In 1940, Walt Disney Animation Studio released its second feature-length film, Pinocchio. Its first movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), had been hailed as an artistic and technological breakthrough, but Pinocchio was in some ways an even greater success. When the film was restored and rereleased in 1992, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most perfect animated feature Walt Disney produced.” Over the course of 85 years, it has garnered almost exclusively positive reviews. Its Oscar-winning tune, “When You Wish upon a Star,” has become the Walt Disney Company’s unofficial theme song, the embodiment of its dreams-come-true mantra. And the film still pulls on viewers’ heartstrings, especially in its final scene, as Geppetto’s wish for a son is granted and Jiminy Cricket reprises the song’s sentimental closing chords.
This article appears in Issue 32 of Alta Journal.
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But that tender quality was quite a swerve from Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 Italian novel. Unlike the succinct fairy tale that had inspired Snow White, Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio was first published as a sprawling newspaper serial. The story’s tone is bleak, verging on terrifying: Pinocchio kills the unnamed cricket, smashing him “stone dead”; the Blue Fairy, far from the film’s angelic godmother, appears as the unsettling ghost of a dead child; and Pinocchio himself is executed, hung by the neck from a tree branch. How did so dark a text metamorphose into such a touching film? It might not have happened but for a writer named Bianca Majolie.
Hired in 1935, Majolie was the first woman employed in a creative role at Disney Studio. Joining the boys’ club put her in the path of countless structural and interpersonal obstacles, but she and Walt often found themselves speaking the same narrative language. In 1937, in the early stages of Pinocchio’s development, he commissioned her to write a full English translation of Collodi’s story, which he hoped would bridge the broad chasm between the Italian novel and the American film he hoped to create. Fluent in both languages and both cultures, and a writer with a knack for unlocking a story’s emotional core, she was the only woman for the job.
Majolie started work as a Disney storyteller at just the right time, because her arrival coincided with what was effectively the birth of the Library of the Walt Disney Studio. While many Disney fans have heard of the mythic Walt Disney Archives, the closely guarded facility established after Walt’s death to preserve the company’s own history, the little-known library was the main reference center for Disney’s writers and artists. Its books passed through the hands of innumerable employees, who left their marks in the form of library checkout cards and hand-drawn marginalia. Many of these storytellers were first- and second-generation immigrants, European exports like the books themselves. But of all its visitors, Majolie may have been the library’s most dedicated reader. The collection became a fortress that protected her during various artistic and temperamental battles. On film after film, standing against a horde of male colleagues, she wielded the library’s books like a sword pulled from a stone.
Majolie’s linguistic, literary, and narrative labors, though mostly uncredited and forgotten, left an indelible mark on the studio’s most beloved films. Her contributions sprang from the bond that Majolie and Walt shared over how best to retell those old fables. It was a wildly successful collaboration that would prove short-lived.
ANIMATED STORIES
It took almost a decade for Disney Studio to start keeping track of its books. Walt and his brother Roy opened their first Hollywood studio in 1923, making their name with Mickey Mouse in 1928, then launching the Silly Symphonies series of animated shorts in 1929, and beginning work on Snow White in the early 1930s. With each milestone came changes to the way that the studio approached storytelling. Walt created the library in 1930 and the Story Department the following year. By the start of 1934, more than 300 books had been cataloged by hand in a library-acquisitions notebook. The entries ranged widely and followed no apparent organization. Titles related to potential story ideas—the Grimms’ fairy tales, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—intermingled with reference materials on animal sketching and the Great American Songbook. Then, in July 1935, Walt hired Helen Josephine Ludwig as the first studio librarian, shortly after leaving on a two-month trip to Europe. He shipped back a trove of 335 books in multiple languages, nearly doubling the library’s size.
Majolie had joined the studio that spring. Born in 1900 in Rome as Bianca Maggioli, she had attended high school in Chicago with a young Walt Disney. She, too, was an artist, and she studied at American art schools before going on to work in Rome, Florence, and Paris, eventually settling in the States as an art director for the J.C. Penney Company. In 1934, ready for a change, she wrote to her former classmate to inquire about the industry, and 10 months later, the two met for lunch at Tam O’Shanter, the Los Angeles steakhouse—still open today—that was so popular with Walt and his team that it was called “the studio commissary.” Walt examined Majolie’s portfolio and offered her a job on the spot.
