Picking up where we left off with Part I of this series:
Which was 1923. Walt Disney’s first animation company, Laugh-O-Grams, has gone
bankrupt. With $40 in his pocket, Walt boards a Santa Fe train headed for …
Photo by Brad Aldridge... HOLLYWOOD!
The Walt Disney Family Museum places you in Walt’s steps:
from the dismal “Laugh-O-Gram” area you board an elevator decorated like a
stately 1920s train club-car, with wood paneling and a window that looks onto
the vast prairie Walt would have seen traveling from Kansas City to Los
Angeles. As your elevator-car takes you
one floor up, Walt’s voice pipes in saying, “I think it's important to have a
good hard failure when you're young.”
The wood paneled elevator doors open and, just as Walt
Disney himself may have felt, you are greeted by a bright room. The letters
HOLLYWOODLAND -- as they would have appeared in 1923 -- greet you with a roar that
entices you to step forward. The letters themselves are actually screens,
establishing Los Angeles in the 1920s.
Much like the Hollywood and animation at the time, this room
evokes a unique sense of possibility. It’s just a start, though, as the next
gallery presents the success Walt Disney had throughout the mid to late 1920s.
I
Photo by Brad Aldridge
A large room expands on early successes: Oswald the Lucky
Rabbit and Mickey Mouse. The room is has an entire wall filled with hundreds of
drawings from Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon with sound. Visitors are invited to play along with Mickey’s second cinematic appearance using faux instruments, this activity
helps demonstrate the difficulty of getting sounds and picture to combine
naturally. Good for the whole family, this small element helps to corrects one
of the museum’s shortcomings: what to do with kids.
Until this point there aren’t any features that young
children can participate in or enjoy—everything is very text heavy. As you move
forward there are a few times where you can move things around or touch
objects, but nothing as interactive and kid-friendly as the Steamboat Willie music maker.
Photo by Brad Aldridge
The gallery begins to reveal Walt Disney’s personal life
alongside his Hollywood successes by adding little nooks of family photos. The
joy is often contrasted with frustration: Walt’s loss of the character Oswald
the Lucky Rabbit is juxtaposed with his marriage. As we walk into the next even
larger room, filled with displays that demonstrate improvements in the
technology of animation and story, small cabinets display Walt the “family
man” -- building a house, the birth of his daughter, Diane, and the adoption of
his second daughter, Sharon.
These small poignant displays are in contrast to the huge monitors and cases filled with art from The Old Mill or film clips of Walt Disney describing the leap to feature film
animation in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. These galleries are where a real animation-geek will obsess over the advancement of animation, primarily by the Disney Studio. The techniques
are carefully explained, often with actual materials or equipment such as the
bottles of pigment for Disney’s Technicolor shorts (which Walt Disney had
exclusive use of for a few years) and an actual multiplane camera. This huge
device creates the illusion of depth in two-dimensional animation by layering
elements of a scene, such as a tree or a bush, in separate levels from other
elements in that scene. This process replicates our natural vision with objects
in the foreground appearing more detailed than those in the background.
Photo by Brad Aldridge
The gallery seems to speed up, mimicking the period of the
1930s and 40s for Walt Disney and his studio in a manner similar to the slower
“feeling” of the earlier rooms and the time period they reflect. Pieces become
closer together and everything seems to be building to something bigger and
better. More movies, a studio in Burbank, a trip to South America. What could
stop Walt now?
Photo by Brad Aldridge
War. And a strike. An often neglected time period in Disney
history, the museum respectfully (and neutrally) offers film and protest-signs
from the 1941 Disney animators strike. Footage from outside the gates of the
recently constructed Burbank studio play alongside tape of Walt Disney offering
not anger, but disappointment. The animator’s strike is a turning point for
Disney’s interest in animated movies and the museum depicts this perfectly.
Many argue that Walt felt betrayed by his “boys” and lost some of his interest
in animation after the strike.
Photo by Brad Aldridge
After the strike, World War II turned the Disney studio into a machine of military training films and animated propaganda pictures. This is about the last we hear of animation at the museum. There is little more about animation seen in the museum after this period.
The next few galleries are transitional: a small, dark room has multimedia displays that are controlled by touching a Star Trek-like table-top display. You can choose from Disney Legend talking heads or flip through film clips.
Photo by Brad Aldridge
Upon exiting this room, the museum contrasts the space with a well lit area that returns the focus to Walt the family man—funny home movies and photos of some family trips greet us. Some hyper-detailed treasures are offered as well: Walt’s lawn-bowling bag, and some of his favorite food (Jello and Chili).
Photo by Brad Aldridge
The hallway gently slopes and opens onto a huge, spectacular view of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
There’s more just around the corner: the 1950s and 60s.
Brad Aldridge is an artist and designer who lives in the San Francisco
Bay Area. He's
also an amateur Disneyland & Walt Disney historian, and runs
JustDisney.com. His tour of the Walt Disney Family Museum will conclude
with Part III of this series. Which will be posted on JHM next Wednesday.
Subscribe in a reader (RSS)