Disney Purity

Freedom from tradition and many times destruction of it is characteristic of American culture, but Walt Disney’s freedom seemed to have encompassed a personal and unique easiness before the unpredictable. While most people are threatened by what behaves like a forever mutant and challenging sea, handling it with the illusionary safety of repeated patterns of behavior, schemes, or plans, Disney was pure enough to be disarmed before it, to be constantly open to novelty.

Disney: Freedom and Courage

Mickey, Walt’s crucial assertion of courage, marks the initial revelation of Disney’s total freedom from traditional limits. In the Mouse, as in everything Walt Disney did, control and passion, down to earthiness and imagination were juggled: Mickey is heroic and, yet, according to Disney, only a little fellow doing the best he can. Mickey joins the extremes of power and fragility, nobility and prosaicness, excellence and neediness. Before personifying Walt Disney’s temperament, behavior, or even ideals, Mickey embodies Disney’s love of extremes. A talking mouse reveals inspiration from nature and from artifice.

Disney: Coherence and Moral Nature

Disney's speech "The Story of Mickey Mouse"also discloses Disney’s moral nature in his simultaneity of originality and coherence. In the days when cartoon figures were nothing but excuses for comedic situations, Disney ran against the current (“Instead of speeding the cartoons as was then the fashion, we were not afraid to slow down the tempo and let Mickey emote”) and preserved the Mouse’s integrity, respecting and obliging the goodness his character came to represent to people. Disney says: “Mickey had reached the stage where we had to be very careful with what we permitted him to do, he had become a hero in the eyes of his audiences, specially the youngsters. Mickey could do no wrong. I could never attribute any meanness, or callous traits to him.”
Mickey is then Walt’s givingness.

Disney: Soul over Matter

With Mickey, Walt fought for the assertion of personality, of human content, in something designated for pure entertainment. Heart had to be hand in hand with joy. Disney created Mickey as a “distinct individual”, establishing, through his creature, the ascendancy of personality over contingency, like soul over matter. For, always kept “in character”, Mickey could be recognized by audiences, in Disney’s words, “as a personage, motivated by character, instead of situations”.

Titanic and Humble

Speaking about Mickey, Disney, titanic and humble at the same time, reveals his own integrity in rendering the great and the small inextricably: He compares the endlessness of inspiration the Mouse was for the public in all levels (“I often find myself surprised with what has been said about our redoubtable little Mickey, who was never really a mouse, nor yet wholly a man, although always recognizably human, I hope. Psychoanalysis has probed him, wise men of critical inclination have pondered him, admirers have saluted him in extravagant terms. The League of Nations gave him a special medal as a symbol of international good will.”) to the humbleness of purpose in the creation of the character (“But all we ever intended for him and expected of him was that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him, we didn’t burden him with any social symbolism, we made him no mouth piece for frustration or harsh satire. Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter”).

Ruling Love

Genuine prayers concern gratefulness, rather than neediness. Disney’s speech on the occasion of Mickey’s twentieth birthday is a prayer (CD Disney Treasures- "The Story of Mickey Mouse", 13 October 1948). In it, a passionate Disney pays tribute to Mickey, to life, to the public that welcomed Mickey, to his team and to his own fight in the superhuman effort he had to make in “the early days” to bring the mouse to the eye of the public. As a merging of self-conviction, gratefulness and love of humanity, this speech is a great revelation of Disney’s soul. Self- referential and deferring at the same time, it expresses assertiveness in abandonment, it is confession and pronouncement, love-giving and decree-passing.

Everlasting Disney

I hope we don't loose sight of one thing- There was a man that
Had the Socratic power of bringing the best, talent wse, out of people.
Described his role as that of a bee taking ollen from place to place so as to make them flourish, a self-description very i much n the line of socrates' "midwife"
Had the guts to be free.
Could provide the flight of abandonment along with the discipline of order, a Dad like support and a maternal giving of fun.
Had the innocence for being carried away, and, yet, the hardship for an iron determination.
Was always self-renewing, like the sea.

