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).

Disney Sharing

In the speech Walt Disney made on the occasion of Mickey's twentieth birthday, Mickey, among many things, also expresses the natural merging of the private and the public in Disney, when the latter, with humbleness, exposes his feelings, almost apologetically justifying his affection for his creature on a emotional and at the same time professional level: “The life and ventures of Mickey Mouse have been closely bound up with my own personal and professional life. It is understandable that I should have sentimental attachment for the little personage who played so big a part in the course of Disney productions.” In the Mouse, Disney’s intimacy is at one with Disney’s sharingness.

Disney Dignity

Disneyland resulted from the dignity of believing that we are worthy of paradise. No wonder, Sergei Eisenstein, in commenting the Silly Symphonies, praised the purity and brightness of Disney’s soul, and asserted that Disney was beyond good and evil. (Sergei Eisenstein Walt Disney- Circe).
Disney’s innocence distilled the American search for material heaven, that is, the all American impunity to the spirit/matter dualism of religion in general and of much of the philosophical tradition that molds and responds to the guilt-stricken human condition. In Disney, innocence, freedom and daring were one and the same.

Disney Heartbeat

The essence of original Disney animation, the power all its other qualities spring from reverts almost literally to Walt’s compulsive giving of life. It is expressed as a sharing of indiscriminating life-of life, therefore, rendered maternally giving- by both organic and inorganic, human and animal, equal and fantastic elements. In early shorts, for instance, animate and inanimate being were given physically human characteristics in responding to action, as if the physical human element was the all- encompassing heartbeat. A train locomotive could have eyes and mouth, a wiener of a hotdog could be spanked on "its" butt. In the feature films, on the other hand, inanimate matter didn’t have to act human, as long as it made sense to the story line. Snow White’s castle, or the well she sings to, or any other “thing” she comes across, for example, didn’t have eyes or arms, it just fit the story. What was physically human became just emotionally human. In the beginning, indiscrimination had a physically anthropomorphic expression, developing, eventually, to the more abstract dimension of story meaning. In both cases though, this sameness of heartbeat is an all-pervading sweetness, all-inclusive warmth. Realizing or not, the audience felt within love when watching it.

Disney Dynamism

The constant motion of the image above tries to pay homage to Walt Disney's ongoing creativity.It alludes to Disney's impersonating, giving of life and giving of identity. Disney and nature are reflexes of each other. He is in the heart of life. In continuous generosity.
When Walt Disney merged participation with spectatorship in Disneyland, participation meant physical presence, along with visual appreciation, or with contemplation. Disney classical rides extended audience's participation to action. Since 2003, with Mission: Space, Walt Disney World has been offering an unprecedented harmony between movement and wonder. In the ride Mission: Space, at WDW, participation encompasses emotion, visceral feeling and the pure mind sense of liberation. More than any other interaction, such exchange, involving not just concentration, but compliance and surrender, is a purgative, upgrading exchange with artifice. Unprecedented as it is though, it obliges Walt Disney's typical reaching for and granting the experience of awe. It also obliges Disney's wedding of extremes that are apparently irreconcilable: the feeling of glory through guts and sight, that is, through physical dynamism and aesthetic appreciation. (The second paragraph is from the book "From Mars to Marceline")

A Streak of Existentialism

In my texts, I wanted to preserve the immediacy of passion, the distance of reflection, and the puerility of homage paying. Whether this is ambitious or not, the reason is humble: I don’t believe anything can be complete if the author of it excludes, in cold impartiality, personal involvement with his subject.
I therefore interweave objective considerations about Disney creativity, not just with what I see as related topics in the technological, psychological and mystical aspects of life, but with what it was for me. The impact it had on decisive moments of my life was definitive, culminating with the revelation of Walt Disney’s life through the reading of his biographies. After all, whether the writer is Bob Thomas or Marc Eliot, none can neither evade nor embellish enough what is so apparent: Disney’s authenticity

Giving Life

In joining extremes, the spontaneity Disney handled fake and real alike, animals and robots, nature and technology, suggests his genius for animation as a compulsive giving of life. Only with such generosity, creativity can be so indiscriminate as to render artifice and nature spontaneous extensions of each other.

The faithfulness of Disney to the primitive, sensorial element is also his faithfulness to himself, to that original and therefore unquestionable part of oneself that, simultaneously, answers to body and to heart. 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,his reaching fantasy through visual expression in animation and through multi-sensory experience in Disneyland.

Man on Wire: A Disneyesque Tour de Force

When Phillippe Petit indignantly answered the police: "there is no why I did this, that is the beauty of it, there is no why!" He was, more than right, an inspiration. What he did had no reason and no function, it was JUST beautiful!
Functionality is generally profane to the poetic eye. It concerns finitude’s compromising of integrity: something is functional because it is pledged to perform a task in a moment ahead of itself: because of its enslavement.
What Phillippe Petit did was pure freedom: he transgressed the law, he even transgressed the security of the Twin Towers to make them magic, giving people a leap of sheer, non utilitarian, beauty.Transgressing the law for pure beauty is the turning of reality into magic. The spirit of it is expressed by Walt Disney's saying:
"It is kind of fun to do the impossible".

Petit, going against all circumstances, security and law, rendered the towers immortal, not in sorrow, like the lowest of blows did, but in beauty. In lightness and joy. Watching him makes one think there is hope, good is yet to prevail, as it already prevailed in heaven, for those who were murdered in the towers. Watching Petit makes one reminisce of a justice that, winged and miraculous, does exist, and will take place.

A Dreamer, a Doer, a Chosen one

Walt Disney asserted he was not a mystic: he did not believe in a lucky star. The mystical dimension I am attributing to him, however, does not relate to mere superstition or belief in luck, but to an individualism of such profundity to discover mission fulfillment in one’s personal life, that is, to discover, in one’s action, the response to meaning, to something that transcends:
“If you live right, things happen right”.
(From the book "From Mars to Marceline"

Intensity

The subtle line between fall and flight
Self-destruction and Freedom,
Courage and Recklessness,
Abandon and Control,
When abyss and sky become one,
Like in Mission: Space,
Like Walt Disney's living Life.