Cinema: Father Goose

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Along a mud track in the Belgian Congo, a district officer peacefully cycled on his rounds. All at once he heard shrieks of terror, and a horde of natives plunged past him, screaming a word he had never heard before. “Mikimus!” they cried in horror, “Mikimus!” Drawing his revolver, the officer went forward on foot to investigate. At the entrance to the village he staggered back, as out of the depths of the equatorial forest, 2,000 miles from civilization, came shambling toward him the nightmare figure of a shaggy, gigantic Mickey Mouse.

It was only the local witch doctor, up to his innocent tricks. His usual voo had lost its do, and in the emergency, he had invoked, by making a few passes with needle and thread, the familiar spirit of that infinitely greater magician who has cast his spell upon the entire world—Walt Disney. Indeed, not since the Age of Fable, not since Mage Merlin and Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire has such power of pixilation been granted as this son of North Chicago carries in his thumb. From the magic hand of Disney has come hippety-hoppeting, tippety-squeaketing, quackety-racketing the most cheerful plague of little animals that has ever been visited on humankind.

New Mythology. By the hundreds they have swarmed across a hundred thousand movie screens from Aliquippa to Zagazig —mice that talk and grubs that chainsmoke, squirrels wearing overalls, bashful bunnies, sexy goldfish, tongue-tied ducks and hounds on ice skates, dachshunds bow-tied, pigs at pianos, chickens doing Traviata—even worms that do the cootch.

In the last few years there has been added to all this hilariously unnatural history a beautiful and often tender and serious attempt, in a series of camera essays on plant and animal life, to see the natural world as it really and painfully is. Aesop on the assembly line, mythology in mass production—whatever it may be called, Disneyism has swept the world.

In the last 25 years an estimated one billion people—more than a third of the world’s population—have seen at least one of Disney’s 657 films, most of which are dubbed in 14 languages. And one taste of a Disney picture makes millions of moviegoers cry for more. Disney takes pleasure—and enormous profit, of course —in gratifying this hunger. Thirty million 10¢ copies of Walt Disney Comic Books are bought in 26 countries every month, and 100 million copies of more expensive editions (from 25¢ to $2.95) have been bought since 1935. Songs from Disney pictures sell $250,000 worth of records and sheet music annually. Since 1933 more than $750 million worth of merchandise featuring the Disney characters—740 companies currently make 2,928 items, from Mickey Mouse weathervanes to Pluto paper slotties to Donald Duck toidy seats—has crossed the counters of the world.

New Directions. Measured by his social impact, Walt Disney is one of the most influential men alive. He has pushed the bedtime stories of yesteryear, the myths that all former races of men teethed on, off the nursery shelf, or amalgamated them into a kind of mechanized folklore. It’s Walt Disney’s Snow White now, and Walt Disney’s Cinderella. The 20th century has brought forth a new Mother Goose, or, rather, a Father Goose. The hand that rocks the cradle is Walt Disney’s—and who can say what effect it is having on the world?

Last week, moreover, there were four major pieces of evidence that Walt Disney is dramatically enlarging his sphere of influence. Items:

¶ With a bang that blew Wednesday night to kingdom come for the two major networks, Disney burst into television. Nine weeks ago Disney’s first program, an hour-long (Wed. 7:30-8:30, ABC) flight on electronic wings over the panorama of Disneyland’s coming attractions, won a phenomenal Nielsen rating of 41, was watched by some 30.8 million people, and, as ABC’s President Bob Kintner put it, “cut Godfrey, the best in the business, down to size.” In the next two months Disney was never out of the “first ten.” ABC believes that “Disney has the biggest family audience in show business today.”

¶ In 60 big movie houses all over the U.S. this week, Disney is offering a major effort in “live action,” a $4,200,000 production of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, starring Kirk Douglas as the harpooner and James Mason as the sinister Captain Nemo. The picture has its faults, but they are not the kind that will make Disney any box office trouble.

¶ Disney’s first full-length nature films, The Living Desert (which cost $300,000) and The Vanishing Prairie ($400,000), are bulling toward world grosses of $5,000,000 and $4,000,000 respectively. And all over the world, holiday revivals of old Disney favorites are flourishing. In Rio de Janeiro six movie houses are running a seven-day Festival do Disney, and the main department stores have based their Christmas decorations on Disney characters. Said one merchant: “Disney will soon be to us what Santa Claus is to the U.S.”

