The Art of Walt Disney

My family collects books. I remember shelves and shelves of them in our house, all over the place. There was a metal bookcase in the front hall that among other things contained what in a normal household would be the coffee table books—books about the museum exhibits we’d visited, books of art and history and science. And one of them, very large and heavy, was The Art of Walt Disney. With a cardboard Mickey glued to the front of it. I didn’t look at it often, because it was fairly intimidating to a small child, but I’ve also never been surprised that we owned it.

As long as there has been a Walt Disney studio of some kind, there have been people wanting to know how the cartoons are made. In the ‘40s, Disney appeased people with The Reluctant Dragon. In 1973, author/artist Christopher Finch wrote The Art of Walt Disney, a tome which covered the studio’s history pretty much through Walt’s own lifetime, starting with Walt’s childhood. Most of the financial failures are glossed over, though he does suggest that some of the pictures are better than others. It even suggests that Sleeping Beauty meant we should consider the possibility that the age of fairy tales was over.

The edition I acquired was not the hefty one Mom had/has. (I don’t know if she’s kept it.) It’s an abridged edition. I think her version was at least twice as thick, presumably with even more concept art and movie stills and so forth. Because that’s the reason to get the book, after all. There’s some interesting stuff in the text, I’ll admit—for one, it’s always interesting to me to see people gloss over how much Elias Disney screwed up his kids. He didn’t even want Walt to go into art. But what’s more interesting is the sketches that show early views of various characters.

Frankly, the title of the book is incorrect. It even says in it that Walt didn’t draw a frame after about 1927. The book is very careful to give a lot of credit to, say, Ub Iwerks, without whom the Disney studio dies before “Steamboat Willie.” Walt wasn’t much of an artist. Walt was . . . a force of nature. He didn’t care about the money except inasmuch as it financed the next project and the one after that. He hired well, and even when people got sick of him and left the studio, or went on strike and left the studio, or got fired for not accepting Walt as Everyone’s Dad, they went on to shape American pop culture in different places.

I don’t know what’s been trimmed from mine that’s in my mom’s. There’s not much about the parks and not much about the live action. More editions have been published in the years since, the most recent in 2023, the year after Finch died. Each edition expands the history that’s related, telling more and more. Eventually adding the Pixar films, even. But the history of the Disney studio isn’t often told. Even Disney+ seems to assume people aren’t interested.