...a bolt of pure reading delight that outdoes even Holt’s utterly winning earlier book Rise of the Rocket Girls. ... It concentrates on five...women: Grace Huntington, Bianca Majolie, Retta Scott, Sylvia Holland, and especially Mary Blair, and through their stories, invaluably researched and assembled here, our author gives readers a look at the women who gave shape to so many of their childhood memories ... In a beautifully sculpted narrative of hurtlingly fast pace, Holt tells the stories of these women and their female colleagues ... In a very real sense, many of the struggles of the Queens of Animation were also Disney’s struggles, and Holt draws readers deep into the fascinating specifics of those struggles ... The fight goes on...but in The Queens of Animation, Nathalia Holt has told the story of indispensable trailblazers. It’s gripping, galvanizing reading.
In a sprightly new book...Nathalia Holt, a science journalist and a popular historian, introduces us to a handful of women who worked on some of the classic Disney Studios films, spins them around, sprinkles some pixie dust, and has them take a bow. She’s a little like a fairy godmother, wanting us to think nothing but the best of her charges, perhaps wishing that she could send them back out into the world with a bluebird or two twittering at their shoulders. I wasn’t always convinced that the five women she focusses on were as influential as she suggests, but I enjoyed reading about them in the workplace they shared.
The Queens of Animation covers the women's particular, personal challenges...and their shared trials, especially their male co-workers' resentment and predatory ways. Among the sketches reproduced in Holt's exhaustively researched book is a shattering one by scriptwriting and storyboarding ace Grace Huntington: it shows an outsize Mickey Mouse-like figure preying on a female worker ... The Queens of Animation does double duty as the story of Disney's animation studio, which was in debt for years and continually seeking financial relief through new technologies. Holt, foremost a science writer, is awfully good at describing how innovations like Technicolor, the optical printer and xerography work ... Of course, the irony is that in the studio's financially unstable golden era, when its male employees thought it beneath them to draw fairies, it was movies about women--a princess here, a Poppins there--that reliably saved Piglet's bacon
Disney’s female artists and writers have finally been receiving long overdue recognition. Holt’s heartfelt, deeply researched tome, however, is the first to truly highlight the sexism they experienced at the studio ... This groundbreaking work laments the discrimination these artists endured while celebrating the verve, creativity, and resiliency they drew on to bring beautiful art and three-dimensional characters to the big screen.
In this engrossing history, Holt...highlights Disney’s largely forgotten female writers and animators ... While restoring these women to their rightful place in history, Holt also covers the evolution of Disney’s animated features ... Going up to the present to highlight how women have continued to play key roles in making films like Brave and Frozen, Holt’s thorough and enchanting account will be a must-read for Disney enthusiasts and champions of women’s artistic contributions.
Holt...who writes with a researcher’s mind and a storyteller’s heart, engagingly chronicles the lives of the women animators at Disney ... Though these women have long since passed—Holt based her portrayals on correspondence, notes, photographs, journals, and interviews with family and friends—the author’s resurrection of this lost age is eminently readable and inspiring ... Disney-philes will appreciate many of the rarely revealed stories, some of which are painful ... A compelling story of women with talent, artistic vision, and spines of steel.
