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One of my favorite animation stories is when Disney hired a group of female animators to work on Snow White and like this was a huge deal, it was Snow White, it was going to be the very first full-length American animated movie, it would go on to win a special Oscar designed just for it (they didn’t know that at the time of production, obviously, but this is how groundbreaking the movie was). And obviously this was back in the 1930s so everything was hand-drawn and hand-inked but…because they had the actual physical cels right there in front of them, they could put whatever they wanted to on the paper, I don’t know about you all, but I feel like I definitely take that for granted. You think ‘pencil, ink, paints’ and that’s it. And apparently Walt Disney had that mindset too because he was confused by the texture of the makeup on Snow White’s face and so he asked his female animators and they were just like, “Sir, we used our actual makeup” like these animators actually did Snow White’s makeup which is mind-blowing enough but then you realize that there were over 250,000 cels in Snow White and okay, sure, only a fraction of those cels actually featured a closeup of Snow but it’s still insane to think that we’re looking at somebody’s real blush here (once you see it, you can’t un-see it):

Animation, man.

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This is myth.

First, there were no women animators. Women only worked in the inking and painting department.

The women of this department actually did develop a new technique for Snow White’s makeup (as well as the Queen’s, and the rosy cheeks of the Dwarfs), but real makeup was not involved. Makeup was too chalky and it will not adhere properly to the cells.

What they did was, they would color in Snow White’s skin tone on the back of the cell, as it was usual, and apply a transparent red dye on the front of the cell. The dye would dissolve and combine with the paint of the skin to give that soft glow effect. The women who did this (and not many could do it) really had to apply it in the exact same spot on each cell so there would be no flicker, essentially doing animation with color. Apparently the one who did it best and got all of the close-ups was a woman named Helen Ogger.

These women really do deserve to be admired, credited and remembered, but for their real skills and amazing innovation, not a fun myth.

You can read more about this in Mindy Johnson’s “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation” and J. B. Kaufman’s “The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.