Disney's European influences revealed at Grand Palais

The exhibition 'Il était une fois Walt Disney' at the Grand Palais in Paris (September 16, 2006 – January 15, 2006) explores the European artistic influences on Disney studio films, focusing on the period between 'Snow White' (1937) and 'The Jungle Book' (1967). Curated by Bruno Girveau, Guy Cogeval, Pierre Lambert, and Dominique Païni, the show highlights how Walt Disney and his artists drew from 19th-century French illustrators Grandville and Gustave Doré for anthropomorphism, as well as German Expressionist cinema for shadows and set design. The training program by Don Graham, which included anatomy courses and plaster models, is detailed in the catalogue by Charles Solomon. Notable influences include Eywind Earle's medieval tapestry-like style for 'Sleeping Beauty', inspired by Italian primitive landscapes, Van Eyck, and Dürer. The exhibition also features a reconstructed six-minute film from the unrealized 1946 collaboration with Salvador Dalí, 'Destino', based on hundreds of preparatory drawings. A concurrent show, 'Mickey dans tous ses états' at Hôtel Dassault, presented contemporary artworks by Bertrand Lavier, InterDuck, Joyce Pensato, Nadin Ospina, and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. The review criticizes the emphasis on feature films and realism, which overshadows the 'plasmatic' quality praised by Sergei Eisenstein, and notes that double projections of film citations were too brief to be effective.