Why gloss over the dark side of movie maverick Walt Disney?
My 20-yEAR-OLD son adores Disney movies. Because he’s autistic, he doesn’t understand much of the dialogue, but he has memorised every word and all the songs and music from a dozen or more of his favourites.
And he can perform entire, fulllength films, strictly for his own amusement, from the opening fanfare to the final chords — rushing about the house, roaring and leaping and singing his head off.
It’s spectacular to watch, though we do have to hide the breakables when he’s building up to the climactic battle between Shere Khan and Baloo in Jungle Book.
Different films seem to apply to different moods. When he’s edgy and frustrated, it’s The Lion King. One Hundred And One Dalmatians warns us he’s feeling exuberant. Cinderella is for days when he’s sublimely happy.
David isn’t the only young man who has a complex and revealing relationship with the Disney classics. Owen Suskind, who is also autistic, is 23 and the subject of a fascinating documentary film released last Friday called Life, Animated.
Through home movies, cartoon sequences and interviews, Owen’s parents Ron and Cornelia explain how they helped their son to understand and express his emotions, using Disney characters.
The first time he managed to tell them he felt unhappy, when he was seven, he was talking to a hand-puppet of Iago, the parrot in Aladdin. It’s heartbreaking and inspirational at the same time.
The two-part biography Walt Disney (BBC2) opened by reminding us that the movie maverick from Chicago didn’t just make children’s films: he won more Oscars than any other producer, and reinvented the family holiday with his theme parks.
I think that’s probably underselling it. No one else in film history has created a body of work so pervasive. Everyone in the Western world is touched by a Disney movie at some point in their lives. All of us, surely, recognise some of his characters, and know some of the songs.
It was startling to realise how close his ambitions came to fizzling out. His brother, Roy, wanted him to chuck it in and become a vacuum cleaner salesman.
But elements of his trademark animation style were there from the start. One of his earliest films, in 1923, was a version of Alice In Wonderland, with a live little girl in the midst of the cartoons. It was a technique that would reach perfection 40 years later in Mary Poppins.
And he had a go at drawing Cinderella as early as 1922, with Cinders as a bob-haired flapper like Betty Boop. Those reels are forgotten, as is Walt’s first hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — a silent screen star who was poached by the distributor, leaving Disney close to bankruptcy.
The story sped up when it reached Snow White, the first full-length animated film, and in 1940 Fantasia — a concept so highbrow that astronomer Edwin Hubble and classical genius Igor Stravinsky contributed.
This section needed much more detail. It dispensed with Pinocchio, arguably his greatest film, in three minutes. The haste gave the whole production a superficial gloss: for instance, we learned that a breakdown in 1931 left him sobbing uncontrollably, but a quick holiday sorted him out.
Was Disney manic-depressive? Did he hide his slumps? Were there other breakdowns? This programme wasn’t saying. No doubt the great man was sceptical about psychological analysis, but that doesn’t mean that his biographers have to be.
Superficial analysis is the whole point of It Was Alright In The 1970s (C4), where young comics gather watch clips from ancient shows, and tut-tut at the shameful lack of political correctness.
Leonard Rossiter’s pathetic and desperate landlord, Rigsby in Rising Damp, came in for a lot of stick. Apparently he was racist and treated women badly. Anyone who loved the show when it was first broadcast will know that was the point, of course — and the joke was on Rigsby.
The young Turks sneering at Rossiter would do better to ask whether they’ve ever done anything half as good, or as funny, as the worst episode of Rising Damp. Of course they haven’t.