Whom You Know Kicks off our coverage of Disney: NEW MUSEUM PRESENTS LIFE & ACHIEVEMENTS OF WALT DISNEY: OPENED IN SAN FRANCISCO ON OCTOBER 1, 2009 VISIONARY ARTIST, STORYTELLER & ENTREPRENEUR ENRICH ED WORLD OF IMAGINATION FOR GENERATIONS The Walt Disney Family Museum Showcases Early Drawings of Mickey Mouse, Disney Family Home Movies & Groundbreaking Technologies
The fascinating and inspiring story of Walt Disney, whose artistry, creations, and vision helped define 20th-century American culture, will be brought to life at The Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened in San Francisco on October 1, 2009.
The Museum will illuminate Walt Disney’s tremendous successes, disappointments, and unyielding optimism as he pursued innovation and excellence while entertaining and enchanting generations worldwide through his pioneering ventures. The creator of Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disneyland, and the global yet distinctly American company that bears his name, Disney was a risk-taker who started his first business at the age of 19 and worked tirelessly to elevate animation to an art form.
He invented timeless and much beloved characters and stories that brought the fantastical to life and continue to inspire a sense of wonder. Through animated and live-action films, television programs, and theme parks, Disney created global symbols, icons, and characters that, more than 40 years after his death, are an indelible part of popular culture in America and around the world. The Walt Disney Family Museum will illustrate how Disney’s irrepressible creativity enriched the imagination of generations. The Museum will tell the story of the man behind the myth in Disney’s own voice and in exhibits that reveal his expansive vision, from early drawings of some of his most popular characters to plans for Disneyland and EPCOT.
“My father has one of the most well-known names around the world, but as the Disney ‘brand’ has grown, the man has become lost,” said Diane Disney Miller, one of the Museum’s founders. “We are committed to telling the story of Walt Disney’s life, in his own words, and in the words of others who knew him well and worked with him. My father was very open, and in the many conversations and interviews that you will hear in the galleries, you learn the story of his life. It is a wonderful story, and Dad himself loved to tell it. Thanks to the amazing work of many dedicated people, we are fortunate to be able to tell it here using the tools he worked with—art, music, film, and technology— to present an honest yet affectionate portrait of this amazing artist and man.”
“From Steamboat Willie to Pinocchio to EPCOT, Walt Disney’s unyielding ambition was to ignite a sense of wonder and to mesmerize audiences through great storytelling,” said Richard Benefield, Founding Executive Director of The Walt Disney Family Museum. “He recognized the power of art to spark the imagination and, time and again, pushed himself and his companies to the breaking point as he pursued the highest level of excellence in everything he did. The Walt Disney Family Museum will present the compelling story of his life—of his successes and failures—as he entertained and enlightened the nation while it struggled with the Great Depression, joined the fight of World War II, and entered a golden age of prosperity and preeminence.”
During World War I, he was rejected by the army because he was too young. He enlisted in the Red Cross Overseas and served as an ambulance driver in France. An ambulance similar to the one he drove in Europe will be exhibited at the Museum. The Museum will chronicle Disney’s early, fitful starts at developing live and animated films, including the difficulties with his first cartoon company in Kansas City, where he settled after he returned from Europe. After Laugh-O-Gram Films went bankrupt in 1923, Disney took the train to California, with $40 in his pocket. But by the end of the 1920s, Disney had risen to international fame and recognition with the creation of the world’s most famous mouse. His studio also enjoyed great financial success—and changed the animation industry—with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), its first feature-length animated film and a movie that peers had warned Disney against making. Yet Disney’s animation studio nearly went bankrupt after the completion of Fantasia (1940), a film that received favorable reviews but did not win large audiences. It is now celebrated as a cinematic landmark and is notable for being the first major film released in stereophonic sound. Throughout these decades, Disney pushed groundbreaking technological innovations that revolutionized animation and enhanced story, character development, and color, using dimensionality and original music to improve his storytelling. These innovations included synchronizing sound with animated images and the use of story boards, multiplane cameras, and optical printers. He consistently challenged himself and his employees to surpass what they had already achieved. The Museum will illuminate Disney’s parallel interests in the fantastic and real. After completing the early-1940s animated masterpieces Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, and a hiatus mandated by World War II during which the Studio produced morale-boosting films, Disney began to expand the scope of the studio’s work by making live-action nature documentaries that grew out of his childhood love of the outdoors. He sent a team of naturalists to Alaska for a year to film anything they might find interesting. The result was Seal Island, which won the 1949 Academy Award® for best two-reel documentary.
