Once upon a Time Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios

March 9 to June 24, 2007

Once upon a Time Walt Disney is divided into seven thematic sections:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: “Some Day My Prince Will Come”

It All Started with a Mouse
The exhibition opens with an exploration of early work that features the first – rarely seen –Mickey Mouse drawings and models created by Iwerks, as well as storyboards for Steamboat Willie (1928) and The Band Concert (1935), featuring Mickey in Technicolor for the first time.  The original paintings created for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – the international success of which marked the birth of a genre that would rival major Hollywood motion pictures – are a major highlight here.  The special Oscar® – accompanied by seven little Oscars – that Disney received at the Academy Awards that year is also on display.  

This section of the exhibition moves on to portray the crucial role of the pioneer Disney Studio artists.  Disney himself had given up drawing at an early age, as his greater talent lay in his ability to find the right artists and to discover literary and artistic sources for his films.  He recruited some of the best of the European illustrators who had immigrated to America, including Albert Hurter (1883–1942), from Switzerland; Gustaf Tenggren (1896–1970), from Sweden; and Kay Nielsen (1886–1957), from Denmark.  Trained in the art academies of their home countries, these cartoonists and their native-born American colleagues collectively brought to their work familiarity with French popular artists such as Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré and Jean-Jacques Grandville; the German Romantics; the Symbolists; the Pre-Raphaelites; and the Flemish and Italian primitives. 

Masterfully orchestrated by Disney, the studio sketch artists pooled these Old World influences, along with their respective cultural backgrounds, knowledge of folklore and contemporary inspiration, to create the magical world that gave rise to some of the greatest animated movies ever made.

 

Literary and Cinematographic Sources
The exhibition’s second section begins by examining the effects of Walt and Roy Disney’s 1935 trip to Europe (see page 3).  They took this seminal journey armed with a list of suggestions from their studio artists to help guide them in their research and anticipated purchases: it included folk and fairy tales by the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and French author Charles Perrault.

The examples of European literature that the Disneys collected on this trip provided subjects and a stock of images that inspired many Disney films.  The Studio’s first efforts, for example, were based on Aesop’s Fables and the story of Pinocchio by Italian author Carlo Collodi.  Perrault’s fairy tales provided the stories for Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, and British author Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book was used for the film of the same name.  On view in this section of the exhibition are several dozen of these rare or original editions, featuring illustrations by Gustave Doré, J.J. Grandville, Heinrich Kley, Ludwig Richter, Moritz von Schwind and Arthur Rackham.  These books are still part of the collection of the Walt Disney Imagineering’s Information Research Center in Los Angeles.

Walt Disney was, of course, inspired by filmmakers as well as by artists and writers.  The exhibition highlights connections to early animator Edwin G. Lutz, photographer Eadweard Muybridge, French filmmaker Emile Cohl and American pioneer filmmaker Winsor McCay, who made Little Nemo (1905) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), by juxtaposing examples of their work with excerpts from Disney movies.  Additionally, two large screens show movies from the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating how Disney’s short feature The Mad Doctor (1933) gave a humorous twist to scenes from James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), or how the misadventures of Donald Duck in Modern Inventions (1937) were uncannily like Charlie Chaplin’s mishaps in Modern Times (1936).  The profound impact of German Expressionist cinema is revealed in the ways in which Friedrich Murnau’s Faust (1926) is clearly present in several sequences of Fantasia (1940).

 

Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Detail)

Sources for Settings and Landscapes
The exhibition moves on to explore the inspiration for the decor and sets of Disney’s animated films.  This section illuminates the ways in which European architectural elements and landscape scenes provided most of the models for Disney’s backgrounds.  The castle in Sleeping Beauty (1959), for example, is a cross between the one depicted in the illuminated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413–1416), the nineteenth-century designs of architect and Gothic revivalist Viollet Le Duc and the architectural extravagance of the castles of Ludwig II of Bavaria (about 1869–1886).  Forests in Disney Studios movies were inspired by a variety of sources, including fifteenth-century Chinese painting, Japanese prints and English forests, while bird’s-eye views drew on the work of American regionalist painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.  The influence of Caspar David Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin’s landscapes can be seen in Fantasia, and that of the Flemish and Italian primitives in the decor of Sleeping Beauty.

 

Anthropomorphism: Animals and Trees as Men
This section shows how various nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and illustrators, including J.J. Grandville, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, Benjamin Rabier, Heinrich Kley and Beatrix Potter, inspired many Disney characters.  Although Disney’s anthropomorphic animals and plants are usually treated kindly, there are some films in which this transformation – of trees in particular – triggers revulsion and terror, as in the scene in Snow White in which the heroine flees into the forest after narrowly escaping death at the hands of the huntsman.

 

Character Sources
Walt Disney himself played a very active role in the complex process of character development.  He outlined the characters’ main traits and, if he was not satisfied with the initial sketches produced by the studio artists, he would revise their overall graphic appearance as well.  These discussions and the combinations of several sources – historical, pictorial and cinematographic – led to the creation of characters that were then animated, either from model sheets, on which each character was drawn in all conceivable poses and expressions, or plaster prototypes.

This section illustrates character development in ten films over some four decades, ranging from Snow White to The Jungle Book.  It reveals, for example, that Disney had suggested that the ambiguous figure of the Wicked Queen in Snow White be a mix of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf, but that her face finally took on the features of the American actress Joan Crawford, and her general silhouette was derived from the column statue at the entrance to the Gothic cathedral in Naumburg, Germany.  The transformation of the Queen into a Witch is taken from various cinematographic versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while the Witch herself perpetuates an iconographic tradition developed during the nineteenth century.

Included are galleries dedicated to each of Disney’s most celebrated animated features, including Pinocchio, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, 101 Dalmatians and others.  A highlight is the first public display of an original wooden Pinocchio marionette, rediscovered two years ago in a cabinet in the basement of a building on the Studio lot.

 

Salvador Dalí: The Destino Adventure
This section tells the story of how Disney and Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí admired each other and collaborated on a film called Destino. Although the movie was not made during their lifetimes, it was completed in 2003 under the direction of Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney.  The exhibition features many of the spectacular drawings and paintings that have survived from this collaboration and also screens the movie.

 

It All Starts Again with a Mouse: Disney Recycled by Contemporary Art
By the mid-1960s, Disney films enjoyed immense universal popularity.  Since the release of Snow White, a generation had been raised on his films and had not forgotten them.  Pop Art made Mickey and Donald into icons, and artists continue to be inspired by Disney’s legacy today.  This section shows some thirty works based on Disney characters, created by a diverse group of modern and contemporary artists that includes Gary Baseman, Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Saul and Andy Warhol.  As French painter Robert Combas said in 1977, “Mickey is no longer Walt’s property, he belongs to us all.”

 

 

Claude Coats, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: “Some Day My Prince Will Come”, 1937, celluloid, ink and gouache.Stephen Ison collection. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Claude Coats, Fantasia: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Detail), 1940, Preliminary study, Oil on paper, Burbank, California, Walt Disney Feature Animation and the Animation Research Library. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.