“Walt Disney’s Inspiration: Animation of French Decorative Arts,” which opened this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a classic holiday exhibit: family-friendly, frothy, and doesn’t require much of a heavy load. And like the holiday season itself, the promise is a bit overrated.
The exhibition traces, in often minute detail, the disparate elements of the European aesthetic movements that Disney animators, numbering 600 by the end of the 1930s, swept across in his films: French Rococo in “Beauty and the Beast” (1991); Gothic architecture in “Cinderella” (1950), art of the late Middle Ages and early Holland in “Sleeping Beauty” (1959), nineteenth-century Germanic romanticism in “Snow White” (1937). All of these stories originated in Europe, so the idea that a Disney machine entrenched its visual interpretation in European art isn’t as much of a leap as Hamlet’s show in Manhattan in the 2000s era.
As the title suggests, there’s plenty of 18th-century French gilded bronze candelabra, porcelain figurines, and fluffy biscuits, but there’s also, by the four Disney films included in the treatise, a good share of German and Dutch, and British examples as well. Those pieces, totaling 60 pieces and most of them from the museum’s private collection, are topped off two to one by items loaned directly from Disney: 150 pieces of art, works on paper, movie footage from the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, the Walt Disney Archives, and the Walt Disney Fictional Collection, and the Walt Disney Family Museum, which can make the viewer in the show feel as though Alice is falling down the rabbit hole in a sponsored content post. (The Met says the show was not secured by Disney, and I’m not sure this level of capriccio for sanctioned companies is better or worse.)
The original “Beauty and the Beast” is a Rococo-era fairy tale written by French novelist Gabriel Suzanne Barbeau de Villeneuve, and later popularized by Jean-Marie Lebrance de Beaumont. (Jean Cocteau also made a famous movie version, in 1946.) None of these three treats featured anthropomorphic Paul watches and teapots with English accents inexplicably, which is understood to be a Disney triumph. The exhibition, however, is credited to Prosper Julio de Cribion, whose 1742 novel “The Couch, a Moral Fable” tells the story of a man who was punished for dishonesty by condemning his soul to living in couches until he witnessed a declaration of affection.
The show explains that this predecessor was unknown to Disney animators, and the company’s invention is due to chance. The Met tries to base this section on a luscious red velor sofa (ottoman night light It dates from around 1760, to show its Rococo roots.
Although there is no bad excuse to look at the magnificent sofa or the richly decorated and miraculously complete Sèvres dinner service circa 1775, as also shown here, it is an implied affinity with the Disney duo “Beauty and the Beast” of Lady “Beauty and the Beast” Potts (turned into a teapot) and her son Chip (a teacup) feel upset and ambivalent. In fact, we learned that Disney animators found Rococo’s jagged lines impossible to translate, and instead settled on a neutral stylistic expression. This is shown disappointingly here in the caricatured costumes of its masculine characters: Rococo’s brilliance has been toned down so as not to alienate American notions of masculinity. The historically correct Gaston would have delighted with a luxuriously embroidered bodice and ruffled tie, rather than a solid-colored V-neck whose only embellishment was the plunging frill.
Beyond the visuals, there’s a tighter parallel between Disney’s goal of group entertainment and Rococo’s superficial expression of fun that the show doesn’t discover (the exhibition is curated by Wolf Burchard, associate curator at the Met Museum). Both schools reflect the short-sighted optimism of their makers, Rococo, with their over-ornament, pastel color palette, and graceful shapes evoking youth and eroticism; Disney with its flat ideas of good, bad, and tidy endings. This optimism paid off more for Disney than Rococo, whose aristocratic decadence helped spark the French Revolution.
The exhibition settles on forced rhymes, such as the suggestion that the faltering still life of Beauvais by Alexandre François Desports (1661-1743) might resemble the line of the dancing candle choir in Be Our Guest, and that the satyr presides over the feast painting a kinship with Lumiere.
One of Disney’s clearest and most enduring influences is Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, a historic 19th-century dessert built in honor of Richard Wagner. It’s the direct model for centerpieces for Disney theme parks around the world, and many iterations of its logo, so it’s surprising that Neuschwanstein appears only briefly at the end of the show. In fairness though, Walt Disney’s Inspiration, Animation by Burgenromantik doesn’t easily slip off the tongue.
You might think Disney would object to the Met’s analysis of its apt technologies, but the show is careful not to use the “A” word (the expanded catalog fully addresses that idea). Disney films are “influenced” and “inspired” by European art rather than their wholesale elevators. But the exhibition would be better served by locating Disney’s works in a continuum of veiled theft that revives art history. There is no shame in theft, as Rubens copies of Titian attest upstairs.
Instead, the show offers a fascinating albeit unintended analysis of the particularly American compulsion to take European ideas and make them a little worse (coffee culture, baking, democracy), and compel corporations to make those ideas a little worse.
The most interesting Disney artifacts are the concept art paintings from famous animators – the brightly colored and almost abstract Mary Blair paintings; Evind Earl’s Deep Layered Back Panels; Soft, vibrant pastel colors from Mel Show; and Kay Nielsen’s lavish preparatory graphics, all of which were largely junk or splayed, according to the show, in Disney’s matte realism. They look complete strangers to their final counterparts, and one can only imagine how rich those films would have been if they were loyal to seeing their artists.
Is Disney production art? It’s not a question that really bothers the gallery, but one that the gallery insists be printed in large print anyway, likely in order to pre-empt criticism. In 1938, we learned on the show, when the Met accepted Disney’s gift of a smooth cartoon “Snow White” into its collection, Walt Disney skillfully suggested that several of the old masters he was joining would make good employees, even the man who was arguably the biggest owner He worked in the country for artists portrayed as Rob (“Okay, take Da Vinci. He was a great hand for experiments. He could adjust to his heart’s content to work for us…but don’t ask me anything about art. I don’t know anything about her”).
Now as then, the Met is putting its current Disney listing on the same record as a bold vision, as though Disney is still a cutting edge animation studio and not the world’s largest entertainment IP conglomerate.
Self awareness is not necessary. Disney weathered the high and low controversy a long time ago. A better question is whether a major art organization dedicates programming to a multibillion-dollar behemoth that serves its audience better (the Met allows Condé Nast to do that once a year too, of course, through a costume institute party).
By the time I’ve been spitting on Petrie European Sculpture, it’s hard to tell who all of this is. Fans of the decorative arts are likely to object to the dilution of form, much of which is on display elsewhere in the Museum without commercial interruption; And it’s doubtful that the compliments of Disney, who can be so frantic in their fidelity, have a Rococo-shaped hole in their hearts.
“Children believe what you tell them and do not call it into question,” says Cocteau’s introduction to The Beauty and the Beast. Naivety sure helps here, too. I watched a young girl in a tulle skirt attempt to climb the glass of Meissen ceramic figurines designed by Johann Joachim Kandler, and was particularly fascinated by one group, a fox accompanies a singer on a harp. She was having a great time.
Walt Disney’s Inspiration: Animation for the French Decorative Arts
During March 6, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. , (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.