Ruling Love

Genuine prayers concern gratefulness, rather than neediness. Disney’s speech on the occasion of Mickey’s twentieth birthday is a prayer (CD Disney Treasures- "The Story of Mickey Mouse", 13 October 1948). In it, a passionate Disney pays tribute to Mickey, to life, to the public that welcomed Mickey, to his team and to his own fight in the superhuman effort he had to make in “the early days” to bring the mouse to the eye of the public. As a merging of self-conviction, gratefulness and love of humanity, this speech is a great revelation of Disney’s soul. Self- referential and deferring at the same time, it expresses assertiveness in abandonment, it is confession and pronouncement, love-giving and decree-passing.

Everlasting Disney

I hope we don't loose sight of one thing- There was a man that
Had the Socratic power of bringing the best, talent wse, out of people.
Described his role as that of a bee taking ollen from place to place so as to make them flourish, a self-description very i much n the line of socrates' "midwife"
Had the guts to be free.
Could provide the flight of abandonment along with the discipline of order, a Dad like support and a maternal giving of fun.
Had the innocence for being carried away, and, yet, the hardship for an iron determination.
Was always self-renewing, like the sea.

Disney Spirit

Walt Disney spent his life fighting finitude, that is, asserting soul. Nothing in Disney animation is contingent, because it orbits around personality in story development. This establishing personality over the laws of physics, logic or mere randomness, is, again, a proclaiming of soul over matter. Disney was pledged to life in such a way that, like a pure spirit, he refused, in all senses, to accept its limits. His reinvention of life in animation, going hand in hand with his assertion of personality, represents life over reality: a metaphor of eternal life. It created Disney freedom, endlessness of possibility, humor and fantasy.

Absolute Giver

It seems to me that there are roughly two opposite ways of interpreting Walt Disney: either as someone who was controlling and, to a vast extent, able to manipulate the audience’s psyche, or someone who was driven to transmit the liberation of his own passion. The first case concerns a Disney that practically schemes to please people, and the second, someone who is, before anything else, measuring up to and carried away by himself. To put it in even rougher terms, the first case concerns a taker, or, at best, a trader, and the second, a giver. Considering Walt Disney an absolute giver, I wanted, in my text, to preserve the immediacy of passion, the distance of reflection, and the puerility of homage- paying. If this is ambitions, the reason is humble: I don't believe anything can be complete without the author's personal involvement with it.

Walt Disney's Birthday!

It is generally said that heroes look death in the eyes. Walt Disney looked life in the eyes, which is equally heroic. The courage he had to take turning point decisions for the sake of his integrity is as reassuring as a written proof of the existence of the soul. Disney gave up material security for the abstract value of a relationship with himself. He declares:
“I had made my declaration of Independence, I traded security for self- respect”(American Cinematographer 1941).

Disney Life

With his animation, Walt Disney gave fantasy an immense right: the placing of life over reality in the same way he placed personality over contingency, like soul over matter. Those that, like me, were lucky to be acquainted with the big screen by watching a Disney animated feature witnessed the disclosure of fantasy, for the first time, as this proclamation of life. What you saw wasn’t supposed to be real, but it was, nonetheless, alive. It was something in and of itself, in its own right to be. You could see it, hear it and feel it. Disney’s “illusion of life” was life regardless of, or above reality. Its believability, like that of all art, was its supremacy over the real world. The immediacy Disney gave fantasy meant, in the end, the establishing of life over everything, like a consecration of it. That is why it was sheer reassurance.

Disney's Audacity: The Stage and American Life

Beyond happy endings and uplifting story lines, Disney's coupling of technology to fantasy was the wedding of something totally ruled by finality, by a utilitarian purpose, to a reality that is pleasure in and of itself, it was the reconciling of temporality to poetry. That the world one lived in was so prodigal to grant the wonderful results of the association of these two polarities was not just a revelation, but Disney's greatest generosity. The results of it 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.

Disneyesque Obama

In his Victory Speech, Obama, with his amazing inspiration, summed up the American essence in the phrase "We Can!"
He'd mentioned that something that was practically impossible-his Victory- had happened, for everything is possible in America. Doesn't it ring a very familiar bell?
One of the most fascinating things in the U.S. is the constant interplay of two antagonistic forces: A rigid predictability that results from an almost fundamentalist observing of not just laws, but rules, vs. the freedom of an amazing creativity and tradition-breaking. If, one one hand, Americans go undone when someone breaks a simple traffic rule, even if such infraction does not, at the moment it is done, put anyone in risk-like doing a U turn in a practically empty street- they, on the other hand produce records of rebellious inventiveness (James Dean, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, of course) that change the world. If, on one hand, American life is rigorously rule-regulated, making unpredictability and unconventionality a big, de stabalizing threat for most,on the other hand this same life brings forth the most revolutionary humanitarian and cultural expressions, as well as technologic world-changing discoveries . It goes from Rock'n'Roll, fast food and Coca-Cola to the world web.
Real American leaders, I think, balance these two forces. At the same time they are brave innovators, they look for, they find and they establish essence, and what is essence if not that which is immutable, constant and, even though unconventional, it is, much more than traditional, archetypal? Like Walt Disney, Obama found it in freedom, as a fundamental American value. "We Can!" is the essence.

Disney Givingness

In the Magic Kingdom, technology materializes fiction into stage
and into characters for your participation: because of you. You experience
it as givingness, as a taking care of you, in the same goal you take care
of it by making it valid. You experience it as givingness, as you are also
granted the gift of giving. Disney’s givingness concerns the turning of
his visitors into givers themselves: the granting the gift of giving.
How much more generous can this be?

America for Disney

In the post war period, American art was making its mark with Abstract Expressionism, the style that ends with themes in order to value subjectivity, the inner state of the artist. The nuclear threat and its psychological consequences bequeathed to man a relative, unstable world. If the world turned relative to being destroyed by man himself, if time and space are relative themselves, everything that meant external reality, solid ground, became a question mark, rather than a certainty. To say that the only way, thus, to find stability or meaning was to turn inward is to declare that absoluteness switched from outside to within: to reassert the artistic quest for essence in one’s inner world.
For Disney, however, the external world, more than merely solid, was impregnated with meaning. Walt Disney’s disciplined optimism, coinciding, perhaps with what I am referring to as mysticism, would never allow the dismissal of external reality as something vulnerable to destruction, to a meaningless or “unhappy ending”. Things should turn out well. Disney’s patriotism was most likely his metaphorical “wishing upon a star”. America should settle all conflicts. It was America that served Disney’s idealism and not the other way around. The world should be forever there as ground and stage for the development of a better life, and much better, for that matter, with the help of American ingenuity (Disney’s idealism for Epcot).