Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, Disneyland, California

In contrast with the pop flair of Las Vegas, which increases the scale of everyday objects to turn them into advertising icons, but using rather similar construction methods, Disney miniaturizes architecture to take us back to childhood; Michael Graves used the dwarfs as caryatids in the central building of Burbank, and there is probably no better symbol for this universe than tiny men. Unlike another great draftsman, the Belgian Hergé, who reduced Cheverny to Moulinsart with his clear line, the American used the structures of theater stage sets and monumental sculpture to multiply the anecdote ad infinitum: Louis II of Bavaria seems refrained when compared with the sequence of castles of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella in the various Disneylands or Magic Kingdoms. His way of looking has contaminated our own, blurring the boundaries between history and story in a sloping surface that makes us glide from the genuine to the toy through facsimiles: from Bohemia to Tyrol with a stop at a Belgian castle that will be reproduced in Holland as a theme hotel and palace for weddings. It is, indeed, a sugary world of dwarfs and pets; but also a magical dream world that gives us shelter in the haunted womb of our faded childhood...[+]