Walt Personality or: Deconstructing Disney

For animation, that strangely peripheral art which existed only within the confines of a comparatively new medium of cinema, the 1940's represented a decade of true expansion and self-discovery. In its infancy, animation had little more than short silent cartoons which were accompanied by lavish musical motifs banged out on their respective picturehouse pianos. Walt Disney, however, had turned this small-scale art into a viable industrial wing of cinematic entertainment and by 1940 he dominated the scene in Hollywood.

The success of Disney's first feature-length picture - Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) - and his prolific output of cartoons meant that other potential animators, lacking the resources and business savvy which was the benchmark of Walt Disney Enterprises, would only just survive the exorbitant costs of production and could still afford the specialized type of marketing that animated films required if they were to be widely distributed.

She gets by with a little help from her friends.

Nevertheless, in spite of these problems, animators sought new forms of expression through the growing demands of wartime propaganda. The post-war period saw the development of allied forms of animation, primarily puppetry, and the several types of abstract, mobile designs which were pioneered by Canadian Norman McLaren.

Confessions of a Clock Cleaner.

The early 1940's, albeit, were dominated by Disney. For him it was a period of continued achievement in the signature style he had made his own. Transcending from the simple black-and-white, semi-silhouette stylization that had characterized the early cartoons, as seen in Felix the Cat and Disney's own Steamboat Willie (1928) or Skeleton Dance (1929). Disney's artists had been encouraged towards a degree of pictorial naturalism which was often at odds with the fantasy of his subjects. While Goofy, Pluto, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse were all sublime creatures born of the comic imagination, Disney's more naturalistic humans - from Snow White onward, were conceived with a kind of childishly sentimental artistry. Their movements were given a spurious activity derived from the technique known as rotoscope, whereby the human figure was recorded in movement with a live-action camera and the resultant images were then traced in the form of graphics and used as models for the animation process.

The rotoscope in action.

Disney would ultimately abandon the production of shorts in favor of features. The sheer dramatic force of his early feature films was admirable - and so much, that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was ultimately restricted by the censorship authorities in Britain because it was felt some select scenes with the witch would be devastatingly frightening to children.

I thought you liked baguettes.

Pinocchio (1940) also had sequences that were reckoned to alarm the very young. Costing nearly a whopping $3 million, the film is a masterwork of animation, replete with stunning set-pieces, as the opening multi-plane camera shot of Geppetto's village by starlight, the underwater sequences and the climactic whale chase, all of which proved that Disney's work could no longer be adequately described by the word 'cartoon.' Pinocchio's pictorial richness, imaginative camera angles and quickly paced story-line were enhanced by such wonderful characterizations as Stromboli, the volcanic puppet-master, and the cunning of the Dickensian villain J. Worthington Foulfellow. The film also had an exceptional musical score, highlighted by the Oscar-wining song, 'When You Wish Upon a Star,' crooned by one Jiminy Cricket whose moralistic role as the official 'conscience of Pinocchio; facilitates the film in averting undue sentimentality. The song with its promise of dreams materializing, became the touchstone of Disney's overall screen philosophy.

Mouse Magic

The year 1940 also would see the premiere of Fantasia, a film made possible by the skills developed while working on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, but which came to a public quite unprepared for anything more than another fairy-tale. Fantasia grew out of Disney's quest for a starring vehicle for Mickey Mouse. Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice was selected as a musical pantomime for the infamous mouse, and in the year 1938, Disney would invite the Polish conductor Leopold Stokowski to record the music. This collaborative act developed into the notion of The Concert Feature as Fantasia was originally called, for which Disney's artists would animate an entire catalog of classical music. Noted musicologist Deems Taylor was enlisted as an advisor and remained to provide the film's linking narration. Perhaps the selection of compositions was too diverse, perhaps the differing approaches of the various sequence directors is too perceptible -whichever the reason, the film is a patchwork of the brilliant and the banal.