Davis Fischer-Walker

Dr.Bayraktar
Intro to the Arts
10/18/2015
Museum Write Up Paper
To some Disneyland is a magical place, to others its a place where you spend
hours upon hours eating over priced food in the 110 degree Southern California weather
because your ten year old just had to see Micky for their birthday. Thats not the point of
this paper, the point is to talk about Disneylands design and how it hits in the grey area
between art and design. From their little nuances, to the big blaring mouse ears that you
cant go a week without seeing somewhere in your life, it has all been put under the
microscope and dissected by the Disney Corporation. As interesting as that is, well also
look at the context of this piece. Seeing as it is only sixty years old, there are plenty of
people alive today that remember things like this. So lets dive into this poster about the
Disneyland Monorail and discuss its visual style and cultural happenings around that
period of time so that we may have a better understanding as to why this poster is kind of
cool.
This poster was apart of a serious of posters that were meant to tell all of the
visitors about what attractions they could visit and ride on; they were also meant to help
make the visitors feel like they were apart of this magical land and apart of a new world.
These posters were about standard movie poster size too, 27 by 41, because of their
large size they also did a great job of helping the guests feel like they were in a whole
new world. The work that I viewed was in pristine condition hiding behind glass, but the

originals would most likely be duller and warped because of bleaching and heat from the
sun. Now, those original posters are most likely sitting beneath the rest of the par in
Disneylands secret underground facility where they keep all of their old and prized
possessions.
The composition of this poster is a very textbook example of how graphic design
should be done. It has a very simple to follow hierarchy where the bigger objects in the
picture are also the more important parts of the picture, people would take note of this
even without knowing it, it has the important objects right in the middle of it while all the
less important objects hovering around it, and it has quite a bit of contrast letting the
viewer know what they should see and visit. Speaking from a visual standpoint, this piece
of art does not engage the audience like a Caravaggio painting would. It doesnt have
high contrast between the darks and the lights, it isnt all brown, and it doesnt have a
bunch of hidden meanings. No, this isnt your capital A fine art that can be found in
galleries, this is a piece of art with design in mind, its whole purpose is to be direct and
up front.
Now the poster that I went saw is different from the poster that was originally in
the part in 1955 because the poster at the Walt Disney Family Museum was a reprinted
poster that used modern day technology. For the poster that was reprinted today the
printers most likely used Adobe Illustrator to recreate the designs and then printed it
using a high end laser jet printer that used toner, which is powder based medium that
would be guided by a laser and then be precisely placed on to the piece of paper. For the
posters that were printed in 1955, the designers would have been using tools like drafting
pencils, radiographs pens to get very specific line thickness, guides like a French curve

and angle guides to get very precise lines and points. The printing process would be
vastly different from the laser jet printers that the modern prints would have had. Instead
of using a laserjet printer they most likely would have printed it using lithography. The
lithography process is when someone cuts into either a piece of limestone or a plate and
create a negative of the image, than they will roll ink on to the stone or plate and then
press it against the piece of paper to create a positive of the image.
This style of artwork fits very well into the Atomic Age section of the art world
because this is when those posters were made. The main part of this poster, the Monorail,
was built around the idea of space and exploration, which is one of the main components
of the Atomic Age. Along with the theme of space and exploration, everyone was also
terrified of having a nuclear war with Russia, so maybe the monorail also stands for the
idea of just escaping everything and surviving the nuclear meltdown via train.
During the period of time that all of this was happening there was a lot still going
on in America with race relations, dealing with the remnants of World War II and the
beginning of the cold war. The United States of America has not had a great relationship
with people of varying ethnicities for a very long time, we still have our problems today,
but 60 years ago it was a completely different story. Black people could not drink from
the same water fountain as white people, us the same bathrooms, or use anything really.
Walt Disney knew this, Walt Disney liked this, this is why Walt Disney placed
Disneyland in Anaheim California, and during that period of time Anaheim had the
lowest number of minorities in all of Southern California.
As mentioned earlier World War II played a large part into the culture of that time.
With high tension throughout the entire United States, there was only one thing people

could ever want and ask for, cartoons from the Disney studio. I do not mean this
sarcastically either, okay I kind of do, but the Walt Disney studio did play a large part in
much of Americas World War II propaganda. With pictures, cartoons, and advertisement
create with many of the Disney characters being on the front lines in these cartoons. Not
only did World War II have an impact on America as a whole, it reticulated the economy
and helped Americans produce more products than ever. While World War II helped the
American economy a lot, it had a detrimental effect on the Walt Disney studios and many
other art and culture establishments. Seeing as most of the Disney team, and most of the
film industry at the time, was full of young men the majority of their teams were drafted
to fight abroad. This lead to a low number of staff members, and because of that Disney
didnt really have a choice when it came to creating these cartoons. If he wanted to keep
the whole studio operating, he had to use the federal money to keep the doors open.
Personally Im not a big fan of Disneyland. Its to crowded, I have been there
more than fifteen times in my short twenty year long life, and everything is over priced.
Though, Disney does have a fantastic advertising and design department. I live in a world
where I can easily reach these hyper realistic paintings and look at art on a daily basis,
but back in the 50s it was not like that. The people who looked at these posters were
probably seeing them for the first time, so they had the potential to really be engulfed by
these images and feel like they were actually in anether world.