MARY BLAIR'S UNIQUE FLAIR

A girl grows up to be an instrumental Disney artist.

Mary Blair, nee Mary Browne Robinson, enjoys colors and painting in childhood. She dreams of being an artist and earns a spot at an art school. Later, she accepts a job at Walt Disney Studios. Over the course of her career, she paints Dumbo, creates concept art for iconic animated films (Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan), and helps create and design the world-famous Disney park attraction “It’s a small world.” Novesky’s plotline and prose about Blair’s massively influential achievements are oddly lackluster, reporting facts without spirit. Likewise, Lee’s cut-paper and gouache media have a flatness—neither cut paper nor gouache is recognizable on most spreads—and a lack of vitality. Blair’s a generic, tiny-waisted blonde white lady; characters smile almost unceasingly, even when the subject is poverty. This art is styled similarly to Disney art, but it lacks pizzazz. “It’s a small world” is glorified, with no examination of how it stereotypes and exoticizes race, nationality, and ethnicity; Lee’s illustrations reinscribe that very problem while Novesky romantically calls “small world” a celebration of “unity, goodwill, and global peace” leading to “colorful happily ever afters” (for whom?). Amy Guglielmo, Jacqueline Tourville, and Brigette Barrager’s Pocket Full of Colors (2017) is a far livelier Blair biography, although it also ignores racism concerns.

Watch a Disney film instead.