Walt Disney: The Impossible Man
By most accounts he was a difficult man.
He lived in an age where adults smoked constantly, and was seldom without a cigarette. He died at 65, not surprisingly from complications surrounding lung cancer.
He damaged his spine playing polo in the 1930s and suffered from it the rest of his life.
And he changed the world.
Like it or not, Walt Disney rearranged the face of entertainment. The stories and characters he brought to life are known in every corner of the world, and his influence on animation, film in general, and popular entertainment as a whole are beyond calculation.
I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on about Walt. The more I learn about him, the less I seem to know. A genius before his time who saw what animation could become? The quintessential common man who reflected a cleaned up, homogenized version of America back on itself? The tinkerer who loved gadgets and trains and multiplane cameras? Certainly Walt was all of these, but he was more than the sum of his descriptions. He was driven hard by something deep within. When I think about Walt, the question really becomes, what makes something worth doing? Why commit your life to something no one has ever done before—something that may not even be possible? And how do you start? What’s the first step?
At the deepest level, the “why” of Walt is the desire to take something imagined and make it a reality. That the Disney Company even today considers “Imagineering” as its highest calling makes this a fairly unsurprising statement. But the spark that makes Walt special is his desire to take things that everyday people have or might have imagined and make them a reality. In his own words, he sought “to picture on the screen things that have run through the imagination of the audience”, and not just random fantasies and funny gags.
The “how” of Walt is a bit more complicated. Aware of his own shortcomings as an artist, he actively sought out and recruited the best talent he could find in every discipline—people like Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling. And it was easy for him, almost effortless. He found working with highly talented (and usually exasperating) people fun, and he respected them: “I take my hat off to talent.” But he never allowed the talent to run the joint—in fact they were alternatively encouraged and browbeaten to constantly improve. His HR motto might have been: recognize a man’s potential, and then force him to achieve it. (Animation was somewhat sexist in the 1930s.)
All men have their inconsistencies. Walt was notorious for secretly sneaking into his animators cubbies after hours and inspecting their work unannounced. He rarely complimented anyone or any project directly, and could be aloof. He became embittered toward the people who worked for him after a labor action in the early 1940s, and never forgave them. Walt could not see himself as the problem, and the Walt who ran the company was sometimes at odds with the Walt who made great movies. In the aftermath of the strike, he revealed this duality.
“When I meet people in the hall, I want to be able to speak to them, and have them speak to me, and say ‘hello’ with a smile. I can’t work under any other conditions.”
The second part of “how” was a single-mindedness about story and character. Under Walt, stories were always prepared thoroughly. The dictum was to make it “read”—no ambiguities were allowed, no questions could enter the audience’s heads about what they were seeing: it was always clear. There was one strong central character whose actions were consistent with the story. And the supporting characters had to be interesting in their own right, never just an excuse to get a line of dialogue in.
The final piece of the “how” puzzle lay in Walt himself. He valued nothing—not the movies, not the studio, not the theme parks— more that his own autonomy. He would have been an abysmal failure if not for his brother Roy, who freed him up to concentrate on what interested him. Early on, the division of labor between the two crystallized: Walt ran things as executive production manager, and Roy saw to the money side as business manager. To Walt, there was never an issue about which was more important—money was always second to content. Early in the brothers’ career, just as they were starting to be successful, they lost most of their staff and intellectual rights to Universal. As a result Walt resolved that “never again will I work for somebody else.” Win or lose, from that point on Disney forged his own path.
He developed a remarkable set of skills to keep him going. He had a facility for ignoring disagreeable subjects and people. He drew a distinction between committees and gag meetings, always game for the latter, and consigning Roy to the former. Two things got him riled up in story meetings—getting interrupted when acting out a scene, and someone re-arguing a point that had already been heard and rejected. He liked to move. Walt was completely secure in his belief that quality trumped everything, famously remarking that when competitors gained short-term advantage by cost-cutting, at Disney “we can lick ‘em with product.”
To wrap this up, the part of me that really wants to be heard from right now is the 8-year-old watching the Wonderful World of Color wide-eyed in front of the TV on Sunday nights in 1965. The Walt who introduced the show may or may not have been real, but that was the Walt I knew. He was avuncular, folksy, earnest. He had a truly magical voice. All those years of tobacco abuse (he had started 45 years before in WWI) had given his voice a ‘crack’ in the mid part of his range that no other voice on TV had. And he was interested in his subject. Everything was grist to his mill. He wanted to see how humans were going to get to the moon. He wanted Ludwig von Drake to explain the principles of color (and other physics subjects) to him. He wanted America to feel the way he did about Davy Crockett and The Living Desert. To me, this was the real Walt Disney.
Isn’t it interesting that a man who died in 1966 still casts such a spell on the world? And that so many who attempt the impossible cite Walt as their inspiration?
I am indebted to Michael Barrier for The Animated Man: A History of Walt Disney, Neal Gabler for Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination, and an often overlooked but wonderful book called Disney’s Grand Tour: Walt and Roy’s European Vacation, Summer 1935, compiled by Didier Ghez, Bob McLain, Diane Disney Miller and the aforementioned Michael Barrier.
