Disney Legends: Ruthie Tompson
Notable animator, Disney Legend and super-centenarian Ruthie Tompson passes away at 111 years of age.
October 10, 2021 marked the passing of an extraordinary woman named Ruthie Tompson. At the age of 90, Ruthie was inducted as a Disney Legend in 2000 for her extraordinary contributions in animation.
Born on July 22, 1910, Ruth Irene Tompson first met the Disney family when she visited her neighbor Robert's new baby. The location of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was not far from her home and Ruthie recalls passing the studio on her way to grammar school. Ruthie visited the office often and ended up appearing in the Alice Comedies.
“I was walking by the storefront and there were two ladies in the window painting. I never saw this before, so I stopped to look. And every day, I had to stop and see what they were doing. Curiosity almost killed this cat. I did it so often that somebody came out and said, ‘Why don’t you go inside and watch them?’ I think it was Walt because he roamed around quite a bit. I saw how the fellows flipped the drawings. (Disney Legends) Les Clark and Ub Iwerks were there, and Roy was in the back shooting what the girls were painting over backgrounds. As a 10-year-old kid, I was fascinated. I’d sit on the bench beside Roy, he had an apple box for me to sit on. Walt would engage all of the kids in the neighborhood and take pictures of us running and playing and doing things, for animation purposes. He always gave us a quarter or fifty cent piece, and, of course, I went right to the candy store for licorice.”
Ruthie Tompson recalled in a 2010 oral history with Disney’s Animation Research Library
At the age of 18, Ruthie started working at the stables where Roy and Walt Disney often played polo. Walt Disney remembered Tompson and offered her a job as an ‘inker’ in his studio. Tompson was then transferred to the paint department, where she worked on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Ruthie was later promoted to the position of final animation checker, where she reviewed animation cels before they were photographed onto film. Tompson continued working for Disney and in WWII she worked on training and education films for the US Armed Forces.
Ruthie Tompson represents a group of women, known as Ink & Paint girls, who quickly established themselves as serious professionals within the Disney studio system and opened doors for other women to pursue creative careers within Disney.
Today we honor Ruthie by recalling the early careers of Ink and Paint Girls.
The Ink & Paint Department
During the early years of Hollywood’s Golden Age of the 1930’s and 40’s, cartoon animation was a profession occupied exclusively by men.
The types of jobs women were allowed to apply for at the Walt Disney Studios (and other cartoon studios) were limited to jobs as secretaries and working in the Ink & Paint Department.
In order to move forward as a society, it is important to take a backwards glance at history. Baring this in mind, I have included the following letter from the studio.
While this letter is disheartening to read, it is the ‘inkers’ and ‘painters’ mentioned in the final paragraph who would later go on to break the glass ceiling within the Studio and open doors. Decades later we still marvel at the work of these young women we watch classically hand drawn Disney animation.
Painting a Masterpiece
The purpose of the Ink & Paint Department was to transfer the hand drawn animation sketches made by the principal animators onto clear celluloid animation ‘cels’. Inkers drew in the lines, and painters added color and life to the images. The cells would then be arranged on top of a large background drawing and photographed for the final film using a device known as the multiplane camera.
It is through this painstaking process, classic Disney animated films such as: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella eventually made their way to theaters across the globe to be enjoyed by millions.
Despite being excluded from principal animation, inkers (as the Ink & Paint girls were called) were considered the queens of the art department, and highly regarded.
After the principal animators made their sketches, it was the job of the inkers and painters to trace the characters on clear cels with India ink and fill in the tracings on the reverse side with paint according to directions from the animation department.
The process of inking was considered an art within itself. The process took a steady hand and a painstaking amount of precision. An inker can be likened to an animator, as a sous chef is to a chef. They were artists.
As well as tracing the animators’ pencil lines exactly, the steady hands of the inker had to convey the emotion of what the animators were intending in the scenes. To best achieve this, the inkers would use the thinnest brush-nibs available to apply India ink to the cels. The inker would then apply color exactly within the previously traced lines. The inker needed to work quickly so the paint didn’t leave streaks, which would inevitably appear on camera, when it came time to film the individual cels.
A former inker expressed she preferred being assigned characters like Pluto and Goofy to trace, since those long, lean figures required fewer strokes of the pen.
At an average of 8 to 10 cels an hour, 100 inkers could turn out nearly one minute of screen time per day. Considering a film like Pinocchio (1940) ran 88 minutes, the time it took to hand paint the cels was extensive. This time estimate excludes the time it took to create the original animation, the time spent finishing the cels and the capturing the completed cels on film.
Fact: Jiminy Cricket required 27 different colors of ink. Imagine inking 100 cels for Jiminy to create under a minute of screen time.
Hundreds of Brilliant Shades
The paint was made in the Hyperion Studio laboratory in the adjoining building. The paint came in hundreds of shades and certain shades would eventually be named for different characters. In the early years, when operations were located on Hyperion Avenue, paints were individually numbered to designate the different shades.
