Disney had been a high roller, yet the tremendous prosperity of his last 15 years or so was solidly built on earlier successes. He turned out superior work for more than 30 years, and a generation had grown from children into adults associating his name with outstanding, accessible entertainment. Thus he was perfectly positioned to turn Disney into a trusted trademark for family fun in new media. Combining a commitment to quality with a willingness to adapt, he was able to broaden his commercial vision while making few missteps.
So what does Watts make of all this? He separates the "golden age" from the later work of the 1950s. So far, so good. But when he gets to particulars, the commentary tends to be facile in the extreme. For example, Watts thinks the early cartoons, with the persistent Mickey Mouse and the feisty Donald Duck, expressed Walt's "sentimental populism"--the average citizen overcoming adversity--a theme that went over well during the Great Depression. Could be. But the theme of the little guy taking on the bully hardly needs to be shaped by a Midwestern childhood. Nor does it require a 1930s audience. One of Disney's favorites, for instance, was Charlie Chaplin, whose quasi-Victorian "little fellow" was popular 15 years before the Depression.
Watts analyzes the feature-length movies along similar lines: "With marked populist overtones, [Pinocchio] chronicled a quest for stability, self-definition, and humanity within a threatening social environment." He's referring to Pinocchio, but would it matter if he meant Snow White or Cinderella or Jungle Book or Hercules? This sort of analysis could apply to any number of coming-of-age stories. It doesn't distinguish Disney from the competition. The audience was responding to something more.
That something was Disney's command of the medium. Walt was a masterful storyteller--probably his greatest talent. He hired the best available people--and since there was a depression, he was able to get them cheap (that's how the times affected his work). He eagerly took advantage of the latest technology. With such attributes, he would likely have been a success in any era.
Animation is a unique form, and Walt, a hands-on boss, was able to get something none of the other great artist/perfectionists of Hollywood (Chaplin, Von Stroheim, Astaire) could ever achieve--complete artistic control. Not a square inch appeared on the screen unless Walt wanted it that way. And unlike live-action auteurs, almost no effect was beyond his reach. Disney was an innovator in animation, doing new things with sound, color, and even duration. And whether you think of him as a farm boy made good or a heartless captain of industry, there's no denying the greatness of the work during the golden age, or that he was the man most responsible for the final product. His primary concern was always quality, not profits (his money people often needed to bring him back down to earth).
Walt expressly disavowed political intent in the 1930s, but historian Watts can't accept this. Maybe there is a point of view in his cartoons, but they're a pretty varied bunch. The Disney studio turned out 15 to 18 shorts a year, and the main commonalities were fine draftsmanship, clever gags, and enjoyable scores. You can read what you want into wild physical comedy, well-synchronized music, and characters beating the odds, but Disney could have borrowed much of this from other movies of the time.
The "vision" of a Midwestern Protestant turns out to be not all that different from the "vision" of a handful of Eastern European Jews. When messages do come across (especially in the features), it's because the tales Disney adapted were meant to be cautionary and instructive to children, and when Walt told a story he knew he had to tell it like he meant it. But even when Walt wanted to teach, entertainment came first.
Watts sees the Disney of the '50s shifting toward "libertarian populism." Don't get too excited. It's hard to pin down exactly what Watts means by this term. He mostly seems to use libertarianism in a negative sense. This new populism still has the same old positive belief in individual autonomy and the power of small producers, perhaps now with a new faith in technological innovation. But on the down side, Watts says, "it encouraged a suspicion of big bureaucratic institutions, be they governmental or financial, public or private." This, Watts contends, was Disney's reaction to the Cold War. During the Eisenhower years, Disney offered a "narrower, more defensive rendition" of the "older, optimistic, inclusive populism of the Depression era."
In fact, I think this is Watts's reaction to the Cold War, something he can sink his teeth into. Here, Watts starts to really go off the rails. To be sure, Disney changed in the '50s. And yes, his newer work was often corny (Disney proudly admitted this) and sometimes bland. It didn't reach the heights of his earlier work, but it was still children's entertainment of a higher quality than most.
In some ways, this new world of Disney was Walt's greatest creation--a multibillion-dollar organization built around beloved children's characters, with enormously valuable copyrights, hit movies, and parks that are bigger tourist destinations than most countries. This creation was by no means an historical inevitability: Once again, it was mostly due to one man's dreams.
Watts, however, sees a chance to tie it all to the McCarthy era and the Cold War and simply goes overboard, too often ignoring the financial and artistic achievement to concentrate on overheated, even absurd analyses: Lady and the Tramp and 101 Dalmations become symbolic of "the disruption of modern domestic life," while the light comedy The Parent Trap (1961) "explore[s] explicitly and seriously the threat to the Cold War American Family." The Disney nature films are "an unspoken rejection of the hovering Communist specter of artificial government direction and centralized planning." Watts gives us pages and pages of this stuff. Disney films are worth investigating from a sociocultural perspective, but that doesn't mean every investigation is worthwhile.
Reading The Magic Kingdom, one is ultimately struck by the imagination and energy of Disney as both filmmaker and businessman. His productive life is one of the most intriguing of this century. Watts's scholarly research (there are 57 pages of notes) has turned up enough information for several books. Unfortunately, he tells his story in a way Walt wouldn't have let get past a first draft.
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