Photo by Cesar Rubio Photography, Courtesy The Walt Disney Family MuseumYesterday, I walked through the downstairs galleries.
You take the elevator to get to the second floor galleries. But this is no ordinary elevator. It becomes a way to advance the story. Decorated like the interior of a railroad passenger coach we hear Walt talk about having a good hard failure when you are young and how that motivated him to go to Hollywood with $40 a “coat and a pair of trousers that didn’t match,” and his 1923 film Alice’s Wonderland. The doors open and you are in Hollywood…well Gallery 2 to be precise.
When Walt arrived in Hollywood, his goal was to land a job at one of the studios that had popped up. However, he had no luck and decided to return to animation. So he hooked up with his brother Roy and convinced Ub to move out west to set up shop as the Disney Brothers Studio.
Along one wall are large movie theater marquee poster frames with video screens. The images are of the Alice shorts. I was surprised to learn that the series lasted for 3 1/2 years and there were three different Alice’s. The combination of live action and animation slowly evolved into mostly animation. When the series started to run out of gas, Walt created a new character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
These films were distributed by Universal and Walt’s work was showing up in some of the best theaters in the country. But a miserable sequence of events took Oswald away from Walt and Roy and they were stuck with no staff (except Ub) and no principal character to animate. As Thomas Edison once said, “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” That progress came in the form of a little mouse named Mickey.
This gallery is loaded with gems. Along one wall is a cartoon (in this case Steamboat Willie) broken down into the individual drawings (some of which are little video screens). It is remarkable to think that Ub drafted up to 700 drawings a day on those early films. In the center is an interactive display where you can add the sound bits to a film. But the real highlight has to be what is considered the earliest known drawing of Mickey Mouse. This is where is all began. The popularity of Mickey was immediate and you can see a huge display of merchandise that was available at the height of Mickey’s career.
As is the case in all of the galleries, there is a sidebar with an update on what was going on in Walt’s personal life. Here we get to see his marriage certificate to Lillian Bounds. One very touching display is the Chow dog that Walt gave to Lillian one Christmas. This gag would we recreated in Lady and the Tramp.
By the 1930s, Walt was on a roll. This is the main feature in Gallery 3: New Horizons. Mickey Mouse was becoming one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. The additional of new characters joined Mickey and Minnie Mouse such as Pluto, Goofy (aka Dippity Dog), and Donald (who would go on to be more popular than Mickey).
This was a time of rapid growth in the field of animation. And most of that momentum was created at the Walt Disney Studios. You first come upon a display about telling you how the Silly Symphonys got their start. These shorts allowed Walt to experiment. The results were advances in the nature of color, depth, and characters who display true personality. Ample credit is given to the artists who helped make these innovations possible. I got the sense that the Studio at the time was a dynamic, close knit group of artist who all knew they could more as a team lead by a leader with a strong vision than what they could ever hope to achieve individually. They all new they were creating something never done before.
To demonstrate how songs became an integral part of the Disney experience, there is a great short film featuring Frank Thomas, Ward Kimball, Walt, Pinto Colvig, and others as they bang out the hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.” This was the first Disney’s hit song and it made a strong impression upon Walt.
I also enjoyed how they had two different versions of The Ugly Duckling playing side by side. One was produced in 1931 and the other in 1939. It is remarkable how far the Studio had advanced the art form. The entire gallery is a demonstration on how influential the Disney Studios was to the animation art form. All of the basics for the classic Disney film is right here.
This was the time when Sharon and Diane came into Lillian and Walt’s life. Tucked in every gallery is a link back to Walt’s family. These displays provide important context and really round out the story of the man.
All of this activity was just a warm up for the next big thing. Gallery 4 is a detailed looked at the development of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. As Walt suggested, when you are going to take a risk, go big and do it right. If the film was going to be a failure it needed to be a spectacular failure. Here you see the growth of the Hyperion Studio and the start of Walt’s creation of his own art school to teach the “Disney” style.
I found the exhibit featuring Ward Kimball to be quite telling. Ward had worked 8 months on a really funny sequence for Snow White where the dwarfs were eating soup. Walt loved the bit but told Ward that the movie was running a bit long and the scene didn’t add to the story. Ward was crushed. Before he left the room, Walt offered Ward another challenge. Would he do the animation for Jiminy Cricket? Ward always said Walt was the greatest salesman and left the room energized.
One of my favorite exhibits, and I wish I could get a copy of this, is an organization chart that showed how everything flowed from Walt to the audience. Simple and effective.
All sorts of concept art are on display. One video display for Bambi tells a story that was between Walt and his daughter Diane. When Diane asked her dad why Bambi’s mother had to get shot, Walt replied, “Well, it’s in the book.” Sharp cookie that Diane was state, “Dad, you change lots of things from the book, why not this?” For middle aged men who can’t help but burst into tears during this scene, we agree with Diane.
