Art imitates life, and life imitates art, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which. Take the little town of Marceline, Missouri, a place so idyllic, so orderly, so utterly fine that it seemed impossible to improve on. Marceline declined once the automobile came and the crowds started to roll in, but it is forever enshrined in the memories of several generations of Americans, and of people from every corner of the world.Walt Disney in 1945
The person who put Marceline there, who remembered it as the best of all possible places, was Walt Disney—Walter Elias Disney, in full—who lived in the little town for only a few years as a child at the turn of the last century. It did not matter that his father failed in business there, so that the family had to leave it for the city in order to make a living. Disney took paradise and, characteristically, improved on it, turning his vision into Main Street, U.S.A., a perfect place in the perfect world of Disneyland.
Walt Disney has been gone for 42 years, having died on December 15, 1966. In the years since, historians and pop-culture students alike have debated Disney endlessly, some convinced that he was as dark a character as his witches and sorcerers.
Enter Neal Gabler, author of the indispensable An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, and other books of film and cultural history, who was granted unrestricted access to the vast Disney archive on the sole condition that he write a “serious” book. That he certainly did; his book Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination is serious, and definitive.
Disney took a long road from Marceline to cultural icon, which Gabler carefully traces through the pages of his very long but unfailingly readable book. Driven by a strange and unhappy family—always a motivation to succeed at something and then get far away—Disney founded an advertising cartooning firm, then a partnership with an oddly named fellow named Ub Iwerks (or, formally, Ubbe Iwwerks) to make animations. The new studio was soon recognized as one of the best in the business, but thanks to Disney’s free-spending ways, it was always on the edge of bankruptcy. It remained so when the studio moved to Hollywood.
Following one painful negotiation that almost cost him his company, Disney cobbled together ideas from many sources and came up with Mickey Mouse, whose immediate appeal was that he was both recognizable and easy to draw. “Mickey Mouse was the product of desperation and calculation,” Gabler writes, “the desperation born of Walt Disney’s need to re-create an animation sanctuary and the calculation of what the market would accept.”
The market accepted Mickey, and Disney’s studio was on its way, making a succession of brilliant animations that thrilled Depression- and World War II–era audiences: The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Pinocchio. The money rolled in, but, as Gabler notes, Disney “was not much of a businessman, and he cared nothing for money except as a means to an end.” He did keep tight, micro-managerial control over the studio otherwise, though, and the friendly, avuncular figure he portrayed for all those years on the long-running television series The Wonderful World of Disney was not at all the man his employees saw.
Source
Britannica Blog
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