Happy Bday Walt Disney!

One of the most beautiful things of Walt Disney's genius was a characteristic that also allowed him to be many years ahead of his time: his inventing interaction with fantasy and having had, himself, a constant, interactive experience with his audience. Disney knew or sensed that everything is interconnected and, be it entertainment or education, a growing population in a world of quick, eletronic comunication  will only respond to interactive experience. In a world of speed, only impact and directed involvement communicates. The scission between subject and object, audience and stage,  and action only tends to disappear with the technology of immediacy because of the lack of time to contemplate. From this, came, in art, contemplative interaction, for which, Disney threw the seed.

Disney Apple

  
     Thanksgiving hasn't arrived yet, and there are already Santas in some malls. They stay on playing areas, abandoned to themselves, for, the kids much prefer to play in the available toys. Santa Claus, the one character that was once a Saint and revered as such, became something pathetic, replaceable and even, dare I say, disposable? Not yet disposable, but the prior step to it, which is, a tool for propaganda. The moral of the story is that greed for money took the place of magic, turned the sacred into something worse than the profane, the so called "propaganda". One doesn't know who to be sorrier for, Santa or children.
    Only someone saint-like can reconcile magic and capitalism, the profane and the sacred, like Walt Disney. What would he do, if he saw such demoralizing of Santa? One doesn't have to go that far, he would first take care of the Disney co itself needing of magic. One sees abandoned Santas and, on the other hand, children, youths and old alike teeming inside Apple stores, some with their
jaws dropped.
    Magic, if there's still some, went from something that, in its impossibility to be explained,  carried one away, to something that is exact, more than explainable (for those who want to learn it) and manipulable. Magic became "apple" power.  Like with the fall from paradise, the power of the apple dethroned innocence,
that availability to be dazzled without understanding how and why it dazzled you; without being in control!
  Very much the contrary, the power of the apple is control itself!      I, like many, make use of this power, but I regard it as a mere tool. I am still waiting for the Disney Apple, the one that, rather than a tool for something, is the "something" itself, the "it", that first "Ahhhh" one used to utter when entering, for the first time, Main Street USA. How would Walt Disney make it anew?

Disney Analysis

     

     The letter Walt Disney wrote Don Graham shows something very important in Disney's guidance. The analysis of many different elements is fundamental to the reaching of integrity in the acting character, that is,  unity of shae, movement, expression and action. Walt Disney seemed to know that, like in real life, maybe like with Disney's own personality, only the awareness of division can bring unity: Integrity is a conquest of reconciliation.

The Seriousness of Playing

When you look at a miniature, be it a toy or a model, you immediately imagine a world happening in or through it. In creating such world you act like a god, and in living it in your imagination, you also become a character of it: a creature. In his love of toys and miniatures and in his creation therefrom, Walt Disney brought out the spirit of childhood as the common ground between  ritualistic activity and playing: the right to invent characters; to become a character and to follow scripts. 

   Disney gave shape to the right of giving matter a meaning beyond its appearance: to turn the world into one big story.

Disney Devotion

 Devotion is part of charisma, and it is also a mystery of the heart. It is a link with some sort of transcendent certainty. According to Ward Kimball, Walt believed "devoutly" in his cartoons and could, therefore, convince the bankers to invest in them. Faithfulness to oneself is, paradoxically,  faithfulness to what is beyond oneself. In being so much himself, Walt Disney was also the universal heart of his public.

Disney Reverence

     

 

     Like Walt Disney, who had ecology concerns much ahead of his time, the natives preserve nature because they revere it, and not just because of self-interest, like the "civilized" men, who finally realized that, by exhausting it, they will be victims themselves.

Disney Light

  It is reported that Walt Disney was an intense person. And he was a workaholic and he was always in the grip of passion.
  
