Report

Walt Disney Family Museum opens in the Presidio

By Sura Wood

The Bay Area enhanced its reputation as an animation epicenter with the addition of the Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened Thursday. It would be difficult to conceive of Pixar or PDI without Walt Disney. And it’s the Bay Area’s reputation as a leader in the field, along with the fact that Disney’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, resides in Napa, that made the Presidio’s Main Post the logical location for the new museum. “Modern day animation owes everything to Walt Disney,” says the museum’s founding executive director, Richard Benefield. “In every decade of his work, he was ahead of the curve technologically but he was first and foremost a storyteller. He used all those technological tools, the fine arts and music to help him tell stories.” (The primacy of story is a mantra you’ll hear echoed by John Lasseter and his fellow animators at Pixar.)

For the last decade, Disney’s collections and personal effects have been housed at the Presidio but, until recently, they’ve only been available to scholars. On view in the newly renovated facility’s ten exhibition galleries are over 1,400 objects, including rare film clips, scripts, vintage artifacts, home movies, three-dimensional scale models of the railroad and Disneyland, magazines of the period, original art from his films such as cels from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated feature, a series of drawings that trace the evolution of Mickey Mouse, Disney’s fledgling attempts at animation and an illustration for his high school yearbook. A colorful, 113-seat theater presents assorted lectures and Disney classics (Fantasia is being shown this month alongside the documentary Walt & El Grupo); 200 video monitors help chart Disney’s life story through recollections and film clips.

“If the museum had been located in LA, where the company is based, the man himself would have gotten lost,” says Benefield.

The museum is as much a crash course in the history of animation—Disney died in 1966 at age 65—as it is an expression of one man’s singular vision and obsession with innovation. His company developed the use of storyboards and refined the multi-plane camera, which stands nearly two stories high within the building. He also pioneered personality animation—which is what made kids fall in love with cartoon characters in the first place.

For more information, visit www.waltdisney.org.

topics: animation, bay area, pdi, pixar

10.04.2009