“My most unfavorite colors were gray and purple: they streaked,” another Ink & Paint girl was quoted, referring to her work on Monstro, the whale in Pinocchio. “And you had to work very, very fast so that they wouldn’t dry.”
Later, after the Studio moved to the current Burbank location, paints were occasionally named after individuals. Having a color named for you would become a special accolade.
The Art of Animation: The Multiplane Camera
Invented in 1933, the multiplane camera quickly elevated the style and quality of Disney animation. The camera was later patented in 1940 and quickly became a signature of Disney animation.
The purpose of the camera was to add depth and light to otherwise flat animation paintings. At any given time, up to six layers of cels and backgrounds (painted on glass) could be accommodated by the multiplane camera, including layers of background scenery, characters and special effects.
Fun Fact: The name used on the patent for the multiplane camera, The Art of Animation, would manifest its self again in May of 2012, when Disney’s Art of Animation Resort opened its doors to guests in Orlando, Florida.
“Tea Twice” is Nice: A Day in the Life of an Ink & Paint Girl
Like their male counterparts in the animation department in the 1930’s, most of the young women working as inkers were pioneering, ambitious and under the age of 25.
At the height of production as many as 100 young women worked at the studio. From dawn to dusk, inking hundreds of cels, these young women brought Walt’s vision to life. They were intelligent, diligent and hard working. Compared to other young women of the time period, the inkers were considered modern, progressive…and fashionable.
It was said by VIPs touring the studio, “…there was never a more charming assembly-line, than inkers and painters, in their rayon print dresses, pearls, and heels; or the high-waisted, flared pants and slip-ons…” which Katharine Hepburn had made fashionable.
A select handful of these women would eventually be promoted out of the department and go on to hold prominent positions with the in studio. The most notable of these women was Leota Toombs, who later became an Imagineer.
The girls woke before dawn, as early as 4:30 a.m., to make their way to the studio on Hyperion Avenue by streetcar or bus, to begin their shifts.
“There were corridors each for inkers and painters, and rows of assigned desks with gooseneck lamps and hard-backed chairs—you could bring a pillow—were lined up next to the high, mullioned windows that offered abundant California light.” -Ruthie Tompson
The long work days, which bled into longer work evenings, were punctuated by two tea times each day at 10 a.m. and again at 3 p.m.
A hostess would bring tea out to the lawn where the employees would enjoy a much needed break. One inker reported working 60-80 hour weeks when production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in full swing.
There were also ping-pong and badminton games for Studio employees, and picnics and tennis at nearby Griffith Park. Though the women in Ink & Paint, and the men in Animation were not encouraged to mingle, close relationships developed, and many of them resulted in marriage. The most famous being that of Walt and Lillian.
Simply Remarkable
Ruthie Tompson’s career at the Walt Disney Animation Studio spanned four decades. She was eventually promoted as an animation checker and later finished her career as a scene planner.
During her tenure with Walt Disney Productions, Ruthie worked on several feature length animated films, and dozens of short films. Some of her notable contributions include her work on the following films: Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Donald in Mathmagic Land and Mary Poppins.
Ruth Irene Tompson retired in 1975 from Disney after completing The Rescuers. At the time she was the head of the scene planning department.
If you were to check Ruthie’s IMDB page, you would find something surprising. Much of Ruthie’s early work went unaccredited by the Studio. This was typical of the times. Walt Disney wished for audiences to be drawn into the stories of his films, never seeing ‘the brush strokes’ made by the people who helped create his films. For a time even the lead voice actors went unnamed by the studio when these early films were released.
Since this time, many early artists have now been recognized for their remarkable achievements in film and for their later work in the Disney Parks.
In 2000 Ruthie was honored as a Disney Legend for her remarkable accomplishments in animation. In a way, her award also honored the remarkable young women of the Ink & Paint Department whose work we still marvel at today.
“The best way to describe Ruthie is simply ‘remarkable.’ She was perhaps the last link from the earliest origins of animation in Hollywood. Ruthie was a living witness and vital contributor to the progress and growth of the animation industry as we know it today.”
Mindy Johnson, Disney historian and author of Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation
Here is a link to an article about Ruthie in the New York Times.
If you would like to learn more about women like Ruthie who worked for Disney Animation, check out Ink & Paint by Mindy Johnson. I was able to find it available for purchase online.
The Queens of Animation by Nathalia Holt is available on Audible and Kindle. It is also available for purchase on Amazon.
Thank you for spending time with us today to celebrate the life of Disney Legend Ruthie Tompson, and as we learned about a league of extraordinary women who helped ‘color’ and shape the Walt Disney Studio during Hollywood’s Golden Age.
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Two articles were referenced while writing this post. Check out these articles from the Walt Disney Family Museum and Vanity Fair.
Stay optimistic, and see you real soon!
Sincerely,
Harper