With 65 million items the Walt Disney Animation Research Library is the largest and most valuable collection of animation art in the world. It looks like nothing from the outside: a ho-hum warehouse in a backstreet of Burbank, California. But the alarm system is state-of-the-art, backed up with a high-tech “fire-suppression system”.
After the Aardman Animation fire this month, this last precaution, which seals each vault and reduces the air’s oxygen content to 12 per cent in the event of a fire, no longer seems extravagant.
The collection is a treasure trove of original artwork and models dating back 80 years. But the public will never see it. The collection is for Disney employees only — most commonly studio illustrators seeking inspiration.
The most requested files contain the work of Mary Blair, the quietly brilliant talent behind the studio’s resurgence after the Second World War with Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland. “She’s something of an unsung genius,” says Lella Smith, the library’s director. “She drew with relatively simple lines, but she was just brilliant at affecting the viewer’s emotion with her use of colours.”
That genius can be properly appreciated with the 55th anniversary edition of Cinderella, released on DVD this week in eye-popping, digitally restored Technicolor. In America the DVD sold 2.5 million copies in its first week, confirming its status as a classic.
It boasts celestial arias of wish-fulfilment (“Have faith in your dreams and someday your rainbow will come smiling through”) and the archetypal makeover — “You shall go to the ball!” And yet in narrative terms it is also the most simplistic Disney film.
The story has an impossibly virtuous heroine and a virtually characterless prince with no possibility of moral growth. The problem of blandness was cunningly solved by the addition of a frolicking cast of animal friends. “There is nothing funnier than the human animal,” said Disney.
After the war the studio was facing bankruptcy with debts of $4 million. It desperately needed a hit. “We never go wrong with a girl in trouble,” said Disney, thinking back to his 1937 hit Snow White, so Cinderella was picked.
The grislier aspects of the Mother Goose fairytale were trimmed — no ugly sisters cutting off their toes to jam their feet into the glass slipper — and the spectre of Cinderella’s dead mother was replaced by a jolly all-purpose fairy godmother singing Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.
Stylistically and visually, though, Cinderella is another matter, a sumptuous, complex mix of styles; the bridge between the classic style of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the informal modern style ushered in by Lady and the Tramp in 1955.
While most of the supporting characters have the familiar Disney look of rounded caricatures, the backgrounds — the vaulting castle hallways, the glowing, ethereal palaces — all bear the stamp of Blair’s modernist designs.
Walt Disney was determined to remain an innovator, even after the privations of wartime and the box-office failure of Fantasia, so he once hired Salvador Dalí to design a short film. “That’s $70,000 down the drain,” he said when he saw the result.
He saw something more accessible in Blair’s drawings, even though she was still radically modern compared with Disney’s animation team, his so-called Nine Old Men. She put different shades of red next to each other, for instance, which was then unheard of.
The veteran animators often struggled to translate Blair’s designs and drawings into feature films. “They’re so flat,” was the common complaint of her two-dimensional style.
But Disney never embraced unabashed modernism, so the two styles had no choice but to find a way to merge. The solution was to keep Blair’s background designs while reshaping her characters.
But she wasn’t just a default decorator. Many of her angles and props are in the finished films. She brought a nimble whimsy to the Disney formula of charm and fantasy and no one else came close to the dramatic impact of her expressionist colour schemes. “Like feasting on rainbows,” said one admirer.
In Cinderella the evil stepmother resides in a bedroom of lurid purple and frowns with eyes of mineral green. Her fingernails are a queasy lavender, while Cinderella’s hair is a unique marmalade-blonde which turns brown in moments of sadness.
Blair had joined Disney in 1941 somewhat reluctantly. She was in her late twenties and had found that her dreams of fine art and genteel watercolours didn’t pay the rent. But it was in commercial art that she found and forged her most personally distinctive style. A studio goodwill trip to South America was the key, exploding her palette with high-key colours, or “jungle colours” as she called them.
She was nicknamed “Marijuana Blair” by the other illustrators for her off-the-wall ideas — geometric backgrounds, wild silhouettes — and seemingly effortless invention. The nickname contained more envy than truth: her inspirational intake was the gin Martini, and from the 1950s she would enjoy three or four at lunch, followed by the same at dinner.
It was her escape from an increasingly bitter and abusive marriage, made worse by her husband’s professional jealousy. Like her, he was a painter of tasteful watercolours who’d been forced by lack of funds to start work at Disney. But Mary was unquestionably, albeit strangely, Walt’s favourite. With no hint of impropriety, Disney championed her for 30 years.
“Why Blair’s conceptual art so appealed to Walt, who demanded a trompe l’oeil illusion of reality in his animated films, is a mystery and a miracle,” says Blair’s biographer, John Canemaker. Mystery or not, the two styles found their own fairytale match in Cinderella.
Under the hammer: Original Disney art
Original animation art from the Disney studios can fetch thousands of pounds at auction — a celluloid from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sold for £11,950 last year. But prices for celluloids and drawings have not been rising in recent years since the early cartoon classics have paint that can dry out and flake badly. The most sought-after art continues to come from early Mickey Mouse films and Disney productions up to the mid-Fifties, including Pinocchio and Dumbo. And, of course, the more memorable the scene, the higher the price.