Disney Spirit

Walt Disney spent his life fighting finitude, that is, asserting soul. Nothing in Disney animation is contingent, because it orbits around personality in story development. This establishing personality over the laws of physics, logic or mere randomness, is, again, a proclaiming of soul over matter. Disney was pledged to life in such a way that, like a pure spirit, he refused, in all senses, to accept its limits. His reinvention of life in animation, going hand in hand with his assertion of personality, represents life over reality: a metaphor of eternal life. It created Disney freedom, endlessness of possibility, humor and fantasy.

Absolute Giver

It seems to me that there are roughly two opposite ways of interpreting Walt Disney: either as someone who was controlling and, to a vast extent, able to manipulate the audience’s psyche, or someone who was driven to transmit the liberation of his own passion. The first case concerns a Disney that practically schemes to please people, and the second, someone who is, before anything else, measuring up to and carried away by himself. To put it in even rougher terms, the first case concerns a taker, or, at best, a trader, and the second, a giver. Considering Walt Disney an absolute giver, I wanted, in my text, to preserve the immediacy of passion, the distance of reflection, and the puerility of homage- paying. If this is ambitions, the reason is humble: I don't believe anything can be complete without the author's personal involvement with it.

Walt Disney's Birthday!

It is generally said that heroes look death in the eyes. Walt Disney looked life in the eyes, which is equally heroic. The courage he had to take turning point decisions for the sake of his integrity is as reassuring as a written proof of the existence of the soul. Disney gave up material security for the abstract value of a relationship with himself. He declares:
“I had made my declaration of Independence, I traded security for self- respect”(American Cinematographer 1941).

Disney Life

With his animation, Walt Disney gave fantasy an immense right: the placing of life over reality in the same way he placed personality over contingency, like soul over matter. Those that, like me, were lucky to be acquainted with the big screen by watching a Disney animated feature witnessed the disclosure of fantasy, for the first time, as this proclamation of life. What you saw wasn’t supposed to be real, but it was, nonetheless, alive. It was something in and of itself, in its own right to be. You could see it, hear it and feel it. Disney’s “illusion of life” was life regardless of, or above reality. Its believability, like that of all art, was its supremacy over the real world. The immediacy Disney gave fantasy meant, in the end, the establishing of life over everything, like a consecration of it. That is why it was sheer reassurance.

Disney's Audacity: The Stage and American Life

Beyond happy endings and uplifting story lines, Disney's coupling of technology to fantasy was the wedding of something totally ruled by finality, by a utilitarian purpose, to a reality that is pleasure in and of itself, it was the reconciling of temporality to poetry. That the world one lived in was so prodigal to grant the wonderful results of the association of these two polarities was not just a revelation, but Disney's greatest generosity. The results of it were typically American, in joining the objectivity of artifice with the warmth of emotion, and yet universal, in expressing the power of childhood, hope and love. They were also typically American in the conception and creation of life purely for the embodiment of a story, or of preconceived lines: for the stage, in a broader sense of the word. Life on stage, or, more precisely, life for the stage expresses in one goal ingenuity and faith, that is, the control of artifice, of creating for a purpose, and the passion of liberation, of the inexorability of storylines. Stage is simultaneously an assertion of mission fulfillment and destine, that is, of will and of forces greater than will.

