Doc shows Disney was a lot more than Uncle Walt
It’s difficult to overstate the impact Walter Elias Disney had on America.
He created indelible characters like Mickey Mouse and adapted others including Snow White. He mass-marketed the concept of vacation destinations like Disneyland.
He showed animation wasn’t just for kids’ cartoons. He expanded massively the concept of entertainment-related product merchandising.
“A lot of people have one good idea,” says Sarah Colt, who directed and produced “Walt Disney,” a four-hour “American Masters” airing Monday and Tuesday nights at 9 on PBS. “Walt Disney kept having more.”
Almost a half century after his death on Dec. 15, 1966, Disney has become a mythic figure himself, a complex concoction of the Uncle Walt he played on television, a brilliant creator, a doting father and a sometimes ruthless businessman, alongside whispers that he was quietly reactionary and anti-Semitic.
Colt says it was that mixture that drew her to his story after doing documentaries on towering figures like Henry Ford.
“I like trying to understand people,” Colt says. “What they do, why they do it.”
She ended up liking Disney “more than I liked Henry Ford,” she says. “He would have been fun to have gotten to know.”
This “American Masters” doesn’t overlook Disney’s uncomfortable comments about Jews in his writing, or the offensive stereotypes in the Disney film “Song of the South.”
“But from all the people we talked to and all the research we did,” says Colt, “I don’t think he was a racist or an anti-Semite. He was a man of his time.”
Neal Gabler, the critic, film historian and Disney biographer who consulted on the documentary, also doesn’t think Disney had those dark sides. Rather, he says, Disney’s bigger conflicts stemmed from his incredible success.
“He created Uncle Walt as a character he played to promote the movies and TV show,” says Gabler. “He always said he wasn’t Uncle Walt — that Uncle Walt didn’t smoke or drink, and he did.
“But he had to play him all the time, because it served the company. I’m just not sure it served him as a human being.”
Colt and Gabler both point out that as the Disney organization got larger, Walt increasingly had to take a management role, and even though his brother Roy handled much of the business side, it dragged Walt away from the creative arena.
“He was a terrible businessman, and he hated being a businessman,” says Gabler. “His favorite times were when he was working with the artists — and by the way, contrary to what he said, he could draw a darn good Mickey Mouse himself.”
The documentary details how Disney started out as one of the boys, working alongside the artists, but gradually became removed both physically and in terms of asserting himself as the boss.
Eventually his perfectionism created such demands on the artists’ time that many of them went on strike.
That strike changed Disney, say Gabler and Colt, though she also says he couldn’t have behaved any other way.
“He had a vision,” she says. “He had to get people to execute it. So he had to be tough. But at the same time, I don’t think he was pretending when he was Uncle Walt. That was another part of him.” In the end, says Colt, what best defines Disney is the way pictures like “Snow White” still resonate in popular culture.
“Consider his first five major films,” says Gabler — “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo” and “Bambi.”
“Every one of these is a film for adults. They were about maturity — how you grow up, how you become human, the price you pay, what you gain and what you give up. That’s what Disney’s best movies were about.
“For those films alone, you’d have to say he’s one of the top five American filmmakers of all time.”