Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler (2006)

As we approach Christmastime, many Americans will be looking to the films of Walt Disney (1901-1966) for holiday comfort.  Those interested in the man behind the brand could do not better than Neal Gabler’s magisterial biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.  It will leave you with the distinct impression of having met Disney himself, warts and all. 

Surely few American entertainment icons have been more discussed – or subject to more historical revision -- than Disney.  During his salad days of the 1920s and 30s, Disney was regarded as both an important artist (embraced by intellectuals and modernists like Dali), and an emerging American institution.  It was only with the national rupture of the 1960s that Disney’s reputation started to tarnish: books such as The Disney Version by Richard Schickel in 1968 sought to take down the Greatest Generation hero down as many pegs as possible.  (Indeed, Schickel’s attack is so out-of-proportion as to seem unhinged, sadly all too common in that both sad and common decade.)

The simple and irreducible fact is that Disney was neither the plaster saint of the right nor the uber-bogeyman of left, but rather a complicated and contradictory man who achieved remarkable things in animation, live-action filmmaking and that strange mix of theater and amusement park that is Disneyland.  Few American artists have had a more influential or pervasive grip on the American mindset (indeed, I cannot think of any), and fewer have transcended their own art to become a brand name.

In addition, there are few artists as resolutely American as Disney.  Raised on and near a farm in Marceline, Missouri to middle-class parents, Walt’s earliest surroundings were a mix of Tom Sawyer and The Music Man.  Though he would remember having a contentious relationship with his father (Walt always had a touch of self-dramatization), friends and neighbors remember him as perpetually sunny and optimistic.  He was fascinated by cartooning, by drawing, and by the possibilities of animated cartoons. 

After knocking around the nascent animation industry for a bit, Disney and his brother Roy (1893-1971) lit out for California in 1929 to hang their own shingle.  Many would think the rest is history, but not so, according to Gabler’s book, which chronicle the young animation entrepreneur’s struggle over the next decades, not fully finding financial success until well into the 1950s, despite great critical and popular success.

This sense of hand-to-mouth desperation is one of the many details found in this richly detailed book.  A dreamer and idea-man, Disney often drove innovation without regard to the costs, leaving money-man Roy with the problem of finding much-needed funds.  It seems that Disney took every success they had and funneled that money into some other plan, vision or scheme. 

Like many gifted creators of children’s entertainment – Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) and L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) immediately come to mind – Disney was pulled in opposite poles by his idealized vision of home, safety and small-village charm on one side and by an overweening sense of travel, adventure and expansion on the other.  It seems that Walt never fully recovered from his happy years at Marceline, and sought new and innovative ways to recreate it.  (It is no surprise that Main Street in Disneyland – that tribute to small-town hominess – was modeled on Marceline.)  Walt longed to return to his own personal Arcadia, one foot in an idealized past and the other foot in an idealized future.  His studio, and later Disneyland, would be the engines he used to drive him back there.

The central argument of Gabler’s book is that Disney sought to create his own personal Neverland, an Arcadia where he could create in peace and play as he wanted.  Disney’s studio in the early years was an earthly paradise, with drawing lessons, endless fun-and-games and goofy good times, all with Walt watching paternalistically.  This haven was destroyed by a series of strikes that permanently marred Disney, pointing him towards increasingly rightwing or libertarian politics, while also making him more reclusive, autocratic and difficult to work with.

After the war and as he entered the 1950s, Walt seemed to lose interest in his empire, and spent a great deal of his time building man-sized model trains.  Though many thought he was losing his grip, actually Walt was retreating within himself as he conceptualized his next innovation: an actual, physical Wonderland that he could call home.  The creation of Disneyland was a balm to Walt, and he entered his second great phase of creativity – as filmmaker and innovator – once the project gained ground.

Soon after making Marry Poppins (1964), his last great film, and conceptualizing key components of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Walt would be diagnosed with lung cancer and die, his studio and his name becoming a byword for family entertainment.  He also left behind a public persona – part real, part myth – that has attracted debunkers and back-biters for decades.

