Disney Vintage

The collection features vintage animation art from behind the scenes of the world's best-loved Disney films created by hand by some of history's leading artists. It may seem hard to believe now, but when Disney first began making feature-length films in 1937, each movement had to be captured by an individual animation drawing and corresponding cel. Hundreds of animators worked together in one building to create the illusion of life through hand-painted cels.

Scroll down to discover original animation cels, storyboards, model sheets and much more!

Animation has changed hugely since these classic films were made. During the 1940s and 1950s, each movement had to be captured by an individual animation drawing and corresponding cel. In fact, Sleeping Beauty was the last hand-inked feature film by Disney, making it an important part of animation history, and representing the end of an era.

When it was released in 1941, Fantasia became the first animated film to feature stereophonic sound, and used what were at the time cutting-edge techniques to create dazzling optical effects. 

Now considered one of the best animated films of all time, Pinocchio (1940) was Disney's second feature film after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Along with the first animal sidekick in the form of Jiminy Cricket, animators took their craft to the next level by introducing three-dimensional models to help capture the movement of characters and keep proportions consistent. Unlike the wood-carved puppet in the original Italian novel, the animator Milt Kahl chose to draw Pinocchio as a young boy, keeping only his wooden nose and angular posture to indicate his creation in Geppetto's studio.

Sericels, or serigraphic cels, are a form of animation art, typically created as limited edition prints, which depict characters or a scene from a full-length feature or animation short. These images are created as silkscreens, with artists creating a hand-inked, hand-painted colour model of animated characters which is then transferred to an acetate sheet by silkscreen printing.

A storyboard is a series of sketches which helps filmmakers to visualise a plot sequence by mapping out the story. Identifying inconsistencies or chances for further development, the method is a useful tool for previewing a film before the cameras start rolling.

The concept is credited to the animator Webb Smith, who developed the idea at the Walt Disney Studio in the early 1930s. Storyboarding is still used in production today for both animated and live-action feature films.

A clear sheet of either cellulose nitrate (cel) or acetate onto which the character or characters have been traced and then painted. The most common method is for an animator’s drawing to be inked or xeroxed onto the front of the cel and then painted with colour on the back. Each second of animated film is made up of 24 individual cels which, when combined, create the illusion of life. All production cels are photographed on production backgrounds during the making of any animation.

Production backgrounds are the most rare and valuable form of animation art due to the fact that only a few hundred of them are ever made for a feature-length animation.

Used to ensure continuity between the many artists who collaborated on an individual film, model sheets – also known as character boards – standardise the appearance and poses of characters. As ‘blueprints’, they depict the character’s head and body at different angles, basic facial expressions and detailed guidelines for their hands and feet.

Animation drawings are accomplished in pencil on paper and are the first step in the final creation of characters. Each drawing will be traced onto the animation cel to form the black outline before it is filled with colour and photographed.

Guthrie Courvoisier was a leading San Francisco fine art dealer in 1937, the year Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was Courvoisier who convinced them to market the art used to create their animated films. What makes these pieces so unique is the style and manner in which the Disney Studios artists prepared it. The special backgrounds drawn and painted, along with the interesting materials used in their preparation, make these works very sought-after.

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