Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out by Sean Griffin

strategy accentuated rather than diminished the sexuality in the film.
    In “All the Cats Join In,” one of the shorts that comprise Make Mine Music, a teenage girl’s naked silhouette appears behind an opaque shower door, and possibly “too much” is revealed as she reaches out for a towel. The Production Code Administration thought it was too much at least and wrote to the studio that “These scenes should be eliminated” from “All the Cats Join In,” one of the rare times in which Disney was admonished.107 Yet, somehow the offending scenes were able to be retained and still get a Seal of Approval. Their inclusion resulted in Time describing the piece as “a jukebox setting of Benny Goodman’s record, in which orgiastic hepcats and bobbysoxers, mad on chocolate malteds, tear all over the place.”108
    The appearance of such elements in Disney animation at this point needs to be seen in the larger context of social and industrial changes during the 1940s. The entire country had experienced during the war a huge upsurge in more explicit sexuality. An entire industry of “cheese-cake” posters and glossy photos was created to keep overseas soldiers aware of “what they were fighting for.” With the American population basically segregated by gender (whether in the armed forces or on the home front), the restrictions placed on sexual relations became more pronounced. Of course, being segregated by gender, many homosexual men and women who had never come in contact with others who felt the way they did were suddenly thrust into close quarters with each other. Men and women in the service were also lectured to specifically about sexual matters in order to prevent the spread of venereal disease 40
    M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
    and to warn against homosexual tendencies. Film was used as part of this education, and, as the overview of Disney’s relationship with the government shows, animation figured strongly. Hence, with such blatant reference to sexuality occurring in American culture, it is not un-reasonable to find Disney participating in it.
    Such considerations take on further merit when looking at the status of Disney animation itself during this period. During the 1930s, Walt Disney and his studio stood so far ahead of other animation departments at other studios that it often seemed as if Disney was the only studio making cartoons. Yet, by the 1940s, the other animation factories had shortened the lead that Disney held and created a distinctly different philosophy and style than Disney. The work of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera at MGM (with Tom and Jerry), and numerous artists at Warner Bros. (with their menagerie of cartoon characters led by Bugs Bunny) challenged the preeminence of Disney animation. Their work adopted much of the “full animation” style that Disney’s studio developed in the 1930s, but was not as concerned with the “illusion of life,”
    and furthermore stressed the violent, burlesque and risqué humor that was rarely found in Disney animation.
    The most blatant example of using Disney’s “full animation” to ends other than those of the moral-driven narratives of the Disney studio was the work of Tex Avery (at both Warner Bros. and MGM). In one of the most popular cartoon shorts of the war, Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), the wolf goes after not a sweet young girl but a voluptuous leggy redhead performing at a nightclub in various stages of undress. The wolf’s reactions visualize quite strongly his raging hormones in a variety of hilarious and physically impossible ways. The liberties taken with the wolf’s body (eyes popping out larger than his body, tongue rolling out for miles, etc.) as well as the “illusion of life” fetishism of Red’s body on stage (animated by Preston Blair) was antithetical to the Disney philosophy. Yet, the short often garnered such a strong reaction from audiences (particularly soldiers) that some theatres reported having to stop the