The Museum will also explore Disney’s marketing acumen. In the 1950s, lacking the funds to complete Disneyland, he embraced TV as a platform to test and promote his ideas while securing the financing needed to complete what would become the world’s first theme park. Always looking toward a utopian future, Walt Disney was enchanted by the promise of technology. In addition to being an early champion of color television, stereo, and widescreen technology, he pursued his interest in transportation with the first daily-operating Monorail system in the United States and by creating the PeopleMover—an innovative tram system with no on-board motors—in Disneyland. Toward the end of his life, Walt Disney developed groundbreaking attractions for global events, notably the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.
Beginning in 1960, Walt and his key creative executives approached several American corporations with the intent of collaborating on major shows and attractions for the Fair. The result was four of the Fair’s most popular attractions: the General Electric Progressland featuring Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress; the UNICEF Pavilion sponsored by Pepsi-Cola featuring, “it's a small world;” the Ford Wonder Rotunda featuring Walt Disney's Magic Skyway; and the State of Illinois Pavilion featuring Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln and the famous audio animatronic of the president. These attractions were later exported to Disneyland in California.
Walt Disney’s work with Robert Moses on the World’s Fair pavilions inspired him to develop a new paradigm, EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), a project Walt described as “a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, testing, and demonstrating new materials and new systems…a showcase to the world of the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.” With a unique city infrastructure that separated pedestrians and traffic, EPCOT foreshadowed the New Urbanism movement by 30 years. Inside the Museum: An American Story The stories of Disney’s life, creativity, family, and the processes and innovations he brought to his art will be told through a series of ten galleries. Highlights of the Museum will include: • Drawings Disney made in his youth • Drawings and cartoons from Laugh-O-Gram Films, Disney’s first company • The earliest known drawings of Mickey Mouse • Storyboards, a Disney innovation that map out timeless film classics • The technically innovative multiplane camera that brought vibrancy and depth to his revolutionary feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs • The unique Snow White Academy Award®, which includes a full-size Oscar® and seven miniature castings • The narrow-gauge Lilly Belle train Disney built for his Hollywood home, which recalled his youth and helped spur his vision for Disneyland • A 12-foot diameter model of the Disneyland of Walt’s imagination Throughout the exhibits, visitors will find rare film clips, concept art, scripts, musical scores, and cameras that Disney and his staff used in creating his characters and films. The Museum’s visually exciting design incorporates drawings that come to life. This includes scenes from animated shorts and movies, over 200 monitors, and audio clips of Disney, his family and his colleagues narrating pivotal and entertaining moments in Disney’s life and career. Visitors will also see hundreds of individual animation cels that reveal the labor-intensive animation process. The exhibits will also pay tribute to Disney’s many groundbreaking achievements and innovations, among them: • The first film that successfully synchronized sound and animation • The first movie soundtrack released as a consumer recording • The first original song from a cartoon to become a national hit (“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”) • One of the first nature documentaries and the first to receive an Academy Award® Disney and his family will be represented, as well, in photographs, artifacts, and home movies. Although famous for his work behind the camera for Walt Disney Productions, Disney was an avid home moviemaker throughout his life. The Walt Disney Family Museum will exhibit to the public for the first time clips that range from experiments with trick shots (unspilling a glass of milk) to reels that documented Disney’s life at home with his wife, Lilly; his daughters, Diane and Sharon; his brother and business partner, Roy; and his brother’s wife, Edna Francis.
