alexiss dawn

This weekend I had the chance to visit the Walt Disney family museum in San Francisco. The museum is located in the heart of the presidio area, and almost seems a bit hidden. (Make note that if you enter the address into a GPS, it will take you to somewhere downtown, and not the museum!)

The museum is full of stories, movies, quotes, pictures, props, and all sorts of knick knacks collected from Walt’s life. You start out learning a bit of his ancestry, then follow him throughout his life from his school days, to his many attempts in starting business, his successes and failures, and through his last days. The place is huge with eleven separate rooms and it takes several hours to get through if you want the full experience and the chance to read and watch everything that is posted, but it’s well worth it if you take the time.

You’re not allowed to use cameras or cell phones, so i scribbled notes of quotes on the back of my museum guide so that I could post them up here. So without much introduction, I just want to post up a few quotes that made me sit back and think while I was there. It may have been said over 70 years ago, but these still apply. So enjoy and be inspired!

“The point must be made clear to the men that our study of the actual is not so that we may be able to accomplish the actual, but so that we may have a basis upon which to go into the fantastic, the unreal, the imaginative - and yet to let it have a foundation of act, in order that it may more richy posess sincerity and contact with the public.

A good many of men misinterpret the idea of studying the actual motion. They think it is our purpose mereley to duplicate these things. This misconception should be cleared up for all. I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things, based on the real, unless we first know the real.”

- Walt Disney to Don Graham, December 23, 1935

“Walt said, ‘That’s what I want to see in the pictures, I want the character to be somebody. I don’t want them just to be a drawing.”

-Friz Freleng, animator

“Walt encouraged his artists to study human and animal movement - not to duplicate reality, but to use it as a foundation for convincing reality.”

“You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make the dream a reality.” - Walt Disney

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Animation, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.