A Trip Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Up with Walt Disney

Thanks to the invention of YouTube, today it takes only the click of a mouse to witness the evolution of the animated film. Walt Disney, the alter-ego of Mickey Mouse, was one of the most far-reaching American innovators of all time. Today, you can hardly find a place on earth that hasn't been touched by Disney's imagination.

The Disney Brothers Studio was launched in 1923 with the purchase of a used camera for $200. There were many failures and setbacks on the road to success. Disney was constantly pushing the envelope, often putting himself in financial jeopardy, for the sake of tackling a problem that he was determined to solve. He said, "I've always had a feeling that any time you can experiment, you ought to do it. Because you never know what will happen."

Enjoy this look back at some of Walt Disney's most innovative experiments.

Alice Gets in Dutch (1924) — Disney's first silent movies featured a real-life Alice who travels to an animated cartoon land.

"Trolly Troubles" Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1924) — Disney's first successful animated character, Oswald the Rabbit, was stolen from him, leading to the creation of Mickey Mouse. (The soundtrack to this originally silent movie is an addition)

Plane Crazy (1928) — The first adventures of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse were silent, inspired by the adventures of aviator Charles Lindberg. After Disney's setback with the theft of Oswald, animator Ub Uwerks worked in secret to created over 8,000 drawings to make the cartoon. Carl Stalling's soundtrack was added later.

Steamboat Willie (1928) — The first animated cartoon with sound

The Band Concert (1928) — The first color Mickey Mouse cartoon using the Technicolor process

Snow White (1938) — Trailer for Disney's first animated feature-length movie, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

How Disney Movies Are Made (1938) — A documentary outlining Disney's process to create the first animated feature-length movie, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

The Disneyland Story (1954) — The first episode of Disney's new television show that helped to fund and promote Walt's new family theme park, "Disneyland." The show was filmed in color, even though the show was broadcast in black and white. Disney knew that not too far in the future, television would be broadcast in color.

With Disneyland, DisneyWorld and EPCOT, Disney's experiments went beyond animation to explore the possibilities of a completely new kind of entertainment experience that Disney called "imagineering." Imagineers include artists, writers, architects, landscape architects, engineers, model builders, construction managers, technicians and designers.

The Walt Disney Studios 2009's offering of animated movies can be seen in a theater near you!

The Frog and the Princess (2oo9) marks a return to hand-drawn animation and features Disney's first African American princess, Tiana, who lives in New Orleans during the Jazz Age.

Up (2oo9) from Disney/Pixar is presented in digital 3-D.

A way to protest art cuts

Just had an idea in response to cuts and all. Maybe all art should be withheld from our legislators so they can really see what it's like to have no art. It would land up as an art piece but:

-we should remove or cover all sculptures with brown burlap

-tape paper over all portraits

-have only silence during phone holds

-take away their designer ties and clothes - make everyone wear gray

-take away all jewelry and designer watches

-paint their floors gray

-kick them out of the fancy offices/buildings and make them work in a bungalow or better yet a shipping container.

-eliminate landscaping and just allow weeds

-serve them fast food on paper plates

Didn't they make a movie about this?

"So Light, Like the Mind"

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

— MERCE CUNNINGHAM, April 16, 1919-July 26, 2009

Innovator Merce Cunningham dedicated a lifetime to the art of dance.

Today, even though time is fleeting, technology gives us a way to watch Merce and his company

of dancers at work in the rehearsal studio.

Mondays with Merce. http://www.merce.org/mondayswithmerce.html

There is a quote from the Tao Te Ching on the www.merce.org homepage.

“...only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world.”

Cunningham was one of the many students who went to school at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a school that was founded in 1933, now remembered as a moment when an artistic and educational experiment led to a burst of artistic innovation that is the stuff of legend. The college brought together artists and great thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Josef and Anni Albers, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and San Francisco artist Ruth Asawa. The ensuing work and influence of these great artists continues to move forward the ideals set forth at Black Mountain that art and life are not separate.

