Animationland, a traveling exhibition coming to the Orange County Regional History Center, caters to the enduring fascination with animation. The main part of the exhibition gives kids (and grownups) the opportunity to create their own characters. | Courtesy Orange County Regional History Center
From Steamboat Willie to K-Pop Demon Hunters, animation has always captured the imagination of the young and the young at heart. Animationland, a traveling exhibition coming to the Orange County Regional History Center, will cater to that enduring fascination in a way that’s less geographically specific than you might expect, given the fact that so many iconic cartoon characters have local connections through Disney World.
Sure, Central Florida will get its due. But the main part of the exhibition will give kids (and grownups) a handle on the process behind the venerable art form regardless of studio affiliation. In fact, visitors will be able to create their own characters, either from scratch or from a set of templates, then watch as those characters cavort in a completed short. Very cool!
Other activities will illuminate every stage of a typical project, beginning with old-school sketches and storyboards. Interactive stations will reveal the magic behind both drawn and stop-motion animation—the subgenre in which three-dimensional objects are photographed one still image at a time and replayed in rapid succession, thereby creating the illusion of motion (think King Kong).
Central Florida’s contribution will be spotlighted in Drawing Magic: Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida, a look back at the working animation studio that was headquartered here between 1989 and 2004 at what was then known as Disney-MGM Studios.
Materials recovered from the animators’ workspaces form a time capsule of the studio that produced the feature films Mulan, Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear in their entirety and contributed key sequences to such timeless classics as Beauty and the Beast. (Park guests were able to watch the work being performed in real time, from behind panes of glass.)
That was back in the days of “Hollywood East,” when both Walt Disney World and Universal Studios Florida had thriving production hubs that generated major films and television shows. The end came when the advent of digital animation made old-fashioned methods obsolete (or so it seemed at the time).
The Orange County Regional History Center is located at 65 East Central Boulevard, Orlando. For more information, call or visit the website.
