Inside Central Park’s 140 Year-old Marionette Theatre

“I spent some time as Peter Pan’s shadow” is the kind of sentence that’d only make sense here, at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater in Central Park. This 143-year-old wooden chalet was plucked from Swedish soil, and rebuilt smack in the heart of Manhattan in 1877. Since then it’s had many lives, but none as…

Snow White Is Real (and She’s a Chinese Vlogger)

“This is China? It looks like a fairyland,” was Nessy’s first reaction to Li Ziqi’s (李子柒) vlogs. Our team watched, entranced, as Ziqi scurried through the misty morning air of her village, dutifully followed by not one but three baby animals (two puppies and lamb); we observed her gather nuts and fruits in a dewy…

Take a Brain Break with Errol Le Cain’s Fantasy Illustrations

Errol Le Cain is the perfect example of the magic that happens when cultures collide. Growing up in Singapore, India, and London, the British illustrator started inventing his fantasy worlds as early as early as age 11, weaving in elements of Moorish symmetry, Indonesian shadow puppets, and Baroque fantasy. Above all, he took the art…

Oh, Just an Abandoned Real-Life Gingerbread Castle to Haunt your Christmas

Because why bake a gingerbread house this holiday season, when a real-life abandoned one can haunt your dreams? Let’s head out to Hamburg, New Jersey, where a local landmark is in dire need of a little TLC from Hansel & Gretel. Since the late 1920s, the now-crumbling structure was known as The Gingerbread Castle, a…

That Time Walt Disney Bought His Own Autonomous Utopian City of the Future

And then, Walt Disney created utopia. Well, almost. Before his death in 1966, America’s greatest entrepreneur was planning his own city which would have almost total autonomy within its borders, where residents would live and work for Disney in some way, using the latest technology in their homes and experimenting with innovative community ideals. Walt called it E.P.C.O.T,…

The Real-life Film Actors Who Inspired Iconic Disney Cartoon Characters

It’s hard to imagine our favorite Disney films any other way, but some of the most popular animated characters of our childhoods started out as real as you and I. These rare images of live-action scenes spliced with Disney animations, reveal how the creative studio used real people to reference or even directly trace their…

Meet the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe

For those whose taste in fairytales favours a darker touch, we’re traveling to the far reaches of Eastern Europe, and into the enchanting world of animator Jiří Trnka. The late Czech animator (whose name is pronounced “Yershy Trinka”) created nearly two-dozen films over his lifetime, from folksy gems like Grandfather Planted a Beet (1945) to the…

Disney’s Bizarre Sports Resort is Actually an Instagram Dream

This is going to be a quick one because I don’t want to sound like I sit around all day thinking about what would make the perfect instagram (although you’re welcome to like any of my posts here, of course), but I just had to share with you a most unexpected discovery. I was getting my daily…

That Time Mickey Mouse Was a Drug Dealer

In the 1950s, non-medical use of stimulant and sedative drugs was widely accepted and promoted in the mainstream media– so widely in fact that they even made it into a children’s Walt Disney 1951 comic book starring Mickey Mouse as a speed dealer who just loves his own product. In ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’,…

Stepping Inside a Paris Cartoon

Most Paris clichés and stereotypes really bug me. Those French perfume commercials starring Hollywood actresses on Parisian balconies with perfect Eiffel Tower views? Eyes roll. But this place? Well this place brings me back to childhood, behind the scenes of an animated wonderland set in Belle Epoque Paris… We’re at the Musée des Automates in La Rochelle, on the…