Ruthie Tompson died at the age of 111; Animation Brings Disney Movies to Life


If Snow White looks appropriately profitable in Disney’s first animated feature film “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”; If Pinocchio’s nose had grown at the right rate; If Dumbo is the right shade of elephant gray; this is all due in part to the largely unannounced work of Ruthie Tompson.

One of the female cast members—and one of its longest-lived members—who worked in indispensable anonymity at Disney in the 1930s and ’40s, Ms. Tompson, who died Sunday at age 111, spent forty years in the studio. Over time, he has worked on nearly every animated Disney movie, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers”, released in 1977.

Disney spokesman Howard Green said he died in the retirement community of his long-time resident, the Motion Picture and Television Fund in Woodland Hills, California.

Miss Tompson joined Disney as an ink and painter. He then trained his eye on the thousands of drawings that formed an animated feature, checking the continuity of color and line. Later, as a member of the studio’s scene planning department, he devised meticulous ways for movie cameras to bring these flat, static drawings to live animation life.

“He made fantasies come true,” said John Canemaker, an Oscar-winning animator and animation historian, in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “At that time the entire setup was pre-digital, so everything is paper, camera, film and paint.”

Totemic films that Ms. Tompson has helped breathe life into include “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940) and “Dumbo” (1941) and numerous animated short films, including the anti-Nazi cartoon.The Face of Der FührerHe won the 1943 Academy Award.

In 2000, Miss Tompson was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for her outstanding contribution. (Previous buyers include Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews, and Angela Lansbury; later buyers include Elton John and Tim Conway.)

His achievements were even more remarkable, for he could barely draw a straight line with his own jovial confession. Yet his relationship with Disney seemed almost predestined from when he was very young.

Ruth Tompson was born on July 22, 1910, in Portland, Me., one of the two daughters of Ward and Athene (Sterling) Tompson. He spent his early childhood in Boston. His family moved to Oakland, California when he was 8 years old.

In 1922, after her parents divorced and her mother married to outdoor artist John Roberts, Ruthie and her sister moved with her mother and stepfather to Los Angeles, where her mother worked as extras in Hollywood films. The family lived on Walt Disney’s uncle Robert Disney and his brother Roy’s street.

The Disney brothers established their first movie studio nearby in 1923, which was on Ruthie Tompson’s way to school. She stared out of a window, ecstatic as she passed him each day, as the reenactment unfolded.

One day, Walt Disney spied on him.

“He came out and said, ‘Why don’t you go in and watch?’ said Mrs. Tompson, nearly nine years later. a podcast For the Walt Disney Family Museum.

“I was really fascinated,” he said. He returned to the studio many times and became a fixture there.

At that time, the studio was shooting. Alice Comedies, a series of silent short films combining animation and live action, and occasionally recording neighborhood kids as extras.

Among them was Ruthie, who appeared in several photos and received 25 cents each. Miss Tompson recalled that her movie salary went to licorice.

Had Walt and Roy not chosen to take polo lessons ten years later, his relationship with Disney might have ended there.

After graduating from Hollywood High School, young Miss Tompson got a job at a riding stable in the San Fernando Valley. A few years later, the brothers visited the barn to learn how to play polo, which was very popular with smart kits at the time.

“Ruthie Tompson!” Walt Disney announced that he saw her there. “Why don’t you come and work for me?”

“I can’t withdraw a penny,” he replied.

Regardless, Mr. Disney told him: The studio would send him to night school to learn the basics of inking and painting.

“Of course,” Miss Tompson recalled, “everyone around me said: ‘Don’t say no! Do not say no!”

He joined the studio in time to work on “Snow White” after night school. Their task – mundane and unartistic, but extremely necessary – was to remove dirt and dust from the finished cells, since the transparent celluloid sheets that go in front of the camera are known.

appointed soon Disney’s ink and paint department. With nearly a hundred women working in relative obscurity, this place was informally known as the “nunnery”. Made entirely by hand, the women’s job was to transfer the animators’ drawings from paper to cells.

Many inks and painters were extremely talented artists. But in the 1930s and ’40s, the most glamorous of the studio’s artistic positions, the animators’ jobs were closed to them.

In the materials sent by the studio to women applying for jobs of the period, it is written that “Women do not do any creative work in preparing cartoons for the screen, because it is done entirely by young men.” “The only job open to women is to smear the characters on clear celluloid sheets with Indian ink and fill in the traces on the back with paint according to the instructions.”

(As of 2015 – the most recent year for which figures are available – women held only 20 percent of creative jobs in the animation industry. Woman in Animation, a professional association founded in 1995.)

Miss Tompson had no future as an inkmaker, as she and the studio quickly agreed: She pressed too much and broke the fine nib the job required. A painter known as “opaker” in animation language was made.

“It doesn’t take a lot of brains to do this – just follow the lines,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Just like number painting.”

It then worked as a final controller, involving mixing the finished setups of a movie – as layered transparencies containing cells and backgrounds are known – like a giant flip book to keep color and line consistent throughout.

“Every four or five out of a 500 cel scene was going to be painted by a different girl, so the colors had to go on,” Ms. Tompson said in 2007. “If they misplaced the blue, he should take them back and have them do it again.”

He was promoted to the dual role of animation controller and scene planner in 1948. As an animation controller, he carefully scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that the characters were literally holding their heads up high: In the haste of the animators, different parts of a character’s body, often made as separate drawings, may fail to align.

The scene planner was tasked with working out the complex counterpoint between finished installations and the cameras photographing them: what camera angles should be used, how fast the characters should move relative to their background, and so on.

“The director, layout person, and animator really needed to know all the mechanics of making the image work on screen as he preferred: how to walk or fly Peter Pan in the specified time,” said Mr. Canemaker. “What he did – whether you see his hand or not – came to the screen because of the way the directors supported his vision.”

In 1952, Ms. Tompson became one of the first women admitted to the International Association of Photographers, a branch of the International Association of Theater Stage Workers, which represents camera operators. He retired as supervisor of Disney’s stage planning department in 1975.

Mr Green said he never married and did not immediately leave anyone who survived.

On the Walt Disney Family Museum podcast, Ms. Tompson fondly remembered her long-ago relationship with Walt Disney and the unexpected career it sparked.

“I could never stop admiring the fact that I was there and was a part of this amazing thing he did,” she said.

“Although it’s just plain old cartoons,” he added pragmatically.

Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.



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