On November 16, 2023, Pawsibilities Unleashed: A Pet Portrait Exhibition debuted in The Walt Disney Family Museum’s Theater and Lower Lobby Galleries. Presented concurrently with our special exhibition, Disney Cats & Dogs, this unique collection of artworks features portraits by local Bay Area and Disney-related artists, showcasing the profound impact animal companions have on their creative expression. The talented staff at The Walt Disney Family Museum was asked to contribute artwork that represented their animal companions.
On view in January–February 2024.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Family Museum is showcasing objects from the museum’s collection which highlight important moments in Walt’s career. These objects, which include recent acquisitions and fragile materials that have never been publicly displayed, will rotate periodically throughout the year.
Watching Alice’s Wonderland, the short pilot cartoon Walt Disney carried with him on his journey west to Los Angeles in 1923, it's ironic to consider the character Alice’s own journey by animated train. The live-action young girl—played by Virginia Davis—makes a triumphant arrival in “Cartoonland” where crowds of cheering, hand-drawn animals welcome her with pomp and ceremony. Walt’s arrival in Los Angeles could not have been more different.
On view in December 2023.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Family Museum is showcasing objects from the museum’s collection which highlight important moments in Walt’s career. These objects, which include recent acquisitions and fragile materials that have never been publicly displayed, will rotate periodically throughout the year.
On view in November 2023.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Family Museum is showcasing objects from the museum’s collection which highlight important moments in Walt’s career. These objects, which include recent acquisitions and fragile materials that have never been publicly displayed, will rotate periodically throughout the year.
Please join us in celebrating the life of our museum co-founder, Diane Disney Miller, who passed away on this day ten years ago. Museum Executive Director, Kirsten Komoroske, reflected on Diane in our December 2014 member magazine: “More than being a philanthropist and enthusiastic supporter of the arts, Diane was her father’s daughter.
Meticulous, theme-enhancing horticulture played a starring role in the transformation of flat Anaheim farmland into Walt’s rich, immersive vision for Disneyland.
Strolling the galleries at The Walt Disney Family Museum, visitors discover how brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney formed a business partnership in October 1923. They quickly began producing animated short subjects known as the Alice Comedies from a small office in Los Angeles.
It was late July 1923 and Walt Disney had failed. His Laugh-O-gram Films was headed for bankruptcy and, with little prospects left in Kansas City, Missouri, he was pulling up stakes. Hollywood was his destination. “Go west, young man, go west and grow up with the country,” the newspaperman Horace Greeley had written in 1865 (Walt would later quote this phrase to his friend Ub Iwerks, still back in Kansas City).
In October 1966, Walt Disney filmed an introduction for a special invitational screening of Follow Me, Boys! (1966)—a live-action film notable for being the acting debut of future Disney Legend Kurt Russell—that he was too busy at the Studios to attend. To express his regrets, he turned to one of the best way he knew how—by getting on camera.