Lost Disney Art Returning to Magic Kingdom

Two hundred and fifty pieces of original animation art will be returned to the Walt Disney Company from Japan after being locked away for several decades in a janitor's closet, The New York Times reports.The cels, backgrounds, paintings and storyboard sketches were handpicked by Walt Disney for a touring exhibition sent to Japan in 1960. The collection—which contains mostly art from Sleeping Beauty but also elements from "Flowers and Trees," "Three Little Pigs," and Fantasia—was then donated to the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. That museum, however, transferred them to the engineering college Chiba University, which locked them away in a janitorial room until their rediscovery four years ago.The collection has since been restored and sent on a tour of Japan, but Chiba has decided to return them to Disney in exchange for high-resolution digital copies and one million dollars in scholarship money.