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.

Unpredictable Disney

       The unpredictable is what makes most of us armed against, turning life into a repetition, wanting to see in it more a confirmation of our plans than the bliss of novelty. 

     

       Walt Disney was unpredictable because he didn't fear this eternal quality of surprise that life can have. 
     His integrity was the nakedness of his own soul, before the nakedness of life itself.

Disney Creator

     Disney's ignoring scruples of tradition and style, limits of real and fake, for the sake of his creativity, reformulates the difference between what to respect and what to infringe, that is,   rendering profane and consecrating. 
     What could be a better account of the mystical than a power to recreate the limit between what to consecrate and what to use: the profane and the sacred?

Perfect Disney

     Roy P Disney said to N Gabler, at D23, that Walt only had two gears, obssession and indifference. Walt Disney was a perfectionist and perfectionism, in common with singlemindedness, requires  the capacity to give oneself fully to what one is doing. 
     It concerns that posture of no self-sparing, coherence and synchrony with what one is doing. 
 It concerns the unforgiving dignity of only giving one's best.

     With such intensity, could a perfeccionist have room for the gear of tepidness, or lukewarmness, or "let's take it out of the way" that most people do?

Disney Angels

    Walt Disney said that he'd been always used to live with competition, and that was how he knew to live. When one thinks that he was always bracing an ongoing and, many times, unscrupulous attempts at destruction, as he kept believing in the fantasy, laughter and dream, one realizes that, like his having a foot in the past and another in the future, Disney could look into evil's face, while being in synch with angels.

Walt Disney!

      Young Walt Disney, according to Gabler, having no real training for it, was
determined to become an animator, something for which a job did not
even seem to exist.
     To this and to what followed in Disney's life, one has to remember the existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's belief in the miraculous power of faith and his brilliant identification of purity to integrity:

"Purity of Heart is to will one Thing" - Kierkegaard.

Happy 2010: A Disney "10"!

The
world feels faster than ever, everyday with tons of information one
would like to learn, with no time. In this race, how can one look
inward, absorb what one sees, return it in the form of creativity? That
is where contemplative interaction appears as a Disney union of
extremes: thought with physical immersion, action with contemplation.
Let's wish 2010 along this line, will be the year of reconciliation!