Disney dreams big at fans’ convention
Halfway between a marketing exercise and a religious experience, Disney’s D23 convention of fans makes
In 1941, as his grand passion project Fantasia lost money hand over fist, Walt Disney found himself in a ruminative mood. His new film broke every artistic and technological boundary it hit: hand-drawn animation dancing to the music of Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky, recreated in then-revolutionary stereo sound. But Fantasia’s initial roadshow release proved ruinously expensive, and all but one of the 13 cinemas that had upgraded their speakers to the Fantasound system later had them dismantled as parts were required for the war effort.
‘‘I have never had the faintest idea where this business would drag me from one year to the next,’’ Disney wrote in a lengthy essay for American Cinematographer, titled ‘‘Growing Pains’’.
‘‘It’s at the controls, not me! But, as I said before, as long as we keep on growing, the future will keep opening up ... What I see way off there is too nebulous to describe. But it looks big and glittering. That’s what I like about this business, the certainty that there is always something bigger and more exciting just around the bend; and the uncertainty of everything else.’’
Disney, born on December 5 1901, at the dawn of the American century, was the embodiment of the write-your-own-legend spirit of the age; he died on December 15 1966, with its brightest accomplishments still ahead. But even the 39-year-old man sitting at his desk, post-Fantasia, and mulling his studio’s future with cautious optimism, couldn’t have possibly envisioned D23.
The D23 Expo is a biennial convention in Anaheim, California, where Disney-lovers from around the world come together to celebrate, dress up in the style of, and purchase goods relating to, the studio’s past, present and future works. It’s been running since 2009 and while official attendance figures aren’t released, they’re thought to stand at around 65,000 over the course of the three-day event.
D is for Disney, 23 a nod to the year Walt and his brother Roy founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in their uncle’s garage. Over the intervening 94 years, this grew into The Walt Disney Company as it stands today: a multinational conglomerate that owns and operates five of the most lucrative film studios in the world - Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm along with countless other media franchises, a cruise line, and seven parks and resorts.
For a sense of the mood, imagine an annual shareholders’ meeting crossed with an evangelical megachurch. The air crackles with the fist-clenching thrill of corporate triumph - during one presentation, Alan F Horn, the chairman of Walt Disney Studios, proudly noted that the five most commercially successful films of 2016 - Finding Dory, Zootropolis, The Jungle Book, Captain America: Civil War, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - ‘‘were all from our studio’’, to widespread whoops.
But aside from the satisfaction of cheering on the winning team, there are forces at work that are honestly affecting. Before a panel marking the 23rd anniversary of The Lion King (attendance: c 4000), the compere asked the crowd to stand and sing together, as if in worship, the film’s musical number I Just Can’t Wait to be King and at its end, the aisles flooded with choristers in gospel robes, who were led in a performance of The Circle of Life by the studio singer Carmen Twillie, whose voice it is you hear in the film itself. As the song swelled, my critical distance telescoped shut with a snap, and I was 12 years old again, hurtling over the African savannah towards Pride Rock.
Whether that counts as a bona fide religious experience or just weaponised nostalgia is up for discussion, but there’s no question that D23 takes place on holy ground - which is to say, one block from Disneyland itself. In the early Fifties, Disney had originally hoped to build the park in Burbank beside Walt Disney Studios, but the city fathers weren’t enthused at the prospect of a permanent fairground on their doorstep. So he bought some orange groves in then-rural Anaheim and built there instead. At its grand opening on July 17 1955, Disney offered the following dedication: ‘‘Disneyland is your land. Here, age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savour the challenge and promise of the future.’’
Not only do those words uncannily pre-empt the two main types of activities at D23 - basking in nostalgia and drooling over trailers - they also go some way towards capturing the old-thingsdone-in-new-ways thinking that seems to drive the studio’s current output. A clip of the forthcoming ‘‘live action’’ (for which read photorealistic CGI) remake of The Lion King, coming in 2019, was a shot-for-shot recreation of the original film’s opening sequence while Emily Blunt, the star of the forthcoming Mary Poppins Returns (ready for Christmas 2018), stressed that she had gone back to the P L Travers books to find her own way into the iconic Julie Andrews character, noting that ‘‘No-one is ever going to outJulie Julie.’’ A life-sized model of the title character in Tim Burton’s forthcoming Dumbo do-over was wheeled out on stage and looked like a Jeff Koons sculpture.
