by Nabil Bakri
In promoting its 16th feature length
animation, Sleeping Beauty (1959), Disney (studio) released a promotional
documentary as a part of Disney’s Adventure of Art program, broadcasted in
Disney’s television program. In Disney’s (person) lifetime, the careers of his
artists were broadcasted almost every single time the studio released a feature
length animation by both media in general and Disney’s promotional department.
Those programs, started from backstage documentaries to expensive documentaries
and shorts, elevated the popularity of the artists. The four artists chosen by
Disney to appear in his television program were undoubtedly famous though they
were not the actors of Disney movies.
Based on the book Art
Spirit, Disney points out the idea that one must ‘educate himself’ and ‘do
not imitate others’. Many (art) students receive knowledge from their teachers
and try to imitate different styles of different influential artists, but Art Spirit suggests students to seek
knowledge somewhere else (‘The best advise I’ve ever given to a student who
have studied under me has been just this, ‘Educate yourself. Do not let me
educate you’’) and to create their own style. The documentary shows how diverse
artists must create a unified style for a movie. The artist must not follow
their own styles to achieve the best style for the animated feature, but to
combine many different styles to create a new style as the ultimate guide in
making the animated feature. The character designers must create many
characters fit to the background and the background artists must create the
suitable background for the characters. Similar to clothing style, the final
result will be awful if one does not fit the other. However, Disney does not
determine a specific style for a specific feature length without a long process
of creating, revising, and selecting.
All artists were allowed to ‘send’ their suggestions to
Walt Disney using their own styles in the post-production of a feature film.
Later on, they must conduct a meeting in order to find the most appropriate
design for the story. They must fit the characters to the plot and select the
design that will be the best to be animated through different angles. The
decisions were practically the same as Disney’s decision not to use the same
Winnie the Pooh design as presented in the original A.A. Milne’s masterpiece,
for not every design and sketch can be animated in three dimensional aspect. Da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa, for instance, is a
great piece of art, but it was not meant to be presented in three dimensional
aspect while in animating a character, though the medium is on traditional (two
dimensional) equipment, it is necessary to have characters that can be animated
through different angles. However, Disney shows to the public that though all
artists must follow the selected style, they all have their own styles.
The documentary shows the very idea of The Aesthetic of Nature, the 11th chapter of Gordon Graham’s Philosophy of the Arts, that the artist holds a very important role in determining the proper aesthetic judgment to the work of art. There are intentions in works of art, and the documentary tries to underline it. The documentary shows that there is no right or wrong in art and seems to point out that the artists’ intentions give meaning to the works of art (it is presented as the closure of the program that ‘The great painter has something to say. He does not paint men, landscapes, or furniture, but an idea’). The outcome that four artists ‘interpret’ the same tree differently shows how different each person’s preference in appreciating the ‘sublime’ of nature. They interpret beauty, pleasure, emotion, and understanding differently as seen on the result of their different paintings of one tree. All of the four artists find pleasure through the beauty of the tree, but they have different emotions connected to different understanding to finish their paintings. As the result, the paintings carry their own beauty, emotions, and understanding given by their diverse artists.