   Intensity is living on edge: facing the abyss for the cause of depth;
   Intensity is creating: discovering ascension in vertiginous fall
   Intensity is burning: forgetting oneself for the sparkle of inspiration;

   Intensity is  breaking limits: infringing the expected, for the killing repetition;
   Intensity is overcoming rules:  Disobedience for the search of true self;
   Intensity is love: receiving infinitely and giving yet more;
   Intensity is flying: dispensing solidity to establish one's ground;
   Intensity is courage:  finding assertion in surrender itself;
     Intensity is fire: self-consumption for the sake of light.
  
  

Disney Light

      Like the sea, Walt Disney was constant change in sameness.
Like the sun, he
had the light of ebullience and that of growth, 
Like the air, that feels freer from the chains of gravity,
he could purify and uplift all of us in flight.

Happy 55th Disneyland!

Great creations spring from the intimate, the everyday, what can "simply" be loved. Maybe because great creators are humble. The idea of Disneyland took shape from Walt Disney's taking his daughters to a common amusement park.  Great creators don't ignore their truest voice; their own heart.

It is said that one man of vision can change the world. Walt Disney changed something bigger than the world: human psyche. In giving the real shape of the essence of America with Disneyland, in making fantasy touchable and available to be acted upon and, last but not least, creating the thematic experience, something that has spread to all aspects of life,  he certainly upgraded the fundamental relation of men to artifice, play, art and faith itself.

Disney Quantum Physics : Talent and Freedom

   When Walt Disney, as a kid, drew faces and arms on the flowers his class in school was assigned to draw, he showed not just freedom from established rules, from anything established, in fact, but talent, imagination, and the very seed of all Disney animation, in which everything has a human heart. Like in quantum physics' discoveries, in Disney animation everything is interconnected and in mutual influence.

Disney "Impossible Plausible": Limitlessness

     When my son was a little, he asked me to tell the sun to stop "following" him, because he was hot. For toddlers, there are no laws of physics, everything is possible, and even the sun can be personalized. They are generally in awe with things, because they see them as if just created.

 They are in a state of poetry, a state that frees everything from the banality of habit; the imprisonment of functionality; the mediocrity of taking-for-grantedness. 
It is something of this awe and innocence that Walt Disney must have preserved for creating the limitless world of animation, overruling physical laws,  personalizing creation and presenting every being and every little thing infused with a primordial, original life.

The Walt Disney Family Museum

     In telling Walt Disney's life, The WDF museum shows his life as the life of, the fight for, and the victory of creativity.

 And creativity, the triumph of spirit over matter,soul over self,

 and freedom over submission, 

is the real happy ending in this world.

Disney Harmony

Walt Disney was the paradoxical harmony of
Impulse and Pledge
Instinct and Determination
Fantasy and Planning
Flight and Grounding
Leadership and Candy
Fight and Faith

Simply Disney

It is as simple and as complex:

Walt Disney brought the best, 

almost the impossible out of people 

because he gave and brought almost the impossible out of himself.

Disney Enchantment

"It takes a lot of courage to see the world 

in all its tainted glory and still love it"
Oscar Wilde. 

Remembering Walt Disney, I say,

" It took him a lot of courage to see the world

in all its tainted glory and still enchant it"

Disney Mickey

Mickey is now considered a corporate logo. He was criticized as lacking appeal for being "sanitized" and taking second place to Donald Duck. But everything Mickey was, having become History, became, also, timeless. All he represented passed from the awareness of everyday life into the atemporality of the unconscious mind. Mickey is no longer just "this" or "that", he is a symbol.

Disney Miracle

Magic is the beauty of fantasy, Miracle is grace

Magic is freedom from the laws of reality, Miracle is blessed reality; 
Magic is multicolor, Miracle is oneness; 
Magic is what Walt Disney created; 
Miracle is his coming into this world.

Disney Intensity

Watch one of Walt Disney's Golden Age animated movies, or clips of Disney himself, when you can see his spontaneity; the synchrony of his movements and expressions with his soul;
how at ease he is in waving, 
or in kissing the mouth of his dog,
or smelling a rose, or talking, by the pool, to baby Diane,
and you learn the truth of a most beautiful paradox: 

     Intensity is power, but the power of delicacy.

