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Wednesday, February 8, 2012. New Comics TODAY!

 

All the Comics in the World: Mary Blair

By Shaenon K. Garrity

Thursday September 11, 2008 09:00:00 am

This isn't technically about comics. It's about animation. And illustration. And why I'm going to Japan next year. Mostly, though, it's about how things get lost and found.

If you've ever wondered how shows happen at the Cartoon Art Museum, this is how. More or less.

1941: For reasons too complicated to get into, the Disney Studios are financially strapped. Needing cash, Walt and Roy Disney accept a job from the federal government as part of FDR's Good Neighbor policy. Walt, his wife, and sixteen Disney creatives spend ten weeks touring Central and South America. For themselves, they're researching the film projects that will become Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. For Uncle Sam, they're on a goodwill tour, exporting the popular Disney characters and their famous creator to stir pro-America sentiments in the hearts of our increasingly Communist-sympathizing neighbors to the south. (Another goal of the trip is to get Walt out of the country so Roy can clean up the Disney animators' strike; Walt refuses to negotiate with the animators and is generally pissing everyone off.)

One of the artists on the trip is up-and-coming animator Lee Blair, who did admirable work on Fantasia with his more famous younger brother Preston. Lee brings his wife, Mary. Mary works as a concept artist, one of the few women in a creative position at Disney, but she hasn't produced much of note and she's ambivalent about working there in the first place. She would prefer to stay home and paint watercolors, but few people during the Great Depression can afford to be full-time housewives or fine artists; Disney pays. Her inclusion in the South America trip is almost certainly an afterthought.

The trip changes Mary Blair forever. During the ten weeks, she churns out dozens of vibrant watercolors and fills a sketchbook with drawings. Inspired by the intense colors of the landscape and the bright patterns of the native arts and crafts, she develops a bold, muscular, geometric—yet whimsical and charming—style radically different from the soft pastels she's been producing for Disney. Mary Blair's artwork forms the visual basis for Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. After the trip, she produces key concept art for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, as well as numerous shorts and other projects.

Mary eventually leaves the Disney Studios as a full-time artist but continues to work as a freelancer, illustrating Disney storybooks and designing murals for Disneyland. She builds a career as a children's book and advertising illustrator, filling the commercial-art world of the 1950s and 1960s with her instantly recogizable style.

1964: At the apex of her career, Mary Blair designs one of four Disney-produced attractions for the 1964 World's Fair. After the fair, her creation, "It's a Small World," is moved to Disneyland and becomes the park's icon, famous the world over.

Late in his life, Disney artist Marc Davis will say in private, "She was Walt's favorite."

1978: Mary Blair dies of a stroke. She is survived by Lee, who continues to paint until his death in 1995, and their sons Donovan and Kevin.

1983: On a trip to Walt Disney World, my parents and I are stranded in a boat inside "It's a Small World" for an hour, listening to the theme song over and over until the maintenance workers save us. I am five years old. Although I don't remember the experience, it is possible that my psyche is permanently altered.

2000: For reasons too complicated to get into, I am living in San Francisco post-graduation, working as a receptionist at a small publishing company called Viz while holding down an internship at the Cartoon Art Museum. One day I complain to the museum's volunteer coordinator about not having a boyfriend, inspiring her to introduce the next new volunteer to me with the words, "This is Shaenon. She's single."

His name is Andrew. Four years later, he's the curator of the Cartoon Art Museum and we're married.

2003: Mary Blair's work has been largely forgotten except by Disney aficiandos and professional animators, who generally hold her in high regard. The books she illustrated have gone out of print, save for the eternally popular Little Golden Book I Can Fly. The murals she designed for Disneyland have been covered with newer, blander artwork.

One of the stalwart fans is John Canemaker, who includes sections on Mary Blair in his coffee-table books Before the Animation Begins and The Disney That Never Was. With extensive help from Mary's sons Kevin and Donovan and her nieces, Maggie and Jeanne, Canemaker writes The Art and Flair of Mary Blair, with many of the illustrations taken from the Blair family's private collection. It's one of the few places most people can see Mary Blair art.

2004: A janitor at Chiba University in Japan cleans out a storage room and discovers 250 pieces of Disney artwork from the 1930s to 1960s, including concept art by Mary Blair, Marc Davis, Eyvind Earle (the painter responsible for the lavish backgrounds in Sleeping Beauty) and others. It seems the Disney Studios loaned a pile of art to Japan over 40 years ago and forgot to ask for it back.

Studio Ghibli, the great Japanese animation studio, sponsors a public show of the artwork before its return to the Disney vault. The most popular artist in the show is Mary Blair.

2005: At a used bookstore, I buy a basement-stanky copy of The Disney That Never Was, a book I've been trying to find for years. After reading it, I tell Andrew that the Cartoon Art Museum ought to do a Mary Blair show. The museum staff is underwhelmed by the idea. Nobody's heard of Mary Blair.

2006: It gets out that several of the panjandrums at Pixar Studios, including Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter, are big Mary Blair fans. The Cartoon Art Museum likes to make Pixar happy. The Mary Blair show is suddenly a much more appealing idea.

I am listening obsessively to the They Might Be Giants song "Ana Ng": All alone at the '64 World's Fair / Eighty dolls screaming, "Small girl after all" / Who was at the DuPont pavilion? / Why was the bench still warm, who had been there? The song is about finding your one true love on the other side of the world.

