Richard Sherman: Walt Disney World and Soul

After meeting and hearing Richard Sherman at D23, I thought that as much as the world of Walt Disney is touchable and visible fantasy, it is equally the untouchable and invisible intensity of soul. People like Dick Sherman transmit this intensity in creating and when talking about Walt. Watching the movie "The Boys", I learned of The Sherman Brother's influence on American musicals, and the Brother's creative process, the way they came to the union of words and musical notes seemed as natural as if it had been first rehearsed in heaven. Coming to think of musicals, it occurred to me, that aside from Disney's mixing animation with live action in Mary Poppins, animation, in its essence, has all to do with musicals. Both liberate movement and sound from transiency and transform it in pure meaning. While in animation, action, synchronized with sound, overcomes the laws of physics in order to oblige the pure expressiveness of story and unfolding of personality, musicals transform dialogue into the expressiveness of melody and movement into dance. Both cases equally make passages of sound and movement value in themselves, beyond being just transitions to what will follow. Both cases liberate sound and movement from the utilitarian character of causality. Both cases make something that happens in a time sequence be, somehow, freed from time passing. Walt Disney inaugurated a visible and sensory dimension to fantasy, by transmitting the invisibility of soul. He tied the unreality of magic to our vision and touch, by setting free the reality of spirit.