Case Study: Walt Disney
The name Walt Disney stands alongside that of Charlie Chaplin in terms of international recognition. Many of his creations: such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto have become icons of Americana , as much as Coca Cola, McDonalds or Marlborough cigarettes.
Walt Disney began his career by setting up a studio with Ub Iwerks (who was to become his long-time collaborator) in Kansas City in the early 1920s. Using a second-hand camera they made one and two minute advertising films shown on local movie theatre programmes, a series of animated sketches called ‘Laugh-O-Grams’, and animated fairy tales such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Goldilocks’. After being cheated by a New York distributor, Walter left for Los Angeles with very little money to join his brother Roy where they set up the Walt Disney Company in 1923. Ub Iwerks later joined the company to assist Walter and his wife (also a trained animator) with drawing, while Walter’s brother Roy acted as business manager. They struggled financially for several years with characters such as Oswald the Rabbit, released with Universal pictures by an independent distributor.
Just before the arrival of sound in 1927 Disney experimented with a new character, Mortimer Mouse. Earlier filmmakers had found that animals were easier to animate than people. Mortimer, later shortened to Mickey Mouse, was drawn with a series of circles and proved ideal for animation. Seeing the huge success of ‘The Jazz Singer’ Disney discarded two silent shorts starring Mickey and produced ‘Steamboat Willie’, the first animated talkie that made a star of Mickey Mouse, with a helium pitched voice-over provided by his creator. Having been refused additional money to fund his sound venture Disney had broken relations with the distributor and launched out on his own. In the next three years Disney made ninety pictures and his cartoon ‘Flowers and Trees’ (1932) was the first film in full Technicolor. This was one of Disney’s ‘Silly Symphonies’ which included ‘The Skeleton Dance’ in which a skeleton climbed out of the earth and danced bizarrely around a graveyard to the music of Saint Saëns’s Danse Macabre. The ‘Silly Symphonies’ were more experimental in form than conventional gag-based cartoons and explored ‘lyrical and whimsical themes in folklore and nature’ (Moritz 1996).
Disney was at this time in competition with the Fleischer cartoons which included Betty Boop (and after Hays destroyed her sex appeal) the relentlessly violent Popeye. In fact, while the early Mickey Mouse punched and kicked his way through his cartoons, by the end of the thirties he was a quieter, less cruel character who left much of the physical mayhem to Goofy and the ill-tempered Donald Duck in such cartoons as ‘Clock Cleaners’ (1937). Walter’s brother, Roy, taking note of the merchandising campaign of Otto Mesmer’s ‘Felix the Cat’ franchised tie-in sales with the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck including watches, dolls and shirts beginning what would become the most lucrative side of the Disney Company’s operations.
In 1937 Disney issued a full length animated feature film ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’. Disney had hired more than three hundred animators to complete the work over three years, and while not the first feature-length cartoon, it created a sensation becoming one of the most popular films in history. ‘Snow White’ was the culmination of a decade’s work in mastering the cartoon form. For some years animators had been developing technical advances such as the Rotoscope, which allowed animators to trace actual filmed movements of people and animals. ‘Cell animation’ allowed redrawing of only those parts that moved on transparent ‘cells’. Disney also employed Multi-plane camera work using different layers of glass to create the impression of depth and allowing the illusions of a three dimensional zoom. The bright colours of Disney’s shorts were regarded as unsuitable for an extended running time, so a more muted tonal range was used in ‘Snow White’.
‘Snow White’ was hailed by critics as a technical masterpiece. Parts of the story, such as Snow White’s flight into the forest employed expressionist devices and innovative use of the camera. In fact, the darker, more violent details of the original Grimm story about the princess who arouses the jealousy of her wicked stepmother were toned down by diminishing the role of the evil queen and emphasising Snow White’s life with the dwarfs. Despite this, many children were terrified by the scenes showing the queen, particularly her transformation into a crooked, cackling ‘hag’.
The few flaws of ‘Snow White’ were felt to lie in the animation of the human characters and a tendency to sentimentalise the dwarfs. Disney’s next feature ‘Pinocchio’ (1939) was an advance on ‘Snow White’, although darker in tone it was thought better suited to the medium. The film follows the adventures of a wooden puppet who can walk and talk and needs no strings, but who keeps running into trouble despite the efforts of Jiminy Cricket to keep him on the straight and narrow path. Jiminy marks the first introduction into a Disney film of a little ‘conscience’ figure who reappears as Thumper the rabbit in ‘Bambi’ (1943), Timothy the mouse in ‘Dumbo’ (1941) and Tinker Bell the fairy in ‘Peter Pan’ (1953) (Finler 1977).