Disneyesque Obama

In his Victory Speech, Obama, with his amazing inspiration, summed up the American essence in the phrase "We Can!"
He'd mentioned that something that was practically impossible-his Victory- had happened, for everything is possible in America. Doesn't it ring a very familiar bell?
One of the most fascinating things in the U.S. is the constant interplay of two antagonistic forces: A rigid predictability that results from an almost fundamentalist observing of not just laws, but rules, vs. the freedom of an amazing creativity and tradition-breaking. If, one one hand, Americans go undone when someone breaks a simple traffic rule, even if such infraction does not, at the moment it is done, put anyone in risk-like doing a U turn in a practically empty street- they, on the other hand produce records of rebellious inventiveness (James Dean, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, of course) that change the world. If, on one hand, American life is rigorously rule-regulated, making unpredictability and unconventionality a big, de stabalizing threat for most,on the other hand this same life brings forth the most revolutionary humanitarian and cultural expressions, as well as technologic world-changing discoveries . It goes from Rock'n'Roll, fast food and Coca-Cola to the world web.
Real American leaders, I think, balance these two forces. At the same time they are brave innovators, they look for, they find and they establish essence, and what is essence if not that which is immutable, constant and, even though unconventional, it is, much more than traditional, archetypal? Like Walt Disney, Obama found it in freedom, as a fundamental American value. "We Can!" is the essence.

Disney Givingness

In the Magic Kingdom, technology materializes fiction into stage
and into characters for your participation: because of you. You experience
it as givingness, as a taking care of you, in the same goal you take care
of it by making it valid. You experience it as givingness, as you are also
granted the gift of giving. Disney’s givingness concerns the turning of
his visitors into givers themselves: the granting the gift of giving.
How much more generous can this be?

America for Disney

In the post war period, American art was making its mark with Abstract Expressionism, the style that ends with themes in order to value subjectivity, the inner state of the artist. The nuclear threat and its psychological consequences bequeathed to man a relative, unstable world. If the world turned relative to being destroyed by man himself, if time and space are relative themselves, everything that meant external reality, solid ground, became a question mark, rather than a certainty. To say that the only way, thus, to find stability or meaning was to turn inward is to declare that absoluteness switched from outside to within: to reassert the artistic quest for essence in one’s inner world.
For Disney, however, the external world, more than merely solid, was impregnated with meaning. Walt Disney’s disciplined optimism, coinciding, perhaps with what I am referring to as mysticism, would never allow the dismissal of external reality as something vulnerable to destruction, to a meaningless or “unhappy ending”. Things should turn out well. Disney’s patriotism was most likely his metaphorical “wishing upon a star”. America should settle all conflicts. It was America that served Disney’s idealism and not the other way around. The world should be forever there as ground and stage for the development of a better life, and much better, for that matter, with the help of American ingenuity (Disney’s idealism for Epcot).

Disney Sharing

In the speech Walt Disney made on the occasion of Mickey's twentieth birthday, Mickey, among many things, also expresses the natural merging of the private and the public in Disney, when the latter, with humbleness, exposes his feelings, almost apologetically justifying his affection for his creature on a emotional and at the same time professional level: “The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is understandable that I should have sentimental attachment for the little personage who played so big a part in the course of Disney productions.” In the Mouse, Disney’s intimacy is at one with Disney’s sharingness.

Disney Dignity

Disneyland resulted from the dignity of believing that we are worthy of paradise. No wonder, Sergei Eisenstein, in commenting the Silly Symphonies, praised the purity and brightness of Disney’s soul, and asserted that Disney was beyond good and evil. (Sergei Eisenstein Walt Disney- Circe).
Disney’s innocence distilled the American search for material heaven, that is, the all American impunity to the spirit/matter dualism of religion in general and of much of the philosophical tradition that molds and responds to the guilt-stricken human condition. In Disney, innocence, freedom and daring were one and the same.

Disney Heartbeat

The essence of original Disney animation, the power all its other qualities spring from reverts almost literally to Walt’s compulsive giving of life. It is expressed as a sharing of indiscriminating life-of life, therefore, rendered maternally giving- by both organic and inorganic, human and animal, equal and fantastic elements. In early shorts, for instance, animate and inanimate being were given physically human characteristics in responding to action, as if the physical human element was the all- encompassing heartbeat. A train locomotive could have eyes and mouth, a wiener of a hotdog could be spanked on "its" butt. In the feature films, on the other hand, inanimate matter didn’t have to act human, as long as it made sense to the story line. Snow White’s castle, or the well she sings to, or any other “thing” she comes across, for example, didn’t have eyes or arms, it just fit the story. What was physically human became just emotionally human. In the beginning, indiscrimination had a physically anthropomorphic expression, developing, eventually, to the more abstract dimension of story meaning. In both cases though, this sameness of heartbeat is an all-pervading sweetness, all-inclusive warmth. Realizing or not, the audience felt within love when watching it.