¶ Work was rushing ahead last week on Disney’s particular hobbyhorse (“The world’s biggest toy,” one of his friends called it, “for the world’s biggest boy”): an $11 million “permanent World’s Fair” set on 160 acres in Anaheim, just 30 minutes from the center of Los Angeles. “Disneyland” opening next July, will be able to handle 10,000 cars and 40,000 people a day. The park will be divided into four areas: 1) Fantasyland—a guided tour through the Disney imagination, during which the visitor takes a ride in an airborne pirate galleon, pops through the rabbit hole into Alice’s Wonderland, hops on a mining cart for a trip to the diamond mines of the Seven Dwarfs; 2) Adventureland—an outdoor museum of natural wonders, designed to complement the True-Life Adventure Films, which will offer a Tahitian village populated by real live Tahitians (peddling papaya juice), and a trip down a tropical river past nattering monkeys, gnashing crocs and yawping plastic hippos; 3) Frontierland —”a glimpse into America’s historical past” that will give its young customers all the sensations of starring in a horse opera; and 4) Tomorrowland—a showplace for science, where audiences can peer into a simulated atom furnace or jump aboard a rocket ship and fly to the moon.

“Why, every kid in the country,” gasped one East Coast parent, “will be hounding his father for a trip to California.”

Cash v. Quality. “Disney hasn’t expanded,” said a moviemaker last week, “he has exploded.” And as the fiscal dust settles, it is clear that in business terms as well as in public estimation Disney has become a major power in the entertainment world. The Disney lot today is the busiest in Hollywood, and one of the most shrewdly managed. Its production is cautiously diversified. “Eighty percent of it, right now, is television,” says Disney, “but we’ll soon be back in balance.” Two major cartoon features—a story about dogs called Lady and the Tramp, which is scheduled for July release, and a version of Sleeping Beauty —are on the drawing boards, as well as six short cartoons.

But Disney knows from expensive experience that the cartoons, which cost about $500 a foot to produce (twice as much as a live-action feature), take a long time to pay for themselves. He will use them as loss leaders for the Disney merchandise (which in 1954 has brought him some $2,000,000 in profits), for one annual, big-budget, live-action spectacle (Conrad Richter’s Light in the Forest will be next), and for a series of full-length True-Life Adventures. A new company, set up by Disney during 1954, will distribute these pictures at a 20% saving to the studio. These facts have been duly noted in Wall Street. In the last nine weeks, since Disneyland went on the air, Disney stock has gone up from 14 3/8 bid to 24 bid. “This year,” says Disney with satisfaction, “has been our best.”

The success, in short, is plain to see; but the secret of it, like the motive force in a Rube Goldberg invention, is hidden in the depths of an astonishing psychological contraption. For though he seems doomed to make millions, Disney is not a businessman; and though occasionally he is capable of fine folk art, he is not an “artist.” Furthermore, though he has probably tickled more risibilities than Charlie Chaplin, he does not really have much sense of humor. Walt Disney is a genuine hand-hewn American original with the social adze-marks sticking out all over; he is a garage-type inventor with a wild guess in his eye and a hard pinch on his penny, a grassroots genius in the native tradition of Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford.

Like most self-educated men, Disney pulled himself up from nowhere by grabbing the tail of a runaway idea and hanging on for dear life. Even now, in middle life (he is 54) he seems to most acquaintances a “cheerful monomaniac.” He works at least 14 hours a day, never takes a vacation (“I get enough vacation from having a change of troubles”)—though he does have a hobby, a miniature train named Lilly Belle (after his wife), and a half-mile of track to run it on. Lacking a formal education—he quit school in the ninth grade—Walt has few formal habits of thought. He cannot bear to read a book (“I’d rather have people tell me things”).* Yet his intellectual weakness only throws him back the more strongly on his principal strength: a deep, intuitive identification with the common impulses of common people. A friend explains that he is really “a sort of visionary handyman, who has built a whole industry out of daydreams. He has that rarest of qualities, the courage of his doodles.”

