NEW YORK – I’ve watched more Disney princess movies in the past few weeks than I have in the first five decades of my life on this planet. As a citizen of American popular culture, I enjoy its grace and charm. But as a citizen of this thing called the American republic, with its roots in revolution and its discourse on egalitarianism, I often find it surreal. Isn’t it strange—and perhaps even wrong, in the deepest moral sense—that Americans are addicted to these gilded fantasies of privilege?
A fascinating exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores something that hides in plain sight if you watch Disney cartoons closely: a curious affinity for all things French, especially the trappings of French aristocracy.
The curators of “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts” are candid about one basic fact: Walt Disney made his films for an audience very different from the one that French Rococo craftsmen produced their dazzling luxury items.
Disney catered to popular taste, during a democratic era, and his films reached enthusiastic viewers all over the world. Watchmakers, statuary designers, vases painters, and furniture makers in 18th century Europe served wealthy and often aristocratic clients, and although their designs were widely influential, the things they made were bought and kept by the elite.
With that caveat, this fascinating exhibition then sets out to record the amazing connection points between these two very different creative worlds. At least three of Disney’s most famous and admired films – “Cinderella” (1950), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) and “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) – borrow much from the design and architectural aesthetics of France and elsewhere. European courts under the control of the cultural hegemony of Versailles. Luxury, in films such as “Cinderella”, is symbolized by gold-plated mirrors studded with vine and mother-of-pearl motifs that characterized the Rococo style. When Belle dances with the Beast in the famous 1991 “Beauty and the Beast” ballroom scene, she is framed by the largely sculptural architecture of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Early Disney cartoons featured animated ceramic figurines, complete with 18th-century dress, wig, and court etiquette.
This was not accidental. Walt Disney and his painters were a cultural glutton if not always cultural discrimination. They relied on an archive of design, graphics, and art, which Walt Disney had collected on his European travels. They often turned to French story books for inspiration and French paintings, especially the muslin and pastel fantasies of the mid-18th century, known as “fetes galantes” for their visual material. Not all Disney routes specifically return to France, but many intersect either with France or with the broader French influence on European culture.
The exhibition, which includes exquisite decorative objects and drawings, film screenings and performances by Disney artists, raises fundamental questions about any artistic era or period. What were they thinking? What were they trying to do? Why were these things important to them? Curated by the Met’s Wolf Burchard Museum, the galleries feature a juxtaposition so surprising, so unlikely, and so strange that both the Disney era and the era of Versailles seem so modern and even surreal.
Isn’t it strange that Disney artists, working in the field of mass entertainment in the mid-20th century, have captured ideas and images from one of the most nuanced and hierarchical cultures in human history? Isn’t it strange that Americans, who reflexively celebrate humble origins, log cabins and rustic simplicity, have embraced Disney’s dancing candlesticks and riffs on porcelain by Meissen and Sèvres? Does any of this raise questions about the credibility of our so-called petty democratic impulses?
These questions are still with us today. For example, a certain ex-president was able to gather a wide range of working-class followers during court stays at Versailles in the sky, his apartment in Trump Tower complete with marble columns (or faux marble), surmounted by gilded Corinthian capitals, below the garish frescoes ceiling and increase from Ornamental molding.
The simplest explanation is that France is coded “fictional” in American slang. But the exhibition notes that there is more than just a reflexive nod to French fashion when images of wealth or power are invoked. Borchard argues that the Rococo style was not just a luxury style: “Dynamic asymmetry, freedom of association, an overwhelming sense of movement, irony, and joy are what distinguishes it from other styles.” The liberties of association, sarcasm, and joy, in particular, liberated Disney animators, especially early in the company’s history when it was more experimental, and its productions (including the marvelous cartoon Merry Melody) were more fanciful and vibrant than the later block. market product.
Therefore, we have a sense of parallel worlds, which seek to escape from reality in things like anthropomorphic furniture and animations of inanimate objects. A liberating infamous novel circulating in Paris in the 1740s features a man turned into a chain of sofas, doomed to witness the murky morals of several couples until at least one expresses true love. Le Sopha was probably not well known to Disney animators, but the idea of human spirits inhabiting chairs, teacups, or candlesticks suggests a parallel interest in animation for everyday accessories.
The enlarged figure, the transformation of one animal species into another, was another parallel obsession. In France, during the Age of Enlightenment, this was a metaphor for looking at fundamental questions about what makes humans human. In Disney, and other forms of American popular culture, it serves different purposes, masking discourse about class identity or surface versus depth of human personality.
The exhibition also covers the fascinating history of Disney and its cultural and social influence. When the Met in 1938 acquired Cel from the movie “Snow White,” Disney was seen as groundbreaking, innovative, and even modern. His works felt empirical and borderline challenging, and in 1942 a well-known critic compared him to Leonardo. Soviet cinema pioneer Sergei Eisenstein claimed that Disney cartoons captured the “structure of primitive thought,” which was what he meant to praise.
The exhibition ends with merger plans for a theme park called Disneyland, centered around a fictional castle city of European neo-gothic palaces and castles, and the architecture of the Loire Valley. Shown, a 1955 architectural rendering of Sleeping Beauty Castle, which includes handwritten instructions next to the taller tower and towers: “This tower will be prefabricated in sections…” Like old porcelain, there’s something fragile in everything Disney does: The stunt can shatter. Easily.
The larger question gaining strength through the exhibition is whether these parallel worlds reflect shared values or shared political ideologies. Is there anything in France in its last decadent era before the revolution that was similar to America in the fifties? Is decadence the common denominator? A penchant for silliness and superficiality?
This road looks like a dead end. French culture has never been silly or superficial, and while the paintings of Fragonard and Rameau’s harpsichord may seem too precious to some audiences, there is substance and depth to both. It is not necessary to attribute the complex depth of Disney’s business. They are so good at appealing to the broad, common, and deep superficiality that we all have in common, which is no small feat.
If there is cultural common ground in the two eras explored here, it likely has something to do with the complex thing we call modernity. France was dealing with the intellectual and political pressures of the Enlightenment. America has just emerged as a global power in the age of the atomic bomb, total war, and the ideological struggle between capitalism and communism. The complex embrace and rejection of these ideas, the twofold face of modernity, was expressed in an idea that Max Weber called disillusionment. As the mysteries of the world, monopolized and privileged by religion, are subject to science and rational thought, the world becomes less enchanted. Things move forward, knowledge advances and barbarism joins the resistance.
Rococo architecture was in part a form of resistance to organized ideas of structure and design, and often flourished in Catholic regions, such as Bavaria, where the Catholic Church wanted to reassert its ancient power. It undermined the logic of architecture in both exhilarating and belated ways. Disney, which ended up testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose films perpetuated strict gender norms, racial stereotypes, and anti-democratic fantasies of class and hierarchy, offered viewers a chance to escape two terrifying things: the present and the future.
No one is immune from escaping; Few of us can live without at least a little of it. We flee to the illusions of the past because the past is gone. They can be worn, reimagined, disfigured, and cast in a nostalgic glow, but they cannot be resurrected. When Disney was directing his work not just on children but on the child in all of us, he was giving us permission to ignore democracy and modernity and all the chaos of the two, at least for a while. It’s just play, playing is just imagination, and what’s wrong with that?
However, take some time to work, and you’ll realize that it’s not always innocent play. Sometimes playing can turn into a dream and the dream turns ugly, and suddenly people are doing horrible things in pursuit of a past that did not exist before. Waking up from that nightmare.
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