This month in the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, I realized a long-held dream to tell the largely untold story of the all-female Ink and Paint department at the Walt Disney studio during the Golden Age — the women behind the Mouse. My aunt, Rae Medby McSpadden, was a member of the department that traced the animators’ drawings onto celluloid for filming and began her work on the Silly Symphonies when she came to the studio from Seattle in 1935. Even though Walt — as he was known even to his staff — had resisted doing a sequel to Three Little Pigs, Rae was assigned to painting kittens and Saint Bernards for the sequel to Three Orphan Kittens. That was until she — and almost everyone else at the studio — was pulled into the multi-handed but single-minded obsession that birthed the first animated feature, Snow White.
Though it fell somewhat outside the narrower purview of my story, I could not resist the opportunity to interview one other treasured behind-the-scenes woman, Marge Belcher Champion, famous as half of the dancing Champions of screen and stage, but known to Disney aficionados world wide as the real-live model for Snow White.
When I say model, what do I mean? Disney and staff developed a process called “rotoscoping”; actors were filmed as aids for the animators to impart more naturalism into their drawings for this challenging first feature. Fourteen-year-old Marge Belcher, whose father Ernest had a well-known dance studio in LA, was chosen “out of hundreds of girls,” she says.
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