Disney museum to focus on man behind brand The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon) Fri Jun 19 2009 Source: Reuters Life! Walt Disney is a global brand with film studios and theme parks bearing his name, but now his family is unveiling a museum to tell the story of the animation pioneer they say has been lost behind the trademark. The Walt Disney Family Foundation, a non-profit organization established in 1995 to promote education and the study of Disney, will open the Walt Disney Family Museum on Oct. 1 in San Francisco. "My father's name is probably one of the most well-known names around the world, but as the 'brand' or trademark has spread, for many, the man has become lost," Disney's daughter and museum founder, Diane Disney Miller, said in a statement. The museum will trace Disney's life from his birth in Chicago and childhood in Missouri to his move to California in 1920s, where he married and his animation career took off with the creation of the Mickey Mouse character. Among the exhibits on display will be early animation drawings, film clips, scripts, cameras and many of Disney's numerous Academy Awards, including an honorary Oscar in 1939 for his first feature-length animation film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There will also be a model of the Disneyland theme park he first envisioned, quite different from the park that opened in California in 1955, and a model of the Lily Belle train that ran on a halfmile of track around his Hollywood home. "Visiting my grandpa was pretty fun," Walter Miller, the foundation's president, recalled at a launch of the museum in New York on Wednesday. "Perhaps my grandfather's greatest gift, without question his greatest pleasure, was to bring imagination to life," he said. "He never lost that childhood sense of wonder and of curiosity." Disney, whose other movies included Cinderella, Bambi and Mary Poppins, which mixed live action and animation, died in 1966. John Canemaker, an Academy Award-winning animator and animation studies professor at New York University, said at the launch that Disney's development of "personality animation," beginning with Mickey Mouse, revolutionized the industry. "Within a remarkably short period of time, a mere decade, Disney set the course for animation in the 20th century and beyond," Canemaker said.