The most ‘experimental’ of Disney’s animated feature films was ‘Fantasia’ (1940). ‘Fantasia’ was made up of eight musical episodes conducted by Leopold Stokowski and traditional narrative continuity was undermined in a variety of ways. ‘Fantasia’ lacks an obvious storyline or central character although ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ (Dukas) stars Mickey Mouse. ‘Night on the Bald Mountain ’ (Mussorgsky), by contrast is notable for a semi-abstract, vivid style and almost surrealistic depiction of demons, witches and evil spirits in mountainous hellscapes. Perhaps for these reasons ‘Fantasia’ was seen as a more ‘adult’ film and, in fact, many students in the 1960s and 70s regarded it as the ultimate ‘head’ movie.
For the most part, however, Disney promoted ‘orthodox’ animation containing, for the most part, conservative values. Snow White, faced with the prospect of living with seven men offers a typical female role:
Snow White: ‘If you let me stay, I’ll keep house for you. I’ll wash and sew and sweep and cook..’
All the dwarfs: ‘Cook !’
Doc: ‘Can you make dapple lumplings, er, lumple dapplings..’
All the dwarfs: ‘Apple dumplings !’
Doc: ‘Er, yes. Apple dumpkins.’
Snow White: ‘Yes and plum pudding and gooseberry pie..’
All the dwarfs: ‘Gooseberry pie ! Hooray ! She stays !’
As Gianetti remarks with relation to the norms and values found in Disney’s work:
‘The French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss noted that myths have no author, no origin, no core axis - they allow ‘free play’ in a variety of artistic forms. Disney’s work draws heavily from fairy tales, myths and folklore, which are profuse in archetypal elements.’ (Giannetti)
This tradition continued after Disney’s death in 1967. ‘The Jungle Book’ was completed and released after his death and is typical in the way in presents certain ‘traditional’ values as ‘natural’. Bagheera tries to persuade Mowgli that he must return to the ‘man village’ where he belongs pointing out that, ‘Birds of a feather stick together’. Mowgli is not convinced until, in the final scene, when he sees a girl his own age fetching water. She captivates him with her beauty and her ‘timeless’ song:
‘Father’s hunting in the forest, mother’s cooking in the home,
I must go to fetch the water, ‘till the day that I am grown.
‘Till I’m grown, ‘till I’m grown,
I must go to fetch the water, ‘till the day that I am grown.
Then I will have a handsome husband, and a daughter of my own,
And I will send her to fetch the water, I’ll be cooking in the home.’
Unionisation and strikes hit the Disney studios in 1941. Moritz (1996) explains that the protests against long hours, low salaries, poor working conditions, and the lack of health or pension benefits were similar to strikes in other studios at the time. The ‘golden age’ of animation had been largely built on exploitation of animation artists and craftsmen. In the HUAC trials some years later Disney testified that ‘Communists’ had infiltrated his studios and to this day the Disney organisation has a reputation for using a non-unionised workforce. Disney himself lost interest in animation in the 1940s and turned instead towards wildlife documentaries and television. While other studios either ignored TV or fought it as a threat to the industry, Disney was using the medium to promote his films serving as the host of a weekly show ‘Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour’
After Walt Disney’s death in 1966, the company went into something of a decline. But with new management in the eighties, the revitalising of Walt Disney Studios, the creation of Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures, whose films are targeted at adults, and aggressive merchandising of the Disney characters everywhere, the Disney organisation is the second largest media conglomerate in the world, just trailing the Time Warner Company. It includes Miramax Film Corporation, Touchstone Pictures and the distributing arm Buena Vista Pictures. Touchstone, set up in 1984 to produce films outside the usual Disney ‘type’, proved successful with features like ‘Splash’ (1984), ‘Three Men and a Baby’ (a remake of a superior French film), and ‘Pretty Woman’ (1990), the tale of a happy hooker (Julia Roberts) and her rich, handsome ‘John’ (Richard Gere). To quote Gianetti (1996)
‘Virtually all of their pictures might be entitled ‘As You Like It’. Disney executives were in the forefront of developing what has been called a ‘high concept’ product - that is, a picture that can be marketed in twenty-five words or less. The usual ingredients ? A ‘cute’ story premise with a sentimental angle, likeable and non-threatening actors, lots of action, and slick packaging. Major stars and arty directors are avoided in favour of employees who will do what they are told. The product is tightly controlled and developed in-house, with no expensive outside talent, thereby maximising the profits.’
The Disney Company returned to feature-length animated cartoons with ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1989) and the box-office smash ‘The Lion King’ (1994). In 1995 the company also released the highly innovative ‘Toy Story’ which was the first full-length computer animated cartoon, pointing the way forward for industrial animation. In addition to film production and distribution, Disney owns Buena Vista Television, the Disney Channel and ABC Inc. which includes the ABC network (the largest in the States), several other TV stations, and shares in cable companies including ESPN. It also has publishing interests, theme parks including Disney Land, Disney World including EPCOT (The Environmental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), Disneyland Paris, Disney Land Tokyo and has recently launched a its own Internet browser service.