My six-year-old daughter – with little girls all over the world – aspires to be a princess. But her notions of princesses are shaped almost entirely by the heroines of Disney movies, with their ruffled dresses, pink-towered castles, and escorts of talking animals.
A new exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art shows visitors that Walt Disney never dreamed of these fictional royals. He was heavily influenced by Rococo, a decorative and dramatic aesthetic that emerged from Paris in the early 18th century. Walt Disney’s Inspiration: Animation of the French Decorative Arts explores Disney’s fascination with the graphics, architecture, and interior design of the French elite, and how he incorporated them – sometimes wholesale – into his films and theme parks. In doing so, he popularized this aesthetic, transforming it into a global phenomenon that continues to be the stuff of my daughters dreams even a century later.
When Walt Disney visited France
The exhibition was held by Wolf Burchard, Co-curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Met. He was fascinated by the fact that Disney animation and 18th century design were two seemingly unrelated art worlds. After all, Disney was trying to create popular films for the masses, while the rococo arts were designed for the French aristocracy. But as Burchard puts these two worlds side by side, you immediately see the connections. Disney seemed to love luxury and over-representation of Rococo arts, and wanted to create films that would allow audiences to lose themselves in this fantasy world.
His early films, such as CinderellaAnd sleeping Beauty, And snow White, all featuring architecture, interior décor, and clothing taken directly from objects he saw on his European travels. In some ways, this made a lot of sense because it was based on fairy tales written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coinciding, in fact, with the Baroque and Rococo artistic movements. When he shot these films alongside the hundreds of artists he hired in his studio, he used images from Rococo paintings of women in flowing pastel dresses. Even the idea of creating accompanying talking animals or inanimate objects came from this period. Many Rococo arts feature clocks or teacups with faces. “People at the time were fascinated by the idea of moving inanimate objects,” he says. “They wondered what their watch had seen or said when they weren’t there.”
In some ways, Disney himself saw these arts as an escape. As Burchard points out, Disney came from humble origins, growing up in a poor family in rural Missouri. He first visited France when he was 17 years old while serving in the Red Cross in the aftermath of World War I. And that was when he first discovered and fell in love with French arts, from the gardens of Versailles to the Louvre. He later returned with his wife to explore the palaces and artifacts in more detail. Disney doesn’t seem to see these things out of his grasp; In a distinctly American way, he saw in her something he aspired to and dreamed of. By incorporating these aesthetics into his films, he gave others something to imagine as well. “Walt Disney took advantage of the fact that we all love to dream,” Burchard says. “These fairytale fairytale castles are a symbol of the idea of letting your imagination run free and thinking about what other life you might live.”
This aesthetic and the aspirations it symbolizes had universal appeal, as we now know. Disney films were a hit in the United States, and when they were exported internationally, they did well, too. Disney continued to create products and theme parks based on the films, which continued to benefit from these Rococo designs. Today, people around the world are drawn to the Gothic castles and Baroque interiors that Disney depicted in his films – but most have little idea of the original art that inspired them. “There are now six Disney theme parks, three of which are in Asia, and the main center is always a Gothic revival castle with spiers and turrets soaring into the air,” Burchard says. These castles are located in countries that have no direct cultural connection to the architecture they represent. But thanks to Disney, these castles have come to represent our aspirations.”
Faustina Bordoni and Fox, California. 1743. [Image: courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
The origins of princesses culture
When he founded his company a century ago, Disney couldn’t tell how powerful his ideas and image were. Generations of kids have grown up watching these movies, taking on castles and storylines. Girls, in particular, can grow up immersed in the culture of princesses these movies made. Over the past few decades, there has been criticism about gender norms in early Disney films, particularly how a princess’ main goal is to marry a prince, usually after he rescues her. The films were also criticized for their lack of variety. All the first princesses were white.
Disney tried to update the heroines of his fairy tales. Burchard points out that Disney was using fairy tales that first gained popularity 300 years ago, and the moral of these stories was generally for women to try to find rich husbands to have a comfortable life. But in CinderellaAnd sleeping BeautyAnd snow White, and later Beauty and the beastThe heroines are complex characters with other interests and feelings. They often reject Prince’s advances at first. “Movies look old to us today, but the heroines were distinctly more modern than the original literary source from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” Burchard says.
Ultimately, Burchard explains, Disney did not create princess culture but simply exploited its appeal. After all, princesses have been a feature of fairy tales from all over the world for centuries. Disney’s skill was to translate these stories into engaging films, and then make extensive use of them. “Everyone in Europe knew these princesses and fairy tales for hundreds of years before Disney came along,” he says. “He just introduced them to a wider audience. I would argue that this is a global phenomenon. Societies have the magic of this kind of ideal, and if Disney hadn’t reimagined these princesses stories, someone else would have.”
Burchard defends Disney’s approach, saying it was a product of its era. He was composing these films at a time when the feminist movement was in the making, and most people still had relatively conservative ideas about sex. And in the end, Disney himself was not particularly political or ideological. “Walt Disney used to say he made movies for entertainment, and the professors could analyze what they meant,” he says.
Today, the Disney studio appears to be making an effort to create more diverse and feminist films, while not completely eliminating princess culture. lately Raya and the last dragon It features a Southeast Asian heroine who has a royal dynasty, but her role is to save her kingdom, rather than marrying a prince who saves her. While the film derives very different aesthetic influences, Burchard argues that the approach remains true to Disney’s vision of creating ambitious modern heroines, found only in part because of their gorgeous costumes and lavish mansions. “It is likely that within a century, these princesses’ stories will be reimagined in a different way, appropriate for the audience at the time,” Burchard says.