Walt Disney Animation Studios

is the subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company responsible for creating the company's well-known animated films.

The feature animation studio was an integrated part of Walt Disney Productions from the start of production on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1934. In 1986, during the corporate restructuring to create The Walt Disney Company, it officially became a subsidiary of the company under the name Walt Disney Feature Animation. The division took on its current name in 2007, and is the company's only existing cartoon studio.

Source: Wikipedia

Walt Disney Animation Studios, johann sebastian bach, 1st generation

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Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Rewind, Play, Fast Forward (2010) – The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video by Henry Keazor, Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) brings together different disciplines as well as journalists, museum curators and gallery owners in order to take a discussion of the past and present of the music video as an opportunity to reflect upon suited methodological approaches to this genre and to allow a glimpse into its future. (transcript Verlag)

Fantasia (1940) is an American animated feature produced by Walt Disney and the third film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. Fantasia features animation set to classical music and no dialogue. The music was recorded under the direction of Leopold Stokowski and seven of the eight pieces were performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Animated artwork of varying degrees of abstraction or literalism was used to illustrate or accompany the concert in various ways. (Wikipedia)

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was a German abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. (Wikipedia)

Jules Engel (1909-2003) was a Jewish-Hungarian American filmmaker, painter, sculptor, graphic artist, set designer, and director of live action and animated films, and teacher. He is most remembered as the founding director of the Experimental Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts, where he taught until his death, serving as mentor to several generations of animators. (Wikipedia)

Opus I (1921) - Music by Max Butting. Walther Ruttmann's Opus 1 is the first abstract or absolute work in film history screened publicly. Instead of containing depictions of reality, it consists entirely of the colors and shapes already formulated in Ruttmann's Painting With Light manifesto. In 1919, he writes that, after nearly a decade, he finally "masters the technical difficulties" struggled with as early as 1913 while executing his formulated idea. (Media Art Net)

Art in Cinema – Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (2006) by Scott MacDonald provides extensive and fascinating documentation of one of the most important film societies in American history. Art in Cinema presents complete programs presented by the legendary society; dozens of previously unavailable letters between Stauffacher, his collaborators, and filmmakers including Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Vincent Minelli, and Man Ray; a reprint of the society's original catalog, which features essays by Henry Miller and others; and a wide range of other remarkable historical documents. (Temple University Press)

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

Synchromy No. 4: Escape (1938) by Mary Ellen Bute's first color film tells a story in abstraction of an orange/ red triangle imprisoned behind a grid of vertical and horizontal lines under a sky-blue expanse, perhaps representing freedom. Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata (in D Minor) adds dramatic tension to the visual variables in motion. (Cecile Starr)

Johann Sebastian Bach: Fantasy in G minor (1965) by Jan Švankmaker, his second short, is as close as he has come to a musical testimony, but even then it's a typically free interpretation: less conventional filmic homage than an act of communion between sound and image. As a lonesome organist unfolds Bach's composition from a derelict loft, Švankmaker lets loose his own fantasia of quasi-animate architectural motifs: bars, bannisters, gates and locks. Perforations blister open in solid walls; doors swing open into darkness, further empty rooms; the film thrums with the counterpointed ideas of passageway and its impediment, spiritual mobility and the material weight of the world. (Nick Bradshaw)

Visual Music Archive

Walt Disney Animation Studios

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