Disney Paradise

The world in the animation Walt Disney brought to fruition, is, in one goal, an extension of thought and body, like in the world of toddlerhood, in which both are one, and like in what should be "paradise".

Disney's Whisps of Being

Drawing by Eleonora Duvivier 

Sergei Eiseinstein asserted that Disney seemed to know all about feelings. He reached the essence. He reached that world in which everything is each and each is everything. The one soul of creation, as well as the individuality of each's soul. THe world of Disney is animated not just because it moves, but because, in it, things, sceneries, and beings, in preserving their individual soul, equally partake of the all-encompassing "änima". As if from the dawn of Being, Disney gave shape to his own created beings!

(Disneyssence)

Disney's Essence

Disney's essence is Disney's oneness with creation,
Disney's Nirvana is Disney's surrender to his own heart,
Disney's heart is Disney's absolution,
Disney's absolution is Disney's inspiration,
Disney's inspiration is the Will of God for
Disney

(Drawing by Eleonora Duvivier)

Intense Walt Disney

   Walt Disney was reported to be always in the grip of passion. Hegel, the German Philosopher, as much as a rationalist as one could ever be, asserted that great things are always done with passion.  I guess it was through and with passion that Hegel gave rationality a divine status. And of course, it was also through and with passion that Walt Disney gave fantasy the truth of spirit.









 (Sketch of Walt Disney by Eleonora Duvivier)

Disney Birthday

    One of the nice things about being a Disney fan, with friends like one on FB, is that one gets birthday cards and wishes from all the Disney character's family. And when that was such a pungent reality at the beginning of one's childhood, that works like a soothing and healing root throughout one's life, it makes one's birthday, literally and metaphorically "magic". It reverts you to that genuine  part of your being that happens also to be your foundation, as if cradling and reasserting it. I will thus post this lovely mandala that one of these friends made for me!

(image by Mark Vitek)

Disney Inspiration

     As always, Walt was the simplest and the most complex, when saying: "When you believe in something, believe it all the way, implicity and unquestionably"

     One cannot "make" oneself believe in this way,

     One cannot simply pick something in which to believe,

     One cannot force oneself to believe in anything,

     One cannot have such fervor just on advice,

For, to believe at all takes intuition,

To believe so strongly requires single mindedness,

To believe unquestionably involves purity,

To believe implicitly (non verbally ) involves integrity, and, finally,

To have all these qualities results from imperative inspiration!

-Disneyssence- (drawing by Eleonora Duvivier)

Disney America

 Walt Disney always acted on ideals,

before any self- profit;

 Walt Disney always look for challenges, 

rather than repeat what was successful;

Walt Disney always in search of outdoing himself, 

and convince others of it;

Walt Disney always asserted that if they didn't grow 

artistically, 

they would begin to die...

Walt Disney imparted a sense of cause, rather than just

business....

That someone so self-sacrificing, 

with such a love of work,

with no shadow of self-sparing, 

and having such an inflexible

faith,  should so gloriously succeed in this country,

 is a proof 

not just of his worth, but of America's.   (Disneyssence)

Disney Encounter

     Disneyland is totally adictive. I thought I was never going back to a Disney park, because of the lines that keep getting bigger, but even if all one cares to do is to hang out on Main St, one is still inside that bubble of fiction that allows one to be in touch with oneself and with one's childhood.... I guess it is because the greatest welcoming one can have from the world is, paradoxically, to be allowed to be with oneself; with one's inner child.

Disney Wisdom

     Walt Disney understood that life was fight and fun, laugh and determination, freedom and leadership, and that reaching fantasy is not an escape, but a victory, an overcoming of reality.
"Disneyssence"

Disney Happy Ending

   Fernando Pessoa had the poetic and unabashed optimism to assert: “Everything ends well. If things are not well, it’s because it is not the end yet. “  Along these lines death is  an ending well, and the other world a possible  paradise, which it should be. Not as vague and equation like as Pessoa, Disney had enough innocence to specify this ending- well as the communion of love, faith and fantasy. Since love, faith and fantasy are equally transcendent, a Disney happy ending, like that of Pessoa’s, is beyond chronology: before having or not to happen, it is true in its very conception, self sufficiently true.

