About a week ago, I spoke with a reporter from a Dutch newspaper (as one does). He had reached out to me after my CNN piece and I had been delinquent in my reply. As it happened, I told him, I was headed to the Netherlands in just a few days for a 72 hour work trip. He would soon be in Florida for some Disney reporting. We would pass like the proverbial ships in the night.
I said I was going to Groningen.
“Ah, are you going for the Disney exhibit?” he asked me.
The WHAT now? “No, I’m going for a seminar my center is co-hosting at the university there.” There’s a Disney exhibit? I thought.
“My friend just took his children to a Disney exhibit there,” he said. The friends’ kids found it a bit dull, he told me, but there was a lot of history in it.
I filed this information away in my brain and assumed that I’ve been working on this project for so long that I’ve started to hallucinate Disney things around every corner. Or that perhaps he was mistaken and it was really a small show. There were papers to grade, bags to pack, and apocalypses to ponder for my seminar on the end times.
But of course, this past Tuesday, when my colleagues and I walked into Groningen’s spectacular Forum—a combination library, community center, cinema, and more— the first thing I saw was this:
Followed by this….
And then, of course, there was this banner, the full height of the ten story atrium:
Clearly, the mouse had landed in here in Groningen, a charming city in the northeast of the Netherlands, roughly a two-hour train ride from Amsterdam.
And so it came to pass that I spent my two free hours at the close of the trip back in the Forum, visiting “Disney: Telling Timeless Stories.”
Unlike the so-packed-you-can’t-move opening weekend of “100 Years of Wonder” at the Franklin Institute I attended last February, in Groningen, on a Wednesday afternoon, I had a bit of breathing room to explore “1,000 metres of Disney fun.” (For the weekend, timed tickets were recommended). But I wasn’t alone. There were still plenty of folks there with me. Most of them were speaking Dutch. Only a few had brought children.
The exhibit was organized by story genre: myths, fables, legends, and fairy-tales. Each genre received a large section of the two-floor show. (So, the pastoral scenes of Fantasia and all of Hercules were in the “myth” room, along with King Midas; the princesses were over in “Fairy Tales.”) But first, in the introductory room, as I stood a few feet from a giant model of a book with the opening “pages” of classic Disney films being laser projected onto it, I read: “Over the course of the centuries, scribes, minstrels, poets, novelists, and philosophers” have expressed “the most beautiful creations of the human imagination.”
Of course, I thought. I’m in Europe. Land of the first stories Walt Disney adapted for full length features. There was a lot of home-continent pride, with references to French, German, English, Scottish, Greek, Swedish, and Norwegian influences— as well as several video interviews with northern European artists who had worked for Disney.
There was also a room on “American folklore.” “I guess I don’t need to explain that part to you,” the nice man at the desk had said to me as he showed me the map (I gathered from his tone that his usual spiel for European visitors might mention stories like Johnny Appleseed and John Henry. And yes, as an aside— every ridiculous stereotype about how nice everyone in the Netherlands is held up on this, my second trip there. If you reading this from there, many thanks for putting up with uncouth Americans like me who only know how to say dank u wel, which I can’t even spell correctly).
I’m jet lagged and still absorbing all that I saw, but the amount of original art in this exhibit was, frankly, astounding. The 100th birthday show in the US did cover all of Disney, and did have original live action props and theme park material. Don’t get me wrong, it was huge. But some of its animated materials were reproductions.
Instead, here, with the exception of some animation cels from the older features, there was just original art. I saw sketches that actually came from the hands of early Disney artists— Fred Moore, Frank Thomas; from mid-century greats like concept artist Mary Blair; and from more recent virtuosos, like Andreas Deja (important for the “Disney renaissance” of the early 1990s) and the creators of Frozen.
In my own writing work this week—the non-Disney part of my writing, anyway—I just finished a rough draft about old paper in the archives. Looking at old handwritten lines on old paper is one of the things that got me into this business. That’s part of my own fascination with this kind of show, and why a lot of people still want to see original art, not just its reproductions (no, academic readers, I’m not going down a Walter Benjamin rabbit hole today, too tired). The lines were under glass, but I was a breath away from those graphite and colored pencil lines on a yellow piece of paper that once, in a room lost to time, began to make Cinderella. Or at least one tiny spark of her. The process was unveiled. The mystery remained.
There were also some interactive bits designed to keep the smaller humans engaged, like this chance to look into the Evil Queen’s Magic Mirror from Snow White (and then watch as your own face faded into the animated one of the mirror character):
Travel is a portal, and it’s also always a bit of a magic mirror. You look different in a different continent’s light. Your own language sounds different when another one echoes off the walls. Time slows down and speeds up as you dwell in the radical present of lovely streets you haven’t seen or even mundane things like the line for coffee at the airport, because it’s not your coffee, and not your airport.
Disney looked both different and same in Groningen. Here is what was the same. There was an overstuffed gift shop and there were baked goods ….
But Disney also looked a little bit different, and it had to do with the topic of my work trip. The seminar itself was more conversational than presentation-based (the best seminars are!), but we each had to have something to say, and I had presenting some musings on EPCOT, Small World, futurity, and childhood. I was thinking about utopia and technological progress—analyzing 1960s visions of endings and futures.
But there, in the museum after three days of discussing what we mean when we talk about time and religion— I found time in the very title of the exhibit: “Disney: Telling Timeless Stories.”
“Telling timeless stories.” This version of Disney is supposed to be outside of time, more than time, or containing all of time, somehow, as if time were just its plaything. Beyond time. It reminds me of the first episode of Loki (streaming on Disney+), in which the title character finds a batch of infinity stones—which are kind of a big, “control-all-of-reality” sort deal in the MCU— just hanging out in desks at the Time Variance Authority, some used as paperweights.
“Is this the greatest power in the universe?” he wonders.
I can’t speak to Disney’s metaphysical power over the entire universe.
But Disney seems—like travel— to be simultaneously sublime and mundane. Its power stemming from the dialectic between its omnipresence as a comforting background — just another image on another touch screen in another venue— and its ability to break time open and make us feel things about so many times and places, in our own universe and the Disney universes, all at once.
** Speaking of time: friends in the Netherlands—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I would be there!!!!!!! There really were only two free hours and life just didn’t allow me to extend the trip in either direction.
***Anyone reading this else who knows me IRL: nothing is wrong, but somehow the last few months have just been bananas in terms of workload and life generally, and it’s actually gotten more bananas since the semester “ended,” not less. I’m truly months behind on correspondence, and owe many of you letters/work things/thank yous/and more. Apologies.