Disney Mother's Day

  

 Other than his unique communication with children, Walt Disney also the intuition to know their world,  the courage to make it  and the passion to share it.  He also had the maternal self-detachment of generosity: His fictional offsprings were destined to delight the offsprings of all mothers in the world!

   As an homage to this mother's day, women and their young children should watch and cherish a Disney cartoon together!

Happy Disney Mother Day to all!

Disney Religiosity

 

 Real religiosity is to see heart in matter, life in things,

and meaning in what is apparently inhuman and inanimate;

everything being manifestations of the divine anima. 

Because he felt that, Walt Disney re invented 

 animation as the expression of this alive interconectedness.

 

 

 

 

 

all inclusive interconectedness.

Disney Gratefulness

 Life may be a constant lesson in humbleness. 

That is its spiritual generosity. 

Some people take it that way, 

and that is their gratefulness. 

Walt Disney was the most life grateful person: 

 He was constantly overcoming himself.

Disney Real Ecology

 

 

Walt Disney was the primordial ecologist, not just because he loved and respected nature, but because he expressed, in his animation, the truth that took modern science much study to assert: 

EVERYTHING is connected EVERYTHING is interdependent!

EVERYTHING shares one common Meaning!

In this small example of the interconnectedness of Disney animation,  we can see Mickey's ears equally participating in the manifestation of Mickey's fear,  as he anticipates what is to come.

 

 

 

Disney Awe

   

One cannot love highly enough

a man who fought to share with all

 the unparalleled awe he felt for life!

This man was Walt Disney.

Contemplative Disney

   Walt Disney's contemplative side is clearly shown in his love of miniatures, his power to see the immensity of the small. Before a tiny setting, or a small world, one, like a god, imagines stories, becomes its characters, at the same time of creating them. One is creator and creature at the same time.

Disney Imminence of Life

The imminence of life is awe of its mystery and joy of its miracle. 
It is reverence before the immaculate and its unforgivingness. 
 It is the ambiguity of freedom;
of being permission and yet will of God; 
owner of a destiny but also part of a living whole.
 It is the seed of creation before life It is the awareness Walt Disney had, in his drive to animate.

Disney Call

External duty is law, convention and imposed learning. 

Inner duty is mission fulfilling. 

It is a call from God. 

Walt Disney is the best example of 

rebelliousness for the sake of inner duty.

 

He fulfilled it. Beautifully. 

With all his rigor as a boss, intolerance and what not, 

he fulfilled the call. Beautifully!

Wasn't he an angel?

Happy Easter to all!

Disney Eternity

"But time never mattered to Walt except as an annoyance. 

The only thing that mattered to him was that he had done everything in his power to make the cartoon as excellent as it could be" Gabler. 

In fact, what is time for someone who lives the timeless urge to give his best? 

Someone who, in the constant measuring up to his own dignity, 

had a pact with eternity?

Disney Triad

Innocence, intensity and devotion are the three manifestations of our relationship to God.

Walt Disney had immense innocence to dream, great intensity to make and unique devotion to promote.

Disney Extremes

     Walt Disney was considered to have  the gift to reach the human heart. That is why Disney animation many times reaches extremes, without falling overboard. Extremes are limits: everything there is to give. But in the Disney extremes, there is always a touch of delicacy to counterbalance the exaggeration of mere melodrama. A Disney extreme reconcilies the subtle and the obvious, what is suggested and what is visible, the secret and the revelation.

Disney Animism

To animate is not really to give movement, but to give life (Animus means to live). 

Walt Disney gave life to the drawings of things, animals and plants because he gave them soul. 

Like the Great Creator with original creation, he identified with his creatures in one common heart; to that extent, Disney declared that he naturally thought of anything as capable of having the same feelings as himself.

Disney Confession

  " He (the white man) is the victim of a civilization whose ideal is the unbotherable, poker-faced man and the attractive, unruffled woman. Even the gestures get to be calculated. The spontaneity of the animal-you find it in small children, but it's gradually trained out of them". Walt Disney. 

  
    Is there any doubt that in children and animals Walt Disney found the reflex of his own integrity and authenticity?

