Huey, Dewey, and Louis XV
Fig. 1. Covered vase in the form of a tower, Sèvres manufactory, French, c. 1762. Soft-paste porcelain with overglaze pink and blue ground colors, polychrome enamel decoration, and gilding; height 20 ½, diameter 9 inches. Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California, Arabella D. Huntington Memorial Art Collection; photograph courtesy of the Huntington. It might seem odd, even profane, to encounter the works of Walt Disney in that temple of high culture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet, Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts persuasively argues that the linkage is stronger than one might suppose. As early as 1938, some of the animator’s storyboards had entered the Met’s collection, and four years later the augustly highminded Museum of Modern Art devoted an entire exhibition to Bambi. Fig. 2. Concept art for La Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant, Disneyland Paris by Frank Armitage (1924–2016), 1988. Gouache and acrylic on board, 21 by 45 inches. Walt Disney Imagineering Collection, © Disney. Except as noted, photographs courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In mounting this illuminating show, Wolf Burchard, the curator, has posed (and answered) an inspired question. Despite more recent attempts to expand Disney’s cultural reach (for example, Moana, from every animation frame to issue from the Disney studios seems to be populated with artifacts of the European past, from Gothic castles and Renaissance palaces to rococo interiors and attire? In the animistic worldview that has always reigned at Disney, everything that exists is in movement and so is part of the same cosmic dance, whether teapots and candelabras, or sofas and long-case clocks, not to mention squirrels and hummingbirds. Architecture, either drawn on celluloid or reified in theme parks, is as apt to invoke the Chambord Palace of François I