At the moment Walt Disney is my favorite genius. (& since his brother Roy ran the company, maybe he qualifies as a business genius.) First, he was an animator and then a micro-managing supervisor of animators. All sorts of tech was created in Disney shops to support animation. Then he invented the theme park. He also pioneered live-actio…
At the moment Walt Disney is my favorite genius. (& since his brother Roy ran the company, maybe he qualifies as a business genius.) First, he was an animator and then a micro-managing supervisor of animators. All sorts of tech was created in Disney shops to support animation. Then he invented the theme park. He also pioneered live-action nature films. And he was an enormous propagandist for technology and the future.
One problem is that he's been badly served by biographers for a variety of reasons. I've read 4 or 5 biographies, and there's probably been a dozen or 20 written. For my money the best one is The Animated Man, by Michael Barrier, though I must confess some bias as I've been corresponding with Mike for years. But Mike clearly understood and was sympathetic to Disney. He had no trouble understanding why a grown man would get interested in making model trains, which Disney did after WWII, and how that lead to creating Disneyland.
You know, cartoons were much more respectable before WWII than afterward, when they came to be seen as kids fare (Japan, of course, is rather different). Disney got honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale before WWII.
I think part of the problem is that he IS at the intersection of art and business and people have trouble getting their hands around that.
Doing idiosyncratic things with longer term payoffs are just really hard to internalise, and therefore depict. It's a wonder we don't see more takes on his life! The model trains bit for instance can be played for pathos, or a laugh, or as evidence of crazy, but none as an essential output of a singular mind.
At the moment Walt Disney is my favorite genius. (& since his brother Roy ran the company, maybe he qualifies as a business genius.) First, he was an animator and then a micro-managing supervisor of animators. All sorts of tech was created in Disney shops to support animation. Then he invented the theme park. He also pioneered live-action nature films. And he was an enormous propagandist for technology and the future.
Yes indeed! In the intersection of art and business he's phenomenal.. and weirdly still underrated.
One problem is that he's been badly served by biographers for a variety of reasons. I've read 4 or 5 biographies, and there's probably been a dozen or 20 written. For my money the best one is The Animated Man, by Michael Barrier, though I must confess some bias as I've been corresponding with Mike for years. But Mike clearly understood and was sympathetic to Disney. He had no trouble understanding why a grown man would get interested in making model trains, which Disney did after WWII, and how that lead to creating Disneyland.
You know, cartoons were much more respectable before WWII than afterward, when they came to be seen as kids fare (Japan, of course, is rather different). Disney got honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale before WWII.
I think part of the problem is that he IS at the intersection of art and business and people have trouble getting their hands around that.
Doing idiosyncratic things with longer term payoffs are just really hard to internalise, and therefore depict. It's a wonder we don't see more takes on his life! The model trains bit for instance can be played for pathos, or a laugh, or as evidence of crazy, but none as an essential output of a singular mind.