Disney Brazil

I've been always intrigued by the difference between loving Disney creation in Brazil, from loving it in the US.
    Looking at a little Mickey doll I carry with me when I travel, it seemed to me more clear cut, precise, inexorable and also freer. I wondered whether it had to do with the fact that the Brazilian space, being less planned, and determined, is less submited to spacial limitations,  feeling, therefore,  more like the kind of space depicted in a cartoon, in which nothing is impossible.
Mickey here in Brazil looks freer, and absolute.
Walt Disney must have hated limitations!

Disney Circle

     The past is the heart, what lives forever without having to be seen. The future is the mind, what has to be projected in order to be. Walt Disney, with a foot in the past and another in the future, was heart and thought: the complete circle. 

Disney Ressurrection

In the nineties, some social workers that I know, took a bunch of ghetto kids to the movie for the first time. It was a free session of Snow White!

      Not unlike me (once a miserable rich girl) at the end, the kids said: We now have hope to get a better life! The movie was DIsney's Snow White! Among the kids, there was a thieve girl who hyper ventilated at so much beauty. She was shot on the following day. She died, but her head was on Disney Heaven!

Disney Birth

Purity is birth; the immaculate coming into being. Creator and creature split, with immense innocence and sadness, yet with the hope of freedom. Like the parting of the hand of God from that of Adam, by Michael Angelo.  Initial animation, the blowing of life into drawings, is giving birth. 

Walt Disney animated because he was pure!

Disney Fight

According to Neal Gabler, Walt Disney was fighting to be the "lord of animation". 

But Disney's fight, before being a mere competition with others, concerned the endless effort to measure up to himself: 

As a giver that he was, to give his very best!

Disney Universe

When at the deck of my apartment by the sea, Uli, my little nephew, was told "This is Eleonora's house", to which he replied: No! It is the house of the Sea!" 

The Sea, for this toddler, appearing so powerful and majestic, took over the house like a much greater personality than myself. The soul and heart of the sea, like in Walt Disney's universe, was recognized and asserted!

Disney Fire

     Like the fire, Walt Disney had the innocence and beauty of self-consumption, of sacrifice for the sake of Light!

Charismatic Walt Disney

   

   




     Like Walt Disney, leaders have charisma,
whereas bosses just have power.

Disney Authenticity

            Walt Disney was unpredictable because he was himself 24hs a day. 
        
     Most people are predictable because they are 

what is expected of them to be.

Disney Reconciliation

   Two days after returning from Brazil, where we had an amazing experience with the Brazilian Indians, I had to go to the Mac store, to fix a problem with my phone. As if it weren't hard enough the jet lag, the extreme change of whether, and almost as extreme change of culture, the iPhone was letting me down. I was obviously feeling in a limbo, and as I walked into that sanctuary of the computer world, going under that logo, the apple in which, no matter how bitten, is so totally precise, I saw myself, almost literally, like an Indian out of the jungle. 
    As one of the staff member explained to me the new features of the iPhone and the connectedness it allows one and one's friends and whoever else one wants to be in, I couldn't help comparing such connectedness with the connectedness one I felt in the Indian Sacred Ceremony. 
     Technology, no doubt, makes the world all connected through the exact processes of electronics. 

     
     The Indian Ceremony makes one feel the connectedness of being part of a higher, transcendental love, in which one is everything and everything is one. I thought that these two  instances of being netted to one's fellow men, to places and to the world are extreme opposites. 
    With animation, in which everything shares the same mood and everything communicates, and likewise with Disneyland, Walt Disney reconciled the connectedness of technology, which is that of control, and the connectedness of love, which is that of awe; or letting go.  
    What else can one expect?

Transparent Walt Disney

     Walt Disney told his daughter Diane, that he was seen in different ways by different people at the Disney studio, being even  described as the bogeyman that tore up what others had put hard work on. Disney concludes: "Someone has to say yes or no and stick to it and that is my job." 

