Disney’s rococo roots

Extensive research went into the writing of this piece. First, I lay on the sofa watching Disney’s Cinderella. Then, Beauty and the Beast. Then, because I’m assiduous about these things, Frozen. The singalong version. I wish I could tell you that the sofa was a rococo number with ormolu mounts and a pink satin seat, but that would upholster the truth.

My excuse – who needs one? – was the Wallace Collection’s delightful exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts. It’s not often that I leave a show smiling, humming and near enough twirling my way through the West End. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

What a clever and original exhibition this is: an ingenious pairing of the Wallace’s 18th-century collections with rococo flourishes from Disney’s classic films. It is a pendant to a larger show that has just finished at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Get the Met catalogue if you’re craving more.

Walt Disney, born in Chicago in 1901, to a father of Irish and a mother of German and English descent, was fascinated by the ‘Old Continent’. He first travelled to France in 1918, just after the end of the first world war, as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He returned to America the following year and began his artistic career in commercial illustration. By 1923, he had, with his brother Roy, set up the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, later the Walt Disney Company. Five years on, he struck big with Mickey Mouse. When he arrived in London and Paris on a grand tour in 1935, Walt was a megastar. He visited the Palace of Versailles, where a family home video shows him wandering the park, Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors and Marie Antoinette’s private apartments.