So today on the podcast, we dive back down into the life of Disney legend Mary Blair,

a woman who is often presented as Walt's favorite artist.

In earlier episodes, we followed Mary as she attended art school,

then worked at various animation studios in Los Angeles.

In the early 1940s, Mary became a key concept artist

at the Disney studio, with Walt sending her across the states and to foreign countries

to imagine how stories set in those locales might be visually adapted into big-screen animation.

As we last left off, Mary was finishing key location work in Georgia for the Song of the South,

and Indiana for so dear to my heart, as World War II was coming to an end.

With the war over, her husband Lee, a former Disney studio artist,

decided to start his own production company in New York, largely to make films paid for by

American companies. Mary joined him there, far from her own friends and family, who remained in California,

though she continued to work for the Disney studio, completing all of her work assignments at home

and typically mailing them into Walt.

Though Mary doesn't yet know this, she's about to move into one of her best-known iconic periods of

production, where she creates concept art that will guide the production of Cinderella,

then Alice in Wonderland, and finally Peter Pan. As we finished up on our last episode,

Mary learned that after years of trying to start a family,

she was finally pregnant,

and it is at this point that we pick up her story today.

Thank you. her story today. Life in New York in the fall of 1946 was a substantial change for both Lee and Mary.

Lee oversaw his own studio called Film Graphics, which was focused on commercial and corporate

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