Animator helped create Disney classics from Snow White to The Rescuers
When Walt Disney offered Ruthie Tompson a job in his animation department, her instinct was to turn him down. ‘‘I can’t draw worth a nickel,’’ she told him. No matter, Disney insisted. The studio would send her to night school and she would soon pick up the rudiments of inking and painting.
She took the job and finished her classes in time to work on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the studio’s first full-length animated feature to be made in sound and colour. The film heralded a new golden age of animation and Tompson stayed for four decades, becoming the studio’s longest-serving employee and working on Disney classics including Pinocchio, Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty and The Aristocats.
Her initial duties were menial, cleaning dirt and dust from the transparent celluloid sheets before they were filmed to create the animation, but she was swiftly promoted to Disney’s ink and paint department, tracing the animators’ paper drawings with India ink on to blank celluloid sheets (known as ‘‘cels’’) and painting them in. ‘‘It doesn’t take a lot of brains to do that – just follow the lines,’’ she said modestly in a 2007 interview.
There were about 100 women working in the department, which was referred to within the company as ‘‘the nunnery’’, but Tompson’s meticulous attention to detail marked her out. By 1948 she had been promoted to an animation checker and scene planner, responsible for scrutinising the artists’ work to ensure that drawings aligned and colours were consistent across the different cels. Her duties also included working out camera angles and how fast the characters needed to move against the backgrounds as the cels were filmed, a vital role in bringing the static drawings to life.
In one capacity or another she worked on almost every full-length animated Disney feature film from the first in 1937 to The Rescuers in 1977, after which she retired. Of all the animations she worked on her favourite remained the first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. ‘‘We worked into the night, day after day, until we got it exactly right.’’
According to John Canemaker, an animator who co-wrote the book Treasures of Disney Animation Art, Tompson’s role was nothing less than to ‘‘make the fantasies come real’’. ‘‘The whole setup then was pre-digital, so everything was paper, camera, film and paint,’’ he told The New York Times. ‘‘She had to know all the mechanics of making the image work, and what she did ended up on the screen, whether you see her hand or not.’’
Her work was mostly uncredited at the time, but over the years her contribution came to be recognised. In 2000 she was the recipient of the studio’s in-house Disney Legends Award and in 2017 she was honoured by the Academy Awards for her contributions to the animation industry.
‘‘I never got over being awe-struck at the fact that I was there and I was a part of this wonderful thing that he was doing,’’ she said in a podcast for the Walt Disney Family Museum. ‘‘Even though it was just plain old cartoons.’’
Ruth Tompson was born in Portland, Maine, one of two daughters to Athene and Ward Tompson. The family moved around, first to Boston and then to Oakland, California.
Her parents divorced and her mother married John Roberts, a painter, and they moved again to Los Angeles. Her mother found work as an extra in silent Hollywood movies, and the family lived in the same street as Robert Disney, uncle of the brothers Walt and Roy Disney, whom she met when they were visiting to see a newborn cousin.
Her arrival in LA coincided with the Disney brothers opening their first film studio in 1923 in the back of an estate agent’s office, which happened to be on Tompson’s route to Hollywood High School, in an era when people still walked in Los Angeles.
Fascinated by what was going on inside, she would stand there for hours until one day Walt Disney emerged to speak to her. She feared a rebuke for being so nosy but instead he invited her inside to take a closer look. She became a regular visitor, sitting on an apple box until she was told to go home for dinner. At the time Disney was shooting a series of silent short films called the Alice comedies and, before long, she was appearing in them. She later recalled that she received 25 cents per film and spent her wages on licorice.
On leaving school in 1928, the year Disney made the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, she took a job mucking out horses at a riding academy, and there her film career might have ended, but for the fact that several years later, flush with the success of Mickey Mouse, the Disney brothers decided to join the poloplaying classes.
To hone their riding skills they went to the stables and, when Walt Disney recognised his former child star from the Alice shorts, he told her ‘‘Ruthie Tompson! Why don’t you come and work for me?’’
She later admitted that, without the encouragement of her fellow stable girls, she might well have declined. ‘‘But everybody around me said, ‘Don’t say no! Don’t say no!’ ’’
With Disney planning a major expansion with the studio’s first full-length animated feature, her timing was perfect. After learning the ropes on the short Mickey Mouse cartoon Lonesome Ghosts, she was on hand to help put the finishing touches to Snow White.
She never married and left no immediate survivors. Her final years were spent as the oldest resident at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement home on Mulholland Drive. When she celebrated her 110th birthday there last year during Covid quarantine, she took the restrictions in her stride, telling her fellow residents that she remembered having to wear a mask during the 1918 spanish flu pandemic.
‘‘Have fun,’’ she said in a message to her birthday well-wishers. ‘‘Try to do as much as you can for yourself. Remember all the good things in life.’’