WALT DISNEY: Images of Innocence

THE mythmaker is a primitive. He molds his fantasies out of primordial impulses that are common to all men. In an age of reality, he is a rarity, for he celebrates an innocence that does not mix well with the times. Walt Disney was such a man, molding myths and spinning fantasies in which innocence always reigned. Literally billions of people responded out of some deeply atavistic well of recognition, and they lavished their gratitude on him. Soldiers carried the cartoon-figure emblems of his creations on their uniforms and their war planes. Kings and dictators saw them as symbols of some mysterious quality of the American character. David Low, the great British cartoonist, called Disney "the most significant figure in graphic arts since Leonardo." Harvard and Yale gave him honorary degrees in the same year (1938); on his shelves were more than 900 citations, including an unprecedented 30 Academy Awards.

When he died last week of cancer at 65, Disney was no longer simply the fundamental primitive imagist (the psychedelic merchants preempted that role), but a giant corporation whose vast assembly lines produced ever slicker products to dream by. Many of them, mercifully, will be forgotten, but the essential Disney creations, the cartoon comics, the full-length animated features such as Fantasia, Snow White, Bambi, Pinocchio, Cinderella--even that fantasy-filled 300 acres of dream puff called Disneyland--will remain as monumental components of American culture.

It was in the early days of film animation--1928--that Disney labored and brought forth his Mouse. Mickey was the first situation comic: saucereared, squeak-voiced (it was Disney's voice on the early sound tracks), perfectly sensible, always cheerful, and eternally scampering in and out of trouble. He and the rest of the Disney bestiary were instantaneous hits with audiences primarily because they were anthropomorphic, hilarious because they were so incongruous. The loose-limbed, dim-witted dog Pluto was an unequal match for a piece of flypaper. Goofy was also a dog, but with more human attributes, who introduced each of his maundering reflections with a delicate hiccup. He starred in a series of "how to" films in which he lamentably embarked on the study of every sport from football to horseback riding. After Mickey, the most famous character was, of course, that choleric, put-upon, slap-stuck Donald Duck, easily the most ridiculously funny fellow ever put on film.

In The Three Little Pigs (1933), Disney foreshadowed the work of his full-length films. Crisp in color, jaunty in jingly music (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?), the movie was also a significant departure in its simply stated moral theme. In Snow White, Disney and his staff met the challenge of creating believable characters. Each of the seven dwarfs, from sober-sided Doc to dim-bulb Dopey, had a distinct personality. In Cinderella, a handful of Disney creations nearly stole the show: the bloodthirsty but fatuous cat Lucifer, and the nimble mice, Jaq and Gus-Gus. Millions of children the world over grew up convinced that Disney wrote as well as drew such tales as The Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. And there are grown men and women today who, recalling Fantasia, cannot hear the Dance of the Hours without visualizing the delicate prancing of Disney hippos and elephants, or The Sorcerer's Apprentice without seeing Mickey Mouse trying to dam the flood wrought by a many-splintered broom, or A Night on Bald Mountain without shuddering at Disney's crackling thunderbolts and the satanic wingspread darkening a tumultuous sky.

Disney always maintained that he made films not for children but for "honest adults." He was pleased when the enormously successful Disneyland was dubbed "Disney's Golden Cornfield," and said defiantly, "We're selling corn. And I like corn." Though most of his later "real-life" nature movies--The Living Desert, Beaver Valley, Water Birds--were imaginative documentary films, some critics protested that he spoiled them with gimmicks. And though historical pictures like Davey Crockett were also big hits, Disney was again criticized for sugar-coating his history.

The basic concern of the critics was always that Walt Disney refused to see life in the raw, to accept the end of innocence. He came from the Midwes--born in Chicago, reared there and in Missouri--and stubbornly adhered to the idea that wickedness was no subject for entertainment. In his work, children and animals were naturally good; nature, at least in his animated films, was not so red in tooth and claw as it was cuddly in fur and paw.

In the literature ostensibly created for children--Huck Finn, Grimm's fairy tales--fantasy was mixed with social satire and cruelty beyond the comprehension of innocent minds. Mark Twain and Grimm succeeded by stressing the differences between the child's and the adult's world. Disney perhaps would have been incapable of tackling such subjects without diminishing in some measure--as he did with Mary Poppins--their hard bite of inner reality. He stressed the sameness of the two worlds, ignored or abolished the differences, reconciled the generations. If at times the results were mawkish, Disney scarcely gave it a thought. He saw his own role as the fantasist animating the warm dreams that men and children refuse to let die.

After Disney died last week, thousands of visitors poured through the gates of Disneyland as usual to drink in the fantasies that he had manufactured for them. Some went galumphing through the sparkling air atop elephants, others drifted down the Congo, past the snapping jaws of crocodiles and the whalelike surfacing of rhinos. Birds and flowers sang in one enchanted room; a land-fast 80-ft. rocket took off for the moon in simulated flight. Yet in all the gaiety and glare, in the whomp of bands and the bray of a calliope, only one elegiac sign reminded pleasure seekers that the man was no more who created this fairyland: the flag was at half-staff.

Three thousand miles to the east, long lines of moviegoers formed along the 50th Street side of Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall, prepared to stand in numbing patience as long as necessary to see his latest film, Follow Me, Boys. Perhaps later there will be a special monument, but now not even a meditative ceremony--just the show going on. Disney was dead, but not his vision of innocence, nor the dreams he made.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.