How Iconic Disney Castle Interiors Were Inspired By The Real-World

I'm Meredith Cohen

and I'm an architectural historian specializing

in medieval architecture.

Today I'll be breaking down the interiors of famous castles

in Disney films.

[lively music]

This is the Sleeping Beauty throne room.

[dramatic music] [thunder crashing]

Here's everything that jumps out to me.

I see columns with capitals suggesting a great vault

in the middle there.

I see in the middle ground a narrow wall that's accentuated.

I see gables and pinnacles, very tall thrones, a canopy

over the thrones with a coat of arms to either side.

I see these aisles extending into the back

behind the thrones and lancet windows with stained glass.

On the capital here, I see a fleur-de-lys symbol.

There's another fleur-de-lys symbol over here, and we know

that Sleeping Beauty takes place in the 14th century.

They actually tell us in the movie.

Now, father, you're living in the past.

This is the 14th century.

I'm a specialist of 13th and 14th century architecture

and what I see here actually is not that.

It's what we call medievalism.

Medievalism is a kind of imagined recreation

of the Middle Ages where one is pulling

from different medieval time periods

and accurate and inaccurate aspects.

One of the most inaccurate things here

and the thing that we associate

with the Middle Ages most is just how dark

and gray this space is and that the walls are left bare.

That is completely inaccurate.

Originally, in the Middle Ages,

these walls would be plastered, painted

and then covered with either frescoes or with tapestries

and even the columns

and capitals would've been painted in bright colors.

A throne room is traditionally a hall of justice

where the king and the queen sit in state,

ruling on trials, ruling on questions.

In this scene,

they're announcing the birth of their new daughter,

which probably wouldn't have happened in real life.

The birth of a child is an important thing

but they didn't really want daughters, right?

They wanted sons.

[trumpet announcing music]

In the 13th and 14th century,

a typical way of covering a roof

was through stone cross rib vaults like we see here.

A gothic vaulted roof is a stone roof

that covers the entire space, and the vault refers

to the stone work that's actually covering that wide space.

The one we're looking at here

is using a quadripartite rib vault.

That means you have two ribs crossing to create four spaces

that is filled in with stones called webbing.

Pointed arches are typical of gothic architecture

because the point is more structurally stable

than a rounded arch.

Tracery is decorative work

in stone that makes it look kind of like lace

and it can be really beautiful.

Here we're looking at a sexfoil tracery oculus,

six petals on the right side.

In another shot, you can see this door is decorated

with a tracery gable that extends upward

with these repeated floral motifs.

These windows here are very typical of the Gothic period

and they remind me of those at the Sainte-Chappelle.

Lancet windows are very tall, narrow windows

in the shape of a keyhole.

This lattice work or diamond pattern feels very kind

of 1950s or harlequin-like, not typical to the Middle Ages.

Stained glass actually is predominantly blue and red,

deeply colored glass, not pinks and greens and light blues.

Sleeping Beauty is, of course, a fantasy film

and they're trying to pull together a lot

of these beautiful ideas

and images to create a fantasy world

but they are drawing from a lot

of medieval sources and in a way that is highly inaccurate

and that's what we call medievalism.

Here's the scene of coronation in Frozen.

[inspirational music]

It looks to be taking place inside a chapel.

I see lancet windows

on the first level covered with a kind of gable frame.

We see posts like piers that are holding up some kind

of wooden arch.

I see some decoration here, cross-like decoration, arcading

and then we see on a gallery level

up above these upper windows, a choir singing.

And there is another kind of hybrid or mishmash

in the architecture here is not only do we have a kind

of all the Scandinavian motifs

but then we have these European gothic elements

of the windows with the gable frames.

The fact that this architectural space

is made of wood tells me

that it's probably taking place in Scandinavia.

This space seems to be drawing

from stave church architecture that we also see

in Scandinavia and in particular in Norway.

This is Arendelle Castle

and it looks very much like a stave church.

Stave churches are so-called

because they're made with staves, which are pieces

of wood that are beveled to fit together,

kind of like a wine barrel or a whiskey barrel.

The stave church is a type of architecture

that goes back to the early Middle Ages

to the great Viking Age, and we see these cross motifs,

which are called andreaskors in Swedish

or the St. Andrew's cross.

It's a decorative motif.

The detailing in Frozen is very similar

to the church we see here

with the use of the St. Andrew's cross

and the elaborate architectural detailing.

