March 13th, 2012 
DaveWill 
Browsing the net a few days ago I was struck by a beautiful image that grabbed my attention. It was a delightful looking poster for a movie I had heard nothing about. It would seem that Ryan Gosling was to play Walt Disney in a biopic about the great man himself! How did I not know this?! Is Ryan Gosling the best choice to play such a legend? When is this due out?! Why is he sitting on a train? What is that in the sky…
Sadly, before my imagination got too carried away I was brought back down to earth when I discovered that the image was actually the personal work of French artist Pascal Witaszek who had designed one of the best pieces of concept art I think Ive ever seen. Details about the artist and his poster are few and far between, Pascal doesnt seem to have a website and no details have been given by the artist but what we do know is that the quality of his work would be a tremendous addition to any theatre foyer. Its a real shame that the poster isnt genuine!
Take a few minutes to soak up the poster, the detail is so rich its definitely worth a second look, and a third, and a fourth…
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The question “Why is he on a train?” is easily answered: That’s where Walt came up with Mickey, on a train ride from New York to Los Angeles, “somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles” to be exact. What wouldn’t work about this poster however is the quaint expression on Walt’s face, and the fact that he took that trip with his wife. Here’s an excerpt from the biography “Walt Disney” by Neal Gabler:
“If the story is to be believed-and it would be repeated endlessly over the years until few doubted it- this was to be one of the most momentous journeys in the annals of popular culture. At the outset Walt was furious. ‘He was like a raging lion on the train coming home,’ Lillian would recall. ‘All he could say, over and over, was that he’d never work for anyone else as long as he lived; he’d be his own boss’. Lillian admitted that she had another response-not rage but fear. She was in a ‘state of shock, scared to death,’ since they had no source of income now and no idea of what the future held for them.
Even before leaving New York, Walt said he had tried to devise a new character to replace Oswald, without success. When he was not venting about Mintz and his own treasonous crew, he spent most of his time on the trip sketching on the train stationart. Somewhere between Chicago and Los Angeles, he later said, he wrote the scenario for a cartoon he called Plane Crazy, about a mouse who, inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 sollo flight over the Atlantic Ocean, builds himself a plane to impress a lady mouse. Walt read the story to Lillian, but she said she couldn’t focus because she was upset by the name Walt had bestowed upon his character: Mortimer. ‘The only thing that got through to me,’ she told an interviewer, ‘was that horrible name, Mortimer… I’m afraid I made quite a scene about it’. ‘Too sissy,’ she said. When she calmed down, Walt asked her what she thought of the name Mickey, an Irish name, an outsider’s name. ‘I said it sounded better than Mortimer, and that’s how Mickey was born.'”