The most remarkable aspect of the PBS prestige documentary, Walt Disney, is that the film is made as if Walt Disney and his studio never existed. There is none of Disney's anarchic and comical invention, no homage to the great man's invention of the music video, not even any trace of Disney's poor taste, his kitsch sensibility and the vulgar tear-drenched, if effective, sentiment suffusing his best films. This PBS biography exists in a cultural milieu in which the only landmark and reference point is Ken Burns' tediously pious and fraudulent civil war documentary. When I tuned-in the show, I hoped that it would be crisp with surreal animation, designed and constructed to evince in its bones and genetic structure Disney's all-encompassing influence on the history of cinema -- I hoped the talking heads would include people like Crumb and Matt Groening, the guy who first drew The Simpsons. Instead, the viewer gets the same somber pacing, the same platitudinous talking heads, exactly distributed according to gender and racial quotas, the same left-leaning cautiously liberal politics, the same "nuanced" and ostensibly "neutral and objective" approach to its subject matter -- most of the talking heads speak of Disney in terms of awe and admiration; when he is criticized, the talking heads sound like literary theorists reluctantly identifying character flaws in King Lear. I would pay to see a documentary about Disney made by a geeky, up and coming animator fan-boy or fan-girl -- a kid enamored of Disney employed in making raunchy cartoons for Adult Swim, the guy who animated Ren and Stimpy or Uncle Grandpa; similarly, I would pay to see a documentary by someone who hates Walt Disney, someone like David Thomson, who regards Disney as having betrayed all the children of the world with his toxic combination of right-wing certitudes and nauseating sentimentality -- but this big four-hour film has all the facts but none of the attitude necessary to create a successful documentary about Walt Disney. It's like the Ken Burns film on jazz, the least jazzy, least improvisatory, most prosaically declamatory film possible or Burns on baseball, a massive documentary that somehow forgets the baseball is primarily a game, that is, a form of play and entertainment.
Of course, I will watch the whole four-hour documentary because embedded in the hagiography and left-wing parables, the viewer sometimes finds gems. Disney's early films were exercises in anarchy, wild surrealist ventures in which every line was wiggling and hopping and bobbing with frantic energy -- you get to see some examples from Steamboat Willy and the Silly Symphonies. At one point, Disney effortlessly shifts into Mickey Mouse's high-pitched squeaky voice and the effect is unnerving. But the film is pretty much silent as to Disney's actual contributions to his movies -- did he play the voices? How much of the animation did he do? What was the role of the brilliant Ub Iwerks in his early work? Disney is photogenic -- he is the literal "pick of the litter" when shown among his siblings, by far the most handsome and energetic of the rather saturnine brood. And there is something indefinably smarmy about Disney; he looks like the world's best used car salesman. (And, apparently, his forte was, in fact, sales and marketing -- his fortune seems to have been based on licensing his cartoon characters for commercial use.) Disney is shown in about half of the shots in the picture and he looks sleazy: when I was a kid, I always expected that when you climbed onto Uncle Walt's warm and inviting lap, there would be a big erection waiting for you. Although the talking heads are silent about the creepier aspects of Disney's persona, the film does give you sense that the man was a hustler, an egotist, and astonishingly self-centered. (The only talking head with any real energy is a guy named Ron Suskind, a man with a strangely expressive and plastic face, who looks like a 'toon himself.) And like all Ken Burns' films, the movie is structured to make a liberal Democratic point -- Disney is portrayed as mistreating the rank-and-file at his studio, underpaying women in particular, a misdeed that led to a destructive strike in 1940. Disney's discomfiture at the strike, his look of vaguely baffled bemusement, as he drives through lines of picketers, many of them brandishing images of an angry Mickey Mouse, is shown as vaguely tragic -- after pride comes the fall. There's a fair amount of interesting information and the film clips from the Disney pictures are impressive -- they remind you of Disney's greatness and how his best work is inextricably entangled with the worst aspects of his sensibility. Like Pullman, and like the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Disney sought to create a work environment that was all-encompassing and home-like -- all in the name of brutal capitalist efficiency. We see the animation "ink" and "paint" girls playing ping pong, Disney's huge cafeteria, the assembly-line technology, and the lush, lavishly appointed suites where his best animators worked. In his efforts to inspire his workers, Disney comes across as a precursor to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And some of this stuff is so strange you can't make it up -- for instance, Disney bought a mansion for his aging Midwestern parents but its furnace leaked and carbon monoxide in the Hollywood villa killed his mother. The film's subject is interesting enough -- I just wish the movie was made with more gusto and pizzazz.
(The second two hours of this PBS documentary are better, perhaps, because these events invade the terrain of the viewer. I can recall watching Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on our black-and-white TV set every Sunday night, the whirling kaleidoscope patterns during the titles a mere pudding of greys and whites on our screen. In the last third of a man's life, the things that made him great begin to unravel, revealing the knotted strands of accident and idiosyncrasy from which human destiny are comprised. In this part of the film, Disney becomes increasingly tyrannical and, even, paranoid. He identifies Communists as his enemies, the source of bad reviews and labor unrest, and testifying to HUAC he names names. (Of course, PBS is so wedded to a particular liberal vision of the McCarthy era that the documentary never pauses to consider whether Walt's enemies might, indeed, have been Communists at one time and to what extent radical-left agitators did stir up trouble for his studio -- I know that when P-9 struck in Austin, the source of the labor dispute had nothing to do with outside Communist provocateurs. But I would hasten to add that such people appeared in droves at the picket lines once the trouble had begun.) Disney finds that he can't make feature-length animated cartoons according to his notions of excellence -- it's simply too expensive in the post-war economy -- and, so, he disengages from film production, spends several years driving three-foot high model trains around his estate, and, then, begins to build his theme park at Anaheim. There is a fantastic still photograph of a bemused-looking Salvador Dali squatting on a tiny train car as Disney on the locomotive wearing an engineer's cap pilots him around the flower beds. Disney pushes the clock to open Disneyland and the film has some amusing footage of blunders occurring during the live broadcast from the amusement park on its opening day -- it was 100 degrees and nothing worked very well. The show tips its coonskin cap to Disney's TV productions and concludes with Uncle Walt dying prosaically in the hospital across from his studio from lung cancer (he was a lifelong chain-smoker) while dreaming of Epcot, his radiant city at Orlando -- Disney began by animating six minutes strips of film; he ended configuring entire utopian cities, conjured out of miasmic swamps. The second half of the show feels rushed -- there's too much material, much of it somewhat familiar to viewers my age. In fact, the story of Walt Disney is a huge and epic one, and, probably, worthy of the full Ken Burns' treatment: at least another two hours. And Disney is, in fact, an immensely consequential figure -- for better or worse, as Wim Wenders said of the Americans in Germany, he has "colonized our subconscious." And there are lots of aspects of Disney's biography that the film slights: Disney movies always had tremendously engaging, tuneful soundtracks -- his animated features were constructed in some respects like Broadway musicals: who composed these songs and how did Disney work with professional song-writers and musicians? What about the propaganda films from the war era? What about the legion of short films with Donald Duck, and Goofy and others? What about Disney's contribution to robotics with respect to configuring "animatronic" animals and people for his theme parks? Disney's problematic relationship with the African-American community emblematized by his notorious Song of the South is mentioned but not discussed. And what about his use of Native Americans a bit like zoo-animals in Frontierland at Anaheim? Like Coca-Cola, the Disney movie is one of America's signature exports to the world and the subject, certainly, requires additional study.)
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