Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at the Wallace Collection

By Erin Hamer

Presented in collaboration with New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wallace Collection’s latest exhibition is the perfect day out for Disney fans, art lovers and enthusiasts of the eighteenth century alike.
 
Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts draws links between eighteenth-century French paintings, furniture, and ornaments (for instance Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 masterpiece The Swing), and sketches drawn for twentieth-century American animated films, namely Cinderella (1950) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). The exhibition demonstrates that despite the seeming modernity of Disney’s animations, these adaptations nevertheless consciously pay homage to the rococo era in which the original French stories were written. The incredible amount of consideration of French art and culture put into these productions is evident, displayed by the ornate detailing of the architecture, furniture, and costuming featured in the films. 

For any budding animators, artists, or those interested in the complex process involved in developing ideas from pencil sketches into classic Disney films, the exhibition presents the original sketches of well-loved anthropomorphic characters such as Beauty and the Beast’s Mrs Potts and Lumière, complete with artists’ notes to the animators, regarding their movements and different emotions. One wall of the collection is devoted to twenty-four sketches contributing to just one second of animation: the transformation of Cinderella after the iconic ‘bibbidi-bobbidi-boo’ scene.

​I would recommend this exhibition to anybody in London this summer, and beautiful prints designed specially for the exhibition are available in the gift shop (as well as many more items!).

Tickets are £10 for students, and each comes with a free audio guide featuring contributions from people in the industry. Visit the exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London from 6 April 2022 to 16 October 2022.