What is it about frothy French rococo that so captivated, inspired Disney?
NEW YORK — A fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art explores something that is hiding in plain sight if you watch Disney cartoons closely: the curious affinity for all things French, especially the trappings of French aristocracy.
The curators of “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts” are upfront about one basic fact: Walt Disney made his movies for a very different audience than that for which the artisans of the French rococo produced their dazzling luxury objects.
Disney catered to popular taste, during a democratic era, and his films reached eager viewers around the globe. The clockmakers, figurine designers, vase painters and furniture makers of 18th-century Europe served a wealthy, often aristocratic clientele, and though their designs were widely influential, the things they made were bought and cherished by the elite.
With that caveat, this fascinating exhibition then proceeds to register the astonishing points of contact between these two very different creative worlds. At least three of the Disney company’s most popular and admired films — “Cinderella” (1950), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959) and “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) — borrow heavily from the design and architectural aesthetics of France and other European courts under the sway of Versailles’ cultural hegemony.
Luxury, in films like “Cinderella,” is denoted by gold-gilded mirrors, encrusted with the vine and shell motifs that defined the rococo style. When Belle dances with the beast in the famous 1991 “Beauty and the Beast” ballroom scene, it is framed by architecture modeled largely on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Early Disney cartoons featured animated porcelain figurines, complete with 18th-century dress, wigs and courtly manners.
This wasn’t accidental. Walt
Disney and his animators were culturally voracious if not always culturally discriminating. They drew on an archive of design, drawings and art, collected by Walt Disney on his European travels. They often turned to French storybooks for inspiration and French paintings, especially the gauzy, pastel fantasies of the mid-18th century, known as “fetes galantes,” for visual material. Not all Disney roads lead specifically to France, but many of them intersect either with France or with the wider French influence over European culture.
Curated by the Met’s Wolf Burchard, the exhibition features juxtapositions so striking, so unlikely, so weird, that both
the age of Disney and the age of Versailles seem newly unfamiliar and even surreal.
Isn’t it strange that Disney artists, working on mass entertainment in the middle of the 20th century, appropriated ideas and images from one of the most refined and hierarchical cultures in human history? Isn’t it odd that Americans, who reflexively celebrate humble origins, log cabins and rustic simplicity, embraced Disney’s dancing candelabras and riffs on porcelain by Meissen and Sèvres?
The simplest explanation is that France is coded “fancy” in the American vernacular. But the exhibition suggests there is more than just a reflexive nod to
French fashion when images of wealth or power are summoned. The rococo style, Burchard argues, wasn’t just luxe: “It is its dynamic asymmetry, freedom of association, its overwhelming sense of movement, irony and joy that distinguish it from other styles.” The freedoms of association, irony and joy, in particular, were liberating for Disney animators, especially early in the company’s history when it was more experimental, and its output (including the magnificent “Silly Symphonies” cartoons) more vibrantly phantasmagorical than the later, more mass-market product.
The exhibition also covers the fascinating corporate history of Disney and its cultural and sociological impact. When a film cel from “Snow White” was acquired by the Met in 1938, Disney was seen as a pioneer, an innovator, even a modernist. His work felt experimental and boundary challenging, and in 1942, one established critic even compared him to Leonardo da Vinci. Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet film pioneer, claimed Disney’s cartoons captured “the structure of primitive thought,” which was meant as high praise.
The exhibition ends with the coalescing plans for a theme park called Disneyland, centered on a fantasy castle indebted to neo-gothic European palaces and castles, and the chateau architecture of the Loire Valley.
The larger question that gathers force through the exhibition is whether these parallel worlds reflect shared values or common political ideologies. Is there something about France in its last, decadent age before the revolution that was similar to the America of the 1950s?
If there is common cultural ground in the two epochs explored here, it likely has to do with the complicated thing we call modernism. France was dealing with the intellectual and political stresses of the Enlightenment; America had just emerged as a world power in the age of the atomic bomb, total war, and the ideological contest between capitalism and communism. The complicated embrace and rejection of these ideas, the dual face of modernism, was articulated in an idea by Max Weber called disenchantment. As the mysteries of the world, once monopolized and franchised by religion, yield to science and rational thought, the world is a little less enchanted. Things move forward, knowledge advances and barbarism joins the resistance.
Rococo architecture was in part a form of resistance to orderly ideas of structure and design. It undermined the logic of architecture, in ways that were delightful, and retardataire. Disney offered audiences an escape from two things they found terrifying: the present and the future.