Simpers & Innocence. Like many who came up the hard way, Walt is a hard man to work for. “Walt puts up this mild front,” says his brother Roy, “but underneath it there’s drive, drive, drive.” He runs a one-man studio. “When you work here,” an employee punned, “you’re all Walt in.” The studio atmosphere, says a former executive, is one of “compulsory democracy.” The lowliest ink-girl calls Walt by his first name. “If we didn’t,” says one employee, “we’d get fired.” Says another: “If you contradict him, you’re out. Even the top creators at the studio have to be careful. Nothing is really funny until it’s proclaimed funny.”

The Disney magic, says Salvador Dali, who once worked with Walt for three months, is “innocence in action. He has the innocence and unselfconsciousness of a child. He still looks at the world with uncontaminated wonder, and with all living things he has a terrific sympathy. It was the most natural thing in the world for him to imagine that mice and squirrels might have feelings just like his.”

Up to a point, Walt himself might agree. He admits that he likes children and animals better than grown-up people. “Some of the most fascinating people I have ever met,” he once said, “are animals.” He has, understandably, a special feeling for mice. No mousetraps are permitted in his home, and once, when he heard one of his animators call Mickey Mouse a four-letter word, he fired the man on the spot.

Through his feeling for animals, says a friend, Walt is related to nature and to the mother warmth of the earth. Out of this earthiness, Walt feels, there sprout whatever seeds of creativity he has. “I’m an earthy guy, all right,” he says. Some of Disney’s detractors disagree. The cartoon animals bear almost no relation to real animals. Nature in them is not idealized; she is at best played for pratfalls and at worst she is simpered over and over-sanitized. Indeed, the man whom all the world knows as Mother Nature’s right-hand man has hardly ever lived outside city limits.

A Mouse in School. Walter Elias Disney was born on Dec. 5, 1901 on the North Side of Chicago, the fourth of five children. His father was a small building contractor who argued Debs Socialism all week and on Sunday played fiddle in St. Paul’s Congregational Church. When Walt was about six, the family moved to a farm in Marceline, Mo. There, on the day when an old man down the road gave him a dollar for drawing a picture of a horse, Walt decided that he wanted to be “an artist.” A few years later, father Disney bought a newspaper route in Kansas City and the family moved there. Walt and brother Roy got up at 3:30 every morning to deliver papers. The two brothers, who are now partners in Walt Disney Productions, Inc., were very close from the first. In school Walt was chiefly noted for sleeping, for squiggling doodles in the margins of his books, and for the time he brought a mouse to class.

Walt was in his teens and back in Chicago, where his father had bought a jam factory, when he got the camera bug and bought a $70 movie camera on the installment plan. Girls, he recalls, were a nuisance. “I was normal,” he says, “but girls bored me. They still do. Their interests are just different.” Besides, Walt was busy. After school he worked as a gateman on the Wilson Avenue elevated line, got a Christmas job in the local post office. During summer vacations he worked as a candy butcher on the Katy Railroad.

Actor or Artist? When he was 16 the U.S. entered World War I, and he decided to go to France as an ambulance driver. He managed to get his mother to sign his father’s name on a parental permit, then he forged the date of his birth, and was off. Home again, he was no longer interested in the ninth grade. “I tried to decide,” he says, “was I going to be an actor or an artist?”

Walt heard of a job in a commercial art shop at the princely salary of $50 a month, and that decided it. Pretty soon he was getting $35 a week from an outfit that produced animated advertisements to run before the feature at local movie houses. In a few months Walt thought he knew enough to start a studio of his own in the family garage. At 19 he had hit the main drag of his career.

In short order Walt turned out four cartoons burlesquing contemporary politics, and sold them to a New York distributor. The distributor went broke before he paid off, and Walt soon did the same. But for six months after that, he tried to keep the business going. Some days he had nothing to do but sit and play with the mice that infested the studio. Walt kept a few in a cage in the office, and some of them became quite tame. One mouse known as Mortimer showed no desire at all to escape, so he was made a trusty, and lived on Walt’s desk.

Before long Walt ran out of both money and credit. One day he realized that he had missed at least three meals in a row. He borrowed a camera, photographed some babies, took the $40 he earned and headed for Hollywood. Brother Roy, who had just been released from a TB sanatorium in Arizona, met him there, and they set up shop in the $5-a-month corner of a Hollywood real-estate office. In the next four years the Disney studios produced 24 cartoons in a series called Alice in Cartoonland and 52 more about Oswald the Rabbit. At first, each cartoon took eight people one month to make, and sold for only $750, “with the result,” says Walt, “that there was many a week when Roy and I ate one square meal a day—between us.” In July 1925 Walt married a girl named Lillian Bounds, who worked in his office; they now have two grown daughters.

