In truth, The Story of the Moving Image had all the trappings of a Disneyland pavilion, putting ACMI’s actual Disney exhibit to shame. The Koorie Oral History Program and the Bill Onus family archive, Memory Garden, 2020, ACMI, Melbourne. Mummies and daddies can even pop into the adjoining restaurant, Hero, developed by television presenter and chef Karen Martini (of Better Homes and Gardens fame), and eat a donut with a knife and fork. Another feature, Cuphead: Inspiration from the Inkwell, is a contemporary incarnation of the nineteenth-century zoetrope invention, which is inspired by Disney and the classic cartoons of the 1930s but makes for a much more enticing strobed/jacked-up attraction. You could watch years of to-camera video diary performances from news and documentary through to YouTube and TikTok stars in You will see me (2020) by Sari Braithwaite, Conor Bateman and Field Carr-a work that reflects upon our tireless performance of self in moving images from the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
#Animations magic archive#
In Memory Garden, you could hold a home video film from The Koorie Oral History Program and the Bill Onus family archive in your hand, or at least projected onto your palm by a shiny black cylinder with the feel of a science-fiction tubular pneumatic transportation device.
On entry to The Story of the Moving Image, visitors are given a circular device to tap on various attractions called The Lens, which allows you to “take home” all the screenworks (or at least their information and stills) discovered during your stay. Screen-induced increases in childhood myopia during the not-quite-20/20 pandemic might make this seem like an untimely grand reopening, but at least this leg of the ACMI experience didn’t make screen culture a static experience. Get the kids off the iPad, out of the house and head into a huge interactive “screen cultures” exhibition. The revitalised ACMI is marked by its free, 1,600 square-metre permanent exhibition The Story of the Moving Image (previously Screen Worlds), which boasts all the immersion a young family could ask for. Disney: The Magic of Animation, ACMI, Melbourne. And while it might seem odd to criticise a lack of something that is so often criticised itself in the Big Business Art World (curatorship with inbuilt organic marketing), I couldn’t help but wonder who this exhibition is for. For a blockbuster, there are surprisingly few Instagram opportunities. The Mickey Mouse zoetrope only worked from one well-lit angle and while exhibition texts promised all those family-friendly draw cards such as “immersion”, “stepping inside” a scene from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) amounted to little other than a glorified face-in-hole board of the Great British seaside tradition. The would-be wonderful world of Disney has been largely reduced to stationary sketches contained in plain black frames, hung on colour-blocked walls. In fact, there is very little in the way of moving images at all. But where those films embedded questions concerning the vitality of objects and environs into the very animation (fusing and confusing objects, commodities and characters/persons), Disney: The Magic of Animation sought to explain away the magic with a few choice wall texts.
#Animations magic series#
Like Disney’s inclusion of the hand of the animator in Saludos Amigos (1943), after Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series (1918-1929), the contradiction between the magical illusion of animation and the articulation of its production is a fundamental formal characteristic of early animation. To animate is to give life and from Pinocchio (1940) through to the enchanted household objects of Beauty and the Beast (1991), Disney has obsessively ruminated on the theme of animating the inanimate. The Disney exhibit promises to show visitors how drawings are brought to life, “from pencil and paper to today’s computer-generated wonders”. The warm, happy hues of the flags with the homely faces of millennial childhoods billow in the cool Melbourne winter wind, advertising ACMI’s would-be triumphant return with a two-year and $40 million redevelopment, as well as a winter masterpieces exhibition- Disney: The Magic of Animation. They bear the recently updated ACMI logo in bold red and a selection of pre-CGI Disney sketches. Melbourne is littered with bright yellow flags.
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