Walt Disney created rich and vibrant fantasies through his animations, but his inspirations were firmly rooted in the real world.
The recently opened exhibition at the Met, “Walt Disney’s Inspirations: Animation for French Decorative Arts,” shows how historic European design influenced both the animator and those who worked with him.
The show goes back to the post-World War I era, when a 16-year-old Disney traveled to France to work with the Red Cross. He fell in love with buildings and art. A subsequent trip through Europe in 1935, when he was in his thirties, provided further inspiration. He photographed the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles during those travels; Decades later, his design would be used as an obvious reference by Disney artists for the backdrop to the famous ballroom scene in the 1991 movie “Beauty and the Beast.”
“It sucked everything up like a sponge,” said 36-year-old Wolf Burchard, a Met colleague who organized the new show, which runs through March 6 and is drawing lines outside galleries.
Disney’s travels also opened his eyes to Gothic architecture, which made its way to “Cinderella” in the 1950s, and medieval art, which inspired the look of 1959’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
While some inspirations – such as the modeling of “Sleeping Beauty” from medieval tapestry – are direct and specific, Disney drew from others, such as rococo references to Lumiere’s character in Beauty and the Beast in general.
“Often the end product doesn’t look like the original source of inspiration – and I think that’s really important,” Burchard said. “Because it shows that Disney animators are not just copying their predecessors non-fiction, but actually creating something new.”
Here, the back stories of four elements and how they affected The Walt Disney Company.
Small rooms, big dreams
California’s Disneyland — the fantasy park that opened in 1955 on 160 acres of former orange groves — finds its roots in something much smaller. The late American artist Narcissa Niblack Thorne’s miniature rooms of the 1930s – dozens of tiny versions of European, American and Asian interiors – caught the eye of Walt Disney in 1939 during a show in San Francisco. “These rooms are created for Americans who cannot travel [abroad] And because it’s so precise, said Burchard, it really helps with the fancy travel leap. At the Met, visitors can view a miniature 18″ x 24″ x 23″ Louis XV period French Thorne bed, which shows a room crowned with a chandelier surrounded by ornate molded walls. These detailed re-creations forced Disney to initially envision Disneyland as a archetypal city, paying particular attention to imaginative play. “They’re all about this childish fantasy,” said Burchard of Thorne Chambers. “This idea of escaping, letting your imagination go free – kids look at it and let their minds travel.”
flower effect
The visual inspiration for Sleeping Beauty was the floral ‘Unicorn Tapestries’, designed in Paris and woven in southern Holland in the 1500s. The Met acquired the furnishings in 1937 and displayed it in Cloisters uptown. Disney employee John Hinch took over textiles during a 1950s trip to New York City. “[He] He returned to Los Angeles to suggest to Disney that “Unicorn Tapestries” should really be a model of beauty and tell the story of “Sleeping Beauty,” Burchard said. “Disney then hired art director Evind Earl to create exactly that stage set, and it’s considered one of the most technically advanced films.” In the new gallery, visitors can see the vibrant gouache work of Earl’s “Sleeping Beauty” concept art, which shows a thatched hut surrounded by trees and plants – all with saturated colors and clear focus. The idea, Burchard said, is to “get into a texture where the foreground and background are reproduced with the same level of detail.” According to the gallery’s catalog, Earl once said, “I rearranged shrubs and trees into geometric patterns. I made medieval tapestry out of the roof whenever possible. All my tapestry designs were of ornamental herbs and flowers.”
With “Unicorn Tapestries” out of town, the new gallery showcases 16th-century tapestry “Shepherd and Shepherdess Making Music” next to Earl’s art to illustrate the effect.
Let the light cross there
Candelabra from the Rococo period in 18th century France—a period best known for its highly ornamental designs—inspired Disney animators to develop the perfectly radiant Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast. In the exhibition, a 1991 conceptual artwork by Lumiere was paired with a stunning bronze candlestick made between 1735 and 1750 by designer Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier.
Lumiere’s inspiration was not specific to this single candle, but to the aesthetic period in general; Both pieces are intended to show visitors how somewhat theatrical design can bring inanimate beings to life. Shows concept art from the movie “melting wax that forms [Lumiere’s] “A shiny face, and then you have the same shiny metallic candlestick, and you can see how the arms move to let you know how the animation is working,” Burchard said. Meanwhile, the 18th century candelabra, perched on a rotating platform, shows a series of lustrous curves that give a sense of movement to any ordinary object. “This is a different kind of animation,” Burchard said. “This is how Rococo designers, in pre-drawn and pre-cinema animation, attempt to move the object through… ripples and carry the eye across a complex abstract surface. It is the most remarkable work.”
Mi Castle, Su Castle
Inside the gallery’s final gallery, viewers catch a glimpse of four towering French porcelain vases covered in pink and green domes. The vases stand next to each other, and carry a similar Disney castles color scheme and color. Made circa 1762 by Sèvres Manufactory, Burchard said these Rococo pieces are considered among the most ambitious ceramic vases ever made due to their level of detail, such as the carved windows in the domes. Two vases were borrowed from the Huntington Library in California, which Disney visited, but it is not clear if he saw them.
“The point this is making is not necessarily to say that Disney saw and was inspired by those vases when he was supervising the making of Disneyland,” Burchard said. But the reason behind the design is what matters. “The main thing is that the Rococo designers used the same rhetoric to encourage our imaginations to run free, and these pieces of porcelain are as charming as Disney’s castle.”
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