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Source: Reuters -
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Walt Disney is a global brand with film studios and theme parks
bearing his name, but now his family are unveiling a museum to tell
the story of the animation pioneer they say has been lost behind
the trademark.
The Walt Disney Family Foundation, a non-profit organization
established in 1995 to promote education and writing about Disney
as well as scholarships in his name, will open the Walt Disney
Family Museum on October 1 in San Francisco.
"My father's name is probably one of the most well-known names
around the world, but as the 'brand' or trademark has spread, for
many, the man has become lost," Disney's daughter and museum
founder, Diane Disney Miller, said in a statement.
The museum will trace Disney's life from his birth in Chicago and
childhood in Missouri to his move to California in 1920s, where he
married and his animation career took off with the creation of the
"Mickey Mouse" character.
Among the exhibits on display will be early animation drawings,
film clips, scripts, cameras and many of Disney's numerous Academy
Awards, including an honorary Oscar in 1939 for his first feature
length animation film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
There will also be a model of the Disneyland theme park he first
envisioned, quite different from the park that opened in California
in 1955, and a model of the Lily Belle train that ran on half a
mile of track around his Hollywood home.
"Visiting my grandpa was pretty fun," Walter Miller, the
foundation's president, recalled at a launch of the museum in New
York on Wednesday.
Revolutionized animation
"Perhaps my grandfather's greatest gift, without question his
greatest pleasure, was to bring imagination to life," he said.
"He never lost that childhood sense of wonder and of
curiosity."
Disney, whose other movies included "Cinderella," "Bambi" and "Mary
Poppins," which mixed live action and animation, died in
1966.
John Canemaker, an Academy Award winning animator and animation
studies professor at New York University, said at the launch that
Disney's development of "personality animation," beginning with
Mickey Mouse, revolutionized the industry.
"Within a remarkably short period of time, a mere decade, Disney
set the course for animation in the 20th century and beyond,"
Canemaker said.
"There would be no 'Toy Story' and no Pixar (Walt Disney Co's
animation studio) without Disney personality animation, nor other
studios that yield to the pantheon of stories and characters that
fascinated throughout the years," he said.
Richard Benefield, executive director of the museum, said the Walt
Disney Co had made their resources and archives available to the
foundation and loaned several exhibits to the museum.
"Walt Disney reached people because he was a magical story teller,"
he said.
"Now it's our turn to tell his story, to narrate the life of someone whose name is often confused with a brand and to present him simply as a human being with an extraordinary vision."
