“Quick-Like a Bunny!”

Abstract

From the 1920s through the 1960s, the animation industry was a labor force segregated by gender, in which women were almost entirely restricted to the Inking and Paint department. Indeed, despite notable exceptions like Mary Blair and LaVerne Harding, Disney correspondence and internal papers show how women were regularly rejected as applicants or referred to inking and painting as their only career options.[1] One of the final steps in a Taylorized labor intensive industrial machine of specialized labor, the Ink and Paint Dept. usually consisted of several hundred female workers[2] in each animated studio, wearing white gloves (with thumb and two fingers cut off) and pongee smocks (to keep cels free from dust). After cleaned up pencil drawings were received from animators, inkers used the finest Gillott 290 nibs to make precise small, medium or large black (and sometimes color) lines around those drawings. Painters would then flip the nitrate cels and color in the inked outlines, following numbered specifications from a model sheet created by the Color Key Artist who selected colors for characters and props (Furniss, p. 74). They worked on raked boards (as inkers) or flat boards (as painters) producing 8-10 cels an hour (Zohn 2010, p. 289), enduring the lowest pay in the industry, while supervisors like Dot Smith would walk up and down the aisles at Disney urging them to work faster and faster with phrases like “Come on now, quick- like a bunny!” (Baldwin, 1995, p. 4) This paper examines the relationship of color, labor and gender in the Ink and Paint machine with a particular focus on the material representation of paints, pigments, inks and other color materials in classical cel production.