Book Review: Walt Disney: The Triumph of the Imagination (2007) by Neal Gabler

Book Review

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the Imagination (2007)

by Neal Gabler

   I live in Atwater Village, roughly mid-way between Disney's second studio on Hyperion Ave in Silver Lake (present day Silverlake Gelson's parking lot) and the Burbank studio.  Signs of Disney are all around- the restaurant down the street, the Tam O'Shanter bills itself as "Walt Disney's Favorite Restaurant" and has a plaque commemorating his favorite seat.  The model railroad he built at his personal home was relocated into Griffith Park and remains open on a semi-regular basis.   In fact, it would be easy to stake the claim that the literal home of Disney and all he built is that swath of territory between the Hyperion Ave studio and the Burbank Studio, which is basically Silverlake, Atwater Village and southwestern Burbank.  But no one ever says this, and you can live for years in Silverlake without anyone pointing out that the studio that turned out Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) was located in the Gelson's Parking Lot.

  Walt Disney is one of those protean figures of American Popular Culture who can seemingly represent anything to anyone.  At various times in his career, he was a Kansas City advertising agent, an upstart visionary with a dream to raise animation to an artform, a struggling small business-man, a pioneer in the use of color and sound in film, a internationally lauded visionary, a government shill for militarism, a militant anti-communist strike breaker and, of course, the creator of Disneyland itself.

  All this is magisterially described by author Neal Gabler over the course of over 900 pages or 33 hours in Audiobook form.   Calling this biography exhaustive doesn't quite do the narrative justice, particularly when you consider that Walt Disney's personal life takes up about a twentieth of the text, and most of that is his "formative years" growing up in the midwest.

  Disney was convinced from an early age that he was going to revolutionize animation, well before he got to Hollywood.  After a stint driving ambulances/being a gofer in the aftermath of World War I in Paris, he started an animation company in Kansas City that didn't work out.  After that he moved to Los Angeles, following his older brother Roy, who had worked as a bank clerk and relocated to Los Angeles for health reasons.   The early years were times of struggle, where Walt and Roy fought against their own distributors and the vagaries of the marketplace for silent black and white animation.

  The breakthrough came in 1928 when Steamboat Willie, featuring a young Mickey and Minnie Mouse, was the first cartoon to use sound.  It's success was the first of many pop culture sensations created by Disney, and its financial success put Disney on the path to worldwide domination.  Prior to that, a move from the first Disney Brothers studio in what is now East Hollywood to their Silverlake Hyperion studio was the other major development in Disney's embryonic period.  Alongside the Mickey cartoons he began to churn out, Disney had another early success with his series of "Silly Symphonies," beginning with the Skeleton Dance in 1929, that brought a new, non-narrative dimension to Disney's animation art, and began to attract attention from artists and intellectuals.

   While the Mickey series and Silly Symphonies were chugging along, Disney began to plot his first feature- something that had never been tried before and was widely seen as impossible given artistic and audience constraints by contemporary observers.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a years long obsession of Disney's, and if you were to select a single canonical work released by the Disney Studio, surely it would be Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937).   The result was universal critical and popular acclaim- both domestically and abroad, where Snow White was nothing less than a sensation.  Circa 1937 Disney was hailed as a genius by both intellectuals and normal folks, communists and conservatives, adults and children. Disney bristled at the idea that his cartoons were from children and insisted on only focus testing adult audiences well into the 1950's. 

     Unfortunately, the long turn around time between features meant that Disney's next film, Pinocchio (Feb 1940) was released after the German invasion of Poland, meaning that it was hardly released internationally.  Domestically reviews were mixed, with many critics arguing that Disney had failed to anticipate the shift in mood that resulted from the knowledge of war in Europe.  Fantasia was released in November of 1940, and was largely received as a masterpiece, but Disney's insistence in installing his own sound system limited box office receipts in the US, and the war made foreign distribution impossible, meaning that both films were financial calamites. 

  After Pearl Harbor, Disney found himself working for the government making training and propaganda films.   He also found himself grappling with workers unions, and this period was clearly a nadir for the man and his work, culminating in the Disney Strike of 1941 and his bizarre Victory Through Air Power (1942), a highly influential movie he released supporting the development of long range bombers.  During World War II Disney became disenchanted with the Studio, mostly because the worker strike and the events leading up to and afterwards shattered Disney's vision of his studio as a little workers utopia. 

   After the war, he retreated- he was less involved with  Dumbo(1941) and Bambi (1942) and between Bambi and Cinderella (1950) he presided over the least august period in Disney studio history, eight years where the highlight was The Song of the South(1946), a movie deemed so vile by posterity that it has been removed from circulation.  Disney canon carefully omits this fallow period.  It was during this time that he entered his "model railroad period," where he was entirely withdrawn from studio work and bizarrely became obsessed with building his own scale locomotive and accompanying track.

   However, all became clear when he formally separated himself from the studio, essentially selling his name to the studio he still owned and starting his own separate holding enterprise.  It was this new business that became Disneyland.  A writer seeking to evaluate the works that Disney contributed to the canon can stop at this point- Disney studios went on to reel off hit after hit for the ensuing decades, but Walt Disney was not part of those films.  Disneyland is an incredibly consequential development on many levels but it is not a "work of art" like a novel, short story, poem or film. 

   Looking past Disney in terms of animation in film, 1995 emerges as a critical year.  In 1995, Disney released Pocahantas but they also released Toy Story by Pixar- thereafter it would be Pixar which represented the cutting edge of filmed animation and Disney itself would be relegated to second place, artistically speaking.  Nor would Pixar be the first to challenge Disney's preeminent position- as early as the 1940's Bugs Bunny emerged as a credible challenger to Mickey as a leading man of the cartoon world.   As early as the 1940's, critics were critiquing the "Disney" style as being insufficiently sharp-edged for an America at war.

    In conclusion, I think the canonical Disney works are Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) as a strong, unassailable number one.  Number two would have to be Fantasia (1940), a movie I recently rewatched and will treat separately.  Third would either be nothing or Bambi (1942) or Cinderella (1950).   The argument for "nothing" is pretty strong on the grounds that Snow White is the first AND the best so it takes both slots as the early representative and the best representative work.  Bambi has a good case in terms of the post-release initial release revision of the film into an all time classic.  Cinderella has an argument as being the film that restored his artistic reputation after nearly a decade in the doldrums and it also represents an example of the mid-period style- which itself encompasses classic-but-not-canon films like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians and the Sword in the Stone, films that were released in order between 1951 and 1963, followed by a lengthy period of extended mediocrity before The Little Mermaid (1989) after which the releases and sub-studios multiple the point of incomprehsibility.