Disney's Full Circle

The faithfulness of Disney to the primitive is also his faithfulness to himself, to that original and therefore unquestionable part of oneself that answers to body and to heart in one. A rediscovering of origin that, as the coming of a full circle, is mystical. It relates to Disney’s reaching an abstract dimension of matter through matter itself, that is, through the fantasy of visual expression in animation and of multi-sensory experience in Disneyland.
Faithfulness to origin involves the innocence to being carried away, an acceptance of and receptivity to pleasure. Simply put, it might concern an immense keenness of the five senses, a love of life. But its rediscovery as end or conclusion demands genius: a gargantuan humbleness for work.

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.