2023-10-16 07:31:26
Walt Disney He never stood out as an animation specialist, but he was a fabulous storyteller. He demonstrated it when he decided to stop delivering newspapers to set up a company with his brother Roy that began making advertisements in the form of small animated films. He also knew how to soak up European culture and surround himself with the best artists of the moment to launch a series of feature films that would build his reputation and, over time, became his famous film studio into one of the most important entertainment empires in the world.
Now, like the vast majority of greats, Walt is surrounded by rumors, myths and half-truths. “Walt Disney has been involved in myths that diverge greatly,” the historian once noted. Steven Watts. “On the one hand, his disciples venerate Saint Walt as their beloved protector of the innocent imagination, as a defender of fantasy and moral education. On the other hand, his detractors bitterly denounce Walt as “artistic, imperialist fraud, cynical manipulator of commercial formulas and artificially sweetened sentimentality.”.
Walt Disney, lights and shadows around his figure.
DM
To begin with, having a high level of responsibility and perfectionism earned him the label of authoritarian leader. In that sense, animator Ward Kimball said that Walt’s employees respected and feared him at the same time.: “He ran the studio with a kind of benevolent and paternal dictatorship. He was the total boss. He could be harsh or self-centered, but we all recognized him as a genius whose tough behavior seemed to stimulate us and bring out the best in all of us. Even though he was willing to tease and intimidate us all the time, we knew that Walt had revolutionized animated cartooning, and deep inside, we were proud to be a part of that process.
When the factory began to operate, says the writer Jorge Fonte, a specialist in the Disney universe, was only made up of a few employees, and Walt served as supervisor, father and colleague. “He was one more among them,” he assures this newspaper. “He was the one who made the decisions, yes, but meetings were constantly held in which the animators contributed their own ideas. When he wanted to add sound to the first Mickey Mouse short, he met with several of his employees to record it together.
In the early years, many of his animators earned more money than he did, and when the studio became a public limited company and went public, Disney distributed shares among all its employees.”
According to the canary, co-author with Olga Mataix of the book ‘Walt Disney. The animated universe of feature films’, when the magnate realized that it would be good for his animators attend art classes, he himself enrolled them in the Chouinard Institute of Art in Los Angeles, paying their scholarships and taking them there in his own car: “In the first years, a good part of his animators earned more money than him, and when the studio was transformed In a public limited company and became publicly traded, Disney distributed shares among all its employees. That is not precisely the behavior of a ‘dictator chief’, I believe.”
It is true that the man who brought happiness throughout the world also sometimes had malevolent consequences. It happened, for example, when several employees disenchanted with their working conditions decided to join a union, something prohibited by the company, and supported the famous Disney strike of 1941, an episode that the company’s boss experienced as a personal attack. The affair discredited his work and contributed to him becoming a staunch anti-communist. Taking advantage of the fact that since 1940 he had been secretly collaborating as an FBI informant, denounced some of his former employees to the Committee on Un-American Activities during the famous Witch Hunt promoted by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Beyond his anti-communist psychosis, Walt sought to keep his amusement parks and animated characters free of political overtones.”
But beyond his anti-communist psychosis, Walt tried to keep his amusement parks and animated characters free of political connotations. “For most of his adult life, Walt had been neither conservative, nor Republican, nor anything,” said his biographer.Neal Gabler. The American had voted for President Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and came to sympathize with Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940, but he also declined the request to support the latter’s campaign. “I discovered a long time ago that I knew nothing at all about the game of politics, and ever since I have preferred to remain silent about the whole matter rather than see my name attached to any statement that was not my own,” wrote Walt, who He left for the other neighborhood in December 1966, just a few weeks after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Shortly after that, the urban legend that the businessman had been frozen before his death to resurrect him in the future (although the truth is that his family opted for cremation).
Legend also says that Mickey Mouse’s father was racist. And it is a proven fact that the racial stereotypes reflected in some of her films served to intensify the criticism. There are the black crows of ‘Dumbo’ (1941), or the redskins characters of Peter Pan. Not to mention ‘song of the south (1946), where black slavery was glorified. “Walt Disney has been accused of everything, most of the time without the slightest evidence,” says Fonte. “They accused him of being racist because there were no African-Americans working in his studio. But that was not because he didn’t want to but, in fact, because there were no African-American animators in Hollywood… in any animation studio! The first of them was Floyd Norman, that came to the Disney studio in the mid-1950s.
In some places, Walt is also portrayed as a somewhat misogynist. Kimball once explained that his boss did not trust “neither women nor cats” and, as proof of this, he mentioned the letter he wrote to a young artist who wanted to be part of the cast of animators at his studio. she, the tycoon explained that women did not do “any type of creative work” in their company, since that task corresponded “entirely to young men.” While it is true that Disney employees worked mainly in the ink and paint departmentmade up almost entirely of young people under 25 years of age, it is also true that several girls were part of the script departmentdrawing concept art or creating graphic scripts.
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One of them was Bianca Majoliewho had gone to high school with Walt and joined the company in 1934, just as the studio was preparing to create its first feature film, ‘Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs’, which cost half a million dollars but, to the surprise of many, raised eight million. Majolie worked in the story development department, which was then full of men who (according to her own testimony) did not hide their disdain for the arrival of what was their first female partner, someone whom they treated with jokes and boos, “looking for any weakness they might find.” She also had a prominent role in the factory Mary Blaira brilliant artist whom Walt hired personally in 1940. Among other things, Blair was artistic director of films such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’, and played a key role in the design of the iconic Disneyland attraction It’s a Small World, which opened in 1966.
Walt Disney at the opening of Disneyland in 1955.
REUTERS
What does escape the realm of rumor mill is that Walt’s death did not mean that his company disappeared. Those who remained in charge knew how to adapt to what was coming so that Disney not only maintained its power in Hollywood, but increased it, to the point of reaching its centenary without any other agent in the industry being able to compete for its cultural hegemony. “Disney’s ideology was ‘whatever suits the market’, and this is something that Walt always saw clearly,” the journalist responds. Alberto Coronaauthor of ‘The Other Disney’, when asked what the magnate would think today about the evolution of his company and its timid steps on the path to visibility. “I think he would not have been too irritated by the fact that today there is a commitment to a certain diversity or a certain progressive spirit. That’s supposedly what the market is asking for. However, If there is one thing about market ideology, it is that it will always be false.”.
A good example of this is the research by the organization Data for Progress, which in 2022 revealed that Disneywhose directors criticized the enactment in Florida of the law that prohibits teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity, also was on the list of companies that financed politicians opposed to LGTBI rights. “This issue caused them a very serious credibility crisis,” adds Corona. “In fact, that’s why Bob Chapek lost his job.” [como primer ejecutivo de Disney]. In reality, if Disney is still making money today, which it still is, Walt would have been happy by now.”
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