Of mice, men and movie magic

This time pioneering animator Walt Disney is in the spotlight, along with a gallery of painters, sculptors, animators and other artists whose work fuelled the vision that led to the creation of some of modern culture’s most endearing tales and characters.

With this week’s opening of Once Upon a Time Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios, the MMFA is hosting the only North American appearance of this unique exhibition, curated by Bruno Givreau.

Those expecting a celebration of Disney films will certainly not be disappointed, for the focus remains fixed on the feature films released by the studio during Disney’s lifetime, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through The Jungle Book. But this is no superficial celebration of Mickey Mouse and his friends. Instead, as the title suggests, the emphasis is on inspiration, and many of the exhibits were produced long before Disney himself was born. Others came about as a direct response to Disney’s work, while many more were created in preparation for the films themselves.

Viewers may not come away with a profound sense of the man himself, but the creative aspect of Disney’s career is emphasized throughout. The exhibition shows him as an artist keen to remain on the cutting edge. He was, after all, working in a medium strictly controlled by the all-powerful Hays Office, yet he continually pushed conventional boundaries while carefully retaining his core audience—children. Some of the concepts and images he created may have been downright disturbing for younger viewers—death, brutality, racism and imprisonment are all common themes in his films—but he rarely failed to win over his audiences with simple enchantment.

Disney’s early full-length feature period was clearly influenced by 18th- and 19th-century European art and architecture. From Beatrix Potter’s whimsical, very Victorian renderings of mice and rabbits, which inspired secondary characters in Cinderella and Bambi, respectively, to the darker imagery of Honoré Daumier’s caricatures and German Expressionist art and cinema, Disney and his staff sought inspiration from a wide array of sources. Original works depicting the castles, villages and landscapes in which many of the films were set are included in the show, as well as the many models, drawings and backgrounds based on them.

Not surprisingly, Fantasia—that groundbreaking epic of creative animation that puzzled as many viewers as it awed when first released back in 1940—is given a prominent place in the exhibition. The multi-faceted character of that film and its diverse array of influences sums up the spirit of this exhibition more than any other Disney work.

Salvador Dali’s repeated efforts to break into mainstream cinema have been well-documented, from his successful collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound to his never-realized attempts to work with the Marx Brothers. But the little-known collaboration between the Surrealist and Disney in the mid-1940s is brought to light in this exhibition with a series of paintings and drawings Dali created for Destino, a proposed short film that would blend live action and animation. Although the original Destino was shelved (it was finally reassembled and completed in 2003), Dali’s work was carefully preserved. Originally intended as production backgrounds, storyboard drawings and character sketches, the surviving material is quintessential Dali, full of such characteristic images of eyeballs, classical architecture and objects supported by long stilts.

By the time of Walt Disney’s death in 1966, he had created a unique gallery of characters who had become permanently embedded in an increasingly media-driven culture. Images of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were especially familiar, making them natural subjects for Pop artists who sought not only to comment on mass consumerism and the entertainment machine but later used their gentle images to create ironic counterparts to the carnage in Vietnam.

Andy Warhol venerated Mickey Mouse much the same way he did Marilyn Monroe and the Mona Lisa, with one of his trademark four-panel silkscreen portraits, while Roy Lichtenstein naturally gravitated toward the characters for use in his large, comic-strip dot paintings. Add to this works of Claes Oldenburg, Peter Saul and Robert Combas and the exhibition completes a full cycle—from the earliest influences on Walt Disney’s creative output to the modern pieces that comment directly on his profound influence on contemporary culture.

As it does with most major exhibitions, the MMFA has organized a series of free lectures to augment the exhibition. Ersy Contogouris speaks on the topic ‘L’illustration du XIXe siècle: au sources de Disney’ on March 14; Oksana Dykyj speaks on ‘Mickey in Hollywoodland: Influences and Context’ on March 28; and Philip Szporer speaks on ‘The Disney Dances: Of Mousetros and Hippos’ on April 4. All lectures begin at 6 p.m. in the Maxwell Cummings Auditorium, 1379 Sherbrooke St. W.



Once Upon a Time Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios / Il était une fois Walt Disney : Aux sources de l’art des studios Disney remains at the Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavilion of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St. W., through June 24. Info: 514-285-2000.