While recovering from my turkey-and-pecan-pie-induced-coma this afternoon, I visited San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum. The venue is very small-- just the right size for a perfectly digestible bit of culture. My favorite exhibit was Once Upon a Dream: The Art of Sleeping Beauty. Not having seen the film since I was a kid, I had no appreciation of how great this film was from an artistic perspective; artistic lead Eyvind Earle was given free reign and nearly ten years by Disney himself in order to create the film's "unique blend of lush detail and bold, stylized designs." The best part was seeing the rough sketches, and Sleeping Beauty painted with many trial combinations of skin and dress colors juxtaposed to the final animation cels. In the Stanford JPD we place a lot of emphasis on these types of simple sketches and cardboard mockups, knowing this process can (and often does) yield wonderful masterpieces.
Other current exhibits include Monsters of Webcomics, where the medium meets the internet, Fantastic Mr. Fox's puppets and sets, and Spain Rodriguez: Rebel in Ink and the highlights of his 40-year comic book career.
Unfortunately, cameras weren't allowed inside the exhibit, so you will need to go in-person to enjoy the shows.
