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The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001) 427-432



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Book Review

Walt Disney and Europe:
European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney


Robin Allan. Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1999.

If you think that much of recent American intellectual life has been derived from European models, from the recondite complexities of Lacan and Baudrillard to the earnest moral cautions of Habermas, you might be fascinated by Robin Allan's magisterial study of the Continental sources employed with such huge effect by Walt Disney. Popular culture owes Europe a hitherto little-acknowledged debt. But Allan's book is more than its remarkable tracing of Disney's European sources. Resembling a Baconian assemblage of information and scholarship and drawing from a plethora of sources, it weaves together Disney's biography; a history of the Disney studio and its productions; an overview of major and minor figures having direct or indirect effect on those productions; anecdotal asides about Disney and these figures (including the small and large tragedies of some); cultural and film history; interpretation of the films (from general aesthetic critiques to feminist ones); compendious footnotes filled with more anecdotes, history, and interpretation; and a wide-ranging selection of plates of the European artwork that influenced Disney as well as reproductions of early Disney sketches and completed images that demonstrate that influence. There are also two appendices, a twenty-page select bibliography, a select filmography--and all within 294 pages.

If that last paragraph left you breathless, you have a sense of the exuberance and scope of Allan's study and of his own enchantment with Disney. Holding the many small tales together are two larger stories: the first relates the explicit intention of the book to examine the European cultural and artistic forces shaping the artists who worked for Disney; the second seeks to understand Disney the man and, though embedded in the larger story, may in fact be the book's barely repressed, true ambition.

In the manner of the traditional scholar, Allan introduces his study by carefully defining his rationale, subject, and sources. He believes "Disney is an international institution" (Preface) who drew upon "European . . . literature, graphic and illustrative art, music and design as well as upon European and indigenous cinema" to create a new art form (xv). The study examines those films made from the late twenties up to Disney's death in 1966 and finds that fourteen of the seventeen fully-animated [End Page 427] features made during that period have European sources. Allan's own sources are multiple, rich, and original. And they, in part, distinguish his work from the many earlier studies. He refers to scholarship based on primary source material from the Society for Animation Studies and interviews he conducted with associates of Disney and their relatives. Most significantly, he was given permission to use the Walt Disney Archives, which gave him access to "story sketches, preliminary drawings, props and designs as well as original conference notes taken by a stenographer at the story meetings between Disney and colleagues" (xv). Allan's delight in using many of these notes and original dialogues results in a scholarly study that also feels like a PBS documentary. The texture is multivocal: there is the narrator's overview and the many voices emanating from the interviews and conference notes.

Although his theme is not novel--that in Disney high and popular culture, the old world and the new world meet--Allan's perspective is. Keenly aware of Disney's intention to create a new art form through his animations, Allan shows in a manner recalling Marshall McLuhan how these various influences become the "content" of this new technology. McLuhan in Understanding Media had argued that each new technology creates a new environment whose "content" is the previous technology. Hence, "[w]hen writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialogue into an art form. When printing was new, the Middle Ages...

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