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Milan, September 2 2021 – Telling timeless stories while managing to enchant the public is considered a real art, but behind the typical immediacy of the result lies – as often happens in the art world – a work of creative research that lasts for years. “Disney. The art of telling timeless stories”, at the MUDEC Museum of Cultures in Milan from 3 September to 13 February 2022, is the exhibition that tells the public about this creative process.

Once upon a time there was Walt Disney, a pioneer in the art of animation. His innovative creative approach to storytelling created some of the most beautiful and famous films of the twentieth century, from Pinocchio to Fantasia, from Cinderella to Robin Hood. The exhibition presents precious original works from the Disney Archives of many famous films from Walt Disney Animation Studios, including Hercules and The Little Mermaid, up to the most recent animated film Frozen 2 – The Secret of Arendelle, created by a new generation of artists and filmmakers still deeply inspired by Walt Disney's legacy.

The exhibition, promoted by the Municipality of Milan-Cultura and produced by 24 ORE Cultura-Gruppo 24 ORE, curated by the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, with the collaboration of Federico Fiecconi, historian and critic of comics and animated cinema, offers a path with a triple interpretation.

The itinerary tells the visitor about Walt Disney's masterpieces, tracing the stories - which we are all used to knowing in the Disney version - to the ancient matrices of epic tradition: they are the myths, medieval legends and folklore, fables and fairy tales that constitute for centuries the archetypal narrative heritage of the different cultures of the world, a true melting pot between the different continents. These are also the thematic sections of the exhibition in which the most famous stories from which the Disney films were based are placed.

The great innovative effort of the Disney artists was - and still is - to bring these stories to the cinema using different artistic tools, from hand drawing - a founding element of the work in the Studios - to digital animation, to capture the essence of ancient fairy tales and revitalize them, updating their universal value.

While the symbolic value of the stories has remained intact over the decades, it is the production techniques that have evolved. This is the second key to understanding the exhibition itinerary, which tells the public how an animated masterpiece is born, the 'behind the scenes' of some of the greatest Disney animated films of all time, entering the heart of the studio and the artistic process. We start with an idea, a story concept and develop a narrative plot. The characters are then created. Every single character that will animate the story is 'visualized' by Disney creatives and, even before our hero (or the villain or the sidekick) has the face and features that we are used to recognizing in the film, their eyes are imagined , the hair, the clothes and the most iconic movements, thus obtaining sheets and sheets of preparatory sketches and three-dimensional maquettes in which the character slowly comes to life. The team's work is supervised by an artistic director. The settings are defined with the same creative process and under his guidance. Various artistic techniques used (which include graphite drawing, colored pencils and pastels, charcoal, watercolours, tempera, acrylics, collages): computer graphics, which today assists in the study and creation of film scenes, is only the evolution of those traditional techniques, and concerns above all the subsequent steps of animation and coloring, today created using digital processes. By transforming hundreds of thousands of images one after the other into frames, the film is created.

The third key to understanding the exhibition allows for a personal and experimental interpretation of the great and creative art of storytelling. The visitor is encouraged to become a narrator himself and will be able to walk through the rooms of the exhibition not only as a passive spectator of contents, but as a protagonist of them. The objective is in fact to build your own story, which will be composed in a small 'booklet' to take with you home. Through interactive stations and a setup that evokes the scenarios of the great masterpieces of Disney animation, the visit route itself will provide the tools of the trade for each storyteller. Room after room everyone will be able to experiment with the fundamental structural elements to give life to any narrative - setting, characters, narrative plot - until they experience the thrill of identifying with the work of an animation artist through the same techniques as the Disney Studios.

The catalog of the exhibition “Disney. The art of telling timeless stories,” is published by 24 ORE Cultura and available for sale at the exhibition bookshop, in all bookstores and online.