Disney Dynamism

The constant motion of the image above tries to pay homage to Walt Disney's ongoing creativity.It alludes to Disney's impersonating, giving of life and giving of identity. Disney and nature are reflexes of each other. He is in the heart of life. In continuous generosity.
When Walt Disney merged participation with spectatorship in Disneyland, participation meant physical presence, along with visual appreciation, or with contemplation. Disney classical rides extended audience's participation to action. Since 2003, with Mission: Space, Walt Disney World has been offering an unprecedented harmony between movement and wonder. In the ride Mission: Space, at WDW, participation encompasses emotion, visceral feeling and the pure mind sense of liberation. More than any other interaction, such exchange, involving not just concentration, but compliance and surrender, is a purgative, upgrading exchange with artifice. Unprecedented as it is though, it obliges Walt Disney's typical reaching for and granting the experience of awe. It also obliges Disney's wedding of extremes that are apparently irreconcilable: the feeling of glory through guts and sight, that is, through physical dynamism and aesthetic appreciation. (The second paragraph is from the book "From Mars to Marceline")

A Streak of Existentialism

In my texts, I wanted to preserve the immediacy of passion, the distance of reflection, and the puerility of homage paying. Whether this is ambitious or not, the reason is humble: I don’t believe anything can be complete if the author of it excludes, in cold impartiality, personal involvement with his subject.
I therefore interweave objective considerations about Disney creativity, not just with what I see as related topics in the technological, psychological and mystical aspects of life, but with what it was for me. The impact it had on decisive moments of my life was definitive, culminating with the revelation of Walt Disney’s life through the reading of his biographies. After all, whether the writer is Bob Thomas or Marc Eliot, none can neither evade nor embellish enough what is so apparent: Disney’s authenticity

Giving Life

In joining extremes, the spontaneity Disney handled fake and real alike, animals and robots, nature and technology, suggests his genius for animation as a compulsive giving of life. Only with such generosity, creativity can be so indiscriminate as to render artifice and nature spontaneous extensions of each other.

The faithfulness of Disney to the primitive, sensorial element is also his faithfulness to himself, to that original and therefore unquestionable part of oneself that, simultaneously, answers to body and to heart. A rediscovering of origin that, as the coming of a full circle, is mystical. It relates to Disney’s reaching an abstract dimension of matter through matter itself, that is,his reaching fantasy through visual expression in animation and through multi-sensory experience in Disneyland.

Man on Wire: A Disneyesque Tour de Force

When Phillippe Petit indignantly answered the police: "there is no why I did this, that is the beauty of it, there is no why!" He was, more than right, an inspiration. What he did had no reason and no function, it was JUST beautiful!
Functionality is generally profane to the poetic eye. It concerns finitude’s compromising of integrity: something is functional because it is pledged to perform a task in a moment ahead of itself: because of its enslavement.
What Phillippe Petit did was pure freedom: he transgressed the law, he even transgressed the security of the Twin Towers to make them magic, giving people a leap of sheer, non utilitarian, beauty.Transgressing the law for pure beauty is the turning of reality into magic. The spirit of it is expressed by Walt Disney's saying:
"It is kind of fun to do the impossible".

Petit, going against all circumstances, security and law, rendered the towers immortal, not in sorrow, like the lowest of blows did, but in beauty. In lightness and joy. Watching him makes one think there is hope, good is yet to prevail, as it already prevailed in heaven, for those who were murdered in the towers. Watching Petit makes one reminisce of a justice that, winged and miraculous, does exist, and will take place.

