Disney: America and Love of the Stage

The results of Disney's coupling of technology to fantasy 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.

Disney Bliss

For those who were born in the middle decades of the last century,(among them, the two kids shown in the picture, my sister Eduarda and my brother Edgar, whose Birthday is today)a search of Disney is also a search of oneself. That first moment of acquaintance with Disney fantasy, at an age when one was accessible, unprejudiced, and totally disarmed, was a moment of, more than happiness, awe, and also of healing. Awe, in itself, has a quality of spiritual healing. The Disney aficionados that made Walt Disney their personal hero concern, in great part , people that are grateful enough to recognize the real value of what felt miraculous: their literal seeing of fantasy; its communion with livingness. Their search of Disney has to do with the constant wish to resurrect that moment, as if resurrecting the best of themselves. Their search of Disney concerns their faithfulness to happiness and to innocence, simultaneously.

Disney Cuteness: "What A Guy!"

In the special features of the DVD "Walt- The Man Behind The Myth", Virginia Davis talks about her being directed by young Walt Disney for the first Alice, when she was a little girl. She describes the genuine delight of a small child in such experience and, in a pure, Minnie Mouse, girlish girl kind of way confesses Walt was her first love. The delicious part: Davis reaches the same conclusion, however innocently, dreamy and lady like, that provocative Peg, when referring to the Tramp, in Lady and the Tramp, seductively voices, as she dances away: What a dog!
Other than the radical divergence of attitude and intention between the two "girls", there is also one little difference, that doesn't affect, however, the wise content of their declarations: Peg's "What a dog!", in Davis' compliment of Walt, becomes:
" What a guy!"
It is (almost unbearably) cute!
Virginia Davis, no doubt, preserved, over all the years that passed since she acted for Walt, the Disney touch.

Disney's Full Circle

The faithfulness of Disney to the primitive is also his faithfulness to himself, to that original and therefore unquestionable part of oneself that answers to body and to heart in one. 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, through the fantasy of visual expression in animation and of multi-sensory experience in Disneyland.
Faithfulness to origin involves the innocence to being carried away, an acceptance of and receptivity to pleasure. Simply put, it might concern an immense keenness of the five senses, a love of life. But its rediscovery as end or conclusion demands genius: a gargantuan humbleness for work.

Predestined Disney

The declaration, “If you live right, things happen right” (attributed
to Disney by Art Linkletter, in the movie Th e Man Behind the Myth)
makes one think that the connection between living “right” with things
happening “right”, in the case of Walt Disney’s self-sacrifi cing, immense
body of work also relates to mission fulfi lling, as if he had a conviction
in the existence of a relationship between whatever it is that makes
things happen and our own behavior . He was generous enough to
derive meaning from what, for most people, is an opaque world.

Disney: Control and Passion

Ready to live in constant discovery, Walt Disney worked with
the most unpredictable element: the variations of individuality. 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 gave unity to
dynamics and identity to difference.

Still Mickey

While I was away in Brazil, without my daughter for the first time, she picked the Mickey doll I have, to clutch at bedtime. I was surprised, because Mickey was never her favorite Disney character, and she has tons of soft toys. A friend of mine said it is because Mickey inspires security. He does. He always did. Even the Mickey of the 30's, considered by many to be often aggressive, even cruel, was not really so. In turning animals into sources of sound, in Steamboat Willie, for instance, Mickey was only echoing the importance of music, as the single, pervasive heartbeat of the short. Those animals were not hurt, as everyone can see. In Plane Crazy, Mickey steals from Minnie the cutest, innocent, however daring, kiss. He "knew" that if she jumped out of the plane, she would not be hurt. The early Mickey's behavior was an assertion of and a response to the infinite possibilities Walt Disney was starting to give animation. He was a reflex of the pantheistic world around him, a voice to resonate, in an endearing way, the choir of which he was the main part. He has always been the loudspeaker for Walt Disney world of synchrony, for the generosity of pure, all-encompassing meaningfulness.

Disney's Single Heart

In rendering the material and the emotional level equally alive and responsive to each other, Disney, in animation, makes them mutually giving.
Communication between heterogeneous realities has the immense generosity of the mystical, that which finds a single heart for matter and spirit, or, on a broader level, for human characters and the circumstances around them.