![]() Each room is climate controlled and meticulously catalogued, with state-of-the-art security and fire-suppression systems in place. This includes everything from the original sketches for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to larger-scale items like all of the puppets from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Frankenweenie. Just in terms of size, the vault is insane - there are 12 vaults, each organized by project. Tom says to watch swinging bags or backpacks because original art will be on display. He points toward a small container of pencils that we can borrow, but I just made notes on my iPhone. And we haven’t even gotten into the actual vault yet.īefore we go in, Tom tells us, we have to relinquish all pens. When the Northridge earthquake struck during the production of The Lion King, some animators lived in this building. It’s the place where movies like The Little Mermaid and Aladdin were produced, after the animation unit had been kicked off of the Disney lot and before the “hat building” had been constructed down the street in Burbank. The building itself is something of a lost Disney treasure. Looking around the lobby, you can already feel the history - on the ceiling are the lantern-like light fixtures that used to hang in the Walt Disney Animation Studio building in Burbank before the recent remodel in the corner sits a piano that used to be in the Animation Studio’s so-called “music room” against a wall is an animation desk used by Pres Romanillos, an animator who would etch his characters into the wood frame of the desk (Pres died in 2010 at the age of 47). Welcome to the Animation Research Library. For all intents and purposes, this building is off the grid. A tall man named Tom says that if you do take photos, for the love of God do not geo-tag your location. When you get inside the lobby, you’re alerted to the fact that this is the only place in the entire facility that you can take photos. ![]() (Full disclosure: I worked for the company for almost two years and never once got to go.) Unlike the main studio archives down the street, which are housed in an inviting glass building with ample signage - it’s this location that appears on-camera whenever the company makes documentaries about the Disney Vault - this place feels like a mirage. Even for employees of the company, the building remains elusive and hard to gain entry to. The only thing that would even alert you to the fact that this is the Disney equivalent of Fort Knox is the abundance of insane security procedures stationed around the building. In an anonymous block of Glendale, California, sits a nondescript beige building free of signage or distinction. Disney, for its part, has done much to perpetuate the gauzy notion of the Disney Vault as something real but out of sight, existing, like so many Disney fantasy realms, in your imagination more so than in real life. Only this time they had a name for where the movies went when you could no longer get them: the Disney Vault.įor most, the Disney Vault seems like something intangible - a marketing gimmick and source for misplaced rage (there are a handful of YouTube videos railing against the Vault and all that it stands for). ![]() But the duo ended up following in the footsteps of those original theatrical exhibitions - the movies would appear on video for a limited time, then disappear from stores. When Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over Disney in another tumultuous period for the company, the 1980s, they decided to release many of the most sought-after animated titles on VHS, a controversial move at the time. The philosophy was to take each film out of circulation for about seven years, which studio honchos felt created a sense of urgency and excitement, and built additional mystique. And while the move to rerelease the film was more of a marketing decision than a creative one (the studio had nearly been crippled, creatively and financially, by America’s involvement in World War II, and none of its subsequent features had captured the Zeitgeist like Snow White had), it set a precedent for the studio, which would soon standardize the practice of both releasing and then withholding its animated classics. The film had been a sensation during its original 1937 release - in addition to being a virtuoso technical achievement as the first feature-length animated film, it was also a critical darling and commercial smash. In 1944, Disney rereleased Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs into theaters nationwide. A piece of concept art for Pinocchio found in the Disney Vault.
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