Disney: Mousebrow to Highbrow

By ROBERT HUGHES

The staff cafeteria is immaculate, lit with fluorescence and perked up by leaf-green supergraphics. Four dwarfs and a brown nylon-shag bear stand at the counter, ordering chipped beef. Their human faces, pinheads emerging from their neck-holes, look tiny, naked and grumpy. Across a wide cinder-block corridor whose ceiling is wreathed like a battleship's with gas pipes and power mains, more ducks and mice are disappearing into the mask room. REMOVE YOUR HEAD AND PLACE ON TABLE AFTER ENTERING, a notice Commands; the racks are full of familiar visages, the icons of one's childhood, Mickey and Pluto and the others blown up to preternatural size, then guillotined; their eyes goggle from the shelves like big affable poached eggs. There is even a set of coolant waistcoats, their design a spin-off from NASA; they circulate a chemical refrigerant round the body. In this humid and swampy acreage of Florida, every hot duck on Main Street contains a hotter man wildly signaling to be let out.

Farther down the corridor is the computer room, which controls the "audio-animatronic" displays: banks of thick cassettes slotted into a blinking steel wall, 14-track tape loops piling and swishing inside their moon-shaped Plexiglas boxes, running across the heads like sepia fettucine. Every second, millions of impulses skitter down the cables, linking the Real-world beneath the podium to the Magic Kingdom: the Bear Jamboree plunks and toots, holographic phantoms squeak and gibber among the cobwebs of the Haunted Mansion, and in the antechamber of the Moon Rocket in Tomorrowland, a robot scientist holds a conversation with a scarcely less robotic Disney World hostess.

It was through these latitudes that Ponce de Leon stumbled in 1513, seeking the fountain of perpetual youth. It was not there. Now it is. The Walt Disney World coat of arms--a terrestrial globe wearing Mickey ears, set in a capital D--is no metaphor but a frank statement of intention. The place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullee in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed to build. Unlike Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, it exists on a plane of unremitting kitsch, sustained by the most advanced technology ever brought to the service of entertainment.

One would be wrong to suppose that Disney--or the "imagineers" who carried this project forward after he died in 1966--planned his World from the outside in, starting with an audience and then successfully condescending to it. "I don't make films exclusively for children," Walter Elias Disney once remarked. "I make them to suit myself, hoping they will also suit the audience." As on film, so in the environments: Disney was nothing if not an expressionist, and he built the old Magic Kingdom in Anaheim, Calif., and the new one in Orlando to please himself. Disney World is a pure feat of self-projection in which neurosis and imagination are rendered equally concrete. One instinctive response is to turn away from Disney. After all, the promotional goo about magic, warmth and wonder that has been ladled over him and his works in the past 20 years would make even Bambi puke. But Disney's really interesting side was not the fabled rapport with children (from all accounts, he was about as innocent as Bobby Riggs and somewhat less likable) but the grip of organization--first in his art itself, and then in the area of business and social manipulation--which made Disneyland and Disney World possible. He turned himself from a cartoonist into the Old Master of masscult, and from there became a Utopian environmentalist.

By now there is no way of approaching the confused feedbacks between "high" and "mass" culture in America without running into Disney at nearly every twist of the discussion. And so, among culture critics--his traditional enemies--there has been a growth of very serious interest in Disney. As Peter Blake, editor of Architecture Plus, put it: "Walt Disney did not know that such things as vast urban infrastructures, multilevel mass-transit systems, People Movers, nonpolluting vehicles, pedestrian malls, and so forth were unattainable, and so he just went ahead and built them. In doing it he drew on all kinds of resources that no other city planner had ever before considered seriously, if at all... it seems unlikely that any American school of architecture will ever again graduate a student without first requiring him or her to take a field trip to Orlando."

Not so the art schools, but "Disney memorabilia"--the auction-room word for old Mickey Mouse watches--are moving from the camp boutiques to Parke-Bernet, and a New York art dealer named Bernard Danenberg has contracted with Walt Disney Productions to exhibit "eels" (the clear plastic sheets on which final animation drawings are made) from a new Disney cartoon, Robin Hood. This migration of Disney's iconography from masscult to the commercial fringes of "high" art (it happened to Norman Rockwell last year) will be prodded along by a 7 1/2-lb. tome entitled The Art of Walt Disney, written by English Art Critic Christopher Finch with the full cooperation of the Disney Archives and published, at $45, by Harry N. Abrams. The text has one defect: it is much too unctuous. Nevertheless the book reveals more clearly than anything written before the intricacy of the collaboration that went on in the studio in its earlier and better years. Finch resurrects from anonymity or near oblivion such artists and animators as Fred Moore, Bill Tytla and the abundantly gifted Albert Hurter, the presiding influence on Pinocchio. Hurter's pencil roughs and details exuded an essence of buckeye surrealism that got into gallery art only decades later--and then through Claes Oldenburg, who had himself worked at Disneyland.

