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THE MOUSE
Gulliver Mickey.
In 1938, when the aestheticians of the film had gathered Walt Disney and his animated anthropomorphs to their bosoms, a critic wrote: "If Charlie Chaplin's pathetic 'little guy' was the symbol of the last 20 years of social confusion, Walt Disney's animated fables may well supply the key to our progress during the next 20 years." How right he was! Given the prevailing aesthetic of movies, that motion was more important than drama or character (a fundamentally anti-humanist notion), Mickey and friends were the answer to a prayer. Easily integrating color and sound (two factors widely believed to be anti-cinematic ) into work in which pantomime remained supreme and dialogue minimal, Disney was regarded as a movie craftsman the equal of Griffith or Eisenstein. Mickey, optimistic, a direct-actionist who opposed violence with violence, fighting bravely for self and ideals in a way heartily approved by a leftist-oriented nation, was more popular than any living comedian of the time. His creator gave out interviews extolling the virtues of experiment and decrying commercialism.
Alas for hopes and ideals! Disney became big business, his Mouse shrank in importance as the studio bent its best efforts to the elaborate and curiously flat feature-length retellings of popular childhood stories (Snow White, Pinocchio,
Bambi), then to the quasi-educational true-life adventures, finally to those dismal live-action comedies to which the entire family may safely repair.
The end of the Disney road, a promising one when it began in 1928, is Disneyland, that sterilized carnival which, lacking the lusty amusements of the old-fashioned midway, pretends educational value in order to painlessly extract money from parents gripped by the sentimental notion that education (and reality) must be sugar-coated for the child's benefit. The first Disney cartoons would today be judged too violent for young eyes. Intended as a reflection of a world in a state of upheaval, their exuberant ferocity reflected a delightfully savage comedic sense not unlike that demonstrated in some of the more popular childhood games.
When Disney ceased to appeal directly to the child's innocent love of violent action (and thereby to the child in all of u"s) and started pandering to the adult's notions of what a child should like, he lost his claim to an artist's stature. The trouble was that in the first flush of his enormous popularity he swept all comic competition before him and became the sole trustee of the low-comedy tradition. It is this which he sold out in the children's market — bringing to an end a great, but short-lived, screen tradition.
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