• U.S.

Art: Mickey Mouse on Parade

2 minute read
TIME

Walt Disney has never considered himself an artist. Nevertheless, ever since Disney invented a good mouse opera, the high-brow art world has beaten a path to his door. Manhattan’s Metropolitan and Modern Art Museums have hung stills of the Big Bad Wolf and of Snow White’s vultures.

The fault of most exhibitions of Disney art is that they leave out its most striking feature: animation. For, considered simply as drawings and paintings, most Disney stills rate only a notch higher than Christmas cards. Last month one U. S. gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum, put on an exhibition that did Disney justice. Los Angeles Museum’s enterprising director, Roland J. McKinney, concentrated on showing the public how the technique of animation developed, step by step, from the flip-books and shooting-gallery slot, machines of the late 1890s to Fantasia.

The main exhibition rooms housed: 1) a Disney animator at work, tracing the successive movements of animal arms and legs on an animation desk; 2) a model of the inside of a multiplane camera, showing how backgrounds and characters are photographed together from superimposed drawings on celluloid; 3) stage sets and sculptural models of Disney characters used by Disney draughtsmen as models for their drawings; 4) music from Fantasia, played softly on a public-address system through the museum’s ventilating ducts; 5) (most popular) a 4-by-5 screen on which visitors, seated on wooden benches, could see a soundless 15-minute reel of excerpts from everything from Steamboat Willie to Pinocchio.

Last week, by the time Director McKinney got ready to move his show on to Minneapolis, 27,380 people had gone to see it, and polls had shown that a majority of visiting moppets liked Jiminy Cricket best of all Disney characters. Captious critics, looking at the Disney show as art, could still complain that Disney is more successful with mice, ducks, dwarfs and hobgoblins than with human characters. But they had to admit that in his first 17 years Disney had never stood still or done the same thing twice. Today, with world-famed composers and artists clamoring to work at its Burbank studio, Walt Disney Productions, Ltd. is revolutionizing art faster than all the longhairs of Greenwich Village.

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