John Canemaker’s generous book The Art and Flair of Mary Blair is a long-overdue tribute to an animation designer who deserves to be well known outside the coterie of animators amongst whom she is already a legend. Blair, who died in 1978, brought an inestimable supply of blazing color, vivid design and outright surrealism to the works of Walt Disney’s studio during the years of her primary influence from 1940 to 1953.

Disney originally hired Mary Blair after her husband Lee, also a painter, had already joined and then left the studio. Mary was with the studio through the war years and most of the decade that followed, as Disney moved from Good-Neighbor travelogues such as Saludos Amigos to omnibus collections like Make Mine Music and back into animated feature production. Blair left her stamp on the features Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, as well as dozens of short subjects in between.

Blair was born as Mary Robinson in Oklahoma in 1911 and moved with her family to California at age seven. A talented painter from a young age, Mary won a scholarship to Los Angeles’ Chouinard School of Art, where she met her future husband, Lee Blair. This prolific couple originally intended to pursue nothing less than the ideal artist’s existence of painting and showing, but the economic realities of the Depression forced them to take work at Ub Iwerks’ animation studio after they married in 1934. After leaving Iwerks they both worked briefly for Harman-Ising animation studio before Lee moved to Disney in 1938. Mary joined him in 1940.

The task she was set during her first year of work wasn’t much of an improvement on her previous animation duties, and after doing development artwork for projects that never got off the ground like Penelope and a Fantasia sequel, she quit in 1941. But Disney rehired her only a few months later to tackle a new project, Saludos Amigos, a South and Central American travelogue designed to cast a loving and sympathetic eye over the many countries south of the U.S. border. Sketching for three months in cities stretching from Argentina to Mexico, Blair found herself shaping a feature project from its embryonic form and decided she indeed had a future in the field of animation.

Mary Blair’s mark on Disney’s output in the 1940s is most strongly impressed on the many short subjects she designed for the studio’s “package” features such as Make Mine Music and Melody Time. The stylized unreality of Melody Time’s “Once Upon a Wintertime” is a good example of a Blair design come to life — a boy and girl skate on a frozen country lake: the lake pitch-black, the sky black and the trees and snow bank in the background blood-red. Her focus on eye-pleasing color juxtapositions free from the shackles of realism stands in stark contrast to much of Disney’s output of the period. Blair’s work also formed the design backbone of Johnny Appleseed, Blame It On the Samba, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and the swinger’s utopia depicted in the perennially toe-tapping Bumble Boogie.