Weekly Reader: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler; A Comprehensive Biography About The Good and The Bad of The Man Who Taught Us All To Wish Upon a Star
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Like the subject of last week's biography, Barbie, the image of Walt Disney and the company he produced are what we put into them. Are Disney's products beautiful works of art and offer a sense of magic, escapism, and wish fulfillment to those who come into contact with them? Are they over commercialized pieces of tripe that distort the original stories from which they came turning them into sentimental nonsense? What about Walt Disney himself? Was he a brilliant artist who created wonderful characters and worlds? Was he an anti-Semitic perfectionist who peddled mindless drivel to the masses?
Neal Gabler's comprehensive biography of Disney gives us both sides to his character: the creative innovator and the driven perfectionist. Like many people, he was neither good nor bad and Gabler gives us this multifaceted look at him.
No matter what we feel about Disney and his creations, what can be agreed upon is that they are pure escapism. Whether you ride the rides at the Disney park, watch your favorite animated feature for the hundredth time, or laugh at the antics of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and their friends you are transported to another vibrant, clean, beautiful, and hopeful world. This theme of escapism is not coincidental. In fact, Gabler’s book shows that this was a theme that Disney had been looking for his whole life.
Even though Disney was born in Chicago in 1901, he and his family moved to Marceline, Missouri when he was four. Even though Disney's father was a hard taskmaster, he had an idyllic childhood in Marceline. Gabler’s writing showed Disney’s childhood years as one of playing with friends, studying at school, and exploring nature. Disney would return to his nostalgic feelings about Marceline and recreate that childhood town or towns just like it in movies like So Dear To My Heart and Pollyanna and on the Main Street U.S.A. section at Disneyland.
Disney's early career showed the beginnings of his tremendous talent and his detached nature. He created early characters like Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, the precursor to his later characters. One of his most creative early works were the Alice Comedies, which depicted a live-action girl interacting with animated characters.
Unfortunately, those early years also taught Disney a lesson about betrayal. Charles Mintz, one of Disney's colleagues signed a contract with Universal Pictures giving him the rights to Oswald and taking Disney out of the loop. This moment would become the groundwork for Disney's guarded personality and suspicions towards his employees.
Disney's desire for escape and imagination not only came into creating his characters but in remembering how they were created. He often told the story that he created Mickey Mouse during a train ride in which he drew a mouse figure and suggested the name Mortimer for the little fellow. His wife, Lillian, didn't care for the name and suggested Mickey instead. The truth is more prosaic than the legend. Actually Mickey was created and named during a brainstorming session between Disney and his animators in which they suggested various animals and settled on a mouse.
Despite the dispute in his creation, Mickey became a success after the release of his first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie. The popularity of the character was also helped by the original Mickey Mouse Club in which children were invited to attend screenings of the cartoon shorts as well as the merchandise with Mickey plastered all over the place. (Proving that Disney like the company after him would be an expert on marketing and commercializing his characters.)
Despite the perception of Disney and his company becoming conservative and formulaic, the book reveals Disney's willingness to take risks and innovate his creations, particularly during the early years. One of his most famous examples was in making Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, his first feature length animated film. Many thought that no one would sit through a feature length cartoon. Disney and his animators tried unique approaches to animating the movie such as using a multiplane camera to provide background detail to the landscape and rotoscoping (filming live action humans and animating over that image) to capture facial styles and features. He also improved upon the original story by providing names and personalities to the seven dwarves and offering dark visuals such as a terrified Snow White running through the woods where hallucinations frighten her and the beautiful Wicked Queen using ingredients like a scream of fright, an old hag’s cackle, and the dark of night for a magic potion to turn her into an old peddler. Disney’s first animated feature was such a success and pleased him so well that to the end of his life, he considered Snow White and Mary Poppins as the only two features he considered perfect.
Besides his pleasure for Mary Poppins on a technical level including combining live action and animation in the scene where Mary, her friend, Bert, and her charges, Jane and Michael Banks go
on a “Jolly Holiday” through a chalk drawing of the countryside, Mary Poppins also touched Disney on a personal level. He identified with George Banks, the father who is unable to spend time with his children and regretted it in the end because Disney did not spend as much time with his wife, Lillian and daughters, Diane and Sharon as much as he liked. Disney also loved the Sherman Brothers song, “Feed the Birds”, a moving song about an old bird woman feeding birds outside St. Paul’s Cathedral who urges people to give money to feed the birds for “tuppence a bag.” He loved the song so much that whenever he met with the brothers, all he would have to say is, “Play it” and they knew which song he wanted to hear.
Sometimes the risks didn't always pay off. When Disney created the movie Fantasia, he intended it to be a continuing project of animated shorts put to classical music much like they already did with the Silly Symphony shorts. The movie would then be updated every few years with new segments. He also wanted to make the movie a full sensory experience by inserting odors into the theaters including floral, gunpowder, saltwater and other scents. Unfortunately despite Disney's ambitions for the project, Fantasia tanked in its initial release discontinuing his proposed ongoing project idea for the movie until 1999 when his company released Fantasia 2000. Many children were reportedly bored by the music, parents either objected to the animation segments or felt that they were inappropriate for children. Classical movie buffs, including Igor Stravinsky whose piece “Rite of Spring” was used in the movie (and whose “Firebird Suite” would be used for Fantasia 2000) thought that Disney's animated segments distorted the music’s original styles. Disney took this failure as a personal blow. It's a shame that Disney didn't live long enough to see the hippy generation give Fantasia a new life as an ultimate visual experience just as they did with Alice in Wonderland, which also similarly tanked upon its initial release. Both Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland obtained cult followings and then later received the critical and commercial success that they originally had been denied proving that sometimes Disney's vision wasn't always wrong, just far ahead of his time.
