This week Year 4 were very lucky to be able to visit the Wallace Collection to view the new exhibition ‘Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of the Decorative Arts’ and participate in a workshop to create their own characters inspired by the beautiful surroundings at the Wallace!
We began by looking at the original sketches and concept images from Disney’s most iconic films such as Cinderella, created in the 1950s, when each frame and detail had to be drawn by hand. We learnt so much about the process of animation and how more recent films such as Beauty and the Beast, created in the 1990s, began to use computerised images to create animation.
However, although the process of animation has changed, the inspiration behind the characters, settings and objects we are all so familiar with remain the same.
We discovered that Walt Disney and many of the other illustrators took inspiration from places around the world including the royal palaces of France such as Versailles and even the Wallace Collection! We saw how candelabras inspired the character of Lumiere, a gilded grandfather clock was used to shape Cogsworth and a very beautiful painting from the Wallace’s own collection which was used to decorate the interior of Elsa’s castle in Frozen.
The class later headed into one of the main rooms in the house to look at some characters created by illustrators using objects from around the room. We drew comparisons between an octopus and a chandelier and a butler which was inspired by a vase. The Wallace Collection is full of so many amazing treasures with beautiful and ornate lines and details. Some of these objects were over 300 years old and belonged to the King of France, Louis XV!
Our next challenge was to follow the same process Walt Disney and his illustrators did to create our own characters. We used the handles of drawers, the bottoms of vases and the legs of tables as body parts to combine and come up with some unique characters! The class then invented a name for their new character and thought carefully about their personality, before bringing them to life in a short story board.
It was so wonderful to go on a trip again after all this time…Thank you to the Wallace Collection for inviting us! We hope to visit you soon…
What was your favourite part of the exhibition and the workshop?
