The animator who shaped Disney classics
Ruthie Tompson 1910–2021
Ruthie Tompson was not long out of high school when Walt Disney offered her a job in the animation department of his cartoon studio in the early 1930s. “I can’t draw worth a nickel,” she told him. That didn’t matter, Disney said, and the 40-year career that followed bore him out. Starting as an inker and painter— transferring animators’ drawings onto celluloid sheets (or “cels”) and filling them in with paint— Tompson rose to become a checker, scrutinizing cels from different artists for alignment and color consistency. Then she became a scene planner, a key cog in the process of using cameras to turn flat drawings into vivid, breathing scenes. Beginning with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney’s first full-length film, Tompson had a hand in nearly every Disney feature for the next four decades, including Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo. “She made the fantasies come real,” said animation historian John Canemaker.
Born in Portland, Maine, Tompson moved with her family to California at age 8, said The New York Times. Young Ruthie’s walk to her Los Angeles school took her past the new Disney Bros. Studio, and she would peer “through a window, transfixed, as the work of animation unfolded.” One day Walt Disney invited her in, and she became “a fixture” in the studio, sitting on an apple box and watching for hours on end. After graduating high school in 1928, Tompson “took a job mucking out the horses” at a riding academy, said The Times (U.K.). “And there her film career might have ended” but for the fact that Walt and his brother Roy—flush with the success of Mickey Mouse—decided to take polo-playing classes. Recognizing Tompson, Walt offered her a job and sent her to “night school to learn the rudiments of inking and painting.”
“Though she operated behind the scenes, Tompson’s technical skill was recognized” in 1952 when she became one of the first women admitted to the International Photographers Union, said SmithsonianMag.com. Tompson was supervisor of Disney’s scene-planning department when she retired in 1975; 25 years later, she was given the in-house honor of being named a Disney Legend. “I never got over being awestruck at the fact that I was a part of this wonderful thing,” she said of her work at the studio. “Even though it was just plain old cartoons.”