I’ve been wanting to post about Mary Blair since I spent a day at Disneyland in August, but it’s hard to know where to start, esp. since Bob Staake’s amazing Mary Blair resource is no longer available online.

Image from The Golden Book of Little Verses, courtesy ASIFA – Hollywood Animation Archive.

I was first attracted to her work from the Disney films Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan (the backgrounds especially – it still fascinates me how much shape and form and story can come from a single brush stroke), but her influence is in dozens of other Disney features, and most of my favourite Little Golden Books from childhood were illustrated by her. She is known for not only her striking two dimensional look (you can only skew perspective like that when you’ve mastered it) but for her revolutionary color work – one anecdote talks about using two shades of red next to each other which “just wasn’t done” until she entered the field.

Travis Gentry wrote an essay in 2004 about Mary Blair’s influence on Pixar’s animation style. It gives a great background and talks about her huge imprint on Disney and how it’s continued into the Pixar generation.

The Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco is presenting a Mary Blair retrospective on October 27th, until March of next year (found via the Disney History blog, as the Museum’s website doesn’t yet have a listing for it.

Dan Goodsell has a Flickr set of various Mary Blair goodies – ice cream labels and other advertising ephemerata.

And the ASIFA Hollywood Animation Archive has a wealth of images and info about Mary Blair – a great resource!

For a better look at the painted backgrounds of some of YOUR favourite cartoons and animations, you really shouldn’t miss the Animated Backgrounds blog, where Rob Richards painstakingly recreates whole backgrounds scene by scene of various animated features (also check out Hans Bacher’s Animated Treasures). Beautiful stuff.

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