Disney the American dreamer

Published on November 11, 2007

Walt Disney
By Neal Gabler
Published by Alfred A Knopf
Available at Neilson Hays Library
Reviewed by James Eckardt
The Nation

Neal Gabler has written the definitive biography of Walt Disney. Appropriately subtitled "The Triumph of the American Imagination", this big, serious, scholarly, yet vividly written book is the product of prodigious research. The 850-page text concludes with 165 pages of notes.

As a Hollywood historian, Gabler comes well equipped for his task. His two previous books are "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" and "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality".

Here he takes on the protean genius who gave the world Mickey Mouse, Snow White and his ultimate triumph, Disneyland.

Walt Disney was a complex man and, to his credit, Gabler presents a complex portrait. The narrative generally gallops along in the wake of this ever-restless showman.

Disney's childhood was both idyllic and Dickensian. He grew up on a farm near the perfect small town of Marceline, Missouri, which he would idealise as the "Main Street" of Disneyland. After moving to Kansas City, he dropped out of school, lied about his age and escaped to France as a WWI ambulance driver. Returning to Kansas City he set himself up as an animator, went bankrupt and fled to Los Angeles to join his older brother Roy, who would run the business side of the Walt Disney Studio.

His big breakthrough was the first soundtrack cartoon, "Steamboat Willy", starring Mickey Mouse.

Mickey's creator was plainspoken, plain-dressed - favouring sweaters and a slouch hat - generous and genial to his staff, all of who addressed him as Walt. He was a man of simple tastes, a faithful husband to his wife and doting father to two daughters. But he had always been unknowable, and the older he got, the more imperious he became with his staff until they all feared him.

"If you want to know the real secret of Walt's success," Gabler quotes long-time Disney animator Ward Kimball as saying, "it's that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he would have fun with or be proud of."

He reached his artistic apogee during the Great Depression.

"An American everyman, he lived the American experience and seemed to embody it in his doggedness, idealism, informality and lack of affectation, perhaps above all in his sudden rise from poverty and anonymity to the summit of success ... The synchronicity between Disney and America would become his brand.

"[This] was especially tight in the anxiety-ridden depression America of the 1930s, when his films seemed to capture and then soothe the national malaise. Virtually everyone interpreted 'Three Little Pigs' as a depression allegory, and many others saw in Mickey Mouse's pluck an intrepid American spirit."

Then came a winter night in 1934, when Disney got up on stage before 50 writers and animators and for the next three hours acted out the story of Snow White, assuming all the many characters' voices and mannerisms. He announced they were going to make the world's first animated feature film.

"That performance lasted us three years," one animator claimed. "Whenever we'd get stuck, we'd remember how Walt did it that night."

"Snow White" turned into a technological marvel of inspired improvisation and backbreaking work. On its release in 1937, it was a critical and popular triumph, and was followed by "Pinocchio", "Dumbo", "Bambi" and "Fantasia", Disney's collaboration with composer Leopold Stokowski.

Gabler maintains that the studio was Disney's refuge from the real world; that he was indeed Snow White, with his hardworking staff as the seven dwarfs. If so, that world was abruptly shattered in 1941 by a strike led by animator Art Babbit, a communist and bitter personal enemy of Disney. World War II also cut off the overseas revenue needed for expensive animation movies. After the war, Disney seemed to lose interest in the studio, devoting himself to an obsessive interest in model trains.

But Disney bounced back in 1954 with his foray into television with the "Mickey Mouse Club" and "Disneyland", which he hosted himself to tie in with the giant amusement park he was building in Anaheim, California. This was to be his new refuge.

On Disneyland's opening day in 1955, Disney surveyed the crowds from the balcony of his apartment atop the firehouse on Main Street. He was grinning widely, a tear streaming down his cheek. "I have never seen a happier man," observed his daughter Diane.

His studio by now was producing mostly dreck, but there were exceptions: "Cinderella", "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "The Lady and The Tramp" and "Mary Poppins".

Gabler sums up: "He was a Horatio Alger hero whose life demonstrated social mobility. He was a naïve artist whose work demonstrated a Jamesian unpretentiousness and common sense. He was a visionary whose plans demonstrated the breath of American imagination and the power of American will. And however he behaved privately, he was publicly a modest, affable and decent man whose image demonstrated America's own decency and generosity of spirit."

James Eckardt's eighth book, "Singapore Girl", published by Monsoon Books, is on sale at Kinokuniya, Bookazine and Asia Books.