So, after so many years of pro-and-con debate, where does that leave Gabler’s readers?  There is a great deal of data to sift through in Gabler’s book – the research is exhaustive and the reporting sometimes exhausting.  (This is the type of biography where the author writes, “Walt walked the 90 feet to his office.”)  Gabler had unfettered access to Disney’s papers, and worked on the understanding that he would have complete autonomy over the final product.  Here, then, is the true Disney as he was, take him or leave him.

Disney was too slippery an entity for such classifications as hero or heel.  For example, he greatly wanted to create an Arcadia of sorts with his studio, but was also parsimonious with money, perks and control.  Gabler believes, and I agree, that he had no idea of the acrimony that would lead to such divisive strikes – strikes which cut Walt to the heart because they questioned his own inherent sense of decency.

To the charges that Disney vulgarized everything he touched, Gabler also chronicles the true artistic masterpieces for which he was responsible, including Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Fantasia.  The legacy of Disneyland is perhaps best summed up by the simple fact that a visit there has made countless millions of people happy.

A devoted husband and a doting and caring father, Disney could also be a shark in the realm of business, a credit hog, and a bully.  But Disney also faced hardships of a type that few readers of these words could ever imagine, and still managed to retain his innate optimism and come out sunnily on top.  He had grit and moxie, and, perhaps most of all, he had heart.  Bastard Saint, Everyman Bully, Uncle Hardcase – he was equal parts monster and sweetheart. 

Perhaps Disney managed to connect with America’s children in such a deep and profound way because Walt never completely grew up.  He was a paternalist who was still a kid.  The strike and financial hardship may have unfortunately politicized and soured him, but it never robbed him of his ability to dream. 

Neal Gabler’s book is a splendid chronicle of a complex and contradictory character; a uniquely American visionary of a type never to be seen again.  It is easy to see that, by the end of 800 pages, Gabler has become enamored of his subject, and Your Correspondent left the great man somewhat teary-eyed.  If you read only one book about Disney, make it Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

Bambi, A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten

Every now and then, successful films make the novels upon which they were based superfluous.  Most everyone has seen some version or another of such classic novels as Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield, but very few crack the original texts. 

When Walt Disney released Bambi in 1942, it seemed to erase all memory of its wonderful source-material, the novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods, written by Felix Salten (1869-1945) in 1923.  This is a great shame because in nearly every way imaginable, the novel is infinitely superior to the admittedly classic film.

The Disney film greatly softens the material, providing Bambi with amusing sidekicks and expanding the action with comic set-pieces.  Though there is an emotionally wrenching scene where Bambi’s mother is shot by hunters, it is not overall a somber or lachrymose film.  Indeed, it is one of the most limpid and lovely Disney films of the era.

This is very different from Salten’s novel (originally translated into English by Whittaker Chambers).  There, Bambi is born into a world of largely absent fathers, continual threat from hunters, fierce competition for food and resources, and the bitter reality of death. 

The lessons of Bambi are that life is often hard, and frequently entire populations become the sport of the casually cruel and powerful.  (As Salten himself would learn under the Nazis.)  Bambi particularly in his romantic maturation, often behaves badly himself, as if Salten is saying that we are born into a world where we are hardwired to be selfish and destructive.

While reading classic children’s novels, it is easy to think of their adult counterparts.  (For example, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is the Jane Austin novel of the field).  The prose of Bambi, with all its simple, declarative force and echoes of an incantation, made me feel as if I were reading an anthropomorphic book of the Old Testament. 

It is also a remarkable meditation on mortality and loss.  While the film focuses on the death of Bambi’s mother, the novel’s most eloquent rumination on death comes between two leaves, anxiously discussing their upcoming fall.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Can it be true,” said the first leaf, “can it really be true, that others come to take our places when we’re gone and after them still others, and more and more?”

“It is really true,” whispered the second leaf. “We can’t’ even begin to imagine it, it’s beyond our powers.”

“It makes me very sad,” added the first leaf.

They were silent a while.  Then the first leaf said quietly to herself.  “Why must we fall?”

The second leaf asked, “What happens to us when we have fallen?”

“We sink down…”

“What is under us?”

