Walt Disney’s surprising inspiration –Rococo art
‘Cinderella’ and many other hit films were influenced by a trip to Versailles,
The castle in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is stuffed with swags and sconces from the late Baroque era
Alittle before Christmas in 1918, 16-year-old Walt Disney arrived in France, to do his bit for the war effort. In light of the war having actually ended two weeks previously (he had been completing his training when the Armistice was signed) Disney was put to work chauffeuring and running errands for the Red Cross. His memories of the experience were of revolting food, freezing nights, and pawning his shoes to buy cognac.
Don’t feel too sorry for him, though, because he was stationed next to the gardens at Versailles, and spent much of his time gazing over the boundary wall towards the chateau’s spectacular Baroque facade. Subsequent postings in Paris, Neuilly, and at the base of the Vosges mountains ensured that, by the time he returned to America nine months later, he had a monumental case of Francophilia.
A new book, Inspiring Walt Disney, published here to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, considers how all that Disney absorbed on this 1918 trip, plus another he made in 1935 – this time with his elder brother, Roy, and wife, Lilian – had a pronounced and lasting influence on his animated films.
Indeed, Francophilia, or more precisely, French painting, decorative art and architecture, suffuses not just those films that Disney Studios produced in Disney’s lifetime (he died in 1966), but some made decades afterwards. That’s because, when he returned from the 1935 trip – he was a superstar and rich by now, so it was a sort of Grand Tour of London, Munich, Rome and Paris (he even returned to Versailles, taking cine footage of Roy in the Hall of Mirrors) – Disney brought home with him an extraordinary 335 illustrated books displaying the best French art and fairy tales. Until the mid-1990s, when internet search engines came into play, it was these 335 volumes that were the core of the research library at Disney Studios, in Burbank, California, and always his animators’ first resource. A selection of them, now eminently well-thumbed, will be in the exhibition, which travels to the Wallace Collection, London, in the spring. They reveal, says Met curator – and the book’s author – Wolf Burchard, “just how impressed Disney was by the grandeur of 17th and 18th-century France… the great impact it had on his vision”.
Porcelain gimcracks may seem poles apart from Disney cartoons, but, as Burchard explains, in fact they share a “visual freedom, gaiety and wit”. Both sought to invoke feelings of excitement, or marvel, in their respective audiences and so “called on the senses rather than the intellect”. Indeed, many of the “figments” that delighted Parisians 300 years ago, such as porcelain pink castles and novels about talking sofas and princes es who turn into teapots (magical transformation was beyond popular in 18th-century literature) sound uncannily like Disney fantasies.
The book and exhibition focus on three films in particular: Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Beauty and the Beast (1991). All three are set in fictional kingdoms of “a distinctly Francophile atmosphere,” Burchard explains, plus based on fairy tales that were written in France – by Charles Perrault ( Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty) and Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve ( – at the dawn of the 18th-century Burchard, who is a fervent Disney fan, believes it perfectly plausible to discuss hand-drawn animation in the same terms as an Old Master painting. He is a particular fan of the animator Glen Keane, who worked on Beauty and the Beast, and refers to the opening of The Lion King (1994) as “a rather stimulating Gesamtkunstwerk”.
The particular influence of French decorative art comes most clearly to life in the three servants who have been turned into household objects in Beauty and the Beast. The origins of Mrs. Potts, a teapot; Lumiere, a candlestick; and Cogsworth, a mantel clock, are, in fact, traceable to specific pieces, including, in the case of Cogsworth, clocks made by the fashionable Parisian cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle, who worked in the Louvre under royal privilege. Beast’s castle, meanwhile, is stuffed with Rococo-era swags and sconces. The film’s animators even based the ballroom specifically on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
In Cinderella, animators took their cue from the mid-1800s, enjoying the colour, fancy ornament, and excessive scale of that era’s Neo-Baroque and Neo-Rococo styles. The film is particularly well-suited to Burchard’s premise because, in the name of intimacy, intim much of the story takes place in its it characters’ bedrooms. The king’s gargantuan state bedchamber, for example, has gilt-wood panelling, a huge crimson bed with a “ceiling” and curtains, and a flock of thronelike armchairs. Even Cinderella’s garret is furnished with (broken) pieces typical of the period, such as a side table with an elaborately scalloped top.
For Sleeping Beauty, the Disney artists travelled further back in time, to medieval France. Its opening credits, for instance, draw on both the Limbourg Brothers’ Book of Hours for the Duc de Berry (c1412-1416) and The Unicorn Tapestries, designed in Paris in 1500 and, since 1937, on display at the Met. In fact, Disney himself had a penchant for the late medieval era – when he and Lilian built a home in Los Angeles, it was Tudor-style. While it isn’t perhaps cricket to make assumptions about Disney’s personal taste from the settings he thought best suited his films, “there is no question that both Hollywood filmmakers and interior decorators of the 1940s and 1950s set out to exhaust the full spectrum of the Baroque and Rococo in response to postwar and postDepression austerity,” writes Burchard in the book.
What’s more, though he wasn’t “an art collector of any distinction,” in the 1950s Disney did develop a recreational passion for miniature European furniture. He even made his own – about 100, individually decorated, miniature pot-bellied stoves – in a workshop at his home on Carolwood Drive, in LA. “It turned out so cute with the grate, shaker, and door, and all the little working parts,” he noted. He gave some to friends; others were sold for $25 apiece (about $250 today) in a New York antique shop.
“He seems to have favoured objects that evoked the simplicity of rural, pre-industrial life,” offers Burchard, “just as his films conjure and are nostalgic for a sort of Arcadian idealism. I think you can say that, in a way, Disney was creating a lens through which his American, and eventually his growing international audience, could fall in love with the old continent.”