By Steven Vagnini This spring, D23 invites fans to take an inside look at a few beloved rain-and-flower sequences for insight into these memorable moments in Disney animation. From feature films like Bambi and Alice in Wonderland to shorts like Ferdinand the Bull and Disney•Pixar’s The Blue Umbrella, the fan in all of us will …
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by Stacia Martin While not a musician himself, Walt Disney instinctively recognized the appeal of rhythm from his earliest filmmaking days—even before pictures learned to talk. Beat, meter, patterns, and cycles created visual harmonics onscreen in much the same way that poetry can be said to communicate the musicality of words without the addition of melody. …
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By Max Lark In 1966 Floyd Norman was a budding animator who suddenly found himself quite unexpectedly elevated to a story role on The Jungle Book (more on that later). With the release of the live-action The Jungle Book just around the corner, the Disney Legend was kind enough to visit with D23 recently and …
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By Steven Vagnini With its breathtaking introduction of color to animated films, Flowers and Trees (1932) brought a sense of renewal to the cartoon industry. Walt Disney’s Studio had done it again, pushing established boundaries in the service of creative storytelling—this time in glorious, new Technicolor. As reflected in this trade ad taken out by …
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March 11 marks Middle Name Pride Day, a chance for those of us with middle names to shout ’em from the rooftops! No one can truly pinpoint how long middle (or “second”) names have existed in the English language—but we do know that the practice of putting a name between someone’s given (“first”) name and …
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Today in Chicago, Illinois—the city of Walt Disney’s birth—D23 Members, Disney fans, and shareholders gathered at the Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University for The Walt Disney Company 2016 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. Everyone most certainly recalls the exciting news that emerged from last year’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco; it was there that plans were …
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While many Disney fans point to Marceline, Missouri as Walt Disney’s hometown, it was actually in Chicago—and in a very special house—that young Walter was born and spent his earliest years. His parents, Elias and Flora, had moved to the windy city in 1890 and later purchased a lot on Tripp Avenue to build a …
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Happy Leap Year! We get one extra day, every four years, to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the Sun. (Without it, we’d lose almost six hours every year. Crazy, right?) As February 29 rolls around, we wonder just what to do with those extra 24 hours… and that sparked a …
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Alice Estes Davis instantly makes you feel at ease. Her home, in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles where she’s lived since the late 1950s, resembles a museum more than a dwelling. Alice, along with her husband and fellow Disney Legend, Marc Davis, moved here not long after they were married, and the rooms …
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By Steven Vagnini In July 1955, construction on a 160-acre site in Anaheim was picking up at a hurried pace. Disneyland would soon premiere with a grand invitational preview, as national attention was drawn to this first-of-its-kind amusement enterprise. Yet amid the oversight and coordination of tireless designers, carpenters, painters, and landscapers, a restless Walt …
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