Retta Scott

the first woman to receive screen credit as an animator at the Walt Disney Animation Studios

Retta Scott was born in Omak, Washington. She is notable as the first woman to receive screen credit as an animator at the Walt Disney Animation Studios. After attending high school in Seattle, she moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, a school that fostered many young talents who would soon find their way to Walt’s growing studio. From as early as her childhood drawings, Scott always demonstrated an aptitude for picturing animals. At Chouinard, she’d make regular visits to the nearby Griffith Park Zoo, filling page after page with sketches of the animal inhabitants, each image more striking than the next.

Arriving at the studio in 1938, her striking charcoal studies of the powerful sequence where Bambi battles a pack of hunting dogs caught the attention of Walt and the production team. Though Scott’s work was considered conceptual, meant as inspiration for the other artists, it seemed all too clear that no one would be able to convincingly animate the dogs as well as the artist who first gave them life in charcoal form. “When the time came, there was no question but that [Scott] would somehow have to do the animation herself,” Thomas and Johnston would say. And so The Walt Disney Studios would welcome its first officially credited female animator. With guidance provided by animator Eric Larson, Scott took on the challenge with characteristic gusto. The results were striking, unforgettable, “one of the most chilling and exciting pieces of action ever to be animated.”