Disney museum to open in San Francisco

[thedisneyman]

Disney museum to open in San Francisco

By Mary Anne Ostrom
Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12179355? ... rynews.com
Posted: 04/19/2009 05:23:21 PM PDT
Updated: 04/20/2009 06:59:49 AM PDT

For years, some of Walt Disney's most precious belongings have been locked away in a former Army storage building in San Francisco's Presidio.

Now, after nearly a decade of efforts by his eldest daughter, and help from the company that bears his name, Disney is getting his own museum, the first to focus solely on the life and work of the father of animated film.

Don't expect Disneyland north when the Walt Disney Family Museum opens in October in the historic Presidio. Instead what designers, Disney historians and family members, led by Diane Disney Miller, are planning is a $110 million museum filled with technology and artifacts chronicling the ups (and a few downs) of Disney's already much examined life.

The Disney showcase will help cement the Bay Area's reputation as the center of animation, said John Lasseter, a friend of Miller and chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. The Oscar-winning Lasseter began his animation career at Disney.

"Walt Disney has become synonymous with the Disney Company, and I think the museum will educate people and remind people it was the vision of one man," Lasseter said. "The Bay Area is so associated with technological innovation and it's applied here in so many different fields. Having the museum here will really celebrate not only his artistic achievements but his technological ones as well."

The Presidio is already home to the Letterman Digital Arts Center — where
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George Lucas relocated his Industrial Light & Magic in 2005 — and The Orphanage, a visual effects company. Pixar is in Emeryville and DreamWorks Animation is in Redwood City.

The Walt Disney Family Museum will have the unmistakable mark of his family foundation, the project's sponsor, which selected the location and in recent years has been on a mission to separate the public's image of the man from the company that he spawned.

After considering locations in Southern California (where the studio and amusement park are), Kansas City (where Disney launched his first cartoon company), and Chicago (Disney's birthplace), Miller and the family decided to expand their tiny Presidio office into a showplace that required renovating three historic buildings while keeping the exteriors intact. Disney had few Bay Area ties during his life, but his wife, Lillian, moved to Napa Valley after his death from lung cancer in 1966, and Miller lives in the North Bay.

"This will be a place of pilgrimage for the Disney fan," said museum director Richard Benefield.

In addition to the family, a legion of Disney Company historians has been culling through 8,000 artifacts and company archives. David Rockwell, designer of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles and set designer of several hit Broadway shows, in addition to the most recent Oscars, is creating the interior spaces.

The museum idea was hatched by Miller, who has been protective of her father's image, especially in the wake of unflattering books and an urban legend that his body is in a deep freeze chamber. (He was cremated and his remains buried at Forest Lawn in Glendale.) In recent years, the family set up a Walt Disney Family Web site. The Walt Disney Co. owns the Disney name and image and has been collaborating on the project, but is not funding it.

Some critics have questioned whether the family's control will interfere with an accurate portrayal of his life. Benefield said the museum will not leave out negative pivotal moments, including financial struggles and a nasty strike against his studio. Officials will also include his testimony during the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s.

Housed in former barracks with stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Disney museum may find itself in the middle of a new Bay Area entertainment and museum hub. In addition to Letterman Digital Arts, Gap founder Don Fisher also plans to house his art collection in a Contemporary Art Museum at the Presidio, which became part of the national park system in 1994 after the Army left.

Inside the museum, large parts of the Disney story will be told by Walt Disney himself. All told, there will be 4.5 hours of multimedia presented on more than 200 video screens throughout the museum.

Among the highlights will be 29 of his 32 Oscars, the groundbreaking multiplane-camera he built to give Snow White a three-dimensional effect, the narrow-gauge "Lilly Belle" train he built for his Hollywood home, and a detail model of Disneyland as he built it in 1955.

With hundreds of Disney-oriented blogs and legions of fans worldwide, museum designers recognize they have a heavy burden. "We're going to have a demanding audience," Rockwell noted.

"He was a great storyteller," Rockwell said. "Now we are telling his story."

if you're interested Tickets to the museum go on sale beginning Aug. 1. All tickets will be time-stamped, allowing 60 visitors every 15 minutes. Go to http://www.waltdisney.org.

[thedisneyman]

Lint to source http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090618/med ... ney_museum

NEW YORK (Reuters) – 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 nonprofit 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."