We also learnt that where innovation and familiarity don’t come hand in hand, the studio is now prepared to match-make. The forthcoming Pixar film Coco ,a mesmerising-looking fantasy spinoff from Mexican folklore, in which a boy crosses over into the land of the dead, looks like one of the studio’s most conceptually radical projects to date. Accordingly, as revealed by Disney’s animation chief John Lasseter, it will be paired for cinema release with Olaf’s Frozen Adventure -a 21-minute semi-sequel to the Let It Go-spawning phenomenon, with four more numbers to add to the Arendelle songbook and characters as cosily familiar as a comfort blanket.
The most extraordinary thing I saw was the animator Eric Goldberg sketching characters live on stage: audience members would call out adjectives which he’d seamlessly weave into his work. It was Goldberg’s pencil that brought life to the Genie in Aladdin (1992), Phil the stumpy satyr in Hercules (1997), and Louis the alligator in The Princess and the Frog (2009). The studio hasn’t produced a handdrawn animated feature since then, but Goldberg’s skills are still being put to good use: he drew Mini Maui, the living tattoo, in Moana (2016), and works with CG animators to bring a hand-made feel to the shapes and movement of their digital creations.
Again, Walt Disney couldn’t have foreseen the specifics - even though, in his American Cinematographer essay, he did ‘‘for the near future... practically promise a third-dimensional [sic] effect in our moving characters’’. Instead, his sentiment was an expression of the optimistic spirit of the time that California in general, and Disney in particular, had come to stand for. After the Great Depression and two world wars, Los Angeles became a nexus of hopefulness, and Disney’s own animators became energised by artistic movements around the world.
The ornate elegance of Snow White and Pinocchio had delighted audiences of the Thirties and Forties. But according to producer Don Hahn, who gave a talk on the studio’s spicily productive midcentury period, the animators ‘‘realised they couldn’t sit around doing European fairy tales all the time’’, and that their work should reflect the newly hopeful mood.
That was when a small group of Disney artists - most prominently the great Mary Blair, who was hired in 1940 to work on Dumbo (1941) - brought the jigsaw forms and flaring colours of Miro, Matisse and South American folk art into the studio’s visual repertoire.
The stylised storybook opening of Sleeping Beauty (1959), which sprung from the work of Blair’s contemporary at the studio, Eyvind Earle, is pure modernism and by the time One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) rolled around, the studio’s aesthetic had veered so far into Ronald Searlelike scribbled patchworks, Disney himself considered it a step too far.
Quite how these artistic innovations connect to the legions of digitally souped-up, billiondollar grossing Marvel superheroes riddling the current Disney business model, might not be instantly apparent. But at the Disney Legends ceremony, at which a handful of actors and artists were recognised for extraordinary contributions to the studio’s body of work, there was a sharp reminder that even the franchise-to-end-all-franchises began as the same kind of back-ofan-envelope dream.
Among this year’s 11 honourees were Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Martin Lieber, the sons of Austrian Jewish and Romanian Jewish immigrants respectively, who were born in New York City in 1917 and 1922. You probably know them better as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee: the duo who created most of those heroes, from Iron Man to Thor and more, at Marvel Comics in the Sixties. Lee appeared on stage just a week after losing Joan, his wife of 70 years, and looked like a man heartsore from perspective. He tearfully said he was ‘‘thrilled’’ that the honour had been extended to Kirby, who died in 1994, and spoke about the influence Disney’s own work had on him as an ‘‘eight or 10’’ year-old boy.
At the panel where Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige offered an audience of almost 7000 a glimpse of next summer’s Avengers: Infinity War, there was something extraordinary about seeing those two migrant boys’ creations becoming the vehicle for such an awesome expression of corporate muscle - by which I mean both the expensive-looking footage itself, and the fact that Disney was capable of summoning 15 of its stars to travel 3200km from the shoot in Atlanta, Georgia, for little more than a photo opportunity.
Though the Disney brand rings back through history, the studio’s dominance of the pop culture landscape is a recent development. It was CEO Bob Iger who acquired Lucasfilm, the studio behind Star Wars, in 2012 and Marvel Studios in 2015 - a move the suave executive described on stage as having ‘‘opened up tremendous new realms of creativity’’, and, naturally, the revenue to match.
The big and glittering time to come Disney felt he’d just about glimpsed in 1941 is here. He didn’t see it; couldn’t know it. That’s the thing with times to come.
‘‘We, the last of the pioneers and the first of the moderns, will not live to see this future realised,’’ was how he tied up that essay in 1941.
‘‘We are happy in the job of building its foundations.’’ - Telegraph Group