quite geometrical and interesting. The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen!

The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen!

The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen!

The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! The Queen! And this was 1950s air travel. So she focused on doing illustration work and advertising children's books and whatever else she could find. But Mindy says Mary Blair was still feeling frustrated. She was a very kind and sweet soul. And sometimes that kind of sweet sensitivity can get steamrolled over. And being a woman working in a male dominated world,

the world of advertising and being pigeonholed for doing only children's things, cute, charming children's things. Oh, you do little ads for Campbell's soup or whatever it might be, or children's books, you know, stay out of our lane. She bumped up a lot against a lot that was forces that were against her just being in the room. Walt eventually came back to her with a new pitch. It wasn't a film. It was a ride he was developing for the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

There's this little boat that goes down the river and it meets all the children of the world. The thing that really impressed her, he got her into doing 3D stuff and actualizing your drawings so that people have to ride them and move through a space, in a real space. She was hooked. It's a Small World began at the World's Fair, but of course it moved to the theme parks. I will not play the song because it is such an earworm, it will be stuck in your head and my head for days. But I will play you this. I want you to meet Mary Blair. We start this way. your head and my head for days. But I will play you this.

I want you to meet Mary Blair. Walt brought Mary and her scale model of It's a Small World onto his TV show. This is a half scale model, isn't it Mary? One half inch. I mean, a half inch represents a foot. And I can hear in his voice the affection, admiration he had for her. To be beautiful, like a piece of jewelry, we hope. I'm sure it will.

Yeah, well, thank you, Mary. And she didn't stop there. He had her do Tomorrowland exhibit stuff. He had to do a big space mountain that was down at Walt Disney World. And when she walked into the space where that finally was, she'd just, you know, she'd done the tiles that go on the piece and she'd created this shape of it

and all that and she had never seen it except these little models. She walked in and she said, oh wow. Remember how the animators complained that they couldn't turn her characters around and draw them from every angle? When you ride through It's a Small World, you're seeing Mary Blair's designs in 3D. They were not altered all that much.

Sure, you could see more around the character as the ride goes by, but they're all in these costumes and hairdos and hats and things that are all Mary Blair in terms of her conceptual work. She won. She won the battle.

But after Walt died, they never used her again. It was a male-dominated place. And she got as far as she could. Walt loved her work and trusted her as far as he could, but he himself, I don't believe, could go that extra step and really make something that was all Mary Blair. But her influence lives on. Pete Docter, who's one of the leading directors at Pixar, has said, When we have a project, the first thing we do is we bring out a lot of Mary Blair. He

said this. The great Ralph Eggleston, sadly who passed too early and was a powerhouse influence on early Pixar. Ralph was an ardent admirer of Mary's work, had a number of her pieces in his own collection, unabashedly just, you know, oh, if I could get to what Mary could do. That's such an interesting thing too, when you think about it, like, well, it was like, make it like Mary's and the animators are like, we can't. And then today with all the stuff that people have, that it's like this Holy Gra a way to try to finally animate Mary Blair. Right. It still is the high water mark in a lot of ways.

When I was a college student, I used to grind my teeth at night and I'd wake up with terrible jaw pain. It was all due to stress. And if I were to do a Mary Blair painting of my face, it would be filled with reds and purples. I needed a mouth guard, but getting one from a dentist cost me a lot of green. The good news is, there's Remy. Remy makes dental grade professional quality mouth guards without the painful price tag. The process is simple. They send you an at-home impression kit to create molds of your teeth.

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They're soft and I have bitten down quite hard, I think, overnight. And my jaw didn't hurt, my teeth didn't hurt, and they performed wonderfully. Even better than the ones I paid the dentist a lot for. Remy is for anyone dealing with nighttime grinding, clenching, or jaw pain who wants an affordable solution to protect their smile and say good night to jaw pain and headaches. Head to shopremy.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary to save up to 50%. That's 50% off at shopremi.com slash imaginary, with the code imaginary.