September 2007: Andrew and I rent a car and drive an hour out of San Francisco in the baking Labor Day heat to the home of Kevin Blair, a retired Macintosh technician and Mary Blair's younger son. Kevin gives us the house tour, showing us his massive collection of model airplanes and his parents' paintings, which cover every wall of every room of the house. We haul cardboard boxes and airplane kits out of Kevin's spare room until we reach a stack of archival art boxes, which Kevin proudly tells us were given to him by Pete Docter following a Pixar Studio field trip to Kevin's house. Inside is nearly all of the Blair family's collection of animation art by Preston, Lee, and Mary Blair. Kevin, a shy, mild-tempered man with a stammer who cheerfully describes himself as the "only non-creative member of the family," has appointed himself preserver of the family art collection.

Mary, Kevin tells us, brought four stacks of her art out of the Disney Studios, something unthinkable today. They sat for years in the Blairs' garage in Great Neck. One stack was ruined by water damage. Mary took another stack down to the church swap meet one day and the organizers sold the paintings for about $15 each. What we're seeing, in these boxes, is the two surviving stacks. Dozens of little paintings for Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland and "The Little House" and "Once Upon a Wintertime" and Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart and "Susie, the Little Blue Coupe." Watercolors from the South America trip. A careful photocopy of the South America sketchbook. Kevin has stacks of non-Disney art as well, mainly commercial illustrations for companies like Baker's Chocolate, Meadow Gold Dairies, and, above all, Pall Mall Cigarettes. (Mary Blair smoked like a fiend.) And paintings from late in his mother's career. And photos of murals she designed. And décor from the Contemporary Resort Hotel at Walt Disney World, her last project for Disney. And on and on for hours.

When we emerge late in the afternoon, we discover that we left the rental car's headlights on and ran out the battery. Kevin gives us a jump-start and takes us to lunch.

The Mary Blair show is go.

October 2007: "The Art and Flair of Mary Blair" opens at the Cartoon Art Museum. I write the wall text. Andrew does everything else. I claim a co-curator credit. Andrew's learned to live with me.

In addition to art from Kevin's collection, the show includes pieces loaned from other collectors, many of them animators themselves. Pete Docter loans us Peter Pan artwork and a pair of two-page spreads from I Can Fly. Craig McCracken, creator of the Powerpuff Girls, loans us the cover to I Can Fly, one of the most beautiful pieces of illustration I've ever seen. Those churchgoers at the swap meet got a hell of a deal. Mary Blair concept art now starts at around $9,000 per piece.

The show is a hit. For the six months it remains up at the Cartoon Art Museum, I see it almost every day, and I never get tired of looking at those little paintings, or the big "Small World" collage.

February 2008: The president of Studio Ghibli and some friends visit Pixar Studios in nearby Emeryville, California. While they're in the Bay Area, the Pixar people tell them that they should check out the Mary Blair show at the Cartoon Art Museum. The Pixar people have enjoyed the Mary Blair show very much.

The Ghibli people enjoy it too.

March 2008: Disney announces that the original "It's a Small World" at Disneyland will be undergoing a redesign. Disney movie characters will be inserted into the displays, an element already added in some of the overseas versions of the ride (there are now five Small Worlds, after all). The rainforest room, with its jungle animals and tiki masks, will be torn down and replaced with a display called "Up with America."

Kevin Blair makes a rare public statement in an open letter to Disney, writing that the proposed changes are "a gross desecration of the ride's original theme and my Mother's stylized artwork." He adds, "…ripping out a rainforest (imaginary or otherwise) and replacing it with misplaced patriotism is a public relations blunder so big you could run a Monorail through it." Other relatives of Mary Blair (there are not so many now) also complain. Disney fans and animators rail against the redesign on their blogs.

Disney spokespeople meet with the Blairs. They are polite, the spokespeople. Disney moves ahead with the redesign.

June 2008: A month after driving away from the Cartoon Art Museum with a trunk full of returned artwork, Kevin Blair dies of a heart attack. "I told him to stay away from those deep-dish pizzas," one of his cousins says sadly. He had planned to spend the summer driving Route 66, then making his way up to the old Blair family home in Great Neck, a 1950s modernist house his parents helped design. The only part that worried him was affording gas.

At the time of his death, Kevin was talking to people from the Ghibli Museum about taking the Mary Blair show to Tokyo. It was a happy time for him, spreading the word about his mother's genius, carrying on the family legacy in the best way he knew.

August 2008: Andrew and I meet with a group of very nice people from Ghibli. They are friendly. They bring Totoro keychains. They are delighted to learn that I work for Viz, the big publishing company that handles Ghibli's artbooks in America, and that, even more wonderfully, I edit manga they remember from their 1980s childhoods. They want to know about my favorite battles in Kinnikuman.

They also want us to help curate a Mary Blair retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, expanded from the show at the Cartoon Art Museum. Two floors will be given over to Mary Blair's art, starting with her art school projects and early watercolors and moving through her Disney career, her commercial art, her children's books. Collectors will be contacted. Licenses will be obtained. The Disney vault will be opened. It can be done. Though the mountains divide and the oceans are wide, it's a small world after all.

And the world remembers that it loves Mary Blair.

Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.

All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010

 

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