New Walt Disney Family Museum Opening Fall 2009 in San Francisco

Written by rubin Friday, 03 April 2009 08:58

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - The fascinating and inspiring story of Walt Disney, whose artistry, creations, and vision helped define 20th century American culture, will be brought to life at The Walt Disney Family Museum, which opens in San Francisco in the fall of 2009. The Museum will illuminate Walt Disney’s tremendous successes, disappointments, and unyielding optimism as he pursued innovation and excellence while entertaining and enchanting generations worldwide through his pioneering ventures.

The creator of Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disneyland, and the global yet distinctly American company that bears his name, Disney was an independent risk-taker who started his first business at the age of 19 and worked tirelessly to elevate animation to an art form. He invented timeless characters and stories that brought the fantastical to life and continue to inspire a sense of wonder. Through animated and live action films, television programs, and theme parks, Disney created global symbols, icons, and characters that, more than 40 years after his death, are an indelible part of popular culture in America and around the world.

The Walt Disney Family Museum will illustrate how Disney’s irrepressible creativity enriched the imagination of generations. The Museum will tell the story of the man behind the myth in Disney’s own voice and in exhibits that reveal his expansive vision, from early drawings of some of his most popular characters to plans for Disneyland and EPCOT.

The Walt Disney Family Museum will shed light on Disney’s remarkable life. One of five children, Disney was born in Chicago on December 5, 1901. He spent his early years in rural Missouri, where he developed a love of nature, of drawing, and of trains. After the family sold their failing farm and moved to Kansas City in 1911, Disney began working on his father’s newspaper route and developed a love of the stage. When his family moved back to Chicago in 1917, Disney drew cartoons and took photographs for his high school newspaper and attended night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. During World War I, he was rejected by the army because of his age. He enlisted in the Red Cross Overseas and served as an ambulance driver in France. An ambulance similar to the one he drove in Europe will be exhibited at the Museum.

The Museum will chronicle Disney’s early, fitful starts at developing live and animated films, including the hardship with his first cartoon company in Kansas City, where he settled after he returned from Europe. After Laugh-O-gram Films went bankrupt in 1923, Disney took the train to California, with $40 in his pocket. By the end of the 1920s, despite his humble Hollywood beginnings, Disney rose to international fame and recognition with the invention of the world’s most famous mouse. His studio also enjoyed great financial success—and changed the animation industry—with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first feature-length animation film that skeptics had warned Disney against making. On the other hand, Disney’s animation studio nearly went bankrupt after the completion of Fantasia (1940), a film that received mixed reviews in its day although it is celebrated today as a cinematic landmark. Throughout these decades, Disney pushed groundbreaking technological innovations that revolutionized animation and focused on the areas of story, character development, color, dimensionality, and original music to improve his storytelling. He consistently challenged himself and his employees to surpass what they had already achieved.

The Museum will illuminate Disney’s parallel interests in the fantastic and real. After completing the early-1940s animated masterpieces Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi, and after a hiatus mandated by World War II, Disney began to expand the scope of the studio’s work by making live-action documentaries about wildlife and the environment that reflected his childhood love of nature. He sent a team of naturalists to Alaska for a year to film anything they might find interesting. The result was Seal Island, which won the 1948 Academy Award for best two-reel documentary.
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Toward the end of his life, Disney developed innovative attractions for global events, notably the 1960 Olympics and the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Beginning in 1960, Walt and his key creative executives approached several American corporations with the intent of collaborating on major shows and attractions for the 1964-65 New York World's Fair. The result was four of the most popular attractions at the Fair: the General Electric Progressland featuring Walt Disney's Carousel of Progress, the UNICEF Pavilion sponsored by Pepsi-Cola featuring it's a small world, the Ford Wonder Rotunda featuring Walt Disney's Magic Skyway, and the State of Illinois Pavilion featuring Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln. These attractions were later exported to Disneyland in California.

Walt Disney Family Museum: Facilities
The Walt Disney Family Museum is located in three historic buildings within the Presidio of San Francisco, which is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area of the National Park Service.

The centerpiece is a former army barracks at 104 Montgomery Street, redesigned and upgraded by architecture firm Page & Turnbull of San Francisco, and with interior architecture and installations designed by the Rockwell Group. The Museum uses the building’s original domestic-scale rooms to frame the story of Disney’s life and incorporates a wide range of materials and technologies, from historic documents and artifacts, to listening stations and other interactive displays, to more than 200 video monitors. In addition to the galleries, the Museum contains a 123-seat screening facility, a learning center, a store, and a café.

The Museum campus includes 122 Riley Avenue, a former gymnasium that houses the Walt Disney Family Foundation’s collections and offices. The Riley Avenue building is the site of a 2,000 square foot hall that will be used for special programs and concerts until the special exhibition program begins in January 2012. A third small building in the Presidio will house the Museum’s mechanical equipment.

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