They Drew As they Pleased by Didier Ghez

Author:Didier Ghez [Ghez, Didier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

BACK AT DISNEY

Thankfully, this grueling life did not last for too long. On August 17, 1942, Sylvia was back at Disney (Ethel was not rehired). The first project she tackled on her return was a planned Coca-Cola commercial, for which she wrote several outlines, based on Walt’s suggestions, featuring some mischievous gnomes stealing Coke bottles.95

Soon after, Sylvia created a few storyboard drawings for Victory Through Air Power. “One of the main scenes she handled was the rainstorm—the pilots going out to the planes with the rain pouring down,” explained Theo. “She did aerial views looking down on the earth, going over the pole and so on. One sequence she did was a bomb dropped from an airplane and going through the water and hitting a ship, followed by an explosion.”

In 1944, she also developed stylized continuity drawings for The Story of Menstruation, an educational project that would only be released after the war.96

And starting in April 1943 and until early 1948, she was supplementing her income by drawing for Western Publishing, on a freelance basis, one-shot illustrations for the magazine Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories.97

Though these projects demonstrated Sylvia’s versatility, they did not take full advantage of her talent. It was music, once again, that for a few years firmly put her back in the spotlight at the Studio.

On June 28, 1943, Disney’s head of the Story Research Department, Ralph Parker, wrote Walt: “Sylvia Holland is happy about [the] chance to help Jose Rodrigues with The History of Music. She is also supervising the completion of the musical and some other storyboards. Sylvia would like to write story histories and synopses of the various Fantasia alternates now under review.”98

The History of Music, which ten years later would morph into the shorts Adventures in Music: Melody and Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom, was a project by which Sylvia was clearly enthused. Her pastel work on the different music sections shows passion and love for the subject.

This passion was probably so obvious to Walt that he made sure all her projects were once again connected to music.

In the second half of 1944, she was asked to research the music of the nineteenth century in the context of a combination live-action and animation feature about the life of Hans Christian Andersen and his friend Jenny Lind, which Disney and Samuel Goldwyn were planning to release jointly.99

The three projects that followed were also linked to music. The first of those was a precursor to what would become the Two Silhouettes sequence in Make Mine Music. Theo recalls this period:

Mother was assigned to do storyboards for a romantic couple dancing their way through Paris. Her experience with this is worth recording as an almost supernatural event. She came home from the Studio one evening and felt an urge to work on the feature. She set up her gouache paints, and began to paint on black construction paper. As she worked, someone unseen took hold of her brush and painted with it, in a dashing impressionistic style that was not hers.

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