Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

MOVIOLA MICKEY or HOW TO JUMP-START A MOUSE AND ANIMATE AN ANIMATION MUSEUM

“Who are we? What are we? Where have we been? Where are we going?”

It was Disney Imagineering calling in 1988.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Don’t you know who you are and what you’ve done?”

“Yes,” they said, “but you know better, you’re outside the skin, we can’t see ourselves for the seeds. Come over.”

So I worked, or rather played, for a week with Roy Disney, John Hench, Van Romans, and some other artists who sat in to illustrate our chat as it came out of our mouths. The great thing about Disney is that you say, or type something in the morning, and by late afternoon, you have ten or twenty pen and ink or watercolor sketches to put flesh on your conversational-IBM-Selectric III-typewriter bones.

It turned out that the Disney folks wanted to blueprint a Museum of Animation.

Easy as cartoon pie, I said, remembering that I had got my Mickey Mouse Club pin at the Genesee Theater in Waukegan, Illinois when I was ten, and had seen all three hundred of the Mouse and Silly Symphony Cartoons from 1927 on.

Well, not quite cartoon-pie simple. Roy Disney and John Hench handed over some plans and photos of an Animation Exhibit already in cardboard cut-out, mock-up shape. Which is to say fascinating but not fascinating enough.

Then they all looked at me for answers. What could I add, subtract, or subdivide on the right side of my head? The whole plan was terribly still, awfully quiet, like many other museum exhibits over the centuries. Did I have an electric charge on me somewhere so I could jolt the entirety to life?

I searched my pockets for several days of meetings, riffled through all my Mouse and Dinosaur Fantasia books, and rummaged among some sketches I had birthed at age fourteen. In bed with a cold, I had crayoned forth some bad reproductions of Mickey, Donald Duck and Horace Horsecollar. Carrying these with me, I went back to the studio for what might have been a final round of what looked to be a frustrating talk.

Then, someone threw a plastic photo of Goofy on the table. In it were imbedded seven or eight images of the confused and hyperactive Dog. As you moved the photo or your head, Goofy circled about in various antic poses, continuously in action. I had never seen a so-called three-dimensional photo with so many positions and actions trapped and ready to move. I held onto Goofy for a full two or three minutes, making him run, pause, or leap backward. A sheer delight. Out of this delight I at last said:

“Can we get six- or eight-foot-tall photos like this reproduced by any company anywhere in the United States?”

No one was quite sure, they would look into it. “But why?”

“Because,” I said, “if we can get life-size, three-dimensional images of Mickey and Donald and Pinocchio and Maleficent, and place them on both sides of the Museum Corridor, then when you walk through the halls, the whole museum will walk with you! It will be an animated museum that animates, the first in history. My God, a museum that not only celebrates animated motion, but moves in an earthquake of action, propelled forward, accompanying you as you walk, pause, go ahead again or step back.”

“Good Gravy,” or something like that, everyone said.

Phone calls were made. A company was found that could make the plastic sheets with photography imbedded in long vertical strips like Venetian blinds set sidewise.

The name of the process, the same one that binds those tiny dinosaurs into your measuring ruler so they raise or lower their heads, was lenticular photography. It has been around for years, imbedded in measuring sticks, calendars, and postcards. Now I wanted to grow it to giant size to set free Monstro the Whale, Flowers and Trees, Bambi and the Wicked Witch in the Museum of Disney Animation. My God, I thought, if only we can do it. No, I thought, my God, we must!

So my plan, scribbled out swiftly on a note pad, and brought to perfection by artists sitting with us, was this:

Up front in the Moviola Mickey traveling museum must be a series of Moviolas, those editing machines into which you peer as into kaleidoscopes or wishing wells, to watch the editable flickers, the images of films that you can cut and slice to fit your fancy, run a riot or end a plague. From one of the large-size Moviolas a huge boa constrictor of film would leap. Arcing across the lobby area the film frames would grow larger and larger until they reached a wall and became a door. Future audiences would step through the slotted film-frame and advance through a long, serpentine-like corridor, a history of animation. Gertie the Dinosaur would perambulate with them as they strolled, and then Mickey and Minnie and all the other barnyard friends would follow, imbedded in lenticular Venetian blind slats upended on the vertical. As the audience advanced, they would encounter videocasette frames in the walls in which, for a half minute or minute, scenes from Steamboat Willie or The Skeleton Dance would be repeated endlessly. Moving on, the shapes and the colors in the lenticular walls would change.

With Flowers and Trees, the lenticular images would assume all the rainbow colors. And the old barnyard cartoons would find an additional friend, Donald Duck, to walk with lenticular hops and jumps into the years ahead. Images of the Band Concert would whirlwind in the three-dimensional walls, leading us to The Old Mill, where again convenient videocassette screens would illustrate Disney’s progress leading up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio and beyond. Needless to say, the Dwarfs would march to and from work in the walls, pursued by the Whale, the Dinosaurs, and Maleficent and her monsters.

In a great theater at the end of the exhibit, a longer demonstration on the wide screen would give Fantasia a chance to expand and drown us in color and sound.

At the finale of our trek, accompanied by bright mobs of familiar friends and enemies, photo-imbedded in every inch of corridor paneling, in one long strip of film, it would seem, by the notched projector holes in ceiling and sill, we would step out of the serpentine and see the film we had inhabited snake up on the air and spiral down to vanish into a final Moviola waiting to devour it.

There you have it. A museum that is one long three-dimensional march through animation history. A museum of animation that animates. A corridor where antic shadows wait to escort you through time. An exhibit, what’s more, that can be taken apart, like Lego architecture and moved from Denver to Seattle to Chicago to the Museum of Modern Art to the Smithsonian and back, and perhaps, to some half-permanent, shadow-show perch at EPCOT or Disney World.

That’s how I cranked the big Moviola.

Now it’s up to the Disney Mousekeepers to run the flickers and start the show.