Dreams Come True (ACMI, 18 November 2010 – Tuesday 26 April 2011)
When putting together a museum exhibition I guess one of the key questions is: “who is the audience here?” When reviewing an exhibition, that question might even be more critical.
I have written a previous grumpy review of an exhibition at ACMI (about their Setting the Scene exhibition) and at the time raised the issue that maybe part of the problem was that I wasn’t the intended audience. In that case, I was actually too interested in the subject matter: if an exhibition is pitched at a general audience, someone very caught up in the subject is perhaps inevitably going to judge the material harshly. ACMI’s latest, the Dreams Come True exhibition of fairy-tale themed Disney material, also covers material I’m particularly interested in. So, once again, I have to flag that perhaps I’m a little too close to this to give the exhibition a completely fair go.
That, perhaps, sounds like I thought this exhibition was as problematic as the Setting the Scene exhibition, which it certainly wasn’t. For starters, the presentation is far better, with most of the issues that I raised in relation to that exhibition having been resolved. The exhibition is in a much more logical order. Light levels are better, and they have mostly avoided some of their previous follies such as illuminating items with lights placed behind the viewer so that you are left peering at items darkened by your own shadow. And the use of video screens and film clips is much improved: here they actually seemed useful and instructive, with one montage of “transformation” sequences from various films from Snow White to The Princess and the Frog particularly interesting (if not entirely flattering to the later examples). Compared to Setting the Scene, then, this is a huge leap forward in terms of the presentation of their material.
The exhibition also achieves what must be the basic objective, of giving audiences a chance to stop and look closely, in a way they usually don’t, at the artwork for various Disney films. As suggested by the title, the focus is on the fairy-tale films (including various Silly Symphonies plus Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Frog, and the upcoming Tangled). The advantage of this format is it gives a cross-sectional view: you get a really interesting portrayal of how one studio has tackled similar material across a span of more than seventy years. That’s an inherently interesting structure, and doubtless the chance to look closely at this material will be widely appreciated.
Yet that’s only sort of the actual structure of the exhibition. The intended emphasis seems not to be so much on contrasting Disney’s parallel treatments of virtually the same material over time, as it is on drawing the links and contrasts between Disney’s fairytales and the studio’s literary sources. Here it echoes a similar exhibition that I was lucky enough to see in Paris in 2006, “Il Était Une Fois…Walt Disney” (“Once Upon a Time… Walt Disney”). That exhibition looked at the inspirations Disney artists drew from various European artists, and contrasted many of those original source works with their Disney successors. That exhibition could therefore show interesting older artworks while also giving a respectful treatment to various types of production material from the Disney films. There was also a strong intellectual underpinning there, drawing on Robin Allan’s book Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney.
The difficulty the ACMI exhibition has, in comparison, is it is drawing parallels with less interesting works (fairy tales) that can’t be shown in the exhibition alongside the Disney art. What’s more, by comparing the films to frequently re-told folklore it is skirting at the edges of one of my least favourite scholarly traditions: structuralist analysis of universal mythologies and recurring narrative patterns. Unfortunately, I’m not sure you really learn much about the interesting artistic properties of Disney films by noting their narrative similarities with, and differences from, other fairy tales. Even if you did, it might be the basis for an essay or book: I’m not sure how a theme built around narrative structures (by their nature evident only across an entire film) enlightens an exhibition of the drawings and artwork (which are fragmentary snapshots of moments in each film). This is a crucial point of difference between the more design-oriented basis of the Paris exhibition, where the source artwork and Disney artwork had a clear visual relationship.
Of course, there’s still plenty of scope for an exhibition like this, whatever the purported structure, to show some impressive art. Those who have tended to take the artwork involved in producing animation for granted will find much of this interesting and enlightening, and therefore most worthwhile. Those with a bit more working knowledge of animation history will be rewarded by pieces from some big names: animators like Grim Natwick, Ollie Johnston, Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, and more recent figures such as Andreas Deja; and design / story / conceptual artists such as Joe Grant, Eyvind Earle, and Mary Blair. A couple of pieces are very striking: there’s a wonderful animation drawing by Kahl from Sleeping Beauty; and I was fascinated to see a study for Snow White by Maurice Noble, an artist much better known for his collaboration with Chuck Jones in the 1950s.
Yet it has to be said that this is all a notch down from the Paris exhibition. Except for the odd really good piece like the Kahl drawing, the material from the top artists is generally their inconsequential work. So, for example, many “name” animators are represented by story sketches, not their much more interesting animation drawings. Presumably the Disney archives felt more inclined to release the really good stuff to an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris than it does to one at ACMI in Melbourne, and this is, I suppose, just a sad reality of cultural geography.
What troubled me more, though, were the number of items presented that were labelled as a “reproduction of cel setup.” This is a slightly ambiguous phrase, but on the face of it – and I’d love to be corrected on this – those seem not to be actual animation cels on actual backgrounds, but rather reproductions of cels placed on reproductions of backgrounds. If that’s the case, their historical value is about the same as the chintzy souvenirs flogged off to gullible collectors at animation art galleries. They may well have valuable illustrative function, and be legitimate as part of a display presenting an argument or explaining a point. But then so do film stills I post on this website: by presenting these “reproductions” in a gallery setting, ACMI has created an expectation of something more genuine than that. If they are what I think they are, then the misrepresentation is troubling.
The final slight qualm I have about the exhibition relates to an inevitability. An exhibition of this type is impossible without the co-operation of the Disney Corporation, with almost all the work on show coming from their animation archives. That inevitably taints the presentation, preventing any truly challenging discussion of what Disney’s artistic strengths and weaknesses were, and skewing the focus in subtle but unfortunate ways. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that ACMI are genuinely interested in exhibiting material from The Princess and the Frog and Tangled on an equal footing with that from Snow White. It’s difficult to shake the suspicion that the focus of the exhibition, centering as it does on the properties that feed the “Disney Princess” line of merchandise, has been informed by the marketing priorities of Disney.
This isn’t anyone’s fault, really. It’s just a shame, as the classic Disney work more than stands up to any serious critical examination, and deserves evaluation free of the commercial baggage that the Disney name brings. Ironically, by being so protective of their name, and ensuring exhibitions like this are so unflinchingly respectful, Disney’s gatekeepers probably hold people back from the genuine appreciation that would come if their work were presented in an independent manner, rather than as a Disney-sanctioned package.
I know all this sounds ungrateful. I am glad that this exhibition is here and nudging people down the road towards a more sophisticated appreciation of what these Disney artists achieved. And it’s not really fair to compare this unfavourably to an earlier exhibition that happened to be granted better access to the Disney archives. Certainly it’s rare to get any chance to look at material from these archives, and my qualms don’t erase that central attraction.