Disney Overcoming of Reality

With animation, Walt Disney turned movement, which is the most primary and immediate reality, (lets say, it's the "seed" of all reality) into fantasy; Into the very overcoming and liberation of reality itself. While movement, in reality, is pragmatic, (always in function of a determinate goal), in animation it is valid in itself; while in reality it is always means to an end, in animation, like in dance, it is meaning, or story's expression.
Disneyssence

Disney Advice

"The more you are like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique." - Walt Disney 
It's kind of cute the way he defines authenticity, as "being like oneself", rather than the more usual "being oneself". It makes it as something to be attainable and something that admits of degrees "the more you... the less you...", but as something to be attained. He knew it, because he did it!
Disneyssence
Drawing by Eleonora Duvivier

Disney Coherence

Freedom from the laws of reality in the language of animation fulfills not just the inexorability of fiction lines, but the transcending of personality. Story events and personality, in Disney animation, respond to and reflect each other, so that the surrounding world is nothing more than the scenery, the meant-to-be stage for this exchange to happen.
   The unfolding of Disney animation therefore has the power of sheer coherence in turning action into magic tricks, plot into designation, personality into soul.
Disneyssence

Disney Freedom

                         


                            In the article Growing Pains, Disney expresses his freedom, identifying
                                                 ambition and humbleness:
                         

                                                 “That is what I like about this business, the certainty that there
                                                  is always something bigger and more exciting just around
                                                  the bend,  and the uncertainty of everything else".

                                                                                                        

Disney and Motherhood

To be a mother is to be able to not infringe the most difficult contract, the one mothers have signed, knowing or not, with divinity: To know up to what point a child is theirs, and up to what point it is God's alone. As for the sweetness, roundness and the cuteness which express maternal love, no one better than Walt Disney to know and show it! Being a real, traditional and even a conservative man, did not get in the way of Walt's having this wonderful feminine side, which, if not repressed, is the one to make a real man complete! Thank you Walt Disney, for also helping all mothers in teaching and ingraining the real ethical values in their children

Walt Disney

     It all started with a man, but this man was so humble, so capable of being at one with everything he created, had such a immense heart, and was so grateful, that he declared that " it all started with a mouse...." Disneyssence

Disney Liberation

Walt Disney said that laughter is the best American export, and I think it is because, Joy springs from liberation; rationality from rules;

 Joy is limitless, rationality is exactness;

Joy believes, 

rationality wants to prove,

Joy overflows,

while rationality dries. 

Joy is oneness;

 rationality is relativizing. 

Joy gives thanks; rationality fends for survival. 

Joy springs from excellence; rationality from debt. 

Joy is faith; rationality just control. 

Joy is license from God; rationality is the tree of knowledge. 

While rationality bites, joy is absolution.

Disney Absolution

To be optimist is to surrender, rather than ambitiously predict; it is to render to God what is really God's; the future; it is the humbleness, it is the courage of welcoming life, rather than the pretentious to be a smart ass about it; it is, ultimately, owning up entirely to oneself, to the moment, to "what is in front of you" (as Arthur Rubinstein referred to live)

To be a "behavioral optimist",
like Walt Disney was, is to be absolved.

Disneyssence

Disney Joy

Joy is innocence; rationality is skeptical. Joy is limitless, rationality is exactness. Joy is faith, rationality is proving. Joy overflows,while rationality dries. Joy is oneness; rationality is relativizing. Joy gives thanks; rationality fends for survival. Joy springs from excellence; rationality from debt. Joy is faith; rationality just control. Joy is license from God; rationality is the tree of knowledge. While rationality bites, joy is absolution.


     Walt Disney was a fighter from joy, of joy and for joy

(Disneyssence)

Disney "License to Touch"

It has been smartly remarked that in the early Mickey cartoons there was a passionate investigation of the body (tweaking ears, kicking butts etc) and that Mickey thus gave the viewer "the license to touch". Physicality is indeed a fundamental dimension of Disney animation, most characters of which, in their cuteness, or endearingness, arouse not just affection, but the wish to cuddle with them. Frank and Ollie remark on how essential it was that Walt had been a primitive farm boy. In fact, it was Walt's beautiful primitivism, his identifying so directly with nature, the main factor underlying this amazing, affectionate, humorist and thoroughly adorable physicality. 