    

     What humbleness Disney describes his role with, and, yet, with what a transparent, straight forward concision, he transmitts the myriad phases to overcome before not just taking but sticking to a decision, as well as the enormity of full responsibility!

Primeval Disney

I've experienced with
the Brazilian  Indians, in a holy ritual of theirs, that  sacredness, connectedness and love are one and
the same. Maybe that is why the connectedness of everything in Disney animation, like the communication between organic and the inorganic; the world of objects and that of animals, plants and people,  transmits this immense love and warmth that touched the universal soul of humanity. Disney connectedness is an expression of the love which all creation is part of.
     Like a little toddler who,  in his state of poetry, talks to things as if they had the same life as himself, Walt Disney felt this life in everything, joining, in his animation, childhood,  primitiveness  and  essence.
   Walt Disney's intuition was his awareness of a transcendental, sacred love. 

Disney Delicious

     When Walt wanted a train of his own, he just wanted it large enough for him to sit on.
     Is it possible to imagine the greatness of his innocence and imagination, in this merging of realism (the train looked like a real train) and playfulness, in this ignoring of traditional size relationships, wanting to "ride" a train without being inside it?
It is simply delicious!

Disney Leadership

   
The difference between leadership and mere bossyness is like between that of wine and water. A mere boss imposes commands that are external to himself as well as to those under him, whereas a leader brings the best out of people because his authority springs from self-conviction and insight into others.
     While a boss wants things "his way", a leader shows "the way".

Disney Resourcefulness

Looking out of the window, I saw a bird's nest squeezed between the electrical wires of the street. As a lovely, tiny white bird entered it, I delighted in the resourcefulness of nature, or better, of life, in creating the most delicate, spiritually light habitat amidst black and ugly wires. Maybe that is why he said man is the most helpless animal. But he himself acted like those birds, building the mystery of fantasy with the exactness of electricity, as well as adapting to different situations continually, with the most alive resourcefulness, in the most creative way. Disney had the spontaneity of nature and the spirituality of art!

     

Disney Forever

I am in Rio for the week. I was moved when the maid of my brother (in whose house I am staying), a woman in her thirties, recognized Walt Disney from a pic that I have of his in his late 20's or so, : "Thanks to this man I had the happiest moments in my life", she said, to which I answered that we have a lot in common. She then added that one can only imagine how hard he worked to bring happiness to others!

Disney Courage

Recklessness is lack of fear. Courage is the overcoming of it.
Walt Disney, an example of courage, must have been intensely aware of fear
(he had nightmares into adulthood about the fear of being punished by his father)  as well as of
the dignity and coherence of overcoming it. 

Like when he, at fourteen,
held the arms of Elias, who was ready to beat him.

Disney Opportunity

     Walt Disney must have heard many times in his life that he was lucky, to the point that he claimed he didn't believe in luck ( Walt Disney quotes). 
Luck is generally defined as the meeting of opportunity with hard work.
Walt Disney didn't believe in luck because he himself made his opportunities.
It was him, for instance, that led Roy to check out of the hospital where

he was recovering from a relapse of TB, and who knows the reason Roy never had another relapse was, again, due to his brother's enthusiasm and to the meaning he gave their work?
     
       For, the number of good things that might have come out of the blue, for Disney, maybe a double or a triple of that number were setbacks.
    
  Walt Disney believed a man could make his life.
He certainly made his.

Disney Higher Love

   To believe that life has meaning is to believe in a higher human element behind facts and creation. This  higher merging of intelligence and love,  is the essence and possibility of happy endings. 
To believe in it  before the crudity, pain, suffering and transience of life reveals a profound certainty of such love. 

  Walt Disney, someone who brought so many happy endings to fruition, not just on film, but in reality, must have coexisted with such love.

Essential Disney

    Meaning can only be meaning as related to the human understanding or emotion. To believe that life has meaning is to believe in  that love is the source of creation. It is the essence and possibility of happy endings.  
To vow for happy endings, 
before the crudity of life,  pain and finiteness, reveals a profound 
certainty of such love.

In Walt Disney's case, a coexistence with it.