http://hollywoodreporter.com/v/AwardsNews/WasMerylStreepCorrec
Spokespeople for Streep and Disney had no comment on the incident. However, several Disney experts
THR consulted contend that Streep wasn’t being fair to Walt. Here are their reactions to Streep’s three charges against Disney:
Racist? Although Disney shared the racial insensitivity of his day – thinking it would be funny, for example, to have a watermelon-eating black centaur girl in
Fantasia -- he also attempted to be sensitive. Disney biographer
Neal Gabler notes in
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination that he sought input for his live action/animated film,
Song of the South, from NAACP official
Walter White and other leaders and removed some offensive phrases and words like “darky” from the script.
Sexist? Streep quoted Disney animator
Ward Kimball, who said, “He didn’t trust women or cats,” and she read from a 1938 letter from Disney informing a female job applicant, “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that task is performed entirely by young men. For this reason, girls are not considered for the training school. The only work open to women consists of tracing the characters on clear celluloid sheets with India ink, and then, filling in the tracing on the reverse side with paint according to directions."
ANALYSIS: Oscar Ballots Close With a Bang
But women were indeed shut out of animation and confined to inking and painting all over Hollywood in the ’30s. “That was an industry-wide practice,” says one animation expert. “There were, however, a number of women working at [Disney] in a creative capacity during that time, mostly in story development.” In 1941, Walt told male artists working on
Dumbo, "If a woman can do the work as well, she is worth as much as a man. The girl artists have the right to expect the same chances for advancement as men, and I honestly believe they may eventually contribute something to this business that men never would or could.”
Retta Scott became Disney’s first female animator on 1942’s
Bambi, and in the ’40s and ’50s,
Mary Blair was art supervisor and color stylist for
Saludos Amigos,
The Three Caballeros,
Cinderella,
Alice in Wonderland and
Peter Pan.
In 1959, Disney wrote, “Women are the best judges of anything we turn out. Their taste is very important. They are the theatergoers, they are the ones who drag the men in. If the women like it, to heck with the men.”
Anti-Semite? That may be the most misunderstood aspect of Disney’s legacy, say some scholars. “It would be unfair to label him an anti-Semite himself,” wrote Gabler in 2009. “There is no evidence whatsoever in the extensive Disney Archives of any anti-Semitic remarks or actions by Walt.” He employed a Jewish man,
Herman "Kay" Kamen, as his merchandising chief, and he once said that Disney’s New York office “had more Jews than the Book of Leviticus.”
Disney gave to the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York, Yeshiva College, and the Jewish Home for the Aged, and was voted 1955 Man of the Year by the Beverly Hills Lodge of the B'nai B'rith.
So why did
Snow White animators
Art Babbitt and
David Hilberman claim that Walt was anti-Semitic? Gabler and other experts say that, while Babbitt’s and Hilberman’s charges are hard to prove or disprove, they were deeply angry over the animators’ strike of 1941. Disney was paternalistically convinced he was a great boss, which in some ways he was, and the strike also left him bitter, convinced that it had been fomented by communists to damage him.
Streep was correct to note that Disney joined the anti-Semitic, anti-communist MPA – the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Other big studio chiefs avoided the group, but Disney was either politically naive or willing to put up with its anti-Semitism to advance the cause of bashing communism.