Disney Entertainment

     The essence of Disney entertainment is ultimateness. More than an amusement park, the Magic Kingdom is a pilgrimage like place, as long as it is able to grant, in its role-assigning power, the facing of ultimateness, the right to believe on purpose, either with or without the help of sensory illusion. Such right coincides, of course, with the ability to receive Walt Disney's most generous gift: the gift of givingness. For, to face ultimateness in what you see, is to give it final validity, to turn it into a law.
    When you see Alice in the parks, for instance, she isn't just a fiction, a "fooling", but the command to be seen as the definitive Alice, the command, that is, to give her ultimate validity.

Charismatic Disney

     Leadership is motivating, whereas authority is brainwashing. Leadership serves a cause, authority serves the self. Leadership is altruistic, authority is egoistic; leadership springs from courage, authority from repressed fear. Leadership is self-overcoming; but authority is just self-assertion. Leadership is usurping; authority is stifling. Leadership comes from charisma, authority from imposing, and,while authority is repressive, leadership is inspiring. Authority wants to control, Leadership to excel. Authority is limitation, leadership is mystical. 

Natives and Disney

     Why do I love Walt Disney and the Natives? The reasons in common, may be these: they love nature; in their primitivism, they do reach the religious essence; they honor another reality, they see the whole creation permeated with equal life, they identify with animals, they open doors to wonderful worlds.... What else? Disney was reported to not want to make a garden in one of his houses, in order to let nature wild, which he preferred. One more thing: they look at artifice with delight and poetry... Have you seen an Indian at the computer? It's beautiful, he kinds of communes with it, as if diving in the screen, and handles it with respect and familiarity... Like Walt handled technology as well.....

Transcendent Disney

     Through Mickey, Disney expresses full awareness of his own attuning to transcendence, and, in finding a common essence between what lays hidden in every human being and Mickey himself, Disney also gives a beautiful description of innocence. In the article "The Cartoon's contribution to Children", he says of Mickey:
"... we see to it that nothing ever happens that will cure his faith in the transcendent destiny of one Mickey Mouse" and further: " ... the Mickey audience is made up of parts of people, of that deathless, precious, ageless, absolutely primitive remnant of something in every world wracked human being which makes us play with children's toys and laugh without self-consciousness at silly things, sing in bathtubs and dream and believe that our babies are uniquely beautiful. You know... the Mickey in us".

Disney Soul

Disney made a hero out of the most insignificant, unwanted mammal. But Mickey's real heroism is his becoming a someone, his being feelings and not just lines, personality and not only visual shape. Mickey is the transformation of what was just animated, drawn lines, into heart, of physical movement into emotion: Mickey's real heroism is Disney's assertion of soul.

Disney Perfectionism

Perfectionism is integrity: the drive to reflect one's soul on what one does.
It is coherence: the wish to make the best, if one is making something at all. 
It is dignity: the effort to give the best of oneself
It is courage: the absence of self-sparing
It is mystical: the obliging of wholeness and impeccability. Like Jesus said: "Ask to be perfect, knock, and the door shall be open"
Walt Disney was always knocking, and having the door opened. That's why we have gems like "Snow White".... (Disneyssence

Disney Purity

      In the movie clip "How Walt Disney's Cartoons are Made", one can see  young Walt introducing the seven dwarfs of Snow White.
     The pride and care he describes them with transmits the innocence of a boy talking about his favorite toy, but the awe of a creator in love with his universe. The respect with which Disney holds each dwarf, pushing it to the front, as he characterizes it, his touching honesty in doing so, expresses an integrity as immaculate as that of Snow White.
       Most remarkable is how, at the two last dwarfs, he introduces Grumpy by skipping Dopey, so as to save Dopey to the very end, like a kid that keeps the “treat” for dessert.
     "And last but not least”, Disney says of Dopey,  proceeding:  "He is nice” and, looking at the camera, concludes: “ but sort of silly”.
     The smile that accompanies these last four words, contrasting with the concentration Disney characterizes the other dwarfs, like a happy-ending to the whole introduction, is finally relaxation and self-satisfaction.
     It turns the restrictiveness of “but sort of silly” into a blessing.

Disney 2012 !

Let's believe in 2012!
To make believe is to pretend one believes, To believe on purpose is to make oneself believe, To make believe is to forget rationality, to believe on purpose is to overcome it, to make believe is to buy into, to believe on purpose is to edify, to make believe is to fantasize, to believe on purpose is to discover a deeper reality, to make believe is whimsical, to believe on purpose is redeeming, to make believe is the purity of childhood, to believe on purpose is the conquest of a rebirth! Walt Disney made believe and believed on purpose!
(Disneyssence)