Nathalia Holt’s The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History is a good example of what has become a genre in the world of women’s history: the exploration of a group of women within an industry or profession whose contribution was critical and yet has been largely overlooked. Margot Lee Shetterly gave us a name for them “hidden figures.”

As with so many of these books, Queens of Animation begins with the author’s discovery of a missing element in an often told story. Doing research for a different book, Holt interviewed a woman who told her about working for the Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and 1940s. To Holt’s surprise, her interview subject’s stories were full of women artists working in the studios, as animators as well as members of the largely female Ink and Paint department, who traced animators’ sketches onto plastic sheets and brought them to life with color.

Holt was well aware that these women’s names did not appear in the credits for the animated features they worked on*—she had spent many hours of a cartoon-obsessed childhood watching the credits role past and looking for women’s names.** Interested in learning more, she picked up one of the many biographies of Walt Disney only to find that the women whose names she had learned didn’t appear. In a second biography, two of the women were mentioned, though their accomplishments were not. In fact on, Mary Blair, who had been an art director at Disney for decades and whose work had defined the style for many of Disney’s most important films, was mentioned merely as the wife of another, less important artist. Finding no trace of the women or the contributions in the existing histories of the company, she sent in search of the women themselves.

The result of that search is a multi-layered group biography of the women, the art they produced, the challenges they faced, and their contribution to Disney films. Along the way, she also discusses the changing technology of animation, something I knew little about and found absolutely fascinating.

If you are interested in “hidden figures” or the history of animation, this one is for you. Be warned, it may make you want to go back and watch Disney films with a new eye to the artistry.

*This is an astonishing example of erasing women from the story even as it unrolls.
**I swear, the stories find the writer, not the other way around.