Give your teeth a break without breaking the bank with Remy. We could end the story of Mary Blair here. It's optimistic, hopeful, whimsical, just like a lot of her work. But Mindy Johnson and John Kahnemaker told me that if you were to paint Mary Blair's life, you would need darker colors. She had a difficult home life. There were problems with her children, drugs and other things entered in there. There was jealousy between Lee with her successes and not having his own work recognized to

that level. Many people told me that they felt that her husband was jealous of her success at Disney. He moved her to New York because he wanted to open a television studio, which he did. It was a way of trying to control things in a way, some people thought, to get her away from Disney. Michael S. Lauer Mary Blair was also an alcoholic, and alcoholism is believed to have led to her death at the age of 67. Gabrielle Stecker teaches English at Indiana University.

I think it's really interesting. It seems like her art in many ways, it feels very escapist. And it's like, here's what innocence and this very kind of bright and abstract formation, this is what innocence can look and feel like. This is not to say that she wasn't capable of rendering that kind of darkness in her work. I think her earlier fine art was able to kind of make those gestures. But the work she did for Disney and even her children's illustrations for children's

books, she abandons that. And we don't remember her for the darkness. But I think it's because with her status as a Disney legend, we only want to see her in one light. Gabrielle wrote an article that made me see Mary Blair in a different light. Not just the artist, but the work itself. Let's take Peter Pan, one of the major films

that she worked on. There are Native Americans in Never Never Land. It's part of the original lore. Their depiction in the Disney film is blatantly offensive. Now, there have been a lot of racist portrayals of Native Americans in Hollywood movies in the past, but many of those films have faded into obscurity. Not Disney's Peter Pan, or for that matter, many other classic Disney films with cringe-worthy scenes. But there's one film you will not find on Disney Plus. The 1946 film Song of the South.

It was based on the books by Joel Chandler Harris, which were written in the late 19th and early 20th century. The stories in the books were based on folk tales that Harris had heard from enslaved people on a plantation in Georgia. The characters include Uncle Remus, Brer Rabbit, and the Tar Baby. The Disney adaptation has been widely criticized

for being racist. Mary Blair worked on that film as well. The history of Song of the South is complicated. Joel Chandler Harris and Walt Disney were generations apart, but they each said in their own time that they weren't trying to mock the black characters. They thought they were celebrating African-American folklore.

They just happened to do it in very problematic ways. And that's the most common defense I've heard of Song of the South. We can't judge it by today's standards. When it came out, Amos and Andy was mainstream entertainment. Walt and his crew of white artists didn't know any better. But the NAACP didn't see it that way. In 1946, they denounced the movie.

Other civil rights groups marched in picket lines outside theaters across the country. Until I came across Gabrielle Sticker's article, I had no idea that Mary Blair did the concept art for Song in the South. What Blair had established herself as was this incredible researcher, and it was clear that she was able to absorb these environments in ways that others weren't. And so she gets sent as essentially the sole studio representative to Georgia on behalf of Disney to do some archival research. And so she is not only developing concept art, but she's

absorbing the environment. She's visiting the plantation where Joel Chandler Harris learned to read and write. And she, in her own words, there's press coverage of this where she's saying she wants to get the feel of Georgia to herself. Do you think though, I mean, I assume she's probably meeting exclusively with white Georgians, and I assume, and they must be giving her a very disordered view. I mean, she also met with a guy named Wilbur Kurtz, who is the, an advisor to Gone with the Wind. Yes.

She discovered when she was in South America that the research could set her free creatively, that she gets buried in the research. But do you feel like this made her too uncritical in being absorbed in what was given to her? This is what's so bizarre in some ways. So when she comes back, a lot of her concept art does capture the darkness and the kind of reality of plantation life, but that gets very kind of whitewashed when it comes to the production of the film. And one of the things that is curious is, Natalia Holt, for example, she's one of the few writers on Blair who has kind of paid any attention to her contributions to Song

of the South. What's interesting about Holt's narrative is she's very speculative in saying, okay, these are all the things that Blair could have done to interject. Her concept art had this darkness that the production team ultimately removed. She could have spoken up, she could have kind of course corrected the stereotypes that were being perpetuated and she didn't. It's interesting to think about the ways she was kind of ultimately complicit, even though I think she very much knew better and was capable of rendering something more accurate in her own work. Well, first of all, yeah, so you agree, like, because I did look at those paint those paintings that she did, and there is the colors

are muted. And there's some of them are actually kind of ominous looking, not your typical Mary Blair. So you do agree that that's in there? Yes. And so and then do you agree with that argument that she she kind of knew better and she just, you know, she's complicit because she didn't say anything? It's so complicated. I mean, I don't think it's enough just to say, okay, she could have done more. I mean, I think that doesn't quite acknowledge

the studio politics and the fact that she is a woman, she's a concept artist, she's not one of the core animators. So realistically, even if she had spoken up, would they have listened? Would it have made an impact? Probably not. Well, the other thing too is that, well, first of all, this was early in her career. She hadn't done the big movies yet that we all know her for. And from everything I've heard about her, she wasn't the kind of person to speak up in general. from everything I've heard about her, she wasn't the kind of person to speak up in general. Yeah.