A Dreamer, a Doer, a Chosen one

Walt Disney asserted he was not a mystic: he did not believe in a lucky star. The mystical dimension I am attributing to him, however, does not relate to mere superstition or belief in luck, but to an individualism of such profundity to discover mission fulfillment in one’s personal life, that is, to discover, in one’s action, the response to meaning, to something that transcends:
“If you live right, things happen right”.
(From the book "From Mars to Marceline"

Intensity

The subtle line between fall and flight
Self-destruction and Freedom,
Courage and Recklessness,
Abandon and Control,
When abyss and sky become one,
Like in Mission: Space,
Like Walt Disney's living Life.

From Infinity and Beyond

Beyond happy endings and uplifting story lines, the coupling of technology to fantasy by Disney was the reconciling of something totally ruled by finality, by utilitarian purpose, to a reality that is pleasure in and of itself, it was the reconciling of temporality to poetry. That the world one lived in was so prodigal to grant the wonderful results of the association of these two polarities was not just a revelation, but cumulating. It was Disney’s generosity.
(of the book "From Mars to Marceline")

Essence and "Illusion of Life"

Disney’s “illusion of life” was life regardless of, or above reality. Its believability, like that of all art, was its supremacy over the real world. The immediacy Disney gave fiction meant, in the end, this establishing of life over everything, like a consecration of it. That is why it was sheer reassurance. With repetition, formulation and dilution of fantasy to different fiction medium in different types of entertainment, it became taken for granted. Today, with virtual reality, fiction is more immediate, more sensory invasive than life itself. But those that had it revealed by Disney, that experienced it as his original and unique screening, purifying of life, experienced life as essence. In them a seed, that forgotten or not through adulthood, was planted and could never stop taking roots. Writing about it, realizing these roots, is a rebirth.
(From the Introduction of "From Mars to Marceline")

Above the Clouds

Love

One of the most beautiful things John Canemaker says, in the audio comment of Snow White belonging to the platinum edition of the movie in DVD, is that when you put so much love in making a movie, like Walt and his team did, it shows on the screen. No less inspired, Canemaker concludes, as you see the prince’s castle up in the golden clouds, asserting that Snow White shows the transcendence of the human spirit. It is breath taking!

Mystical Disney

The identification between creator and creature, elimination of all distance, is the fundamental religious ceremony.
In the speech on the occasion of Mickey Mouse's Twentieth Birthday,(Disney Treasures) Walt Disney, titanic and humble at the same time, reveals his ownintegrity in rendering the great and the small inextricably: He compares the endlessness of inspiration the Mouse was for the public in all levels (“I often find myself surprised with what has been said about our redoubtable little Mickey, who was never really a mouse, nor yet wholly a man, although always recognizably human, I hope. Psychoanalysis has probed him, wise men of critical inclination have pondered him…admirers have saluted him in extravagant terms. The league of Nations gave him a special medal as a symbol of international good will…”) to the humbleness of purpose in the creation of the character: “…But all we ever intended for him and expected of him was that he should continue to make people everywhere chuckle with him and at him, we didn’t burden him with any social symbolism, we made him no mouth piece for frustration or harsh satire. Mickey was simply a little personality assigned to the purposes of laughter”
(From the book From Mars to Marceline, by Eleonora Duvivier)

Closeness and Distance

The ambivalence of delicacy and exaggeration in Disney animation's caricaturing of reality has the distance of humor with the closeness of affection. It joins the assertiveness of exaggeration with the subtlety of inspiration: the given, the all there with the arousing, the coming to be. The definitive, the page-turned, with the constantly anew.
A good example of this in something different concerns Chaplin’s City Lights. The main female character is blind, sweet, good, poor, orphaned, sells flowers, symbols of beauty in themselves, and “sees” a charming prince in the Tramp, thanks to his good heart. There couldn’t be more misery and beauty in the same package and yet, rather than exhausted, such package, with the same touch of delicacy in humor, is renewed in constantly arousing affection. Extremes of this type are purposeful caricature of dramatic situations, but in the purposefulness of caricature, in the elaboration and distance of criticism, they yet have involvement. If on one hand they are willed for on the part of their author, on the other they carry him away. They result from both control and usurpation, succeeding just at the edge, before turning syrupy.

