Books in Bed

The first thing you have to know about Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation is that it’s an over-sized coffee table type of book. I knew that when I reserved it and I expected it to be mostly pictures with few words. Turns out, it’s more words than pictures (though there are amazing pictures on every page) and it’s not an easy book to read in bed or in a chair or on your couch in front of your coffee table (not that I have a coffee table because coffee tables are from the devil) but still… it’s not a book I could sit comfortably and read. That was frustrating. So, I set it on the bar in my kitchen and I read a page or two at a time, while I ate lunch or while I waited for dinner to be ready. This means it took MONTHS for me to read this book.

The next thing you should know is that it’s more of a history of Walt Disney’s animation with a focus on the women of Ink & Paint. So you learn a lot about men in animation and the men who worked at “Disney’s” as they seem to call it in the early, early days. (You also learn a good bit about Walt but not as much about Roy.) There were a TON of women working for Walt Disney in the early days of animation and the book includes a yearbook style section of all of the women who worked there. Pretty cool stuff, (and it’s Women’s History Month, so this is a great time for you to dive into this book.)

Last, but not least, you should know that this is a really interesting book. If you’re like me and you don’t really know a whole lot about how animation used to work, then this is a great crash course. It may also make you want to look at a zillion old Disney shorts and commercials and maybe watch all of the Disney full-length movies in the order in which they were released (up to the move to computer animation.)