A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Artistic Inspirations of Disney’s Animal Kingdom
By Dave Shute
Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.
ARTISTIC INFLUENCES OF DISNEY’S ANIMAL KINGDOM
By Jim Korkis
On August 3, 2017, the Orlando Museum of Art presented “Pandora: Celebrating the Beauty of the Natural World” featuring two similar forty minute, capacity-crowd presentations by Imagineer Joe Rohde, entitled “Animal Kingdom, Pandora and the Great Masters.”
Rohde spoke about some of the major artistic influences on the design of all of Disney’s Animal Kingdom but in particular on Pandora –The World of Avatar. He made clear that while he studied the works of previous Imagineers when he was doing his design work that he also studied just as intently the great painters and sculptors of past centuries.
Rohde quoted Victorian era English art critic John Ruskin, “There are many beautiful things to see in the world if you stop and you look at them.” His point was that Disney guests at Disney Animal Kingdom would be rewarded if they slowed down to discover some of the details.
One of the major influences Rohde cited was mid-Nineteenth Century American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church.
“Church’s paintings were the IMAX movies of the mid-19th century. These paintings did not hang in a museum [or] church, they traveled the country. … In the paintings were thousands of teensy-weensy details … so people spent an hour that they paid for in an artificial space, wandering in a painting. That sounds remarkably familiar to me.”
These paintings were exhibited in theaters. Audiences would buy a ticket and fill an auditorium. The proscenium of a theater stage before them was covered by a curtain. Sometimes accompanied by music, the curtain would be opened to reveal the massive 18-wheeler-sized painting by Church.
El Rio De Luz (The River of Light), Frederic Edwin Church 1877
When audiences looked into the painting, they would discover another, smaller painting, and another, and another, all the way down to the size of a nickel. Audiences would look into the painting for an hour or more at a time discovering new secrets and images all the time.
“The word picturesque refers to [late Baroque artist] Claude Lorrain, who invented the romantic idea of the landscape,” remarked Rohde. “Without Lorrain, you don’t have the picturesque tradition, and without the picturesque tradition, you really don’t have the arts at all.
“When you ride through [Kilimanjaro Safaris], you do not realize the degree to which this is a manipulated landscape. The height of the little hummocks and rises in the hills just happen to be slightly higher than the sightline of a person in a vehicle, so even though there are unimaginable numbers of those trucks driving around, you are [only] aware of six.
“Landscape was considered the highest form of art in the 18th century, because it combined all the appeal of sculpture, all the color of painting, with the process of movement through space. So when you ride on a vehicle through our lovely crafted landscape, you are in fact experiencing what the great philosophers of the 18th century considered to be the highest form of art.
“[We] continually talked about Giovanni Bernini, because who in the history of the world has taken absolutely rigid, inflexible material – marble! – and rendered it in such a way that it appears to be weightless?” revealed Rohde. “To get the sense of uplift, the sense of swirl, the sense of suspension that makes [Pandora’s floating] mountains not hang over you, but lift above you, rise above you? That’s not easy.
“We even talked about commissioning Dale Chihuly [glass sculptor—Dave] at one point [to help in] solving this problem of these organic soft glowing plants that embody the entire nature of this palace. It’s simply not enough to go look at natural bioluminescence, because natural bioluminescence isn’t this psychedelic.”
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Thanks, Jim! Co-author Josh of easyWDW.com recently has the chance to hear Joe Rohde speak at Tiffins–see this for more. And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!
In the meantime, check out his books, including his latest, Call Me Walt, and his Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew
, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.
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