My six-year-old daughter—along with little girls around the world—aspires to be a princess. But her notions of princesses are shaped almost entirely by the heroines of Disney movies, with their bustled dresses, pink turreted castles, and talking animal sidekicks.
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows visitors that Walt Disney didn’t dream up these fanciful royals. He was heavily influenced by Rococo, an ornate, dramatic aesthetic that emerged from Paris in the early 18th century. “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of the French Decorative Arts” explores Disney’s own fascination with the paintings, architecture, and interior design of the French elite, and how he incorporated them—sometimes wholesale—into his movies and theme parks. In doing so, he popularized this aesthetic, transforming it into a global phenomenon that continues to make up the stuff of my daughters’ dreams even a century later.
When Walt Disney visited France
The exhibition was curated by Wolf Burchard, the associate curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Met. He was fascinated by the fact that Disney’s animated cartoons and 18th-century design are two artistic realms that appear to have nothing to do with one another. After all, Disney was trying to create popular movies for the masses, while the Rococo arts were designed for the French aristocracy. But as Burchard places these two worlds side by side, you immediately see the connections. Disney appeared to love the luxury and excess the Rococo arts represented, and wanted to create movies that would allow audiences to lose themselves in this fantasy world.
His earliest movies, like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, all feature architecture, interior decor, and clothing pulled directly from things he had seen on his European trips. In some ways, this made a lot of sense because they were based on fairy tales written in the 17th and 18th centuries, coinciding, in fact, with the Baroque and Rococo artistic movements. As he conceptualized these films alongside the hundreds of artists he employed in his studio, he used images from Rococo paintings of women in flowing pastel dresses. Even the notion of creating sidekicks of talking animals or inanimate objects came from this period. Many Rococo arts featured clocks or teapots with faces. “People at the time were intrigued by the notion of animating inanimate objects,” he says. “They wondered what their clocks saw or said when they weren’t there.”In some ways, Disney himself saw these arts as an escape. As Burchard points out, Disney came from humble origins, growing up in a poor family in rural Missouri. He first visited France as a 17-year-old while serving in the Red Cross in the aftermath of World War I. That’s when he first discovered and fell in love with the French arts, from the gardens of Versailles to the Louvres. He later returned with his wife to explore the palaces and artifacts in greater detail. Disney did not seem to see these objects as out of his grasp; in a distinctly American way, he saw them as something to aspire to and dream about. By incorporating these aesthetics into his films, he gave others something to fantasize about as well. “Walt Disney tapped into the fact that we all love to dream,” Burchard says. “These fantasy fairy-tale castles are a symbol of the idea of letting your imagination run free and think about what other life you might be leading.”This aesthetic and the aspirations they symbolized had global appeal, as we now know. Disney’s movies were hits in the U.S., and when exported internationally, did equally well. Disney’s company went on to create products and theme parks based on the movies, which continue to leverage these Rococo designs. Today, people around the world gravitate to the Gothic castles and Baroque interiors that Disney portrayed in his movies—but most have little idea about the original art that inspired them. “There are now six Disney theme parks, three of which are in Asia, and the centerpiece is always a Gothic Revival castle with towers and turrets spiraling in the air,” Burchard says. “These castles are in countries with no direct cultural connection to the architecture they represent. But thanks to Disney, these castles have come to represent our aspirations.”The origins of princess culture
When he founded his company a century ago, Disney couldn’t have known how powerful his ideas and imagery would become. Generations of children have grown up watching these movies, taking in the castles and storylines. Girls, in particular, can grow up immersed in the princess culture these films created. Over the past few decades, there’s been criticism about the gender norms in Disney’s early films, particularly how the princess’s main objective is to marry the prince, usually after he saves her. The films also have been criticized for their lack of diversity. All the early princesses were white.
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