The Nine Disney Animated Masterpieces
Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty
Would audiences hold still to watch eighty minutes of drawings on a screen? Nobody knew.[1] Rumor has it that among Hollywood big-wigs and movie critics Walt’s ground-breaking new project became known as “Disney’s Folly”. If this derogative was indeed bruited...
This period was the high point of Walt’s involvement with animation. He was healthy, eager, endlessly creative and completely consumed. This was far more than a job. He lived these pictures every minute of the day, thinking deeply into every...
After the decade-long hiatus in feature-length animation during World War II and its aftermath the three films that kicked off the ’Fifties – Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan – capitalized on technologies already in use previously but with...
Next in 1937 Disney evolved the feature-length animated movie during which audiences could explore and savor for nearly an hour-and-a-half a completely fabricated environment as background for an elaborate story: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A significant part of...
Over the course of his career Walt avidly pursued technologies that would enable him to invite his audiences ever more immersively into his revised realities – whatever fantastic realms his imagination conjured. Disney’s drive for technical perfection, one of the...
Well before his exploitation as that nine-year-old newspaper delivery boy in Kansas City Walt Disney’s revision of reality began during his earliest childhood when his family worked a farm in Marceline, Missouri. All those barnyard animals with whom Disney became...
Hours yet until dawn the day after Christmas, 1910, The Kansas City Times must be delivered to seven hundred subscribers before their breakfasts. Your part of the burden slung over your shoulder you trudge away into the blizzard foundering through...
With this new emphasis on exploring and clearly defining personality in animated characters a more primitive “language” of cartooning gradually gave way to greater expressiveness in the drawing. Originally, character animators had done all of the effects in their own...
In addition to three-dimensionality, over their first decade working in the Disney Studio key animators gradually discovered more vital capabilities: how to make drawings that even individually convey a feeling of life, how to make these drawings appear to be...
Remarked Disney animator extraordinaire Marc Davis (1913-2000): Animation is an anachronism. It is that rarity – a handmade product in a mechanized age.[1] “Hand-made” yes, but intricately dependent on machinery! Because animated films share with other cinema the technology of...