And I think being Walt's favorite allowed her to also be kind of passive. She didn't have to speak up to get his attention. She already had his attention. So I think that dynamic is worth noting as well. But it seems like you feel like we still shouldn't forget this. Like that, you know, I mean, because of this year,

it's very obvious why people kind of want to brush past this. I mean, Disney has kind of buried the film anyway. I was surprised how many people I talked about this just in casual conversation had never heard of Song of the South, which just shows how effectively they've kind of buried it. But you feel like we need to talk about this. We need to talk about her contribution to this film

and looking at her legacy. How come? I think there's this tendency to put our blinders on when it comes to Disney, especially in terms of productions or even people that have reached that kind of Disney legend status. But just because you're a Disney legend, that doesn't absolve you from any kind of wrongdoing

and it doesn't mean you are the perfect artist. And I'm hoping that in continuing to turn off these blinders, we're able to have more critical conversations about not only the art, but also the artists. I think people are afraid to because they don't necessarily want to taint the legacy of one of the few women working in Disney, working in animation at mid-century that people can actually name. But I think it's important that we do. We owe it to her in a sense to not pick and choose the aspects of her story that we tell. Even if her vision didn't make it into the final film, she was still the boots on the ground researcher who was the sole

studio representative in Georgia. And so it's this, you know, timeless question of where do you draw the line between the art and the artist? Yeah, because I feel the same way. I mean, not only was she historic, historically important, but everyone loves Mary Blair, you know, even I mean, now everyone loves Mary Blair, the artwork. I mean, she just seems like this lovely, stylish person. I almost didn't want to talk about this in this episode, but I think that you make a really fair point that we should talk about it. Yeah, it's hard because yeah,

and everyone says when they're looking for creative inspiration, everyone says, let's look at the Mary Blair stuff. There's something about her, just this really unique style. And it's like once you know the name behind the art, you just crave more. So no, I don't think we'll ever be at a point where we say we have to cancel Mary Blair or that we can't appreciate her work. Blair occupies this really unique category in that her art, aside from her kind of backgrounds and character styling, didn't often make it on screen.

And so she's occupying this weird middle ground where she's not doing the finishing touches, she's not actually doing the animation, but she's shaping the film from the outset. And that's what makes her unique and I think worthy of attention. And again, it's a matter of we have to get comfortable removing the Disney blinders.

And it's hard to do, but I think you can do that and it not be totally at the expense of the Disney magic. Hmm, that's so interesting to take off the blinders but not at the expense of the Disney magic. That's a tough trick. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think it's, you know, a tough trick. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think it's a worthy pursuit. This series is about artists who have been hiding in plain sight.

That's partly because they worked in industries where credit or blame were ambiguous. On top of that, there were outsiders and trailblazers. The most agency they had was when they focused on their work. What they created next was fully their own, even if they didn't technically own it. They still managed to put their spirit into their work, which then went on to become part of our cultural DNA. That feels like magic to me. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Mindy Johnson, John Canemaker, and Gabrielle Stecker. In the show notes I have links to John's book about Mary Blair, Mindy's book about the women who worked in the ink and paint department, and Gabrielle's article. I also put a slideshow of Mary Blair's work on the Imaginary World's Instagram page. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you liked this episode, you might like my 2017 episode about the creation of the Haunted Mansion ride and my 2019 episode, Actors with Pencils, about the classic Disney animators

known as the Nine Old Men. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show, it's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. I recently talked with Chiochi LaAnssen. He reads the underwriting and sponsorship credits for NPR, but in this episode, you'll hear him talk about something very different.

He described the plot of the substance to me because I'm too squeamish to see the movie. Elizabeth plugs the thumb drive into her TV and she watches it. All right I'm going to give you the full text of what the video says. Okay. Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division that will release another version of yourself. This is the substance.

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