Though Majolie had years of experience as a working artist, Walt hired her to the Story Department. He was famously reluctant to invest artistic training in women, who he predicted would eventually marry and quit. But boilerplate 1930s sexism aside, Walt’s decision may not have been the downgrade it appeared to be. He was adept at identifying latent talent, and the placement may have been a recognition of skills that he saw in her at that lunch meeting. As he put it in a 1935 memo to the head of story, Ted Sears, “I honestly feel that the heart of our organization is the Story Department.”
REFERENCE WORK
Walt’s regard for Majolie’s abilities could not protect her from the high-testosterone work environment. Her mild temperament put her at odds with her rambunctious colleagues, as did her more refined narrative aesthetic. Since the inauguration of the Story Department, Walt had been trying to steer his writers toward balancing slapstick with character-building and feeling. Majolie shared that sensibility and strove to invest her assignments with the warmth characteristic of Walt’s vision, placing her in conflict with her male counterparts, who continued to prioritize gags and physical comedy.
Her time in Italy and France partly explains why she was among the first people Walt engaged to work with the European books. As Walt’s memo to Sears explained, he was taken with the “quaint atmosphere” of the fairy-tale illustrations, especially their woodland communities of tiny insects. “I was trying to think how we could build some little story that would incorporate all of these cute little characters,” Walt wrote, announcing that “Bianca Majoli [sic] has been working on this.” By the spring of 1936, she had completed her first adaptation from the library’s books as story director on Woodland Café, an animated short about a sylvan nightclub frequented by jitterbugging insects, for the Silly Symphonies series.
As Majolie’s workload grew, her struggles within the male-dominated environment escalated, creating the perfect storm for discord, particularly once Walt brought her in to work on Snow White. In a January 1937 meeting, registered in several histories and recounted grippingly in Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation (2019), Walt ruthlessly tore Majolie’s storyboard sketches into pieces. She locked herself in her office, and one of her male colleagues broke down the door to demand that she return to work. After that, she avoided meetings whenever she could. Transcripts show that even when she was present, she barely spoke.
After such a brutal encounter, Majolie might have ceded the project to the male storytellers or quit the studio altogether. Instead, she found alternative ways to help shape Snow White, including, it seems, by using her cultural fluency to bring to Walt’s attention an important volume that the library lacked. The main source for Disney’s adaptation of “Snow White” was the well-known collection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, published in Germany in the 19th century. Walt recounted in interviews his childhood memories of the tales and named the Grimms’ book as the story source in the film’s opening credits. One copy that Walt brought back from Germany, printed in a medieval Gothic font, may even have inspired the look of the live-action storybook that opens the film. The book still bears the sticker of the shop where Walt purchased it, H. Hugendubel in Munich.
But at least one aspect of Disney’s Snow White hails from a different source. In the Grimms’ “Schneewittchen” (“Little Snow White”), the queen never puts the princess in servants’ clothes. Yet the detail is a prominent feature of the film’s opening, both narratively—the storybook text recounts how the queen “dressed the little princess in rags and forced her to work as a scullery maid”—and visually, as Snow White is first seen by the audience in a patchwork dress, scrubbing the castle’s paving stones. Though that element is absent from the German tale, it is a central plot point in one of the oldest print versions of “Snow White,” published in 1634 in Majolie’s native Italy. Lo Cunto de li Cunti (The Tale of Tales) is a 50-story anthology written by Giambattista Basile in Neapolitan dialect and contains some of the earliest print versions of beloved tales like “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Basile’s rendition of “Snow White,” titled “La Schiavottella” (“The Little Slave Girl”), features a jealous maternal figure (here an aunt) who forces her young charge to disguise her noble birth and beauty beneath poor garments. As fairy-tale scholarship has suggested, Basile’s tale was likely Disney’s source for this story feature.
Yet no edition of The Tale of Tales is recorded in the catalog to the Library of the Walt Disney Studio—a surprising fact, considering that Basile’s book was a major influence on the Grimms, who recognized it as the first collection of folktales and even translated summaries of the Italian stories for the second edition of their own book. If the library never acquired a copy of The Tale of Tales, then it seems probable that the detail was shared with Walt verbally by the Italian Majolie. From the haven of the library, and of her own mental archives, she continued to influence the version of Snow White’s story immortalized by Disney animators. And Walt would persist in demonstrating his trust in her storytelling acumen.
