Inside the windowless bunker where Disney stores its 'secret weapon'
The Walt Disney Animation Research Library, which houses 65m items from sketches of Mickey Mouse to the original Pinocchio puppet, is an Aladdin’s cave of intellectual property
Disney staff used to call it the morgue, a windowless bunker of a building near corporate headquarters which stored drawings and sketches dating back decades.
The very first pencilings of Mickey Mouse, drafts of the forest in Sleeping Beauty, underwater sequences in The Little Mermaid and millions of other scenes and fragments from films, all diligently stored in the building’s 11 vaults in Glendale, Los Angeles.
The lugubrious nickname conjured mildewed arcana, a forgotten department two miles from the Burbank studio where paper went to die. A deceptive impression.
The morgue, now officially called the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, channels a corporate life-force that has made Disney the world’s entertainment behemoth.
“For a long time this was known as Disney’s secret weapon because the company could always go back to reuse and develop material. Every single animated drawing has its own record. Amazing really because Hollywood is usually so ephemeral,” said Fox Carney, the library’s research manager.
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Keywords
Aladdin (1992)Animation
Animation Research Library
Comics
Cruise ships
Donald Duck
Exhibition
Fantasia (1940)
Goofy
Horizons
Marvel
Mary Poppins (1964)
Merchandising
Mickey Mouse
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Peter Pan (1953)
Pinocchio (1940)
Pixar
Robin Hood (1973)
Sleeping Beauty (1959)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Star Wars
Steamboat Willie (1928)
Studio
The Little Mermaid (1989)
Universal Studios
Walt Disney Archives
Winnie the Pooh
Winnie the Pooh (2011)
Wreck-it Ralph (2012)
Zootopia (2016)