Article: Gregory McNamee from Reuters
Image: AFP

The person who put it there, who remembered it as the best of all possible places, was Walter Elias Disney, who lived in Marceline 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. Disney took paradise and, characteristically, improved upon it, turning his vision into Main Street, USA, a perfect place in the perfect world of Disneyland.

Disney has been dead for 40 years. 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 has certainly done. He has much to say that might have made Disney uncomfortable, but he also exonerates him of long-standing charges, the most serious that he was an anti-Semite. Disney was not, Gabler argues, explaining how such charges came to be leveled.

Disney took a long road from Marceline resident 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, 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 always was 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 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 kept tight, micro-managerial control over the studio otherwise, though, and the friendly figure he portrayed for all those years on The Wonderful World of Disney was not at all the man his employees saw.

His perfectionism alone – Snow White was a years-long exercise in obsession – was guaranteed to cause friction, and when long hours combined with middling wages to send his artists out on strike, Disney transformed. Formerly apolitical, he became convinced that "the enemy was Communism . . . that had sneaked into Hollywood like a Trojan horse to promote values deleterious to democracy," and to destroy all that he had worked for.

Disney's allies in the new family values fight, which has never ended, included an odd assortment of far-right types. Some were anti-Semitic. Thus was Disney tarred by his own vigorous brush. And thus it is that the mere mention of Disney can rekindle decades-old controversies today.

That the famed artist and filmmaker was a genius, Gabler urges, there is no doubt. He made transformative movies that endure, that most of us carry somewhere in our memories, but did not always produce happy results in other aspects of life.