Learn more about the remarkable minds of historic Black Mountain College:

The PBS "American Master" Series features many Black Mountain College artists

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/black_mountain_college.html

"The College Died, but the Students Really Lived,"

NY Times article about the 1992 Black Mountain College reunion in San Francisco

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/14/arts/the-college-died-but-the-students-really-lived.html

Oral history interview with Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier, 2002 June 21-Jul 3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/asawa02.htm

Who Made America? -PBS show/website on innovators

As I was looking up info on Russel Simmons, I found this article on PBS, Who Made America?
It lists him as an innovator has a map & timeline of American innovators/innovations.

AW, how do you add links on the Innovation web idea links section of the blog?

social entrenpreneurism and art

So have been watching the TV show, The Philanthropist (Wed., 10pm, NBC) inspired by Bobby Sager, a real life social entrepreneur.

The show's main character, Teddy Rist, was your basic rich businessman until he loses his son and starts thinking about others. In the last epsiode, he tries to help heal a fractured community (similar to work Bobby Sager does in Rwanda, where he has brought together women whose husbands are in jail for committing murder in the genocide of 1994 with women whose husbands were murdered in the genocide to start a business together weaving baskets, making jewelry and such like and then he helps them sell those goods on the world market.)

Sager believes:

It's not only bad business to give a man a fish, as all he has at the end of the day is a fish, it's also bad business to simply give a man a pole with which to fish, because at the end of the day he still only has some fish. What is really sustainable is to teach that man how to package, market and sell that fish so that he can buy potatoes and chicken and maybe even educate his children so that real progress with his family is made.

Of course, this assumes you agree that marketing is 'real progress' and there's something wrong with just living. But what does this have to do w/anything we're doing? This show seems somewhat innovative to me (or maybe I'm just naive to other shows).

It seems a little like a social entrepreneur venture.

It's trying to be profitable via the tv entertainment route & internet site. The site has your basic tv website where you can watch missed episodes and chat w/ viewers & such. It must have a deal w/Mac as it lists all the songs in its shows via iTunes store links. It also sells the usual stuff and has plenty of ads.

But then it has this help change social issues side. Each episode deals w/a social issue, though they are realistic fiction, not accurate news stories. The site has has 'games' (somewhat educational -a quiz about what are considered professional business practices, and -a quiz on survival skills). Then it has a whole section on outreach & resources on philanthropy.

How could we do this with our art? With our school? Are we going to open this blog up to other staff members? I just googled 'philanthropy icon' in hopes of finding a visual picture and it came up w/the name

Russell Simmons who started the Rush Philantropic Arts Foundation It never ends...

"Move On" from Sunday in the Park with George

This scene is from the 2008 Broadway Revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, a musical that originally premiered in 1984. The first half of the musical is set in 1884 and focuses on George Seurat and Dot, his mistress. George is obsessively working on his painting, "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." The second half is set one hundred years later in 1984, centering on Seurat's great grandson, George, an acclaimed but unhappy artist who gets this sound advice from the ghost of Dot, his great grandmother. This new production used state of the art video projections to bring the pointillist painting to life.

I hope that you enjoy watching this. It's my first try at embedding a YouTube clip!

Move on...

Stop worrying where you're going-
Move on
If you can know where you're going
You've gone
Just keep moving on...

... Anything you do

Let it come from you
Then it will be new

Give us more to see...

"Move On" — music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

What's your passion?

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” -Carl W. Buechner quotes

So true. So maybe teaching should be more about what feelings we want them to experience and not just what skills/facts
we want them to learn. I don't see 'ability to be passionate' in any of the standards.

When's the last time you heard a parent say, "I want my child to find & study his/her passion? Or a teacher say, I want my students to find & learn about their passion? There's no line on the report card, "Shows passion." We grade effort, but that's different than passion. Passion is an emotion. Effort isn't, it's just the result of or lack of passion. Passion drives effort. In school, we tend to talk about our emotions, and how to control them. If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands; not if you're happy and you known it prove it to us.

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” -Anthony J. D'Angelo

If we instill or help students find their passion, then we don't just plant the seed. We motivate them to want the seed to sprout. With passion, they'll work to find the solutions to where and how to get the water and how to keep the plant growing.

“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.” -unknown

I don't know if those 3 things can make anything impossible, but they make things more possible and thereby give hope, another emotion.

What's this got to do w/innovation? I think I saw it in the innovation vehicle manual under 'fuel and driver.'

Here's to a passionate year as we try new things!