Close to 500 pieces of art will be on show at ACMI’s winter masterpieces exhibition Disney: The Magic of Animation when it opens in May. But that still leaves approximately 64,999,500 others in the climate-controlled vault in southern California where these archived drawings, paintings and concept sketches are treated with all the reverence of Old Masters canvases.
“The hardest part, quite frankly, is choosing the pieces because we have so much art to choose from,” says Mary Walsh, managing director of the Walt Disney Animation Research Library. As one of the three curators responsible for selecting which works made the cut, she says “we really had to keep each other honest, because we each had our favourites, but we had to ask if a piece we loved really helped tell the story.”
Mary Walsh, managing director of the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, and some of the studio’s precious artworks.
The works selected span Mickey Mouse’s first appearances in the shorts Steamboat Willy and Plane Crazy in 1928 to the company’s latest feature, the just-released Raya and the Last Dragon. All up, about 40 films, including shorts, are represented, with everything from concept sketches to finished sequences.
“We want people to step back and look at what it takes to make an animated film, in addition to appreciating the artistry in it,” Walsh says.
That tallies perfectly with ACMI’s ambition too.
“Our audience is really fascinated with how things are made,” says CEO Katrina Sedgwick. “We’re really interested in that conversation between the past and the present, between analogue and digital, and revealing how things are made, and this exhibition does all of those things.”
The museum has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Disney, having previously staged exhibitions of Pixar, Tim Burton, and Alice in Wonderland (not exclusively a Disney property, of course, but with a significant flavouring). This latest show will focus on the work of Walt Disney Animation Studios, the foundation arm of the company, though one that has in recent decades been eclipsed by its flashier offshoots and acquisitions, Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilm. But with the likes of Moana, Frozen, Wreck It Ralph and now Raya over the past decade or so, it has shown there’s plenty of life in those old cels yet.
Early images of Mickey Mouse, who made his screen debut in 1928.Credit:Disney
But exactly how many cels (the industry term for those transparent plastic sheets on which hand-drawn animation was traditionally produced)? According to Walsh, an awful lot.
One second of film consists of 24 frames, and each of those frames could have multiple characters – each of which demands its own design, concept sketches, rough and finished artwork – plus backgrounds and effects. All up, she says, “in a single second you’re talking thousands and thousands of images”.
Not all of them have been kept – some were given away, some sold, some souvenired by the artists who made them – but most were. “Walt Disney understood, because he was an artist first, the value of it from an inspiration and education and reference point of view,” says Walsh.
Of course, he was a producer too, “and in the early days some of the gag drawings would be reused for characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, so there was also a viable business purpose for it. So Walt Disney kept almost everything.”
She’s not kidding: as well as those 65 million pieces of paper, canvas and celluloid, there’s a tonne of digital imagery too, “close to five petabytes” (a petabyte is 1024 terabytes, or about one million gigabytes). And every piece of it is considered precious – so much so that took two years of negotiations for ACMI to land this exhibition.
Typically, the works are for internal use only, for artists seeking reference points or inspiration, or for a commercial division considering a merchandising or live iteration of a character. But Walsh thinks there’s one other purpose that makes taking it to a wider audience invaluable.
Raya and the Last Dragon is the studio’s most recent offfering.Credit:
“If there’s a kid who comes through the show who’s really good at drawing and doesn’t know if they can make a life out of it [we want them to see] there is a living to be made in commercial art,” she says. “It could be in animation, it could be in gaming, it could be in live-action filmmaking, it could be in graphic arts, illustration, marketing.
“If that sparks that interest for a young person who has an artistic bent but doesn’t know how they can take it into the world, then I think we’ve done our job.”
Disney: The Magic of Animation is at ACMI, Federation Square, Melbourne from May 13 to October 17. Details: acmi.net.au
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