September 09, 2006
THE ART OF DISNEY
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo currently has on display a massive exhibition of Disney artwork from the 1920s-1960s. The story, as I understand it, is that in the early-1960s, the Disney studio had lent 200 pieces of artwork to a Japanese museum for an exhibition. These pieces were never returned and considered lost until they were recently discovered at the Chiba University. Now, the've been put on display again, along with 350 additional pieces from Disney's Animation Research Library.
The museum has also published a very handsome catalog of this work. The book is probably relatively easy to find if you're in Japan, but not so easy for folks elsewhere. A limited number of these books were made available to Disney animation artists last week, and a couple of the studio artists—Mark Kennedy and Paul Briggs—are blogging about how great the book is and scanning pages from it. If you're in Japan, I'd recommend checking out the exhibition, which ends on September 24. The rest of us will be trying to get the book. (If you happen to have an extra copy of the book that you're willing to sell, please let me know. I'd love to get my hands on this!)
UPDATE: The official Japan Disney website for "The Art of Disney" exhibition is HERE. And, Tokyo Art Beat has details about the exhibition in English. (Thanks, Chris Keck)
