Disney Museum

This past Wednesday, we took a trip to San Francisco to wrap up some loose ends. We weren't sure how the day would go, so we planned a Walt Disney Museum visit as our last stop in case we needed cheering up. During our stay in San Francisco in June and July, we'd seen banners advertising a special exhibition of Mary Blair artwork. We'd planned to visit the special exhibition during Roscoe's heart surgery but that opportunity never came. We thought this would be a good way to conclude our San Francisco visit.

Mary Blair was a concept artist who was very well-loved by Walt Disney. She'd create some concept art, upon which the animators would base their animations for the full-length movies. We got to see her concept art for Cinderella, Peter Pan, and Alice in Wonderland (shown below). She also helped design the infamous It's a Small World ride at Disneyland.

Some of the pictures we took are below. We (Alisha) often had to take pictures at weird angles to avoid a light reflection. These pictures we were looking at weren't lithographs or copies, these were one-of-a-kind concept art pieces upon which the movies were based. As you can see, some shots made it into the movie almost exactly like the original, and some didn't make it at all:

Cinderella

Alice in Wonderland

Peter Pan

She also did illustrations for children's books in the 1950's. It was fun for us when we realized that we'd read to Roscoe from some of the books she'd illustrated:

but now we were looking at the originals: