Saturday, September 27, 2008

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")

Saturday, September 20, 2008

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

Friday, September 12, 2008

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.