TOWARD THE ULTIMATE IMMERSION
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 newly-refined animation techniques that enhanced its capacity for conveying information. These were fringe benefits of the studios’ wartime commissions from the federal government (among others) to animate training shorts educating military personnel in such diverting technicalities as how to pop-rivet fighter planes.
Disney’s next two features however expanded the size of the onscreen picture in a further attempt to immerse spectators by wrapping it more around them and encompassing their peripheral vision. Lady and the Tramp was filmed in the new Cinemascope format. Its much wider background paintings depict wonderfully lush turn-of-the-century middle-American landscapes, architecture and interiors. The artist Eyvind Earle’s (1916-2000) sophisticated stylizations made their preliminary appearance in this film’s scenery, especially evident in vivid patterns of floortile, carpeting and tree bark.
Still not content even with Cinemascope’s widescreen immersive properties Walt filmed his next feature in what he called “Technirama 70”, that is, a format in which each frame of the film is 70mm wide.
During the ’Fifties, few cameras nor projectors yet existed that could accommodate this bold concept. “Cinerama” had attempted to project deep widescreen by running three synchronous 35mm projectors simultaneously. This method debuted in This is Cinerama (1952), a “roadshow” documentary presentation. A number of blockbuster features in this format followed. I saw Windjammer (1956), a documentary about apprentice sailors voyaging across the Atlantic from Scandinavia to Boston. Though the one-hundred-by-forty-foot screen was impressively wraparound the three independent 35mm images never quite plausibly stitched together into one seamless picture. This technology was soon abandoned but not so its concept. In 1953 CinemaScope debuted publicly in The Robe and came along just in time for Disney’s Lady and the Tramp. Afterward producer/director Mike Todd (1909-1958) continued experimentation with the idea, creating what he called “Todd-AO” for the initial release of his single cinematic accomplishment the great epic film Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) based on the 1872 Jules Verne (1828-1905) novel.
“Todd-AO achieves a new peak in high-fidelity sound, color photography and feeling of audience participation… the best process to come along.”[1]
Though Todd-AO provided the format for several blockbuster films including 1958’s South Pacific and 1963’s Cleopatra it yielded eventually to further advanced technology.
But Walt had noted this trend and worked out his own method: each frame of his new animated feature was photographed sideways across two sprockets of standard 35mm film and then projected through a lens that turned the picture back horizontal. The result was an enormous screen filled with the lavish uniquely-styled backgrounds especially designed and rendered by artist Eyvind Earle for this feature The Sleeping Beauty. In fact Disney put Earle indisputably in charge of the look of the whole film and challenged him to give it the appropriate elegance of Medieval tapestry. Borrowing most of its musical score from the melodious full-length ballet by Russian romantic composer Piotr Illych Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) recorded in six-track stereo the result is an incredibly beautiful visual and as well as aural wonder. This is Disney’s self-avowed masterpiece.
70mm technology continued to develop sporadically thereafter. Then in 1977 George Lucas produced the first of his Star Wars saga in 70mm. After that, the format became increasingly standard in the industry.
But by the time The Sleeping Beauty was released (1959) Walt’s attention had been completely diverted to the ultimate realization of audience immersion, his theme park Disneyland. Here the public would be not merely watching but rather actually navigating through the phantasm.
On July 17, 1955, Walt unveiled a radically innovative form of three-dimensional art. Some people called it a “theme park”, but it was actually a full-immersion multimedia experience combining motion, light, color, texture, sound, music, taste, smell, story, adventure, thrills, nostalgia, futurism, fact, fantasy and audience participation. It was, at that time, the world’s largest art object, for it covered 160 acres of California real estate.[2]
With a special team of “imagineers” Walt designed the premises according to his best storytelling instincts so that patrons walking or riding through them would experience a cohesive but not necessarily strict sequence of events. Guiding them subliminally were what he referred to as “weiners”. For example in order to draw them down Mainstreet toward the center of the park where it branched off in four directions (the various “lands”) Sleeping Beauty Castle rose majestically and seductively ahead in the distance. Even so Walt was disturbed at the intrusion upon his realm by commercial structures that arose surrounding it compromising its intramural integrity while capitalizing on its commercial success.
Not so with his next venture. In Florida Walt made sure that the property was large enough to banish the mundane outer world totally out of sight. Disneyworld’s real estate is twice the size of Manhattan Island! At the time Walt died he was engaged in applying this total immersion in a pleasantly revised reality even to city planning, what he called an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow or for short EPCOT.
In this way, Disney’s artistic career paralleled on an extravagant scale that of the great French Impressionist Claude Monet whose artistic labors at first produced relatively small paintings. Later at L’Orangerie he created enormous canvases depicting his iconic lilies and arranged these edge-to-edge in a wide circle entirely surrounding and immersing viewers. Finally toward the end of his career Monet planted his fabulous gardens at Giverny, living canvases where visitors actually strolled through landscapes abounding in glorious colors and across Japanese bridges that spanned his lily-scattered ponds.
[1] Williams, Dick: The Los Angeles Mirror-News, November 19, 1955.
[2] Williams, Pat, and Denny, Jim: op. cit., p. 368.
