Walt’s world

>> The MMFA takes a magical trip down
the D-hole with Once upon a Time Walt Disney

STRINGS ATTACHED: Pinocchio

The original Adventures of Pinocchio, written in the 1880s by Italian author Carlo Collodi, tells story of an impulsive, amoral and violent marionette who torments his maker and kills his cricket conscience with a wooden mallet. But it’s the Disney version: cute, clean, fun for the whole family, that we all know. The one where the cricket sings and dances in coattails and a top hat right through to the happy ending.

Disney has long been criticized for watering down and glazing over stories with a cheery veneer. That’s one reason why some people have been raising their brows at Once upon a Time Walt Disney, which has moved in to the main exhibition space at the, ahem, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. But go ahead and tell that to all the kids parked in strollers in front of big screens, watching Snow White run in panic through a forest full of evil trees. It’s pretty near impossible to deny the imagination, artistic scope and cultural influence of the empire.

The show focuses on the genesis of the animated classics, from the 1930s up to The Jungle Book, which was released in 1967, just after Walt Disney died. Walt, who had already successfully introduced the world to Mickey Mouse, took a trip to Europe with his brother in the mid-’30s and returned to Los Angeles with a wealth of work, which would influence everything from the plots to the characters to the sets of the productions to follow.

Disney is portrayed not as an artist (he stopped drawing in the ’20s), but the architect behind a huge team of illustrators, set designers, scriptwriters, layout artists, opaquers and others who behind the movies we all grew up on. The exhibition brings a few of these key artists out of the shadows with profiles and works. Walt himself isn’t expanded on much, except for cursory mentions of the “often intense” relationships he had with his team and the vehement anti-communist stance he took on during the McCarthy era.

We do learn, though, that the Witch-Queen in Snow White is modelled on Lady Macbeth, the Big Bad Wolf, Joan Crawford and a column statue at the Gothic Cathedral in Namburg, Germany. We see how Victorian fairies influenced the Nutcracker suite, the illustrations behind Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole and Disney’s unlikely collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Then again, it’s just as easy to forget all this stuff and get lost in the fantastic world of a set painting.

Most interesting though, is the big picture, the glimpse at how Disney took European stories and art, then re-shaped and Americanized it into a simpler world of entertainment, illusions and good vs. evil. Sound familiar?

ONCE UPON A TIME WALT DISNEY
CONTINUES AT THE MMFA UNTIL JUNE 24