Disney Movie Posters Book Review

Disney Movie Posters by Kevin Luperchio is a new coffee table book from Disney Editions that celebrates the great art that has been used to advertise Disney films since the very beginning. As the subtitle suggests, it covers “From Steamboat Willie to Inside Out.” Actually it’s more than that, covering 91 years of film history from 1924 to 2015. However, those expecting a compendium of every poster Disney has ever made will be disappointed.

This large, hardcover picture book begins with a page about the history of movie posters and how Disney has innovated them over the years. These early pages also include an interesting mix of posters, such as Frozen, Oz the Great and Powerful and Pearl Harbor. That last title is one of many curiosities inside this book, a non-Disney branded film that is not even fondly remembered.

Disney Movie Posters features six sections, five of which are all animation. Each section starts with a page about the history of this collection of films. The first is “The Shorts,” which covers Alice Comedies, Silly Symphonies, and Mickey Mouse shorts. The bulk of this section feature Walt-era content, but it leaps decades by the end to feature Tangled Ever After and Get a Horse!

“The Golden Age” is where things start to feel amiss. This section covers the first era of Disney animated features, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to, for whatever reason, Victory Through Air Power. Snow White receives five separate full-page posters from different releases through time and around the world. It’s neat to see the different approaches used to advertise the film to different generations and cultures. However, it’s at the cost of other great film posters. Fantasia, for example, just gets a boring 1981 poster and is missing the famous psychedelic 1970’s one. And Fantasia 2000 is in this section, even though it’s a sequel that was made 60 years later.

Similarly, “The Rebirth of Animation” features four Cinderella posters. It covers most of the animated films from 1950 to 1988. While Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and The Aristocats each have two posters, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh is skipped (and Pooh was missing from the shorts section as well). Another omission from this section is The Black Cauldron.

“Second Golden Age and Beyond” covers 1989 to 2014 and it is this section where you begin to realize that you can’t always trust the information that Luperchio has provided. It showcases examples of how Disney marketed some posters to children and others to adults with The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. The Lion King features two posters in this part and another at the beginning of the book. That one, which depicts Simba on Pride Rock with Mufasa in the clouds, is credited as “marketed to adults” when it was really the one and only poster used in the United States. The first in this section claims to be “marketed to children” as it features more characters in closeup on Pride Rock. However, this was the United Kingdom’s poster and even advertises Disneyland Paris on the bottom, a pretty big inaccuracy (it says “It’s close to home” in regards to Disneyland Paris…).

“The Pixar Revolution” is mostly straightforward and features nearly every Pixar film (Inside Out is in the front of the book, this section ends with Monsters University). Surprisingly, it only features one Toy Story poster and it’s the one that was “marketed to adults” featuring a few toys on a white background with the words “The Toys are Back in Town.” The more beloved and well known poster, which features Woody and Buzz taking off inside Andy’s room, is not part of this book at all.

The final section, “Lights, Camera… Live Action!”, lightly touches on Disney’s vast collection of over 300 non-animated films and only represents 28 of them. The Parent Trap (1961) is featured on the book’s cover, but is a small image here on the text page. Treasure Island is presented as the first all-live action Disney film and is one of only five Walt-era live action films featured. Mary Poppins is here twice, both of which come from its original release (U.S. and Japan). Almost all of these posters take up a whole page, but Escape to Witch Mountain chooses a wide lobby card in favor of the standard poster and wastes the rest of the page by not including multiple posters in that style (most films from that era had posters in both shapes). Two of the Pirates of the Caribbean films are featured in this section, while Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland claims three pages here plus another one at the front of the book. There are bizarre choices (Prince of Persia) and odd omissions (Old Yeller, Pollyanna, The Love Bug, Who Framed Roger Rabbit). While it provides some nice artwork, this section leaves a lot to be desired.

The back of the book advertises that there are “More then 135 posters inside,” but there are not more than 135 films featured. Luperchio has assembled some of the greatest movie posters Disney has commissioned, but has also devoted page space unfairly. Add incorrect accolades to some of these posters and it becomes hard to really recommend it. As a film buff, I really wanted it to be better. It starts strong in “The Shorts” section, where there are a few pages that feature multiple posters all at once, but the rest of the book feels lazy and uninspired. On top of that, many of the older posters are scans of previously folded artwork with visible seams. Anybody can find those images for free online, adding little value to have them in book form. All of the posters featured in this review, with the exception of The Lion King, are absent from the book.