Disney's Ink and Paint Department: A Case Study

As I've mentioned before, a major reason that animation, inbetweening, and ink and paint are done by artists in overseas studios is that studios create a division between “creative” and “non-creative” work. Work is planned out in advance by “creative” American artists and assembled by paint-by-numbers “non-creatives” in Asian countries. This is obviously a misnomer—overseas animators constantly turn out cool, innovative stuff.

But the hierarchy of creative and “non-creative” work is eerily reminiscent of another time in animation—in Disney’s golden age.

"Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is entirely performed by young men."

Disney himself was not actually against women having "creative" jobs. Eventually the 1940s, there were actually dozens of women who held "creative" positions, including Mary Blair, whose artwork was hugely influential in Cinderella, Peter Pan, and the Disneyland ride "It's a Small World". Still, the bulk of women (in the hundreds) were sent to the ink and paint department (which still stands today on the Disney lot). Walt Disney called these young women "the girls," and they worked insane hours for very, very low pay. The starting pay in the late 1930s was $16 a week, which was almost twenty times less than a top animator. Especially in the production of Snow White, many female artists worked eighty hour weeks.

While the work of inking and painting cartoons did not require female employees to make unique or original decisions, it's way too reductive to call it just "tracing the characters" and "filling in the tracings." Take, for example, this ink and paint drawing from Sleeping Beauty (courtesy of The DejaView).

This drawing actually blows my mind. Not only did the ink and paint department have to ink each line in a different color and use twenty-eight different shades of paint in this frame, but they also had to maintain a level of consistency in the linework so that actions didn't lose their timing and consistency. They had to be good draftsmen and precise workers. If you need further proof, take a closer look at the "Once Upon a Dream" sequence from Sleeping Beauty.

Each line meticulously inked and painted in a way that gave the lines varying thickness, strengthened the vibrant visual design of the film, and made the work of the male animators more visually appealing. 

Sadly, after Sleeping Beauty's disappointing return at the box office in 1959, the Walt Disney Animation Studio shrank from over five hundred employees to seventy-five. The ink and paint department was especially gutted. While some painters remained, most inkers were replaced by xerography. Beginning in 101 Dalmatians, rough animation was directly copied onto acetate cels, cutting out clean-up artists and inkers.

Disney determined that the company was bloated--the only crew members who remained were deemed essential. "Creatives" took precedence. This happens all too often in animation production - and we're seeing it now as animation and vfx companies are being driven out of business by companies who will do it for less money. While the work of inking, painting, and animating from a well-developed plan may not be as "creative" as storyboarding or developing the look of a film, you can't deny that there was a considerable amount of thoughtfulness, skill, and ingenuity in each of those jobs. While it's impossible to stop the film industry to stop from being a business with a bottom line, it does suggest that the skilled artists who fill these roles need to make themselves indispensable.  By being versatile and infusing their jobs with as much creativity as possible, they can stand a chance of surviving the whims and sputters of an unstable industry.


For more info, please check out:

https://d23.com/walt-disney-legend/grace-bailey/
http://www.waltdisney.org/blog/look-closer-women-disney-ink-and-paint-department
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/disney/fact-checking-meryl-streeps-disney-bashing-speech-94380.html
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/2014/07/ink-and-paint.html
Sito, Tom. Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson. University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Print.