My Top 3 Disney Coffee Table Books

An Animator’s Gallery: Eric Goldberg Draws the Disney Characters

By David A. Bossert
Illustrated by Eric Goldberg
Foreword by John Lasseter
Published 2015

Eric Goldberg is one of my favourite Disney animators so I was so excited to discover this book. He was the supervising animator for characters such as Genie from Aladdin, Phil from Hercules, and Louis from The Princess and the Frog. He also directed Pocahontas and the Rhapsody in Blue and Carnival of the Animals segments of Fantasia 2000. Another project of his that I really like is the Get a Horse! Mickey Mouse short. I love how seamless the black-white and coloured animation is combined.

During the planning of Shanghai Disneyland, Eric Goldberg was asked to create caricatures of dozens and dozens of Disney characters to be hung around the Mickey & Pals Market Café on Mickey Avenue. The team behind this project wanted the caricatures to resemble the work of Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, Mary Blair, and Al Hirschfeld rolled into one. Eric had been a lifelong fan of Hirschfeld’s cartoon style and this is reflected in much of Eric’s work.

After Eric completed this project, but before Shanghai Disneyland was finished, the framed caricatures were displayed along the corridor of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building. The artwork was hung in chronological order with characters from the same films grouped together. Some of these even made a bigger picture when hung side by side. These caricutres started with the earliest Disney cartoon characters—including Oswald, the Sensational Six, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie—and ended with Hiro and Baymax from Big Hero 6. There is at least one drawing from each film of the Disney canon (except for Winnie the Pooh from 2011 most likely because these characters were included in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from 1977.) Other films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and many of the Pixar features were also included.

Copies of each of these caricatures were then bound together and made into this book. Background information of Eric Goldberg, Al Hirschfeld, and the Shanghai Disneyland Project are included at the beginning of the book. The book ends with caricatures of Eric that other Disney artists did and also a tribute to Robin Williams drawn by Eric and written by Bob Iger.

I love flipping through this book. The drawings seem so simple but are also way beyond something I could ever draw. I’m very impressed with the way Eric Goldberg was able to draw almost every Disney character, from the 1920s to the 2010s, in a single, uniformed style.

Poster Art of the Disney Parks

By Danny Handke and Vanessa Hunt
Introduction by Tony Baxter
Published 2012

The artwork of this book is absolutely stunning. I love the Disney attraction posters and having them all together in one book is really special.

The chapters of Poster Art of the Disney Parks are broken down by lands, but the first chapter talks about the history of the posters. Since Disneyland is set up to be a dimensional motion picture, the front entrance of the park represents the lobby of a theatre. Attraction posters were hung around this area to entice and excite guests of what was to come once they stepped through the tunnels under the train station. They were a “form of storytelling without saying words.”

A picture at the beginning of the book shows Walt standing in this ‘lobby’ area of the park. Hung along the fence by the floral Mickey are the attraction posters. In the early days of Disneyland, posters were also hung throughout the park as decoration and to add colour to backgrounds. Now the posters are found along the walls of the two tunnels underneath the train station. The idea of the attraction poster was based on travel posters found in airports and train stations by artist Bjorn Aronson. He then worked for Disney to create some of the first posters. The history of how the posters were made is also included in this first chapter—from silk-screening to digital art.

For each chapter focusing on a specific land, Walt’s opening dedication and history of the posters of that land are included. This history is not just about Disneyland, but of all the Magic Kingdom-style parks around the world (except for Shanghai because it was not built at the time of publication; hopefully a second edition will be made!)

The chapters are broken down into Main Street, U.S.A., Adventureland, New Orleans Square & Liberty Square, Frontierland, Fantasyland (with one Toontown poster), and Tomorrowland. There is also a chapter about Tokyo DisneySea and a chapter about Disney California Adventure because those were the only two secondary parks to have a focus on creating new attraction posters.

Throughout the book, quotes are included from artists about their designs and concept art is also shown. There are also quite a few posters of extinct attractions so it is nice to have them preserved in this small way. This book even includes a perforated page of two attraction posters: the Disneyland Railroad and Pirates of the Caribbean. However, the posters are double-sided so you can only choose one to display.

Additionally, Disney created an Art of Coloring book to compliment the Poster Art of the Disney Parks. It includes 36 postcards to colour based on the attraction posters. These are not all attraction posters; some are just close ups of characters from different posters or patterns inspired by them.

Overall, this book is probably my favourite out of the three. It does an excellent job of trying in history and art of the Disney parks.

Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation

By Mindy Johnson
Foreword by June Foray
Published in 2017

I don’t actually own a copy of Ink & Paint (though one day I sure hope to!), but I did check it out of the library for this post—which was quite the adventure lugging the beast home. I’ve had my eye on it for a while and was really excited to dive into such an interesting text.

Ink & Paint looks into so much more than just the Ink and Paint department of the Walt Disney Studios—the department that employed primarily female artists. It looks into the history of animation and the history of women labour before even combining the two to talk about women at the Disney Studios. There are also sections of what work was like for women of other movie studios and sections about the women of Walt’s personal life woven throughout the book. From his mom and sister, to schoolteachers, to his wife and daughters, Walt had many important women in his life and Ink & Paint shines a spotlight on them. There was a section on how Lillian Disney got her start as a Blackener (to “trace and darken the penciled lines of each drawing with ink onto celluloid”) at the early Disney Brothers Studios, but I did not know that her sister was also an employee of Walt and Roy’s. Her sister, Hazel Sewell, went on to head up the Blackening department and was the first female to be in charge of a division. I also learnt that Roy’s wife, Edna Disney, though never an official employee, did help out with Blackening from time to time as well.

Ink & Paint is broken up into sections that focus on a different decade, starting with the 1920s and ending with the 1980s. Each section begins with a timeline of the decade of various important world events that were happening outside of the studios to give readers a sense of what life was like during those times.

The close look this book gives at the Walt Disney Studios is very interesting. There are diagrams, with a focus on Ink and Paint, of what the original studios looked like on Kingswell Avenue and Hyperion Avenue before they moved to the large Burbank lot. Sections include talking about the women’s teatime breaks during the 1930s and how the studios felt more like a “college campus” during the 1940s.

As mentioned Ink & Paint is not just about the Inkers and Painters. Women from all sorts of various roles are mentioned including: artists of other mediums, imagineers, actors, live-action models, and even a strong emphasis on dynamic female characters such as Cruella de Vil and Mary Poppins.

For some more information about Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation, I recommend checking out the Book of the Mouse Club podcast. Hosts Courtney and Emily read and discuss various Disney related books—both fiction and non-fiction and official and unofficial books. For Women’s History Month they dedicated an episode to Ink & Paint. It is one of my favourite episodes and can be found here.

Have you read any of these Disney coffee table books? Which one is your favourite? What other Disney coffee table books do you love?