Discover the history and birth of animation, relive the best moments of Disney’s animation legacy, see the creation of a classic character and draw on your imagination by trying your hand at a host of interactive animation experiments.
Combining theatre presentations with interactive exhibition rooms, Art of Disney Animation aims to take guests right from the birth of the animation technique to the creation of modern-day Disney characters.
Secrets
- Surrounding the Sorcerer’s Hat are a series of Disney character statues, from left to right: Genie, Brer Rabbit, Donald Duck, Hercules, Tinkerbell, Mickey Mouse, Tarzan, Bachus, Mulan, Pinocchio and Dumbo.
- Featured in the pre-show is one of only two remaining original multi-plane cameras — the invention which helped win Walt Disney two Oscars for Flowers and Trees and allowed for the layered animation effects seen best in Bambi and short film The Old Mill. The only other multi-plane camera in existence is at the Disney Studios in Burbank, California.
- Animation inventions featured in the pre-show area include: Greek Urn (500 BC, Greece), Magic Lantern (1659, Netherlands), Thaumatrope (1825, England), Phenakistoscope (1832, Belgium), Zoetrope (1834, England) and Praxinoscope (1877, France). Most rely on a characteristic of the brain known as Persistence of Vision, which means we retain an imagine for slightly longer than our eyes actually see it.
History
- An Animation tour was in plans for the park right from its very beginning as Disney-MGM Studios Europe and was originally envisaged to be nearly identical to the exhibit at its sister park in Florida, which opened in 1989. This even included a working animation studio — indeed, right up to the reworked plans for Disney Studios Paris in 1999 it was planned to move Disney’s existing Feature Animation studio in Paris to the resort, situated right next to the tour in the area now taken by Cars Quatre Roues Rallye. However, when Disney began closing its satellite studios and laying off animators, the move failed to go ahead and the Paris studio, based in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, closed in 2002. The Florida studio closed in 2003.
