The latest exhibit at Orange County Regional History Center may get creative juices flowing and prompt waves of nostalgia. “Animationland” provides hands-on artistic activities, and its companion “Drawing Magic: Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida” is a throwback to home-grown productions.
The bulk of the space, produced by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, has a storyline featuring Tracey the pencil dog from Turtleback Island and assorted pals. The exhibit features multiple stations that enable visitors to produce animated sequences with those characters.
Participants are exposed to storyboarding and drawing techniques, then can move on to stop-motion animation exercises, sound effects production and in-person video creations. It’s kind of like a more active/less screen time TikTok session and could be a good group activity for kids and grown-ups.
On this historic side of things is a mutoscope, a hand-cranked toy from the 1800s that operates in the style of a flipbook to create animation.
“Drawing Magic: Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida” includes materials from the Disney-MGM Studios era. (Dewayne Bevil/Orlando Sentinel)
A separate space is devoted to “Drawing Magic,” locally produced displays that recap animation made a Disney-MGM Studios, the theme park now known as Disney’s Hollywood Studios. (The name change kicked in 2008).
In one corner is an animator’s drawing desk with a schedule, maquettes of the Lilo and Stitch characters, lamp and stool. But the backdrop shows several people looking down through glass partitions at that desk, much in the way some on-stage animators worked at Disney-MGM. Park visitors could watch, at least in theory, a hand-drawn animated film in the works down in the “fishbowl.”
There are explanations about Walt Disney Animation Florida, which existed from 1989 to 2004, according to the display. The department was part of the so-called “Disney Renaissance” of animation.
Theme park fans may be intrigued with old photos (Michael Eisner with Mickey Mouse and Roger Rabbit) and a cartoonish promotional map of Disney World that includes unusual sights such as Scrooge McDuck in a helicopter, Ben Franklin atop Epcot’s Spaceship Earth and a banjo-playing Br’er Rabbit bounding around a lake where Ariel sits on a rock.
One corner of the display re-creates a work station once seen at Disney-MGM Studios. (Dewayne Bevil/Orlando Sentinel)
Other panels detail work done in Florida on Disney big-budget films, including “The Mob Song” from “Beauty and the Beast,” some Jasmine scenes from “Aladdin” and the “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” segment of “The Lion King.”
The Florida-based studio’s first feature-length production was “Mulan,” which debuted in 1998. Its last completed film was “Brother Bear,” released in 2003.
Among the displayed non-animated items in the display are a “Lilo & Stitch” T-shirt, a Walt Disney Feature Animation jacket, a “Brother Bear” cast and crew mug and a small jigsaw puzzle – incorporating Musha, a dragon character from “Mulan” – for the 1998 open house of the animation studio workplace
The display also explains the end of the local studio era, tied to the surge in computer animation. Work was completely shut down in March 2004.
“Animationland” remains at the downtown Orlando museum through May 3. It is included with regular admission. For more details, go to thehistorycenter.org.
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