Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination – Neal Gabler

 

Walt Disney: The Triumph of The American Imagination – Neal Gabler

There’s an early Disney movie that most have never heard called “The Reluctant Dragon” (if you subscribe to Disney+, you can stream it).  The movie came out a few short years after Walt Disney became a household name with his triumphant “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.  The movie is a (mostly) non-animated fictitious account of a man who has an idea for a story, so drives to Walt Disney studios to pitch his idea to Walt.  After the man gets to Disney Studios, he gets sidetracked and stumbles into all of the different rooms where the animated movies are created.  When he stumbles into a room, the workers look up, smile, and say something cheery like “Would you like to see how we create our sound effects?”

So essentially the movie serves as a vehicle for the audience to see how all the magic is made. In addition to sound effects, we see how storyboards work, the hi-tech cameras, the modeling, the paint mixing, and on and on and on.  It sure does look like a happy place. Well, when the movie was released in 1941, it happened to be when the workers at Disney Studios were on strike and many picketed the movie.  The message the frustrated workers were conveying to the public is that the world portrayed in “The Reluctant Dragon” was absolutely nothing like what they had to endure day in and day out working for a tyrant such as Walt Disney.

I use this example to begin my review of this biography, because this is essentially the theme of the entire life of Walt Disney.  He may have created a happy fantasy world for viewers, but the environment where all this happiness was created was nothing at all joyous. I didn’t end up hating Walt Disney after finishing this 1,000+ page biography, but I’m definitely glad that I never had to work for the man. In fact, the underlying message of this epic seems to be that had Walt Disney not been as meticulous and demanding, his movies never would have gotten of the ground and his legacy would probably have been a short-lived footnote as opposed to possibly the greatest story in motion picture history.

Everything is here. We read a lot about Walt’s humble midwestern upbringing under a frugal and demanding father, and a lot of Walt’s early life as a driven yet only moderately successful animator.  We must remember how primitive animation was in the 1920s. So when the first Mickey Mouse short “Steamboat Willy” hit the theatres, we must view the work as a viewer who lived an entire century ago.  Sure it seems a bit dull and mundane by today’s standards, but the thing was incredibly cutting edge at the time and set the wheels in motion for more. Oh so much more.

One of the highlights of the book was reading about the creation of the very first full-length animated feature “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.  Most in the 1930s didn’t think the public would want a full-length animated feature, so Disney knew it had to be excellent.  And man, did he work hard to ensure that the movie met expectations.  It’s here where we really get introduced to the persistent perfectionist that Disney was.  He knew what he wanted, yet his challenge was to make everyone else who worked for him understand precisely what he was picturing in his brain.  He would even get up in front of the animators and “act out” the scenes from the movie.  So we read about a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of frustrated animators, a lot of firings, a lot of screaming, and a lot of money being lost because the studio was constantly behind schedule and over budget.  One anecdote that was particularly depressing and revealing was when one of the animators worked for an entire year and a half on a scene where the dwarves eat the soup the Snow White makes them.  The scene had to be cut because of time limitations.

Once “Snow White” becomes a major success, you would think that everything would be rosy and peachy for Walt and his studio.  Oh no.  The man was never satisfied and always looking for the next big idea. It didn’t help that he was constantly broke.  Although one might think that the company was raking in the dough and living on easy street, this was far from the truth. It seemed like every penny that Disney made, he relentlessly poured it into new ideas and new technology.  So money was always tight. This was one of the few areas of the book that I didn’t find that entertaining.  There’s an awful lot of detail when it came to contract agreements, percentages, loans, and financing that wasn’t necessarily easy reading. At times I felt like I was reading a company’s balance sheet as opposed to a biography.

We then read about how World War II caused him to shift focus and make “military” reels (he needed the money). We also read about his family life that never seemed particularly sunny (although he truly loved and doted on his two daughters), and how he was generally a loner who didn’t really have a lot of friends.  He didn’t really seem to want any, though, as all of his energy went into ideas and innovation, not cultivating relationships.

So by the 1950s, he starts to envision Disneyland.  If you’re old enough to remember the Disney television show on Sunday nights, it was interesting to find out that Disney really didn’t want nor care about this new “television” thing, but he needed something to finance his crazy theme park idea.  So the TV show is born and is massively successful.  Walt, though, couldn’t possibly care less.

Other than “Snow White”, we don’t read much about any of the other films, but we do find out whether they were successful or not  (I was surprised to learn that “Bambi” was generally considered a failure).  Even the more highly reputable films such as Cinderella, Davy Crocket, and Mary Poppins only receive a couple of pages of attention at the most.  There was simply too much going on, and we read throughout the biography that by the 1950s, Disney never really cared much about making movies anymore, everything was about his Disneyland idea.

Once Disneyland opens and becomes successful, Walt still can’t sit still and relax.  We hear about more of his newfangled projects that he wants to tackle next.  We begin to read about the plans for the Florida park that complemented the one in California, but Disney seems more focused on creating his dream of EPCOT. (Note: EPCOT wouldn’t arrive until many years after Disney’s death, and the finished product wasn’t really what Walt had envisioned.)

Too much stress and smoking finally catch up to Walt Disney, and he dies at the age of 65 in 1966 of lung cancer.  Our story then concludes.  I was partly relieved (as I mentioned, this thing is over 1,000 pages) but I really wanted so much more.  I wish the author would have added another chapter or two to write  about what has happened since Walt passed away.  This book was written 40 years after the Walt’s death, and an awful lot has happened, good and bad (mostly good) since then.  But sadly you won’t read about any of those details here. So if you’re wanting to read about Pixar, The Song of the South controversy, or what became the “Magic Kingdom”, you literally won’t find one word of any of that here.

This book also took me a bit longer to finish than most books because I kept switching back and forth from my Kindle reader on my Ipad to my Disney+ app since I wanted to watch (or rewatch) all of the movies and shorts that I kept reading about within the pages.  It’s quite refreshing to know that even though this book was so detailed, that there’s so much more out there to educate the curious.

Other than the aforementioned complaint about too much “finance” being discussed, I was also a bit perturbed by the fact that author Neal Gabler seems awfully inclined to use a lot of big words. An advantage to reading this on an e-book is that one can simply hover their finger over a complex word and see the definition.  OK, maybe it did increase my vocabulary somewhat, but I’m never enamored when authors litter their work with complex verbiage when simpler words will work just fine.

This was a great read though. Even though Disney was less than pleasant most of his life, we get the feeling that this was the only way he (or anyone) could achieve such an outrageous vision that has managed to touch the lives of so many people; even 60 years after his death.