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Production Artwork From “The Mightiest Motion Picture of Them All”
Sixty years ago, “The Mightiest Motion Picture of Them All,” Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, first whisked away moviegoers, diving to new depths of imagination and artistry. Having corralled an industry “who’s who” of technicians and artisans, Walt knew that something as large as the vision he had for Verne’s epic needed an equal sense of ambition. Culled from the Walt Disney Archives collection, the production artwork featured here is meant to begin to showcase just how “epic” the scale of this now-iconic film was, from its very conception, more of which will be celebrated on tour across the U.S. in this year’s D23 Disney Fanniversary Celebration road show, presented by Walt Disney RecordsThe Legacy Collection.
The photo illustration featured here blends a black-and-white reference photograph of one of the massive “Vulcania” matte paintings created for the film by Peter Ellenshaw with a modern-day color image of the painting as it currently appears in the Walt Disney Archives.Here is another of the large matte paintings featuring Nemo’s caldera-concealed hideout on Vulcania. Both paintings (like the film itself) represent a towering accomplishment in special effects photography, and help to showcase the immense talent that matte painter Ellenshaw was.Working with Art Director John Meehan, artists like Harper Goff and Set Decorator Emile Kuri crafted the interiors of the luxurious Nautilus from scratch. The concepts featured here provide a pre-visualization for the interior look of the sub’s salon, with its exposed industrial inner hull and Victorian furnishings brilliantly juxtaposing each other.
The concepts shown here highlight how the Nautilus itself plays an integral character in the film. At once ominous and beautifully powerful, we see how the vessel was imagined to coexist and blend in with the alien oceanic world around it, drawing inspiration from the very undersea wilderness from which it seeks to protect its crew.
Undoubtedly, the most dramatic and exciting scene from the film is the climactic sequence where Nemo and crew ward off the vicious and invasive tentacles of a giant squid, which has set its sights on the Nautilus. During the production, many concepts were created to try and capture the sense of chaos and danger that the filmmakers wanted to convey to the audience with this integral scene’s ambitious special effects. The stunning result is, still to this day, nothing short of Hollywood magic.
