A brand-new exhibition honoring Disney’s beautiful world for one hundred years opens in London on Friday. It features everything from early designs of Mickey Mouse to Cinderella’s glass slipper.
A variety of artwork, costumes, and props from classic animated films like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “The Jungle Book” as well as more recent live-action works like “Cruella” and “Beauty and the Beast” have been chosen by the Walt Disney Archives.
“Disney 100: The Exhibition” features more than 250 objects and starts with an introduction to animator and producer Walt Disney and his character, Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, who is thought to have been a prototype for Mickey Mouse.
Throughout the exhibition’s 10 galleries, visitors can look at props including the carousel horse used by Dick van Dyke in “Mary Poppins” to production models of characters Lumiere and Cogsworth from the live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast”.
Also featured are sketches and interactive stations, and items from Marvel, Pixar and the “Star Wars” films, now part of the Disney conglomerate.
“Most people’s first experience of being in a movie theatre is usually a Disney movie and that connects us all in, in a huge, huge way,” animator and director Eric Goldberg told Reuters at a press preview of the exhibition on Thursday.
“These characters can remain true and universal for decades,” said Goldberg, who has worked on various Disney characters starting with the Genie in the 1992 animated feature “Aladdin”.
Bret Iwan, who has voiced the character of Mickey Mouse since 2009, sees no threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence. “Mickey requires such a warmth that I haven’t really taken the time to be bothered by it,” he said.
The Walt Disney Company is celebrating its 100th anniversary, which is thought to have occurred on October 16, 1923, when Walt and his brother Roy signed a deal with New York cartoon distributor Margaret Winkler. A similar show, which will debut in Chicago next month, is currently running at London’s ExCel.
