Walt Disney and the roots of children's popular culture

Introducing a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly some time ago, Susan Willis commented on the dearth of “serious” criticism of the Disney empire and predicted that “the floodgate of Disney criticism is about to open” (2). Her prediction has come true as the whole area of animated film has become a critical hot spot, with every other publisher’s catalogue listing texts dealing with Disney and/or animation generally. Serious consideration of the cartoon seems to have indeed come into its own.

This critical outpouring has particular resonance for children’s literature specialists, insofar as cartoons have long been regarded as a genre for children. Furthermore, animation, especially Disney animation, has frequently been viewed with suspicion by the children’s literature community because of the tendency for such mass-mediated stories to supplant books as the repository for shared stories, images, and characters around which children may construct their fantasies and through which they may communicate with one another.

As cultural studies scholars have long recognized, a mass-mediated narrative, even if derived from a “traditional” source, changes its cultural meaning. Serving the interests of corporate society, the narrative can become a means of social control rather than a liberating stimulus to the individual imagination. Of course, stories have always embodied cultural values, and so the potential for social control is present even in the most traditional of folk literature. It is the corporate interest that mass-mediated stories reflect and the magnitude of their impact that concern critics from both left and right.

To a large extent, it is Disney who brought us to this point. Disney’s development of animation technology and the studio’s unique success in marketing feature-length cartoons combined to make the studio synonymous with cartoons by the beginning of World War II. Almost all animation since then has had to deal with Disney implicitly, either in imitation of Disney style (as in the more recent Don Bluth films) or in rebellion against this style (as in the Universal Pictures cartoons of the 1950s).

Each of the books discussed here tries in its own way to come to terms with the Disney legacy by examining the roots of this cultural phenomenon. Merritt and Kaufman seek the roots of Disney’s later success in his early, pre-Mickey films. Smoodin’s study, the most ambitious in scope and theoretical significance, uses the tools of cultural studies to identify how cartoons came to occupy their current place in popular culture. Eliot’s biography claims to expose troubling political aspects of Disney’s career which complicate his cultural place.

Merritt and Kaufman’s Walt in Wonderland is a handsome physical product, a large-format, illustrated text with numerous sketches, photographs, and frames from early films; its text is woven around the pictures (and picture sequences). As with trade books destined for the coffee table, one might be moved to inquire which is the text and which the illustration. The book offers impressive scholarship, with all the apparatus implied by that claim—publication by a significant university press, an extensive filmography with summaries of hard-to-find movie shorts, and a (rather abbreviated) bibliography. Its subject matter, too, is of more scholarly than market interest. Most of the Disney films from the silent era languish in archival vaults somewhere (a short list of archival sources is also appended to the book) and are not scheduled for general release; it seems unlikely, then, that the book will find a popular audience.

The book approaches its narrow topic in two unequal sections: a critical survey of the entire silent canon of Disney films that seeks to “speculat[e] on the most important qualities of Disney’s silent work” (11) and a longer...