Why Murals and Animation Were Always Meant to Meet

Making painted surfaces move isn't a new idea — it's basically a century-long obsession. The projection-mapping playbook traces back to 1969, when Disneyland's Haunted Mansion opened with a trick where filmed footage of singers was projected onto sculpted busts, making the "Grim Grinning Ghosts" appear to sing right in front of guests.

That idea — projecting a moving image onto a physical, textured surface instead of a flat screen — kept evolving. In 1980, artist Michael Naimark built an installation called Displacements: he filmed a living room scene with a rotating camera, then swapped the camera for a projector, throwing the same rotating footage back onto the physical room. By the late 1990s, academics were formalizing the concept as "Spatial Augmented Reality".

When it landed on actual murals

Eventually this technology found its way straight onto public art. In Edinburgh, a studio called Double Take Projections partnered with the original 1986 muralists Tim Chalk and Paul Grime to project animated life back onto their decades-old, sun-faded Leith history mural — bringing painted characters and scenes literally back to motion for one night in 2020.

A mural is a still frame. Animation is just asking it to finish the story.

In Siena, Italy, a 2022 video-mapping project called "La bellissima inventiva" animated Ambrogio Lorenzetti's 14th-century fresco cycle "Allegory of Good and Bad Government," projected onto the Palazzo Pubblico's facade using historically researched reconstructions of the original scenes. And at a much larger scale, more than 20 animation studios collaborated on "Living Mural," a collaborative architectural projection covering the sails of the Sydney Opera House for the 2015 Vivid festival.

AR murals: the next step, no projector required

Big projection shows are one-night spectacles that need expensive gear and darkness. But the same basic instinct — give a static painted surface motion — is exactly what mural-specific AR apps have been doing more recently, minus the giant projector truck. In Ballarat, Australia, the 2019 Winter Festival's "Activated ArtWalk" placed six large murals around the city that revealed hidden animated layers when viewed through a phone app, including artist Samantha Thompson's piece referencing the site's history as a morgue cart lane.

That's the throughline from Disneyland's singing busts to a mural in your neighborhood: static art has always wanted an audience willing to help it move. AR just made that trick portable, personal, and available any time of day — not just for one festival night.