He lived in an age where adults smoked constantly, and was seldom without a cigarette. He died at 65, not surprisingly from complications surrounding lung cancer.
He damaged his spine playing polo in the 1930s and suffered from it the rest of his life.
And he changed the world.
 |
| Something about a sharp-dressed man... |
Like it or not, Walt Disney rearranged the face of entertainment. The stories and characters he brought to life are known in every corner of the world, and his influence on animation, film in general, and popular entertainment as a whole are beyond calculation.
I’ve read everything I could lay my hands on about Walt. The more I learn about him, the less I seem to know. A genius before his time who saw what animation could become? The quintessential common man who reflected a cleaned up, homogenized version of America back on itself? The tinkerer who loved gadgets and trains and multiplane cameras? Certainly Walt was all of these, but he was more than the sum of his descriptions. He was driven hard by something deep within. When I think about Walt, the question really becomes, what makes something worth doing? Why commit your life to something no one has ever done before—something that may not even be possible? And how do you start? What’s the first step?
At the deepest level, the “why” of Walt is the desire to take something imagined and make it a reality. That the Disney Company even today considers “Imagineering” as its highest calling makes this a fairly unsurprising statement. But the spark that makes Walt special is his desire to take things that everyday people have or might have imagined and make them a reality. In his own words, he sought “to picture on the screen things that have run through the imagination of the audience”, and not just random fantasies and funny gags.
 |
| Intense, charming when necessary but always in charge |
The “how” of Walt is a bit more complicated. Aware of his own shortcomings as an artist, he actively sought out and recruited the best talent he could find in every discipline—people like Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling. And it was easy for him, almost effortless. He found working with highly talented (and usually exasperating) people fun, and he respected them: “I take my hat off to talent.” But he never allowed the talent to run the joint—in fact they were alternatively encouraged and browbeaten to constantly improve. His HR motto might have been: recognize a man’s potential, and then force him to achieve it. (Animation was somewhat sexist in the 1930s.)
All men have their inconsistencies. Walt was notorious for secretly sneaking into his animators cubbies after hours and inspecting their work unannounced. He rarely complimented anyone or any project directly, and could be aloof. He became embittered toward the people who worked for him after a labor action in the early 1940s, and never forgave them. Walt could not see himself as the problem, and the Walt who ran the company was sometimes at odds with the Walt who made great movies. In the aftermath of the strike, he revealed this duality.
“When I meet people in the hall, I want to be able to speak to them, and have them speak to me, and say ‘hello’ with a smile. I can’t work under any other conditions.”
The second part of “how” was a single-mindedness about story and character. Under Walt, stories were always prepared thoroughly. The dictum was to make it “read”—no ambiguities were allowed, no questions could enter the audience’s heads about what they were seeing: it was always clear. There was one strong central character whose actions were consistent with the story. And the supporting characters had to be interesting in their own right, never just an excuse to get a line of dialogue in.
 |
| Truly an American original. |
The final piece of the “how” puzzle lay in Walt himself. He valued nothing—not the movies, not the studio, not the theme parks— more that his own autonomy. He would have been an abysmal failure if not for his brother Roy, who freed him up to concentrate on what interested him. Early on, the division of labor between the two crystallized: Walt ran things as executive production manager, and Roy saw to the money side as business manager. To Walt, there was never an issue about which was more important—money was always second to content. Early in the brothers’ career, just as they were starting to be successful, they lost most of their staff and intellectual rights to Universal. As a result Walt resolved that “never again will I work for somebody else.” Win or lose, from that point on Disney forged his own path.
He developed a remarkable set of skills to keep him going. He had a facility for ignoring disagreeable subjects and people. He drew a distinction between committees and gag meetings, always game for the latter, and consigning Roy to the former. Two things got him riled up in story meetings—getting interrupted when acting out a scene, and someone re-arguing a point that had already been heard and rejected. He liked to move. Walt was completely secure in his belief that quality trumped everything, famously remarking that when competitors gained short-term advantage by cost-cutting, at Disney “we can lick ‘em with product.”
 |
| The Walt I remember best... |
To wrap this up, the part of me that really wants to be heard from right now is the 8-year-old watching the Wonderful World of Color wide-eyed in front of the TV on Sunday nights in 1965. The Walt who introduced the show may or may not have been real, but that was the Walt I knew. He was avuncular, folksy, earnest. He had a truly magical voice. All those years of tobacco abuse (he had started 45 years before in WWI) had given his voice a ‘crack’ in the mid part of his range that no other voice on TV had. And he was interested in his subject. Everything was grist to his mill. He wanted to see how humans were going to get to the moon. He wanted Ludwig von Drake to explain the principles of color (and other physics subjects) to him. He wanted America to feel the way he did about Davy Crockett and The Living Desert. To me, this was the real Walt Disney.
Isn’t it interesting that a man who died in 1966 still casts such a spell on the world? And that so many who attempt the impossible cite Walt as their inspiration?
I am indebted to Michael Barrier for The Animated Man: A History of Walt Disney, Neal Gabler for Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination, and an often overlooked but wonderful book called Disney’s Grand Tour: Walt and Roy’s European Vacation, Summer 1935, compiled by Didier Ghez, Bob McLain, Diane Disney Miller and the aforementioned Michael Barrier.
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