The first leaf answered, “I don’t know, some say one thing, some another, but nobody knows.”

The second leaf asked, “Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we’re down there?”

The first leaf answered, “Who knows?  Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it.”

Salten was a very prolific author, publishing about one book a year on average.  He is believed to be the anonymous author of the erotic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher (1906), which is about a Viennese prostitute.  Clearly a man of versatile literary achievements.

Like many Jewish artists, he fell into Hitler’s crosshairs; Der Fuhrer banned Salten’s books in 1936, and the author fled to Switzerland two years later.  He would die there.

Salter sold the film rights to Bambi to director Sidney Franklin for a mere $1,000; Franklin then sold the rights to Disney.  As is often the case with Disney and copyright, they would argue in the 1950s that the book was in the public domain and attempt to retain greater profits.  (Disney evocation of copyright always struck your correspondent as risible, considering they have made millions of dollars adapting public domain fairy tales.  Perhaps the scariest sequence of any Disney film happens in business meetings away from the camera.)

Adults who consider a “children’s novel” with trepidation should have no fear.  No less than John Galsworthy wrote that: Bambi is a delicious book.  Delicious not only for children but for those who are no longer so fortunate.  For delicacy of perception and essential truth I hardly know any story of animals that can stand beside this life study of a forest deer. 

We cannot argue.

Tomorrow -- the return of People’s Symphony Concerts!

Born on a Mountaintop by Bob Thompson

My more indulgent Jade Sphinx readers will forgive me if we head West once again as we close out the week.  (And to the wag who sent a comment saying that we should perhaps change the name of this blog to The Jade Cactus by Cherokee Bob, please know that we will take it under advisement.)

No figure – including that glorious tall-tale-spinner Buffalo Bill Cody – is more riddled with confusion, controversy and misinformation than that hero of the Alamo, David (Davy) Crockett (1876-1836).  Despite a strong predilection for all facets our Western Myth, I must confess that Crockett and other early frontiersmen have never really been of particular interest to me.  I am too young to have been consumed by the great Crockett fad started by Walt Disney in 1955, when America’s youth actually wore coonskin caps and went about singing The Ballad of Davy Crockett.  (“Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee/Greenest state in the land of the free/Raised in the woods so knew every tree/Kilt him a bear when we was only three/DAVY, DAVY Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier!” and so on for some 20 verses.)  This fad was as pervasive and as powerful as the furor that surrounded Elvis Presley and the Beatles – if less pernicious than either – and those who were true believers seem never to have lost the faith.  Believe it or not, I once worked for the head of a global public relations firm who was still so besotted by the Crockett craze of his boyhood that he still wore a coonskin cap.  Now that is devotion.

However, Davy Crockett has now come magically alive to me in Bob Thompson’s delightful Born on a Mountaintop: On The Road With Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier, and I finally see why the Crockett myth is so compelling.

For those looking for a straightforward biography, Thompson’s book will come as a disappointment.  Instead, he goes after something much more interesting and personal.  Much in the manner of Footsteps biographer Richard Holmes, Thompson writes a book literally pursuing his subject.  He traces the historical Davy by following him through Tennessee, westward, and then to Washington, where he served two terms in Congress.  We go with Davy on a book tour through Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, and then retrace those fateful steps to Texas and the Alamo.

Though chasing ghosts, Thompson is extremely aware of the difficulties inherent in this method.  He writes:  “The past is a foreign country,” as the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, but I think that Hartley understated the problem.  The past is a foreign country that’s impossible to visit.  You can’t just skip across the border, hire yourself a translator, and ask old John Crockett where he was on the afternoon of October 7, 1780 --- let alone get up close and persona with his celebrity son.

The historical Crockett he finds is a man of contradictions.  Born dirt poor, he received little education.  He fought the Creeks and took part in several important skirmishes in the Indian war.  After several unsuccessful attempts are raising his standard of living, he married (after his first wife died) a woman of modest means, but still of relative means.  He became a local politician and ended up going to Congress – first as a supporter of Andrew Jackson, and then as his bitter enemy.