Mickey Is Born. After an argument with his financial backer in 1927, Walt was out of business. On a train trip, he thought and thought about a new cartoon character to market. Cats, dogs, cows, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, apes, elephants and even dinosaurs—they had all been used before. And then, as the train clacked along somewhere between Toluca, Ill. and La Junta, Colo., Walt suddenly remembered Mortimer.

“Mortimer Mouse!” he shouted.

“Not Mortimer,” said Mrs. Disney. “How about Mickey?”

When the train rolled into Los Angeles, the first sketch of the historic rodent was tucked safely in Walt’s pocket, and the roughs of his first cartoon, Plane Crazy, were drawn. Plane Crazy, however, was not the first to reach the public. Sound came roaring in just then, and silent pictures silently expired. Walt rushed to New York, recorded sound track for a new Mickey Mouse cartoon called Steamboat Willie, and released it in Manhattan. “It’s a wow!” cried one critic after another, and the public came piling in. Man was about to be conquered by a mouse (see box).

In the next few years Walt made a Mickey Mouse cartoon every month. His staff quickly grew from 20 to 50 to 150 (he now employs almost 1,000 people at his studio). Dozens of dazzling offers were dangled before him, but Walt declined to sell out; he knew he could not be happy except as his own boss. With a foresight remarkable in a man only 28 years old, Walt set about strengthening his organization for a long creative haul. He started the Silly Symphonies, even though there was every sign that they would not be very popular, because he felt that he and his staff, already weary of drudging at Mickey Mouse, needed “something to grow on.”

And grow they did. Hands grew more skillful and inventions multiplied.*So Pluto fell off a cliff—what next? His ears whirled around like propellers, his front legs spread like wings, and back he roared to safety. In Disney’s hands the laws of physics turned to taffy. Shadows walked away from bodies. Men got so angry they split in two. Trains ate cookies. Autos flirted. People stretched like rubber bands. But it became harder and harder to outwit the public. Disney gags got downright erudite. In one cartoon Donald Duck might walk over the edge of a cliff and fall down. In the next he would walk off the cliff and keep right on walking—on air. In the next he would keep walking, suddenly notice where he was—and then fall. In the next, he would run back to safety without falling, or fall and catch the edge of the cliff with an arm that was suddenly 30 feet long.

A Hit, a Flop. Three Little Pigs (1933) and The Country Cousin (1936), a technical masterpiece in the new Technicolor, proved that Disney was ready at last for the task he had set himself: to make a full-length cartoon feature. It had long been his heart’s desire, but by this time it was a business necessity; cartoon costs had risen so high that it was no longer possible to make a profit with shorts. So he borrowed $1,500,000 and made Snow White. Released in 1937, it was one of the biggest hits that Hollywood had produced since The Birth of a Nation. It grossed $9,000,000 on its first release (it has since earned $5,000,000 more), produced seven top tunes, won eight (one for each dwarf and one for the picture) of Disney’s 22 Academy Awards, sold more than $10 million worth of merchandise. It also made Dopey, the seventh dwarf, the darling of millions,* and Disney himself more than ever the darling of the intellectuals. Harvard and Yale awarded him degrees. People called him “the poet of the new American Humanism,” and drew Chaplinesque morals about Mickey as “the symbol of common humanity in its struggle against the forces of evil.”

To these siren songs, Walt lent half an ear. Encouraged by Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor, he made the biggest boner of his career: Fantasia. Its basic idea, to illustrate music with pictures, was depressing enough to anyone who loves either form of art. Its declared intention to bring “culture” to the “masses” turned out to be silly: it had nothing to do with culture, and the “masses” would have nothing to do with it. Fantasia has never earned back what it cost. Worse yet, though Walt learned a lesson from Fantasia, he learned the wrong one: mistaking for culture what Stokowski and Taylor had offered him, he decided that culture was not for him.

