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From Mickey to Moana — Disney treasures at ACMI tell the story of animation’s evolution over almost a century
Disney is one of the longest running animation studios in the world. As a result, the studio’s nearly 100 year legacy also provides a substantial insight into the history of the animated film.

Disney: The Magic of Animation features 500 items — original sketches, drawings, paintings, concept art and models. They have been carefully curated from the 65 million artworks at the Walt Disney Animation Research Library in Los Angeles.

The first feature exhibition at Australia’s national museum of screen culture since its major redevelopment, it showcases Disney’s legacy, and the process and artistry at work.

Moving pictures
When you first enter the exhibition space you are greeted with an array of large scale zoetropes — spinning cylinders with flickering images inside. They display the animated characters of Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck.

These pre-cinematic animation devices provide a neat summation of the animation process, in which a quick succession of individual drawings, each one slightly different than the previous, can create a moving image. The zoetropes remind us animation has existed for many decades (if not centuries) prior to the invention of cinema.

‘They worked in shifts, night and day, to create this unique experiment in entertainment.’
Also on display are artworks from some of the studio’s earliest and most iconic animated shorts, such as Mickey Mouse’s Steamboat Willie and Plane Crazy. Equally impressive are the extensive artefacts from more than 25 feature films, ranging from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to this year’s Raya and the Last Dragon.

Man draws cartoon mouse on chalkboard
Walt Disney and his Mickey creation. AAP
Australia has also played a little known but substantive role in the Disney animation story. Between 1988 and 2006 Walt Disney Animation Australia operated in Sydney, and employed hundreds of extremely talented Australian animators, artists and technicians.

They worked on dozens of animated sequels to big name Disney features, including The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea, Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure, and Peter Pan: Return to Neverland.

Read more: Shrek at 20: celebrating the film's unique brand of animated anarchy and sardonic irreverence

Artistry on display
Exhibition curators have chosen a remarkable selection of highly dynamic animation drawings for display. Even as still images, these pencil drawings express incredible life and movement.

There are also a number of concept drawings created by American artist Mary Blair, whose designs informed Disney’s Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. She was also known for her children’s book illustrations (I Can Fly) and murals (including Disneyland’s It’s a Small World attraction). Her drawings and paintings use just a few strokes and splashes of contrasting colour to convey brilliant vibrancy and expression.

Also remarkable to behold are the series of background paintings from 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Created by artist Eyvind Earle, the works show angular shapes and exquisite detail. Eyvind Earle’s sister, Yvonne Perrin, was also an animation background painter, who spent much of her life in Australia, working at the Eric Porter Animation Studio in Sydney and later illustrative children’s books with bush themes.

Walt Disney was a fan of Mary Blair as an artist within the studio and beyond.
Read more: Explainer: what is storyboarding for film?

Mechanical to digital
It’s not just two-dimensional art on display. Model cars made of wood and metal from the production of 101 Dalmatians provide insight into the technical aspects of making the film.

Painted black and white, the cars were moved by hand and filmed in real time, using high-contrast film-stock. The resulting footage was then enlarged and transferred, frame-by-frame onto cels and incorporated into the rest of the animated scene.

The result was fluid motion on screen and accurately depicted vehicles which, despite appearing to careen around corners and collide with each other, maintained their precise dimensions. The approach, to some degree, anticipated the use of 3D digital models that would be incorporated into the studio’s later animated films.

Disney warrior Raya
Modern Disney warrior princesses are a tougher breed than their dainty predecessors. Raya and the Last Dragon/IMDB
Because Disney’s more recent films like Frozen and Moana were created almost entirely in the digital realm, the displays devoted to them tend to highlight concept art, rather than production materials. But it is still fascinating to see the concept artwork which guided these films through their early development. We gain a greater understanding of how the artists conveyed atmosophere, adventure and enchantment to create fantasy worlds.

As technology has evolved, so have Disney’s characters and narratives. This is notable as the exhibition reacquaints visitors with classic and dainty Disney princesses through to today’s more contemporary warriors like Moana and Raya.

Disney: The Magic of Animation celebrates each frame and component behind some of audiences’ favourite films of the last century. In doing so, the exhibition not only provides an illuminating peek into the animation process — but also gives us the opportunity to admire the artistry and complexity of what went into making every second of these works of art.

How a sense of purpose can link creativity to happiness
There are plenty of famous artists who have produced highly creative work while they were deeply unhappy or suffering from poor mental health. In 1931, the poet T.S. Eliot wrote a letter to a friend describing his “considerable mental agony” and how he felt “on the verge of insanity”. Vincent Van Gogh eventually took his own lifet, having written of “horrible fits of anxiety” and “feelings of emptiness and fatigue”.

So how are creativity and happiness linked? Does happiness make us more creative or does creativity make us happy?

Most of the research so far seems to indicate that a positive mood enhances creativity. But others have challenged this argument, suggesting a more complex relationship.

For example, a large study in Sweden found that authors were more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders compared to people from non-creative professions. Even in the corporate world, it has been suggested that negative emotions can spark creativity and that “anxiety can focus the mind”, resulting in improved creative output.

Meanwhile, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi conducted extensive research on creative individuals across many disciplines, which found a common sense among all the people he interviewed: that they loved what they did, and that “designing or discovering something new” was one of their most enjoyable experiences.

It seems, then, that research to date supports a variety of different views, and I believe one of the reasons for this relates to time scale.

A key factor that affects creativity is attention. In the short term, you can get people to pay attention using external rewards (such as money) or by creating pressure to meet urgent deadlines.

But it is much harder to sustain creativity over longer periods using these approaches – so the role of happiness becomes increasingly important. My experience of working with a large number of commercial organisations in Wales (and my own career in the public and private sectors) is that creativity is often not sustained within an organisation, even when it is encouraged (or demanded) by senior management.

Typical reasons for this lack of sustained creativity are pressures and stresses at work, the fear of judgement, the fear of failure, or employee apathy. One way to tackle this might be to aspire to psychologist Paul Dolan’s definition of happiness as the “experiences of pleasure and purpose over time”.

He describes purpose as relating to “fulfilment, meaning and worthwhileness” and believes we are at our happiest with a “balance between pleasure and purpose”.

Early creativity. Shutterstock/Rawpixel
Therefore, if your work is meaningful, fulfilling and worthwhile it helps in supporting your happiness. It also has the added advantage of making you want to engage and pay attention (rather than having to).

Bringing purpose and creativity together helps provide the intrinsic motivation for undertaking creativity, what has been called the “energy for action”, and enables creativity to be sustained.

So, if you want to be creative in the long term, the key questions to ask yourself are whether you are doing work that is interesting and enjoyable for you, and is that work of value to you? Or, as the American academic Teresa Amabile puts it, do you “perceive your work as contributing value to something or someone who matters”.

Performance anxiety
Another question to ask yourself is: are you helping others gain that “energy for action”, whether you are a manager in a company or a teacher in a school.

In situations where creative work has not been associated with happiness, such as the example of some prominent artists and authors, it might well be that their creative work was still driven by a sense of purpose and that other factors made them unhappy.

Another common element affecting the happiness of many creative people is the pressure they put on themselves to be creative, something I have often seen with my own students. This kind of pressure and stress can result in creative blocks and consequently perpetuate the problem.

So maybe the solution in these situations is to seek pleasure rather than purpose, as a positive mood does seem to enhance creativity, or to encourage people to be more playful. For those creative people who suffer from mental health problems, it is a much more complicated picture. But perhaps the act of undertaking creative activity can at least help in the healing process.

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