3 1/2 stars: Good

From the back cover: When Walt Disney moved to Hollywood in 1923, the 21 year old cartoonist seemed an unlikely businessman-and yet in less than 2 decades, he'd transformed his small animation studio into the world's first multimedia entertainment empire. In The Disney Version, Richard Schickel explores Walt Disney's extraordinary entrepreneurial success, his fascinatingly complex character, and how -as his influence grew- the company he founded came not simply to reflect the values of mid century America but actually to shape the country's character.

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This book was recommended to me by my friend James, shortly before our post COVID Disneyland trip. He has read dozens of Disney books and he said this is his favorite. This gave me insight into the man as well as his creation and growth of the Disney corporation. The author himself admits he's hard on WED, but I didn't find it to be so much that I couldn't enjoy the book. At times it is a bit harsh, but often discussion of Disney is either idolatry or derision - for some reason its hard to find a middle ground? Perhaps that more than anything shows what we tend to think about him and the extraordinary company he created. Of course, people and life is more complex than binary opinions...

This book was very readable, and I learned quite a lot about Disney the man and the early days of the animation studios. Particularly that some of the offerings (notably, Sleeping Beauty) were not particularly well received at the time of release. One of Schikel's central theses is that Disney was trying to tame the "dirt" and "untamed wild" from his midwest upbringing, but I found this not proved in the slightest - just a convenient trope. What was much more proven, was that Disney brilliance was in many respects understanding what middle class middle America was interested in seeing for their entertainment and channeling those wishes into a media empire.

Some quotes I liked:

"The American midwest is a highly practical place. Its habit is to ask how much, how big, how far and sometimes how. It rarely asks why. The bluff and hearty manner it affects is not a conscious pose: it believes in its own friendliness and good spirits - and it is as surprised as anyone when clues to its hidden, darker side escape and intrude upon the carefully slow and easy surface it genuinely prefers for its habitat. It may or may not be afraid of the depths but it certainly dislikes them, finding them depressing to contempate and the work of explicating them of dubious practical value.

THe young Walt Disney might have been a rube, a cornball, a hick on anybody's scale of sophistication but he was something else as well. "History is made" by men who have the restlessness, impressionability, credulity capacity for make believe, ruthlessness, and self righteousness of children. It is made by men who their hearts on toys." [Eric Hoffer].

The determined informality of his manner was no affectation...it was this inbred sureness of his audience (which was merely himself multiplied) that led to his ultimate success and led people to misunderstand him.

It was estimated by 1934 he was taking in $660,000 a year in profit, most of which he was pouring back into his studio. Even so, it is clear that he had accomplished something of an economic miracle, for it must be remembered that the years of this stupendous growth in profitability were the years during which the rest of the country was wallowing in the deepest trough of the Depression.

[After an international trip] "I guess the cartoon is something everyone knows and likes" [WED}. That simple sentence speaks volumes. There was no character more American thatn Mickey Mouse, no environment more American than the small town locale he inhabitated with his gang. And yet the appeal of Disney cartoons is universal. [Reading this in 2021, after discussions of racial inclusion and seeing how the Disney company now has set more recent animation in various other locations, is interesting to consider].

WE may add to this the basic insight that the fantastic is always more acceptable to plain people - and sometimes to sophisticates - when it is rendered in the most realistic possible style. So, when offering time tested mythic material, Disney was careful to present it in everyday, down to earth artistic terms that offered no difficulties of understanding to the large audience - that in fact gentled them with the familiar instead of shocking them with the aesthetically daring. It was the way he personally preferred to arrive at the state in which disbelief is willingly suspended.

One must suspect that Disney found in Pinocchio elements of his autobiography. since he had himself been a child denied the normal prerogatives of boyhood. It is certainly possible that at least some portion of his drive for success was a compensation for his failure to find the father who had, in the psychological sense, been lost to him since childhood. This may also explain why he so relished the paternal role he was now beginning to play with such earnestness - and such ineptitude - with his employees.

[In the original Pincchio story, the cricket is crushed]. More important, the cricket was not squashed but developed. Appointed the puppet's conscience, he became Pinocchio's worldly wise mentor, ally and rescuer, serving him in rather the same manner that Roy Disney served his younger brother.

The advantage of the Disneyland site was that it would be no more than 27 minutes [HA!!!!] from the LA city hall once the freeway was finished. Its disadvantage was that the 160 acres it encompassed was owned by no less than 20 families.

Walt was the one most precisely in the American midstream - in taste and morality, attitudes and opinions, prides and prejudices. The revealing clue is his familiar (and utterly sincere) statement that he never made a picture he didn't want his family to see. His competitors made pictures they thought, or guessed, the public wanted to see. Disney operated through maximal identification with John Doe; the others seek to discover what John Doe was like in order to cater to him.

Disney said "I don't make films exclusively for children, I make them to suit myself....I've proved at least to myself and my stockholders, that we can make money, lots of money, by turning out wholesome entertainment. My belief is that there are more people in America who want to smile than those who want to be artistically depressed." He admitted that the works of Tennessee Williams, for example, might be great art, though they were not for him. ( )