Freedom

Freedom from tradition and many times destruction of it is characteristic of American culture, but Walt Disney’s freedom seemed to have also encompassed his personal and unique easiness before the unpredictable. While most people are threatened by what behaves like a forever mutant and challenging sea, handling it with the illusionary safety of repeated patterns of behavior and schemes, Disney was pure enough to be disarmed before it, to be constantly open to novelty. In the article “Growing Pains” he himself voices this purity with poetic concision, showing a nakedness before life that puts humbleness and courage into one:
“That is what I like about this business, the certainty that there is always something bigger and more exciting just around the bend; and the uncertainty of everything else.”

Disney's Wisdom

I think that Walt Disney's wisdom was his brave nakedness before life, his being as disarmed and opened to it as those who are in a state of grace. A state of grace is when instincts and innocence become wisdom.
Curiously, Disney’s nakedness before life also marks Snow White’s behavior as a state of grace: Having just escaped slaughter by the hunter and forlornness in the forest, she is yet trusting. She asks the little birds what they do when there is a problem. Singing with them she, from then on, entrusts her fate to all the surrounding animals, to life, that is.
Ready to live in constant discovery Walt Disney worked, after all, with the most unpredictable element: the variations of individuality. As if in constant interaction with life and with heart, he was malleable enough to make the best out of difference and change, unifying the diversity of all the talents he worked with into the style of a team that was, at the same time, in constant progress. He thus gave unity to dynamics and identity to difference.

Soaring Disney

After all, Walt Disney’s enormous capacity of appreciation of life was a super-human generosity: in a childhood of physical hardship and poverty, he was still capable of seeing beauty and goodness in what surrounded him - the animals, the little town.
As if pledged to joy, young Disney, poor, even hungry, insisted against all odds on a path in entertainment, something that can only exist for or make sense to those on a full stomach. Walt Disney’s pledge was beyond the demands of the flesh.

Disney's World of Spirit

To know that Walt Disney took turning point decisions for the sake of his integrity is as reassuring as a written proof of the existence of the soul. Disney’s declaration “I traded security for self- respect” can be understood as: I traded the commitment to survival with the commitment to myself, that means the giving up of material reassurance for the abstract value of a relationship with himself.
To benefit from the message of Walt Disney’s authenticity equals a perpetuating of his life regardless of its being chronologically ended, a making peace with the separation between this world of material existence and that of spirit. For this, one can’t be but grateful.

More Eisenstein on Walt Disney

“Il cree au niveau d’une representation de l’homme non encore enchaine par la logique, la raison, l’experience. C’est ainsi que les papillons creent leur vol;”

" He creates on the level of a representation of man not yet enchained by logic, rationality, experience. That is how the butterflies create their flight;"

A Pure Soul (Sergei Eisenstein on Walt Disney)

“On dirait que cet homme connait non seulement la magie de tous les moyens techniques, mais qu’il sait aussi agir sur les cordes les plus secretes des pensees, des images mentales et des sentiments humains. C’est ainsi que devaient agir les preches de saint Francois d’Assise.”

Translation: One would say that this man knows not only the magic of all technologic means, but he also knows how to act on the most secret chords of thought, mental images and human feelings. That is how the sermons of Saint Francis of Assise must have acted.

Sergei Eisenstein

Disney: Inspirational

Here goes three declarations of Disney that stand, respectively, for courage, single mindedness and dignity: the three aspects of integrity.


"I traded security for self-respect."

"When you believe in something, believe it all the way"
"When I do something is because I want to do it better"

(The first one is revealed, thanks to Didier Ghez, in the Newspaper articles of 1941 he posted in his blog "Disney History")