Gabler also explores Disney's darker nature with great detail. Despite giving a warm welcoming persona, in truth he was very guarded and standoffish to his employees. He wasn't above showing preferential treatment to animators who had been with him from the beginning or that he favored including his legendary “Nine Old Men” such as Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, and Woolie Reitherman. He considered them friends and would laugh and joke with them and approve of their ideas for scenes and characters (making it perfectly clear that his word was the final say.).
However, he wouldn't have as much camaraderie with other animators like Freddie Moore (who had been fired by the company twice.) and many of the artists that did the lesser known work such as in-betweeners and clean up. (Those who didn't draw the initial characters but went scene by scene frame by frame to make sure the characters and scenes were uniform and mistake free.) This hierarchy created dissension in the ranks as many who were not in Disney's favor feared his criticism and wrath. He often made public examples of them either in the studio or in the Sweatbox where they watched the rushes. Many of the animators who weren't in Disney's favor either quit in fury or were outright dismissed.
This “With me or against me” attitude was particularly noticeable during the Animator’s Strike of 1941 in which a group of animators led by Art Babbit campaigned to unionize Disney's animation team. Disney was an ardent anti-Unionist and refused. While the strikers and the corporate office eventually came to a negotiation, Babbit resigned and Disney considered him a traitor to the end of his life.
The strike and Disney's mistrust of some of his employees created a fear of Communism in him. Disney was a “friendly witness” to the House of Un-American Activities and wasn't above naming names based on nothing more than mere speculation. Unfortunately Disney's staunch anti-Union and anti-Communism stance as well as the images in some of his works (such as Jim Crow in Dumbo, the Big Bad Wolf impersonating a Jewish peddler in the Three Little Pigs, and the movie, The Song of the South which had been so criticized by the NAACP and other groups that Walt Disney Studios still refuses to re-release it in any form) led to accusations that Disney was both racist and anti-Semitic, accusations that Gabler dismissed.
Gabler cited that Disney hired both Jewish and African-American employees and had close friends that were both. At most Gabler writes that Disney could have been guilty of being “racially insensitive” as so many people in Hollywood were at the time by using stereotypical characters for cheap laughs and making inappropriate remarks. Another proof of Disney not being anti-Semitic Gabler believes could also be seen in his other works particularly the World War II propaganda cartoons. The darkest one (among the darkest animated works the Disney company produced even to this day), Education for Death comes down hard on Nazi anti-Semitic policies by depicting a young Aryan boy destroying others and ultimately bringing about his own destruction because of them.
Gabler also explored how the public persona of Walt Disney as the warm family-friendly benevolent creator and works was both a virtue and a prison to him and his company. This even started at the beginning with Mickey Mouse. In the original shorts, Mickey was a mischievous troublemaker who often played pranks on his adversaries. However as his popularity grew, Mickey shifted towards a heroic nice guy making him seem dull and bland in comparison to his colleagues the temperamental Donald Duck and the clumsy Goofy. Donald even eclipsed Mickey in popularity because audience found his flaws more relateable rather than Mickey's goody-two-shoes character. (In fact one of Mickey’s most popular cartoons The Sorcerer's Apprentice shows Mickey reverting back to his more mischievous persona by using magic to make a broom come to life and gather water to disastrous results.)
Walt Disney himself would suffer from the strain of maintaining a clean cut personality that he had honed by the 1960’s. This personality and his desire to churn out wholesome family films became a straightjacket that he couldn't quite break free from.
By the 1950’s, Disney's cartoons were no longer daring or original despite or perhaps because he also created Disneyland (which Gabler considered Disney's escape of all escapes.) and such shows as Davy Crockett and the Mickey Mouse Club. Disney instead seemed corny, stodgy, and emblematic of the safe middle-class America. Instead during that time the true animation innovators came out of Hanna-Barbera with Tom and Jerry, Warner Bros. With Loony Tunes, and Dr. Seuss with Gerald McBoing Boing, all of which claimed Academy Awards for Animated Short Subjects (which used to be a lock for Disney and his crew.). According to Gabler, when Disney saw To Kill a Mockingbird, he reacted with envy saying, “We should have done that.” However, he knew that the image that he created for the people would never permit him to make a dramatic film about rape and racial tension. It wasn't until Disney released Mary Poppins in 1964 and made plans for his EPCOT, community of tomorrow (which became Walt Disney World) that Walt Disney retained some of that original magical spark that had eluded him when he became formulaic.
Even though Disney died in 1967, his company still continues to be both loved and loathed by many. Those who say that the company deviated from Disney's vision (or saying he is rolling in his grave or would be upset) are missing the point. The company that Walt Disney left behind is just like he was. They are innovative in style but with conventional storylines. They are wish-fulfillment and formulaic. They are creative in giving us memorable characters and commercial by throwing merchandise at us. They are unafraid to be different by coming to television, creating adult films, adding new facets to the company, shifting from traditional to computer generation, and are willing to adapt for the subsequent generations, but they also peddle in escape and entertainment. They are and have always been exactly what Walt Disney wanted them to be.
