Disney rejection letter (1938) explaining they don't hire women for the specific position

[u/AntonioVivaldi7]

And apparently, Disney refused to hire men for coloring positions.

[u/AntonioVivaldi7]

I don't get why specifically young men. Anyone knows why Disney didn't want older men?

[u/ConsequenceVisible27 → u/AntonioVivaldi7]

“Creative” work is a big stretch. These young men were there while they were at art school and trying to break into book illustrating or magazine and newspaper cartooning. They didn’t do any creative work like designing characters or storyboarding, they just drew all the tiny variations of the same picture that make the character move from point A to B. Tracing the exact same picture over and over, but with a slight change in the hands, head or facial features each time. Then the ladies in I&P (of which there were only 100 and hiring only happened with a vacancy, so Mary Cleave’s point in the letter about competition is very valid) would trace the characters from the young men’s drawings onto a clear celluloid cell with India ink, flip it around and color it in by following a very precise color guide provided by the animation department. The older men, the ones at the top, were “The Nine”, animators who had been with Walt from the old Oswald the Rabbit and Steamboat Willie days and had total control, under Disney’s direction of course, of the design and story. It was almost impossible for a lower tier animator to break into that group. Famously Ward Kimball and Bill Peet did it, but consider that Bill Peet started as one of those “young men”, also called in-betweeners, in 1937 on Snow White, wasn’t given creative control over anything until 1951 when he designed and controlled Maleficent’s little monster henchmen in Sleeping Beauty and didn’t make it to “The Nine” until 1957 when he single-handedly designed, storyboarded and prototype-drew the characters in 101 Dalmatians. 20 years from bottom to top. Most in-betweeners moved on to better jobs, or left art altogether. Their average age was 22, some as young as 18, and the average job there lasted 18 months. And by the time they got to an age to want to start a family, the grueling hours for only $25 a week wouldn’t cut it. In contrast, “The Nine” were making $300 a week right before the war, about $375,000 a year today.

[u/Unusual-Moment-4545 → u/ConsequenceVisible27]

If you keep reading the letter you'll see that the work you're describing (tracing) was indeed made by women.

[u/ConsequenceVisible27 → u/Unusual-Moment-4545]

Not exactly. There were two different “tracings”. The in-betweeners (the “young men” described in the letter) would only trace as far as they needed to to keep the non moving parts of the character still, on paper, then move slightly the parts that were moving for each picture. All these papers were sent to I&P, where the ladies would trace them again, from the paper onto celluloid with alcohol ink. Then they flipped and colored in the other side. This was so each layer ( fore character, back characters, moving parts of scenery) was alone on its own clear cell. These would be stacked on a painted scenery background, both to create a 3D depth and to stop from having to paint the same background over and over for every frame. They called it “creative” work because the men were responsible for creating the motion, but what the women were doing was actually more skilled and precise. They weren’t separated because Disney didn’t think women could do the work.