The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age

The Disney Revolt, The Great Labor War of Animation’s Golden Age by Jake S. Friedman

Chicago Review Press, 2022, Chicago, 322 pp

Just whistle while you work

Put on that grin and start right in to whistle loud and long

Just hum a merry tune

Just do your best and take a rest and sing yourself a song

So sang Snow White as she tidied up the Seven Dwarves’ cottage in the Disney Studio’s ground-breaking and blockbuster full-length animated feature, with the help of many smiling, eager (and one presumes unpaid) forest animals. Disney sold millions of tickets presenting that animated air of happiness. The studio became not just one of the pre-eminent animation studios, but major film studios internationally, rising to fame during the Depression, when temporary relaxation in front of the silver screen was one of the few affordable releases from the incessant deprivation. But that animated happiness was created by hundreds of animators working long hours, often at low pay with no job security, leading animators to seek protection in collective organizing. The behind-the-scenes conflict very effectively laid out in Jake S. Friedman’s The Disney Revolt, an engaging and vital addition that appeals beyond the bounds of much labor history.

Inside the studio, work wasn’t nearly as happy as it was for the seven miners whose worst worry was bad housekeeping. Just that one scene in Snow White took dozens of animators, inkers and draftspeople months to produce. The work of making a short cartoon took weeks; a feature like Snow White took 250,000 animation cells. Cartoons were incredibly labor intensive. Hours were long. Pay could be high, but only for some. Job security was shaky. Disney hired and laid off literally hundreds of animation workers at a time. And relying on the supposed benevolence of “Uncle Walt” had something less than universal appeal.

Hence the appeal of a union, especially during the left-leaning and labor turbulent thirties. Yet as Friedman lays out throughout the book, it was never so clear-cut. As he repeatedly documents, it was also the story of a mogul who actually came from a working class pro-union background. And the union drive was never linear, with divisions—and conflicts—between unions, often mob-boss controlled, with friendships, relationships and marriages strained or broken, often irreparably, between those who walked a picket line, and those who crossed it.

As the movie industry grew, animation studios like Disney, Warner Brothers and Schliemann took on larger projects, with growing staff, often competing with each other for hiring talent and reaching for animated, full-length blockbuster status. Films also had an international market. But the rising labor movement of the 1930s reached out to stagehands, lighting technicians, set builders, and animators, whose work was still mainly by hand. Frustrations with working conditions at all levels and pay divisions between the different levels of animators (and between male and female workers) opened the door for supporting the Screen Cartoonists Guild.

The book is effective delving into the nuances of union support: the Disney company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, competed for years with the worker-led and CIO-backed Guild and the apparently mob-supported IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). With the creative nature of animation, not all animators saw themselves as workers. And even if the worst of the Depression was fading by 1940, putting your job on the line signing a union card wasn’t something everyone was rushing to do. As Friedman points out, red-baiting was very much a strong tactic (Upton Sinclair’s EPIC, End Poverty in California, movement that almost got him elected governor in 1934 was defeated with strong help from the movie studio leaders producing sham newsreels).

Some of those closest to Disney, especially master animator Art Babbitt, became the most ardent union supporters, despite their high pay and relative job security, to Disney’s bewilderment and dismay. As with many labor struggles, the strike in 1940 was years in the making and was an action that neither side really wanted. But when it finally took off, the strike was surprisingly solid, with support from movie stars, movie theater workers, distributors, and easily some of the best picket signs ever produced. Disney’s pleas at being broke due to loss of the European market with the outbreak of WWII mostly fell flat with after the elaborate studio upgrades and record ticket sales.

Reading in the final chapters to see how the strike ended was almost like reading a novel; it was Disney’s attempt to have his own company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, recognized that forced US government intervention in resolving the strike, both unions looking for ratification from the National Labor Relations Board, only initiated under the New Deal in 1935. The Guild-led strike ultimately wound up altering the basic working terms of the animation industry and setting basic working terms for animators.

Friedman’s attempts to paint the story at various levels is admirable, but there’s a tension in the book between the personal and technical details and the bigger story line that isn’t always successfully resolved. His level of detail describing the evolution of animation, the varying styles in the Disney studios, and the personalities of the animators, bring a real level of humanity to the story, but can also overwhelm the larger issues involved. Overall, he does a really good job of setting the backdrop, but the union struggles at other studios like Warner Brothers and Schliemann are just touched on. Hearing more about that would have helped put the machinations of work and organizing at Disney in sharper perspective. On the flip side his descriptions of the cartoonists’ reactions to Disney’s notorious puritanical attitudes, of how they lived and what they drew in the margins, are worth the price of admission.

But nothing in the book is irrelevant or uninteresting, and the buildup, the strike, and the aftermath have a reality and humanity that’s very often lacking in more detached description of labor struggles. (The story was even recently presented as an Off-Broadway play series, Disney Girls and Burbank Walt Disney in Crisis by Cameron Darwin Bossert.)

The book ends by noting that Disney Studios remains a union shop to this day. True, but Disney still has had on-going labor troubles, another example that unionizing doesn’t obliterate the class struggle though it gives those in the workplace a (hopefully) more organized venue for asserting basic rights. The Disney empire has also had a consistently right-wing presence on the American cultural political scene, although having a finger on the pulse of what sells tickets they have made an attempt at cultural diversification in animation (with varying degrees of success), and more recently, in headlines approaching the surreal, Disney was even attacked by the appropriately cartoonish Trumpian far right for not distancing themselves from LGBTQ presence at Disneyland.

It reads differently from much labor history, but The Disney Revolt works not only as a fascinating story, meticulously researched, and engagingly written. It also holds up as a still- relevant tale in organizing and recognizing that all work, even producing cartoons, is still a job, and that allies, and enemies, in the class struggle are not always drawn in black and white.