Walt Disney

Walt Disney by Neal Gabler

Category: Biography Grade: A

So, in the middle of reading this book, Liz posed the question to me - "Why do read biographies?". Good question. Ultimately, a biography is no different from any other book -- it needs to be well written, tell a good story and cover a topic that's interesting. The added plus, to anybody that likes to read history, comes when the author uses the framework of a biography to make a personal story out of the times when the subject lived. Most of the time, the subject of a biography has had some kind of major impact on the world around and has, in turn, been impacted by the things that happen in the world during his or her life. If the times are interesting and the impact is large, then you've got the potential for a great book. If a talented writer gets their hands on the story, then a biography can be full of insights that you don't find in a broader history of the times.

It's hard to imagine anyone in the arts that, ultimately, had more impact on the world than Walt Disney. My generation grew up watching him on Sunday nights showing us clever animations, interesting live-action stories and, of course, Davy Crockett. Our children's generation grew thinking of Disneyland and DisneyWorld as the most sought after vacation destination. It's pretty amazing when you think of all the "firsts" that can be attributed to Disney's company and, as you learn in this book, really to Walt himself -- first personality-based animation, first feature length animation, first "theme" park and on and on. Throughout the 50s and most of the 60s, he was America's Uncle Walt.

Fortunately, Gabler is a great writer. He's clearly done his homewhere, producing 600+ pages of detail. However, he's good enough at what he does to know that, for all the "firsts", this had to be a personal story of one man. Gabler spends a lot of time looking for the motivation behind Disney's ambition. Disney turns out to be, according to Gabler, somewhat insecure and working hard to correct for a childhood during which, he felt, he had little or no control over his own life. For him, the animations became a process where Walt was building worlds to his own specs over which he had complete control. For the early works, especially Snow White, the first feature length animated feature, Walt had his fingers on every part of the project. He could be viscious when he had to be to protect his vision of where the project was going. He pretty much never worried about money -- that was his brother Roy's problem. In fact, he worried so little about money, that company was almost always on the brink of failure until the parks started to open. The parks were Walt's ultimate effort to create a complete physical world where he could be God. He actually had an apartment above a store front on Main Street at Disneyland where he frequently stayed so he could observe.

Surprisingly, you don't learn a lot of negative stuff about Disney although you do suspect that Gabler may be playing down parts of that. Walt was definitely a tyrant on any project that he thought was worthy of his personal attention. As I've said, he had no real concept of money. In the mode of many artists, he wanted perfection and didn't really care, at least for the first couple of decades, whether Roy could manage to turn a profit as long as there was funding for his projects. He became very conservative and a staunch anti-Communist in his later days -- driven primarily by the animators strike at the studio. Walt needed the "communist conspiracy" to deflect what he ultimately felt was a betrayal by his friend's and co-workers.

This book and learning about Disney's life is probably not going to appeal to anybody much younger than 50. While the story is good and his impact was huge, the "I lived through it" is part of the appeal to a reader.

Oh - and the one downside of reading biographies? You know how they end. If you manage to push through a long detailed biography, its primarily because you formed an attachment of sorts to the subject. When the subject eventually dies, you actually feel it personally.