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.