PBS Disney doc could have delved deeper
Four-hour PBS exercise in blind praise offers little critical insight
Snow White, having munched on the wicked queen’s poisoned apple, falls into a coma. She appears to be dead and her friends, the dwarfs, mourn her. As they line up beside her body, huge tears tumble down the faces of Sneezy, Grumpy and the rest. They don’t yet know she can be awakened by a prince’s kiss.
That clip from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the high point of a four-hour documentary, Walt Disney, to appear this month on the PBS network’s flagship series, American Experience. Those who consider Walt Disney (1901-1966) a major artist and a giant in cultural history won’t be disappointed by this lengthy film. Producer-director Sarah Colt and writer Mark Zwonitzer fall happily into hyperbole, leaving no praise unspoken.
Several experts on Disney’s life appear through the four hours. The most talkative is Neal Gabler, who in 2006 wrote an adoring 851-page biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Gabler is overimpressed by everything that happened in Disney’s life — the hardship he faced in childhood, the depression he endured when early projects failed, the wise choices he made, the brilliance of the way he turned failure into success, the eventual size of his worldwide audience.
Snow White, produced in 1937, was a leap into the dark for Disney. After years making short cartoons, he risked a reputation built on Mickey Mouse by making the first full-length animated movie. No one knew whether the world would accept it. His staff members were dubious. The Bank of America, his financial backer, was worried.
American Experience has become a kind of a ceremonial occasion, a time for tributes and little else. The Hollywood premiere of Snow White turned out to be the first large-scale Disney success. When the dwarfs cried, the audience cried. The grosses broke records.
On PBS, journalist Ron Suskind calls Snow White “art” because Disney moved the audiences to tears. It might be more accurate to say he manipulated them.
The documentary praises Disney’s qualities as a storyteller. Certainly he ingeniously used new film techniques. But for content he depended on the books of a dozen writers, from the Brothers Grimm (Snow White) to Carlo Collodi (Pinocchio), from P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins) to Joel Chandler Harris (Song of the South).
In dealing with Disney the man, the documentary says he was unhappy in youth, yearned to be “a somebody” and imposed himself on the audience through hard work and clever strategy. There was one period in childhood he enjoyed, the four years his family spent in Marceline, Mo.
The comments PBS provides on Disney’s work and life are mostly from biographers, journalists and a few animators. No one described as a friend takes part. Family is represented by a son-inlaw’s brief remarks. Apparently he was an ungenerous boss, reluctant to praise but willing to punish.
Disney insisted that all his employees call him Walt, but he still imposed a class system. High-class workers received many perks (such as the use of the company gym) while the peasants at the bottom (mostly women) were expected to be happy with meagre salaries.
In 1941, Disney was enraged when his 1,200 employees joined a union and half the animators went on strike. He called the union members communists, and repeated that charge to the House Un-American Activities Committee, becoming briefly a part of senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade.
His ability to predict a movie’s effect on the public apparently didn’t extend to African-Americans.
In 1946 he stumbled badly by adapting Joel Chandler Harris’s stories about life on a Georgia plantation in the Reconstruction era. The film, Song of the South, ingeniously combined animation with live action but got everything else wrong. At its centre, Uncle Remus, a stereotyped former slave, tells stories of animals, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear, to children. Critics considered Uncle Remus offensive and Disney’s version of Reconstruction condescending. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found it racist. Disney claimed communists were behind that fuss too, but the film never recovered.
PBS follows the story to Disneyland and Disney World. Like everything else Disney produced, these amusement parks are judged quite wonderful.
PBS will air its Walt Disney series Sept. 14 and 15.