THE MOTHER
Near the end of production for Snow White, in 1936, the studio began work on Bambi. The project was based on the 1922 novel of the same name, by the Jewish Austrian writer Felix Salten, the pen name of Siegmund Salzmann. The tale is a dark coming-of-age story in which woodland creatures suffer violent deaths at the hand of Man. Interpreted as an allegory for anti-Semitism in Europe, the book was banned by the Nazi Party in 1935. Two years later, Salten fled to Zurich.
Though none of that social commentary made its way into Disney’s adaptation, Walt’s remarks in story meetings show him to have been well acquainted with the book. An English translation of Bambi was among the studio’s earliest acquisitions, filed in the library’s catalog around the same time as its first copy of the Brothers Grimm collection.
Like Walt, Majolie immersed herself in the original novel. She used that knowledge to take her research beyond the library’s walls, forging a relationship with an outside female collaborator that would deeply affect the film’s emotional arc. In April 1938, Walt assigned Bambi’s writers to study a collection of deer photographs. The images were shared with the team by the late photographer’s wife, identified by Majolie in a memo to Walt as a “Mrs. Dickey”—Florence Van Vechten Dickey, wife of naturalist Donald Ryder Dickey. In elegant prose, Majolie relayed to Walt how the pictures captured “a scenic grandeur of indescribable beauty.” She was taken not just with the footage but with Van Vechten Dickey herself, describing her as both educated and experienced and noting that she had accompanied her husband on “many dangerous and thrilling expeditions in the Canadian wilds.”
Majolie was particularly impressed with Van Vechten Dickey’s zoological knowledge, so much so that after their conversation, she pressed Walt to reconsider a Bambi plot point. In Salten’s novel, Bambi’s father plays a significant role, an importance reflected in early outlines of the Disney adaptation: One set of character sketches describes the Stag’s “wise counsel and advice” as “the leading factors in Bambi’s education.” In her memo to Walt, Majolie pointed out that Van Vechten Dickey was firmly opposed to this characterization: “We spoke of the book, Bambi, and I was interested to note what an active objection she had to the strong father and son relationship.” She knew from her years of observation that a doe rears offspring on her own. Majolie advised Walt to heed Van Vechten Dickey’s assessment: “This, she says, from a naturalist’s standpoint is a definite sock in the eye to an otherwise good story.” Majolie’s shift in register—from lofty descriptions of natural magnificence to informal idiom—may have been shrewdly aimed at persuading her boss, who was well known for his folksy affect.
Majolie’s advice landed with Walt. In a memo from a few weeks later, he indulged in a rare moment of praise. “I am glad to hear of the research on Bambi,” he told her, adding, “Keep up the good work you are doing.” The best evidence of the soundness of her counsel is the final film itself. When Bambi debuted in 1942, the Stag’s role had been cut to a handful of scenes, with only a few lines of dialogue, and the role of Bambi’s mother had become more central to the story. The emotional heft of the mother-son relationship is apparent with her death, in what is still seen today as possibly the most heartbreaking scene in all of Disney filmdom.
Majolie was surely the only Disney writer to engage Van Vechten Dickey as a thinker, rather than merely a secretarial wife. And she was right to do so: Her interlocutor was a naturalist, author of a popular book on birds of the Pacific Southwest that went through multiple printings with Stanford University Press. Majolie’s close reading of Salten’s book, her curiosity about Van Vechten Dickey’s work, and her talents as a storyteller invested the film not only with greater accuracy but also with deeper sentiment, helping to shape one of the key dramatic elements of this classic Disney movie.
ART OF TRANSLATION
Work on Pinocchio began in the fall of 1937, and in November, the library acquired nearly two dozen copies of Collodi’s novel in multiple translations, including one by the Italian American schoolteacher Carol Della Chiesa. But Walt wanted Majolie’s take on the story. Prizing her linguistic and literary sensibilities, he asked her for the translation of all 36 chapters of the novel. It was the first time he had invited a writer to undertake such a task. He also sent her to do story-development research at the central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, and it was there, in blissful solitude, that she did much of her translation work.
