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 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.

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 Everliving

     Once, talking about Walt Disney, a Disney fan told me that it takes the Walt Disney family and people like me to keep the spark alive, for only the baby boomers remember and miss him. He is right insofar as  the baby boomers' favorite "uncle", that figure of righteousness and family stability, is something of the Fifties and Sixties. In the days of the cold war, Americans needed more than ever to be reassured of basic American values. But my Disney fan friend is not right, when it comes to the essence of Walt Disney. And with this, I don't mean the company logo, or the ongoing Disney creations, but of a man whose discoveries and inventions keep on influencing the world of today, in education, art and in the very relationship with technology. The latter is, in a typical Disney way, more playful all the time. As for education and art, Walt Disney, with the storytelling rides of Disneyland, invented contemplative interaction, something that regards not just art, but a profound, elemental form of education (I will be talking about it in the following posts).

    
    Walt Disney is Everliving also as a man  whose integrity, courage and rebelliousness to convention are,  at this day and age, when people are looking more than ever for a sense of meaning, spiritual reassurance and the myriad ways of searching their true self, an existential and mystical inspiration.  

Disney Hand and Heart

          Disney's hands have often been remarked.
         I drew this from a photo that shows his whole being taking part in what he was expressing, the hands kind of sculpting the air, making even the atmosphere around him a part of his heart too!

Disney Grace

  Dumbo shows that work for work's sake is a mistake. When Dumbo is cast as a clown, he doesn't make it. On the other hand, real work, that for which one is gifted and special is liberating. In Dumbo it is literally liberating, from gravity and from the tyranny of people. Disney constantly approaches the theme of liberation. When Mr Banks is fired in Mary Poppins, he first appears to go mad, eventually expressing that madness as an overcoming of his old enslavement to duty and poetic "blindness".  One could say that Dumbo's flight is the liberation of grace, as much as Mr Banks' joy, singing and adopting the "ridiculous" "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". From then on, everything in the Banks family will be in harmony.  Snow White reaches a state of grace, when liberated from her fear in the forest. From then on, she is trusting forces that are beyond her, and nature starts conspiring in her favor. Liberation is overcoming an old self and resurrecting in a new one,  like it is literally shown in Pinocchio. One wonders how deeply Walt Disney experienced liberation, having to change and overcome himself so many times in his life; how often he was in grace!

Disney Animation

    

     Disney could make fantasy visible with the help of technology because he believed in fairy tales and in the ascendancy of life over everything. Disney animation is giving the autonomy of life to fantasy and the timelessness of fantasy to life.

Extreme Disney

      Walt Disney's courage was his intensity to make all of the moments of his life extreme moments, to give himself fully to life and to be disarmed to receive life: to respect life's integrity with his own integrity.

Disney Celebration

When one reflects on Walt Disney's life and personality, one is led to think that courage, after all, is integrity: it is the living of one's entirety, in the entirety of the moment one is living. It is this synchrony; this communion of soul and world, heart and moment, this celebration! It is not being split between considerations with the future and residues from the past.
    That is why Art Linkletter described Disney so well, when saying that he jumped the abyss and invented the wings on the way down.

    Courage is the necessary innocence, the disarmed nakedness Disney had for  being constantly born anew.  Synchrony, communion and celebration!

Disney Meaning

Walt Disney was a man of extremes. He was said to have one foot in the past and another in the future; he joined artifice to nature, technology to fantasy, unpredictability to planning, passion to control. This power of wedding extremes result from his ongoing quest of fighting finitude: asserting soul. Finitude, after all, is  drastic enough of a time limitation to not permit the coexistence of polarities, or to make such coexistence "illogic". Not with Disney. He knew how to overcome finitude and keep extremes reconciled in a meaningful whole. Orbiting around personality in story development, nothing in Disney animation is gratuitous, or "souless": The physical, visible side of it, is at one with the invisibility of pure making sense.

Walt Disney World, Life and Faith

 Animation is giving life. But it is also making fantasy visible. The suspension of logic and the laws of physics in animation is what permits everything in it to make sense, what turns this communion of fantasy and life into pure meaning.  Walt Disney gave visibility to meaning, to that which is abstract and beyond proof, that which   exists  as a function of faith. As a world of pure meaning, the world of animation coincides with that of faith. Disney animation is the visibility of faith, a metaphor of it. No wonder, it  has been said that for Walt Disney animation was a religion. Like a religion, it was the expression of his own faith.  Walt Disney gave life because he saw life as meaning, as faith.  His giving  lifeis his giving the joy, colors and freedom of faith.

Disney Secret

When Walt Disney answered to the question whether he was an optimist, that he was an optimal behaviorist,  he explained that he always acted to his optimal capacity. In other words, his optimism was conquered, it was the result of discipline. Disney's unyielding faith might as well be the result of discipline. The Disney secret to be always upbeat in the face of lack of money and of people's lack of  faith in his projects, certainly has  to do with dignity.

When Oscar Wilde said that in matters of importance it is style that counts he knew, as the aesthete that he was, that only style requires the necessary discipline to avoid unbecoming or undignified behavior. To loose faith, to be a pessimist, is, before anything else, unbecoming. It turns one into a whiner and a defeatist. There is nothing more undignified than to go on living and, yet, to see in life nothing more than predictions for defeat. One has to keep faith in order to be coherent with one's wish to continue living. In order to not be unbecoming. If this is a matter of coherence, it is also a matter of style: to keep one's dignity is beautiful.
Walt Disney was a lover of beauty; he was a perfectionist. Disney's unyielding faith corresponds to his demand of perfection from himself.