In the interior, we see it's painted

with flowers and scroll work, usually of a floral motif,

which is very typical of 18th century Scandinavian painting

but this space is definitely an older space,

so it's referring to the fact

that this family has had this castle for a very long time.

Now we're gonna talk about the staircase in Cinderella.

[lively music]

This is crazy.

This is an amazing staircase,

but definitely not like any staircase I've seen

in a castle before.

Here's everything that jumps out to me.

We have these great big arches

with windows and great huge curtains

and this enormous staircase that kind of funnels down

into this bridge-like aspect, and then it fans open

and then in front here, we have some kind of a vase

with a very Baroque kind of handle.

Immediately to me, this just looks like the kind

of 1950s debutante ball space

or like this Hollywood red carpet style con staircase.

What it does remind me of

is the grand staircase that's in the Palais Garnier

in Paris that was built in the 19th century.

When we have this notion of public life and everyone goes

to the opera to see the opera, but also to be seen,

these staircases were really designed to show the public

and show the people there, each other,

to show their dresses,

to meet up with people on this grand staircase.

Most interior medieval staircases were very narrow.

They were primarily used as practical passageways

and that help really the builders get

around the different spaces that they need to construct.

Or sometimes royal bedrooms

would have these little tiny staircases behind the bed

so the king could go visit his mistresses in secret.

And if we were gonna talk

about an opulent staircase in a castle,

one that comes to mind

is that at the Chateau de Chambord in France.

This is a really special staircase designed

by Leonardo da Vinci.

This staircase is innovative

because it has a double helix spiral.

So we would see really grand staircases

on the exterior of palaces or castles.

One that comes to mind is at the Palais de la Cite in Paris

whose staircase goes back to the 13th century, and this kind

of exterior massive grand staircases are for the reception

of ambassadors and special people,

and it also brought people from the ground level

up to the piano nobile,

the noble level where special people met each other, right?

Royalty, high dignity, ambassadors, not the riffraff

of everyday life who stayed on the ground floor.

These staircases are all over Disney movies.

You see them in Cinderella,

you see it in Beauty and the Beast,

you see it in Frozen.

It seems to be pure fantasy.

I haven't seen anything like this in a castle.

So for Cinderella,

I'm not really sure what date this takes place in

but it seems to be very much aligned with the idea

of fantasy that it's drawing from many different sources

and many different time periods

to create this imagined, wonderful,

exceptional space of dreams.

Now we're going to talk

about the library in Beauty and the Beast

[lively music] [Belle gasping]

Here's everything that jumps out to me.

Yeah, this is a kind of library that one would see

in a palace or a castle or aristocratic household.

There are a couple libraries that come to mind here.

The Vienna National Library in Austria,

the Biblioteca Comunale di Imola in Italy,

and the Library of Saint Gall in Switzerland.

They are just extremely Baroque, very highly decorated,

beautiful spaces to find yourself in and to read.

I see neoclassical tapered columns.

I see this little balustrade here.

I see a fancy spiral staircase here, floor-to-ceiling books.

We know that Disney was referencing the Baroque style.

There's even a line in Beauty in the Beast

where Cogsworth says.

If it's not Baroque, don't fix it.

[Cogsworth chuckling]

These round globes were common features in libraries,

a sign that you understand the world,

that you know the world and that you dominate the world.

The Vienna National Library

even has a whole collection of globes.

The tapered columns in Beauty and the Beast look

like the tapered columns I see at the library in Imola.

If you have a spiral staircase like this in your house,

it's not the most direct way to the upper parts

of your shelves, so they're really purely decorative.

This church, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris,

has these amazing stone spiral staircases

from the end of the 15th century.

The only thing that is definitely inaccurate

is this fireplace.

Book collections like this were incredibly expensive.

You wouldn't have a fireplace in the middle

of your library that could potentially burn them all.

[dramatic music] [Lumiere blowing]

[person screaming]

Well, this is somewhat accurate for the time period

to have a library like this

but what we know about Beast is that Beast was illiterate.

Why don't you read it to me?

I can't.

You mean you never learned?

So what they're trying to say is that there's something

behind Beast referencing his family's great wealth,

their longevity over the centuries,

and that there is a high level of culture

and education in his household.

[lively music]

The Disney creators are really drawing

from popular culture and what people imagine about the past.

If you wanna see some incredible castle or palace interiors,

there's obviously Versailles, but if you have the chance,

also go to Vaux le Vicomte, which is nearby in Paris,

which preceded Versailles and is made

by the same architect and designers.

[lively music]