Disney, Cinderella and The Swing

Mickey Mouse and rococo frippery -- it's not an obvious connection. But a visit to Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at the Wallace Collection in London shows just how much the classic cartoon films produced by the pioneer of movie animation were influenced by the art and design of 18th-century France. 

Disney first went to France just after the end of World War I, as a Red Cross ambulance driver. Back in the US, he and his brother Roy founded their studio in 1923, and in 1935 the Disneys returned to France during a grand tour. A home movie early in this exhibition records the Disney family as tourists in Paris and Versailles, soaking up the architecture, and the decor. As a holiday memento, Walt took back to California more than 300 illustrated books to form the nucleus of a research library that's provided source material for Disney movies ever since. 

The Wallace presents a selection of those films -- and a lot of preparatory artwork -- alongside furniture, clocks and porcelain of the type that made such an impact on Disney. 

We perhaps think of animated films today as being largely computer-generated, but in the golden age of Hollywood, those cartoons were painstakingly handmade; images were drawn or painted on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and turned into film, each single frame containing a slight alteration to make the image move convincingly. You needed 24 consecutive pictures of Cinderella's rags being gradually and magically changed into a ball gown to create just one second of Cinderella the movie.

So you can appreciate that the men and women who made these films -- the animators, the designers, the people behind the concepts -- were, above all, artists. And like any artist, they were inspired by the art that had gone before them. 

One of the films highlighted in this show is Beauty and the Beast, based on an 18th-century French fairy tale. The Beast is a prince who has been transformed by an enchantress, who also changed his servants into household objects. 

How to animate those inanimate objects? Here's one example of an early proposal to base the character of the Beast's majordomo, Cogsworth, on a rococo grandfather clock.

The artist, Peter J. Hall, created a loose interpretation of real clocks made in Paris at the start of the 18th century. The proportions of the clock mirror those of the human body, and the clock face stands in for the human face. But some of the Rococo embellishments are omitted to simplify the figure for the necessary copying and repetition of the animation. 

Nearby, you can see an example from the Wallace's own collection of the sort of opulent timepiece that inspired Hall, with its ebony and metal marquetry. It's also a case of animating an inanimate object, with, for example, the statuettes around the face that represent the four continents known at the time and the highly worked paws that raise the case off its pedestal.  

When it actually came to the movie, Cogsworth became a mantel clock. But that's the way with Disney movies; ideas are developed, redeveloped, laid aside.... and then possibly used again in a completely different film. 

The timepiece and other interior decor that one sees in the Wallace must have provided a template for the Disney artists. Those working on Beauty and the Beast were only 15 minutes walk away from the Wallace at a studio in Goodge St and visited the collection. In fact, the original idea for the opening sequence was based on one of the Wallace's two most famous works, and indeed one of the most memorable of all rococo paintings, Fragonard's The Swing.

It's such an exuberant painting, such a riot of pink, such froth and froufrou, so romantic; you can see why it would appeal, even if the actual subject matter is rather unsuitable for a family audience ("Mummy, why's that man looking up the lady's skirt?"). 

On the wall next to the Fragonard original are the storyboards the team created; in the end the idea was dropped for Beauty and the Beast, but they finally ended up featuring The Swing in Frozen two decades later.

Beauty and the Beast is not all rococo fantasy, even if the big ballroom scene draws inspiration from Versailles' Hall of Mirrors. On the audioguide, animator Glen Keane explains how, when faced with the difficulty of portraying the transformation of the Beast back into human form, he left his drawing board and went to see a cast of Auguste Rodin's The Burghers of Calais. Keane describes animation as "sculptural drawing". 

This show is really quite an engrossing tour through an unexpected avenue of artistic inspiration, as well as uncovering, for those of us who've never really thought about it, the attention to detail and sheer hard work that goes into producing animated films. 

The Disney studio's early development of ideas can be seen in the short films it produced in the 1930s called Silly Symphonies. Inanimate objects, including clocks and crockery, become animated, and in two of the cartoons, The Clock Store and The China Shop, rococo porcelain figures come to life and dance. 

Like the early cartoons in the cinema, European porcelain in the 18th century was a brand-new technology, offering previously undreamt-of forms of artistic expression. 

Of course, the more frills in the costumes, the more labour-intensive the drawing, and the harder it was to copy umpteen times, so fashions tended to be rendered rather more simply in animation than you might expect -- there's too much "pencil mileage" in 18th-century dress, it seems. Still, In Cinderella, the transformation of the heroine's rags into a sparkling ballgown still required the use of thousands of individually drawn sparkles, all for a brief moment of animation that was, according to tradition, Walt Disney's favourite scene. Here are those 24 drawings making up one second of film, displayed together on a wall at the Wallace:

And below, just a single frame.

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

It is perhaps the porcelain on display in this show that feels most Disney. What about these Sèvres vases? Castles in the air, with their turrets and parapets and cannon; they truly are magical architecture of the imagination. 

And this is just the green pair! There's also a similar couple of pink vases, suitably shipped over from California, which seem even more fantastical. 

And, for an inspiration for the elephant dance in Fantasia, look no further than this twirly, swirly elephant-head vase, again from Sèvres. 

So, to make your dreams come true this year, head to the Wallace Collection. You may not emerge as a handsome prince or a beautiful princess, but if you get in the swing of this show, we think you'll have a good time. 

Practicalities

Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts is on at the Wallace Collection in London until October 16. The gallery is open daily from 1000 to 1700. Full-price tickets to the exhibition are £14, or £16 including a Gift Aid donation, and you can buy them online here. Allow up to two hours to take in this absorbing show. The Wallace is on Manchester Square, a few minutes' walk north of Selfridges on Oxford St. Bond St is the closest Tube station, but Oxford Circus and Baker St are also within walking distance.

Images

Peter J. Hall, Beauty and the Beast concept art, 1991. © Disney
Four Continents clock, case attributed to André-Charles Boulle, movement by Louis Mynuel, c. 1720-25. © The Wallace Collection
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette (The Swing), c. 1767-68. © The Wallace Collection

Two dancers, Höchst Porcelain Manufactory, c. 1758, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cinderella transformation images displayed at Wallace Collection

Marc Davis, Cinderella clean-up animation drawing, 1950. © Disney
Pair of tower vases, Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, c. 1762, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Vase à tête d'éléphant (detail), Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, 1757. © The Wallace Collection