The Animated Man - A life of Walt Disney
Anyone who writes a biography of Walt Disney is obliged to explain what he is up to, given that a dozen or more biographies of Disney have already been published. It is not enough to say that most of those books are not very good. The question is whether a new biography can avoid the pitfalls that have doomed the earlier ones.
Most Disney biographies have portrayed either a man who fell short of perfection only in a few venial ways (he smoked way too much and used a great deal of profanity), or one who was personally odious (anti-Semitism being the sin of choice) and the products of whose labors are a stain on American culture.
I have found few signs of either Disney in my own research into his life, which began in 1969 with my first trip to California and interviews with Ward Kimball, one of his best animators, and Carl Stalling, the first composer for his sound cartoons. Disney was, in my reckoning, a stunted but fascinating artist, and a generally admirable but less interesting entrepreneur. The trick, I think, is to wind those strands of his life together, along with a few strands from his private life, in a way that yields something close to the whole man.
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