Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty
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...
Walt Disney’s thorough undivided and detailed attention to any particular project – what is today called “micromanagement” – seems to have been the determining factor in that project’s artistic quality. Some would assert that Walt’s influence was limited mainly to...
Although Disney’s creations share with other forms of cinema the telling of stories, the big difference is that originally everything on the screen was drawn or painted by hand, a fact which aligns them more closely with pictorial fine art....
So what exactly is it that qualifies any particular work of art as a “masterpiece”? The dictionary definition is simply “a supreme intellectual or artistic achievement.” Check! But I like art collector Dar Reedy’s broader take on this question: …a...
Walter Elias Disney died December 15, 1966, just 10 days after his 65th birthday. During his lifetime he directed the creation of thirteen full-length animated films nine of which are masterpieces unequaled in that art form: Snow White and the...