But how can one describe the Disney collective's view of fine art? Its taste, ultimately, was Walt's and his was not markedly subtle; he had no pretensions to high culture and if he had been encumbered with such longings the barnyard vitality of early Disney would have been lost. When fine-art quotes appear in Disney's films, they are either apocalyptic and expressionist or else genteel: little in between. Their storehouse is, of course, Fantasia (1940). The cold crags and demon-infested clouds of the Night on Bald Mountain sequence refer straight back to the hellscapes of late-medieval religious art. Like many another image in Fantasia, it is also filtered through Art Deco, the popular style of the '30s. Using Deco idioms was as far as Disney ever went in the direction of classicism, but it would be shaky to suppose he picked up the habit in a museum. By the same token, he may never have heard of Gustav Klimt or even Monet, but another section of Fantasia, the Pastoral, now looks like a shotgun marriage of the two, with Disney's plump, nippleless nymphs and plow-horse centaurs cavorting around the iridescent blooms and bubbles of a pond in Arcadia.

The appearance of abstract art in Disney's work was fleeting. There was the Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia, with its pastel runs of animated Kandinsky. Now and then the studio would come up with an image that, while not really abstract, seems a distant reference to early European constructivism like the gush of music drawn as prismatic blocks issuing from the mouth of a dancing horn in Make Mine Music (1946). And, more distantly still, some of the Disney fantasies do run parallel to themes of high art, without displaying any awareness of their patrician Doppelgaengers. The Isle of Jazz in Music Land (1946) is a brassy plebeian version of an almost archetypal image that in fine art reveals itself in Arnold Boecklin's Isle of the Dead and Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera: an island as kingdom of mood.

The point at which the flow reversed and Disney's iconography began affecting high art can be identified almost to the frame: it happened when, in Fantasia, Mickey Mouse clambered up on the (real) podium and shook hands with the (real) conductor Leopold Stokowski. High and low art collapsed into one another. It was inevitably Mickey who made Stokowski more of a star by the handshake, not the other way round. The gesture made Pop art possible and, after a gestation of nearly 20 years, it duly arrived in a flurry of mice: Roy Lichtenstein is said to have happened on his comic-strip idiom after his son asked him to prove he was a real artist by drawing a Mickey. Claes Oldenburg--whose obsessive and imperious fantasy about turning the whole environment into one Oldenburg is the closest thing high art has to what Disney World achieves--has based whole series of sculptures, multiples and drawings on the Mouse.

What this fitful leakage across the culture gap meant was set forth by Richard Schickel in The Disney Version (1968), a book that is still the best dissection of Disney. "It is the business of art to expand consciousness, while it is the business of mass communication to reduce it. At best this swiftly consummated reduction is to a series of archetypes; at worst it is to a series of simplistic stereotypes." Disney's use of fine-art images usually came down to stereotype, for it worried him not to have things clear-cut. He understood business but not richness, which is why the interiors and garden sequences of the prince's castle in Cinderella came out with the nasty polystyrene glamour (twinkledust and all) of the Fontainebleau lobby in Miami Beach.

Since the '50s--since Bambi in 1942, some would say--the reduction has gone even further, acting on Disney's earlier work in a steady process of self-cannibalization that increases to the extent that the early Disney is seen as high art. The animals get cuter and more anthropomorphic, the forest glade more compulsively spotless, the characters blander; and having deprived Mickey of his rattishness, Donald Duck of his foul and treacherous temper, the Disney studio had no qualms about ruining Alice in Wonderland or Kipling's Jungle Book for the kids as well. Yet within the natural bounds of his style, especially up to the late '30s and his masterpiece Pinocchio, Disney repeatedly pulled sequences and single images that seem destined to survive as long as the history of cinema itself: the hilarious ballet of hippos, crocodiles and bemused ostrich in Fantasia, the terrifying image of little Jiminy Cricket perched on the eyeball of Monstro the Whale in Pinocchio, the sight of Dopey with diamonds screwed into his face like monocles, whirling his multiplied eyes within their facets. Such things are the real stuff, and any smart five-year-old can distinguish them from the cyclamate guck of late Disney.

But the specific works are less important than the atmosphere Disney created. Art, or some kinds of it (visionary, surrealist, erotic), has the power to expand the limits of fantasy. Disney could not push those too far without ceasing to be Mr. Clean, the celluloid geneticist who ingeniously bred the anus and genitals out of the animal kingdom, the trusted entertainer whose mandate was to give children the dreams adults like them to have. And so his achievement became a large shift in the limits of unreality, which is not by any means the same thing as art. The shows and puppetry at Disney World, like the recent Disney films, are quite without power to stimulate the imagination. The old symbolism of Carnival is lost and buried; Disney cleaned it up, and in the process illuminated a law that might well bear his name--that when illusion becomes too perfect, one loses interest and instead focuses on the backstage machinery. The real magic of the Magic Kingdom is everything a paying visitor doesn't see: the stupendous technology behind these dinky scaled-down Main Street fac,ades, artificial lakes and unsubmersible Jules Verne submarines on rails. In this, Disney's 50th anniversary year, it appears that the Mouse has labored and brought forth a very odd mountain indeed.

--Robert Hughes

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