The Annecy Animation Festival saw the debut of a new animated short dedicated to one of Disney’s most influential, visionary artists – Mary Blair. The short is just 86 seconds and yet it conveys Blair’s work so well.
According to French animation studio Gobelins, the animated short depicts the following:
Mary Blair is hired to work in Walt Disney’s gigantic and rigorously maintained garden. As he welcomes her and invites her to get to work, she starts producing plants magically. Although he is amazed, Walt cannot refrain from correcting and toning down Mary’s work behind her back…
Mary Blair was a real pioneer in animation, illustration, and imagineering at time when the fields were dominated by men. Among her most recognizable work for Walt Disney was the concept and color for “Alice in Wonderland” animated feature and the classic “It’s A Small World” theme park attraction.
What is your favorite piece of Mary Blair art?
Periodically, my mother would dress me in what she called traveling clothes, which were as dressy as church clothes but somehow different, drive me to National Airport, and pack me onto a plane bound for Orlando.
My grandmother would meet me at the airport, always with a cardigan on the front seat of her station wagon in case I was cold from the plane ride. It was Florida, and I was coming from DC, so I never was, but without fail I faked a shiver just to get that cardigan wrapped around me.
Then we’d drive to her home in Ocala, where I’d stay in the pale rose room in which my mother grew up, sit at my mother’s small, cream vanity, climb up onto my mother’s high bed with the dusty pink bedspread that crackled when moved.
In the mornings, my grandmother would wake me with a cry of “Go pick your breakfast!” I’d run out the patio door and into the orchard. Sometimes I’d sit on the tire swing while I decided. Eventually I’d choose, usually the pink grapefruit I thought so pretty inside and which is still my favorite to this day.
My mother would fly down a few days before my trip ended, and the next morning we three and Cookie, Mr. Cook, my grandmother’s farm manager, would drive over to Disney World.
My favorite thing to do there was “see the dolls”, as I called them, because they reminded me of my doll collection, brought to me by my father from his business trips all over the world.
And so we would get on a little boat and see the dolls and sing the song, and I would be satisfied.
My mother has been dead twelve years now, my grandmother and Cookie far longer, but when I ride “it’s a small world” and see the silhouettes of the people in the boats ahead, I remember the sight of Cookie’s profile beside me, looking at dolls from countries he would never visit, and the sound of my mother and grandmother behind us, murmuring love.
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