The Strike. The decision did not solve all Walt’s problems. The day Pinocchio was released, Germany marched into Poland. The foreign market—in which Disney expects to make about half his take—was cut at least in half. The same problem met Dumbo and Bambi. Meanwhile, Disney had his famous strike. Whatever the rights of the affair—Walt maintained that he was being persecuted by the Communists, the union leaders said he was running a sweatshop—Walt handled it badly and lost the decision gracelessly. The studio was closed down for two weeks. Except for the war, it would probably have closed down for good. For the next four years the U.S. paid Disney’s bills while he made educational and propaganda films. On the side, Disney’s artists designed insignia for the Armed Forces.

After the war, Walt definitely decided: “We’re through with caviar. From now on it’s mashed potatoes and gravy.” His first four postwar features—Make Mine Music, Song of the South, Fun and Fancy Free and Melody Time—looked like mashed potatoes all right, but they didn’t bring in much gravy. Disney’s next big picture, however, made plenty: Cinderella may eventually outgross Snow White. And though Alice in Wonderland was a flop, Peter Pan was another smash hit. which exchanged Barrie sentiment for Hollywood slapstick and almost made the crocodile the hero.

Yet the wolf was still haunting Disney’s door. Production costs on cartoons were rising so fast that they gobbled up the profit as it came in. Walt turned to another source of income. With funds blocked in Britain, he made four live-action features between 1950 and 1953: Treasure Island, Robin Hood, The Sword and the Rose, Rob Roy. They were all amazingly good in the same way. Each struck exactly the right note of wonder and make-believe. The mood of them all was lightsome, modest. Nobody was trying to make a great picture. The settings, in the British countryside, were lovely—wide swards and sleepy old castles and glens full of light. Best of all, Disney was careful to choose his principals—Richard Todd, Glynis Johns, Joan Rice, Bobby Driscoll—not for their box-office rating or sexual decibel, but rather as friends are chosen, for their good human faces and pleasant ways. As a result, each of the pictures was just what a children’s classic is supposed to be: a breath of healthy air blown in from the warm meadows of faraway and long ago.

It was a promising start, and the new 20,000 Leagues, for all its mechanical clank and ponderousness, is something of a continuation. If Disney goes on at this rate, he will soon have compiled a film library of live-action legends to match his collection of animated fairy stories, and the one should be quite as suitable for periodic redistribution as the other.

Pearls into Marbles. Most exciting of Disney’s new developments, however, are the nature films, for with them he has opened up a new world of intense experiences and possibilities. In them, as in few films of recent years, there is the sense that the camera can take an onlooker into the interior of a vital event—indeed, into the pulse of life-process itself. Thus far, Disney seems afraid to trust the strength of his material: he primps it with cute comment and dabs at it with flashy, cosmetical touches of music. But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot quite make Mother Nature look like what he thinks the public wants: a Hollywood glamour girl. “Disney has a perverse way,” sighs one observer, “of finding glorious pearls and then using them for marbles.”

The fact is, however, that he does find the pearls; and, all things considered, he plays a pretty good game of marbles. He plays it like a healthy boy—knuckles down and fire away!—and trust to luck for a hit or a miss. He has no mind or time for the niggling refinements of taste. There is too much to be seen and done, too many wonderful things in the world that might be made into movies; and away he rushes, with his intellectual pockets full of toads and baby bunnies and thousand-leggers, and plunges eagerly into every new thicket of ideas he comes across. Often enough he emerges, in radiant triumph, bearing the esthetic equivalent of a rusty beer can or an old suspender. They are treasures to Walt, and somehow his wonder and delight in the things he discovers make them treasures to millions who know how dearly come by are such things as wonder and delight. Besides, there is always the chance that, when he comes bursting out of the next bush, face all scratched and lumberjacket full of stickers, he may be clutching in his hand some truly precious thing: perhaps, who knows, as precious as—a mouse?

*Once, during the production of Fantasia, Walt sat through a screening of the centaur sequence set to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. When it was over he turned to one of his assistants and said earnestly: “Gee! This’ll make Beethoven.”

*”Those madmen over at Disney’s” became a Hollywood byword. One Disney animator, for instance, was found lying flat on his back on the sidewalk in a pouring rain. As a policeman dragged him off to the station house, the fellow protested that he had been “studying lightning.”

*In France, one observer tried to account for Dopey’s popularity by explaining that he resembled so many French Premiers.