The paradoxes are many.  Here was an Indian fighter who went to Congress and bitterly fought Jackson on an illegal Indian land grab.  He was really “the poor man’s friend,” but he hobnobbed (or tried to) with Eastern Brahmans.  He concocted the most outrageous tall tales about himself, but took umbrage (mostly) when others did so.  Losing his seat in Congress – thanks mostly to Jackson (a man who makes George W. Bush look like Mother Theresa) – he heads West again and becomes embroiled in the battle for Texas liberty.

How and why?  Well, Davy’s time in Texas is just little more than the last three months of his life, but Thompson devotes more than a hundred pages to it.  Like all men, Davy was complicated and self-contradictory.  He really did believe the fight in Texas was “the good fight,” but he also saw it as a way to revive his flaccid political career, and maybe get some land out of the deal. 

Thompson starts the book by explaining that his two young daughters became interested in Crockett after hearing Burl Ives sing the Ballad, and how he spent years becoming fascinated himself.  He also spends a great many pages on the Crockett craze of the 1950s, and examines where fact and fiction overlap.  (Not very often is the verdict.) 

Thompson was a longtime features writer for The Washington Post, and his Born on a Mountaintop is an eccentric, elliptical, solipsistic and often discursive book.  However, it is also a fascinating read and an interesting meditation on Americana, past and present.  It comes highly recommended.

Tomorrow we return with another legend: The Lone Ranger! 

The Art of Rise of the Guardians

Many movie-goers leave an animated film amused or moved or (all-too-frequently) indifferent, but few spare a thought for the incredible amount of work involved in creating it.

Such is not likely to happen with the current animated film Rise of the Guardians, which seems to be the one film to emerge from 2012 that may be a holiday classic for years to come.  One of the most beautifully designed animated films in recent memory, Rise brings to life several of childhood’s most cherished figures, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Sandman and Jack Frost.  (Not to mention Pitch, the Boogey Man!)  Such reinvention does not happen without careful artistic consideration or much thinking and re-thinking.

Fortunately for those who cannot get enough holiday spirit (or insight into that remarkable alchemy that is animated films), a new, deluxe coffee table book is there to tell you all you need to know and more.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians details how these iconic figures were reimagined for the film, along with how the many set pieces – from the North Pole to the Tooth Fairy’s palace – were designed.  The book is written by animation historian Ramin Zahed (also editor-in-chief of Animation Magazine), who provides not only an instructive look at the creative process, but also at how large-scale animated films are conceived, produced, nudged-along, and, finally, let out into the world with the best intentions.

This film is, of course, based on the on-going series of books The Guardians of Childhood by William Joyce.  Regular Jade Sphinx readers are well-aware of our devotion for this illustrator, writer, animator, and filmmaker, who is on his way to becoming something of a 21^st Century Walt Disney.  Joyce provides the preface to the book (Alec Baldwin, the voice of Santa, penned the foreword), where he writes about the Guardians: they have vast, extraordinary domains, they are more than just benign gift-givers, they are great and magnificent heroes who would lay down their lives for innocence and the well-being of children everywhere … It will, I think, make kids believe, and for everyone else, it will remind them of how beautiful and powerful belief can be.

The book then shows everything -- from rough pencil sketches to watercolors to intricate storyboards and special effects shots – a creative team at a world class studio can do to harness that belief.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is a lavishly illustrated book, but the art is put into perspective by a text showing the creative process.  For instance, we learn that Pitch’s lair is not only influenced by such film noir classics as Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai, but also by Venice, Italy.  As Zahed writes, One couldn’t really pick a more appropriate inspiration for Pitch’s home than the melancholy, sinking city of Venice.  The decrepit walls of Pitch’s palace are sliding into the water, and the interiors are covered with mud.  Set in one of the most haunting and beautiful cities in the world, this gloomy Renaissance-style lair is a reminder of the dark turn the villain’s life took hundreds of years ago.

Though the heroes in Rise of the Guardians all have equal time, of course the star turn is that of Santa Claus, perhaps the most famous and beloved Guardian of them all.  The Art of Rise of the Guardians is strongly recommended for believers in Santa Claus (and you know who you are), animation buffs or simply people interested in how intricately-designed, large-scale movies are made.