Disney Disrobed

...his television shows currently are seen by more than 100,000,000 persons each year...

...and Disneyland, his supreme creation, drew 6,700,000 customers in 1966 alone...

...In a sense, then, Disney and the people who made him their Uncle Walt are placed in the balance in this book...

...To supplement and augment his own belief that the comfortable world which evolved from this man was neither wonderful nor uplifting, but rather frightening and reductive, Schickel has assembled a fairly com-r plete dossier of opinion, past and present...

...Reviewed by Chandler Brossard It is my conviction that nearly all education in the schools is a fraud and is also dangerous...

...and in the end, he, and they, are found lacking...

...Bringing all these disciplines to bear in a 384-page book that sets out to prove Walt Disney was not all his publicists blew him up to be may seem in many respects like kicking a dead mouse...

...In his description of the efficient, beautifully planned, clean, and well-groomed amusement park, there is, as throughout the book, a keen sense of personal loss, a lament that the result could not have been a nobler creation of the human spirit from a man who has influenced his fellow Americans so much...

...The first movie he saw was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs...

...In this most childlike of pur mass communicators I see what is most childish and therefore most dangerous in all of us who were his fellow Americans...

...Random House...

...It is therefore urgent and timely to search out the roots and the product of Walt Disney, and this Schickel has set out to do with a vengeance...

...This leaves the early, formative years of Disney's life in some shadow, since the book lacks the personal detail of family recollection...

...Despite his understanding stance, Schickel is disappointed in his subject, and in the environment which molded him...

...To buttress the argument, there are bundles of statistics, extremely well-researched reportage, and a clutch of quotations on economic and sociological matters extending from Karl Men-ninger to Thorstein Veblen...

...And while film critics endlessly analyze the significance of Bonnie and Clyde and the importance of Blow Up, & substantial portion of the American public continues to flock to the sweetness and sentiment of a world populated by cuddly animals and adorable children...

...More particularly, Disney was, for Schickel, the supreme example of "the Midwestern go-getter," a man of humble and undistinguished origins, possessed of limited intellectual and artistic abilities, who was able to succeed in the great American capitalistic dream by virtue of his compulsion for order, his love of technological advances, his unfailing instinct for the right moment, and his unfailing identification with the illusions and nostalgia of his fellow "ordinary" citizens...

...These range from the stuff-and-non-sense of Mortimer Adler's statement that Disney's work "reaches greatness, a degree of perfection in its field which surpasses our best critical capacity to analyze...

...Like so many of us, Schickel grew up in the Walt Disney world...

...And as he traces Disney's progress from the crude energy of those first Mickey Mouse cartoons to the crest of the Disney touch in Pinocchio to the overslick and rigidly patterned formulas of the later works, he sees the promise of artistic creativity degenerate into a merely tremendous capitalistic success story...

...For Disney as a creative artist is now as abruptly dismissed as he once was eagerly embraced by serious critics...

...It also leads Schickel into a great many suppositions about what may have been going on inside Disney as a young man, and it offers him a chance to make some sweeping comments on the nature of Midwest rural and country town life as it shaped the Disney character...

...Among the benefits of these later chapters are highly readable explanations of the intricacies of animation, lucid accounts of Disney's business methods (including the paternalistic attitude which led to the bitter strike by employes in 1941), excellent critical summaries of the Disney films, and, in the book's best section, a truly described and superbly analyzed look at the Anaheim Mecca, Disneyland...

...his book is unauthorized and unapproved as far as the Disney organization is concerned...

...Hiroshima Aftermath Death in Life, by Robert Jay Lif-ton...

...Yet as Schickel consistently and validly reminds us, few men in film have had more impact or a larger audience than Walt Disney...

...to a scathing put-down by librarian Frances Clarke Sayers who found "genuine feeling ignored, the imagination of children bludgeoned with mediocrity, and much of it overcast by vulgarity...

...Fraud in that the same hallucinated "history" and "viewpoints"—the wrong data and the wrong evaluations—are taught over...

...Schickel had to reconstruct Disney's life and work mostly from the public record...

...594 pp...

...Reviewed by Richard Christiansen "Most important, I have sought —and believe 1 have found—in the life and works of Walt Disney a microcosm embodying a good deal of the spirit of our times, including a good many things that disquiet me as a citizen of those times and of the future they portend...

...Foreword by Richard Schickel to The Disney Version It is Richard Schickel's thesis in this masterfully organized and presented book that Walt Disney was a personification of the many virtues and the considerable vices of the American character...

...But as Disney moves away from his family life in Kansas and into his career in Los Angeles, Schickel is able to draw on more specific records, and the facts and theorizing become livelier and much less fuzzy...

...He won more Academy Awards (thirty) than any other person...