Meanwhile, story-meeting notes from these months capture the group’s struggle to transform Collodi’s grim tale into a heartwarming feature. As Walt put it, “people know the story, but they don’t like the character.” True to form, the writing team first tried to solve the problem by introducing gags—for example, a bit involving Pinocchio’s grandfather being a pine tree.
Her work completed, Majolie delivered her 106-page translation to Walt. The final product is a fine thing, carefully formatted and impeccably transcribed, no mean feat in the era of the typewriter. The pride that Majolie took in her work is apparent in the presentation of the title page, where her name appears beneath the book’s title and above the author’s:
Translation by Bianca Majolie
from the original Italian
by C. Collodi
That she included a title page at all indicates that she saw this as not just a tool for other writers’ production but a fully fledged literary object. The text’s content is as noteworthy as its physical form. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is easy to think of translation as a straightforward formula, like punching an equation into a mental calculator. But good translation requires more than a simple knowledge of what the words mean. There is a craft to bringing the original author and the new reader closer together, a process that the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called linguistic hospitality. With her translation, which is both loyal to the Italian author and inviting to the English reader, Majolie proved herself to be a most gracious host.
Moreover, she subtly guided the plot of the screenplay toward the kind of affecting story that she and Walt both valued. Her most salient strategies included abridging comic gags that ran too long, playing up Jiminy Cricket’s sympathetic qualities, and emphasizing the father-son relationship. Additionally, in what read like an appendix to her translation project, she sent a remarkable memo to Walt in May 1938, conveying her dissatisfaction with the way the film’s storyline had taken shape in the months since she had submitted her version of Collodi’s novel. “It seems to me that a big and basic idea is being lost sight of and subjected to less important things,” she warned, urging Walt to focus on Pinocchio having real motivation to want to become human. “Whatever the reason is,” she advised, “it should be a tear-jerker, and from then on we should not lose sight of it.”
We do not know everything that transpired between that memo and the final film, but story meetings increasingly coalesced around the kind of profound tale for which Majolie was advocating, in ways that mirrored her translation choices. The “Grandfather Tree” bit and other gags fell away. “I wouldn’t try to be too damn funny,” Walt told the men in one meeting, directing them back to the central narrative: “I think our story is more important.” Multiple meetings focused on fleshing out Jiminy Cricket as the film’s emotional ballast. Finally, the script pivoted to make Pinocchio’s motivation the granting of his father’s star-borne wish. In the heartfelt final scene, when Geppetto embraces his newly transformed son, he cries out that Pinocchio is “a real, live boy!” The exclamation precisely echoes the very last words of Majolie’s translation.
GHOSTWRITER
Despite Majolie’s intensive collaboration on Pinocchio, she was not named in the credits. Citing burnout, she took leave from Disney around the time of the film’s premiere. When she returned in June 1940, she found her desk occupied, a painful revelation that her position had been filled. Disney Studio fell on hard times, as World War II cut off overseas markets and a massive labor strike occurred in 1941. The repercussions would be felt for years, with the studio turning to cheaper, more modest, and less literary projects until it regained its footing.
Majolie went on to find artistic fulfillment elsewhere, including at a Los Angeles art gallery she opened with her husband, Carl Heilborn. And there is no denying that Disney, too, went on to immense success, commemorated recently with the company’s centennial celebration. But the remnants of the Library of the Walt Disney Studio, closed in 1986, record an alternate timeline, a path foreclosed, in which Walt worked with a bright, Italian-born storyteller to bring to life the formidable, strange, and marvelous stories in his trove of books. Historians like John Canemaker, Didier Ghez, and Mindy Johnson have worked to recover Majolie’s contributions, but she’s been excluded from the kind of renown afforded an artist like the brilliant Mary Blair, one of her successors at the studio, and her name remains mostly unknown to even the most devout of Disney fans. And yet Majolie, with her literary knowledge, voracious curiosity, and keen narrative instincts, found a way to leave her signature on Disney’s earliest and most consequential films.•
Shannon McHugh is a scholar of French and
Italian Renaissance literature and the assistant director of research at the Huntington. She is the author of Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy and is working on a book about the Library of the Walt Disney Studio.
