Design Federation

As Munich nurses its hangover and counts the Oktoberfest tourist dollars earned in the last month, the artistic community in the city carries on with a fascinating, postmodern exhibition showing Walt Disney’s European inspirations.

By now it’s not really a new topic with Walt Disney being the subject of books (Dorothy Clark’s Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney for example) and documentaries that are in much the same vein, but the curators of Germany’s Exhibition Gallery of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich were right to decide the theme has not yet been exhausted. Showing until January 25th 2009, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World and its Roots in European Art is a visually compelling multimedia showcase drawing on archives from the early period of Walt Disney Studio (between 1928 and 1967) when Walt Disney was still building his empire and mass commercialization of Mickey Mouse was still a vague dream.

The exhibition presents boldly juxtaposed original studio artwork, puppets, film stills and movie clips with famous European pieces to illuminate the influence visually apparent in famous Disney works. The paintings and sculptures by German Romantics, French Symbolists, Victorians and Surrealists with their range of subtle echoes through to clear, even comical, appropriations in the crayoned storyboards and sketches form the basis to the surprising relationship between ‘High Art’ and ‘Pop Art’ displayed. This is the magic of the exhibition making it at once obvious and brilliant. All the time posing the question, was Disney not a modernist in his own right?

Throughout the 1930’s Disney hired many artists who were European émigrés such as the Swiss Albert Hurter, the Swede Gustaf Tenggren and the Dane Kay Nielsen who had had formally trained in various art colleges in their home countries and leant their cultural heritage to the images they created , giving life to the master’s stories. Disney himself travelled to Europe in 1935, bringing back with him over 350 books on art history, folk tales and classic stories including Brothers Grimm and Perrault which formed the library for his animation studio and a source of inspiration to his draughtsman.

The exhibition first showed in 2006 in Paris as Il Etait une Fois Walt Disney, aux Sources de L’art des Studios Disney at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais and then in Montreal in 2007. It attracted international media attention for showing such a low-brow collection in a city whose intellectual elite decried Paris Disneyland a ‘cultural Chernobyl’ in the 1990s. Bruno Giveau, the curator of the Grand Palais, stated in the program “It is my conviction that Walt Disney should be considered among the most important figures in the cinema - and more broadly in the art - of the 20th century.”

Adapted for Munich, it is an interesting city of choice given that Hitler called Munich the ‘heartland of the Nazi movement’ and the anti-Semite claims that have hounded Walt Disney’s legacy in recent years. The stirring rumours came to a head in 1994 when Marc Elliot published his notorious biography on Walt Disney, Hollywood’s Dark Prince, which claimed that Disney was a lifelong anti-Semite with Nazi sympathies and right wing political views as evidenced by a from a cartoon created in 1933 in which has the Big Bad Wolf disguised in the garb of a Jewish Peddler. The scene was deleted after an outcry from Jewish groups at the time. While clearly this is a feather-light accusation, the concept of America’s family entertainment grandfather being somehow corrupt is an idea that pervades modern interest.

But this isn’t the only reason Munich seems an apt choice, the Grimm fairytales which originated in Germany were profoundly important to Disney’s storytelling, but it is the powerful visual presence of the country in so many of the cartoons. While Pinocchio is an Italian folk story, the Disney version replanted him in a village modeled on the medieval town, Rothenberg in Bavaria. Likewise, they had Sleeping Beauty snoring in the artist’s version of Neuschwanstein (the fairytale castle of mad King Ludwig II) a popular German tourist attraction. The exhibition also demonstrates the influence of German expressionist cinema on Disney’s work, specifically Fantasia, linking images to F. W. Murnau’s dark, Faust and Paul Leni’s Wachsfigurenkabinett.

The show will go on to Helsinki for its final presentation in February next year with its carpet bag of tricks including Destino, the collaboration in 1946 of Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. Never realized in either man’s lifetimes it was pulled together in 2003 by son, Roy Disney and the six minute film is exhibited here as a curiosity that seems to validate the hopes of the gallery to establish Disney as a credible artist. And why not? Kids study The Simpsons for the HSC these days and as Charles Derwent of The Independent wrote, “Disney may have beaten them all to post modernism by marrying Richard Dadd to Jean Harlow in Pinocchio’s Blue Fairy, or in magicking Snow White’s Wicked Queen out of a Gothic statue in Naumburg Cathedral and the cheekbones of Joan Crawford. “

Though he never considered himself an artist, with enough books, a band of classically trained artists and a vision of grandeur perhaps Walt was tipping his hat to the European greats and saying, you see it’s true, someone like me, can learn to be like someone like you.

Article By Estelle Pigott

Tags: Mickey Goes PoMo, Miss Pigelle