Illustration: Mabel Lucie Attwell's Peter Pan and Wendy

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about children's book illustrators.


There often seems to be a disconnect between the illustrators Walt Disney hired to do inspirational artwork for his films and the designs he actually ended up using. On Snow White, Disney hired the amazing painter, Gustaf Tenggren; but his instructions to him were to paint in the style of Arthur Rackham. For Peter Pan, he hired the illustrator David Hall, but the film itself doesn't resemble his work at all. Instead, it seems to be a "Disneyfication" of Mabel Lucie Attwell's illustrations for the 1921 edition of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan & Wendy.

Attwell was born in 1879 and received some education at the Regent School of Art and Heatherley's School of Art in London, but she grew bored with her academic studies and dropped out to focus on her own interests... painting cherubic children and fairies. Her work wasn't very warmly received at first by galleries and agents, but when her first batch of paintings sold out in three days, they became much more enthusiastic. Attwell illustrated greeting cards and children's books, the most famous of which we are featuring today, Peter Pan & Wendy.

Disney didn't appropriate Attwell's baby faced characters, but he did use some of the same details of costume and setting, and placed the emphasis of his visual storytelling on many of the same elements. Attwell's designs lean a bit too heavily on formula, but there is a distinctive delicate appeal to her style. Enjoy.














Please let me know in the comments if you found this post to be useful.

If you enjoyed this article, see also... Little Verses Part One and Part Two and The New Golden Song Book Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Felix Lorioux's Tom Thumb, Puss in Boots, Fables De La Fontaine Part One and Part Two, Le Buffon des Enfants, Rojankovsky's Frog Went A-Courtin', Tibor Gergely's A Day In The Jungle, Gustaf Tenggren's The Little Trapper, Uncle Remus Stories Part One and Part Two.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

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Illustration: Early 50s Disney Christmas Cards

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about 50s children's book illustrators.

1948


No, you're not suffering from some sort of holiday flashback... It's almost Valentine's Day, not Christmas! Today, we digitized a batch of wonderful 1950s Christmas cards from the Disney studio from 1948 through the mid-1950s. The designs on these cards are so much fun, it makes you wish the films themselves looked this cartoony.

You might wonder why I chose today to post Christmas images. This illustrates a point that I need to make every once in a while... The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Project Blog is NOT the archive itself. It is only a forum for us to report the progress of the project and show examples of the sorts of things we were working on that particular day. Today, we digitized Christmas cards... tomorrow it might be an illustrated children's book from the 1920s... the next day a clip from an animated cartoon by Paul Terry... there is no order implied or intended. The order comes in the way keyword searches link material within the database itself.

The other thing to keep in mind is that for every image you see here on this blog, there are dozens and dozens that we don't post. Our database has grown into the terabytes. There's no way that we will ever be able to post all of it online. My hope is to eventually syndicate the archive as kiosks at university libraries, studios and ASIFA chapters all over the world. But that's quite a ways in the future!

I want to thank the family of Clair Weeks for sharing these great cards with us. See the bottom of this post for links to more treasures from the Weeks collection.




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Many thanks again to the family of Clair Weeks for sharing these with us.

For more treasures from the collection of Clair Weeks, see... History: Clair Weeks' Goodbye Book and History: 1938 Disney Artists' Tryout Book

See you at the Annies!
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

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