Product Description

His classic films illuminated everyone's childhood. The theme parks are on every tourist itinerary. The movie empire is one of Hollywood's biggest players. Walt Disney is one of the few men who unquestionably changed our culture. Neal Gabler is the first author to have had complete access to the Disney Archives, enabling him to write the definitive biography of this remarkable man. It's a long book, as Disney's achievement was so huge, but a truly compulsive read. He shows how Disney built up his fledgling studio with short cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, before quite simply reinventing animation with full-length films like Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo. An astounding amount of work went into a film like Fantasia, with whole crews working round the clock on a sequence a couple of minutes long - only for the obsessively perfectionist Disney to order it re-done. Walt's profligacy and expansionism meant it was brother and business partner Roy who kept the company solvent. Disney then moved beyond animation with huge successes like Mary Poppins, and mixed utopianism and merchandising to conceive the world's first modern theme park, Disneyland. Gabler shows the dark side of Disney - ruthless towards long-serving staff, cavalier with contracts, neglectful of his family - but also the vulnerability, born of loneliness and ill health, in an admirably balanced portrait. Neal Gabler writes for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at the University of Southern California. His other books include An Empire of Their Own and Life, the Movie. He lives in Amagansett, New York.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217703 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 750 pages

Review
`Neal Gabler presents the definitive biography of the legendary animator, in which he skilfully separates the man from the myth at the same time providing a detailed history of the Disney Studio.'
--Film Review, September 2008

Customer Reviews

An extremely engaging biography - highly recommended
As an amateur cartoonist who loves biographies, I went online and bought Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney as soon as I say it reviewed in the Sunday Times. I was not disappointed.

This is a massive piece of work, spanning not only the entire period of Disney's life but also the history of animated cartoon development and, in the background, the evolution of Hollywood itself.

What was so fascinating about this book for me however, was the minute detail that Gabler goes into about Disney's early life in small-town America (which he tried to recreate in the design of Disneyland) and the long and difficult process that turned Disney from a struggling cartoonist into an American icon who, as Gabler suggests, might be considered the most successful artist of the twentieth century.

This is not to say that Gabler holds Disney up on any pedestal to be a saint - far from it. Disney's obsessive drive for perfection, his addiction to detail and his passion for micro-management are all on view. But, in many ways, this makes him a more human and accessible character than the "Uncle Walt" image he so carefully cultivated in public life.

For anyone who wants "a thumping good read" to have on their bedside table (the sheer number of pages makes this book far too heavy to carry off on holiday with you!) I would heartily recommend this as a long-running nightime story.

An interesting journey...
'Walt Disney' has become such a brand name, it's hard to properly grasp that there was a man from an ordinary background with that name, who created all that we associate with the name 'Disney' or 'Disney animation' today. It's also easy to fail to realise that animation - cartoons - did not have to look the way they do or be the way they are... aspects of character animation, copied and adapted by others, were in many ways pioneered by Walt Disney and the employees he inspired. The main pleasure of this book for me was in realising how much one person can achieve in shaping popular culture and in bringing the fruit of many imaginations to life.
It is a very long book, and one that I took breaks from and returned to. The author perhaps indulges in a little too much retrospective armchair psychology in making claims as to Walt Disney's intentions and motivations, but every biographer comes at their subject from a standpoint at at least Gabler makes his views clear enough that you can agree with or reject them.

Makes me want to go to Disneyland again!
Walt Disney is one of those figures that everyone knows without really knowing at all, and one of the things I learned from this biography is that even the people in his life who had daily contact with him, who lived with him, worked with him, even grew up with him, would have said the same thing. He was an intensely private person, and one wonders how much of the carefully cultivated image of himself that was created and wrapped up with his films was a deliberate attempt to hide that private self. Disney has had a lot of criticism over the years, but for better or worse you cannot deny that there are few people who have had the same level of influence on popular culture as Walt Disney. And I for one like that influence. This is an exceptionally well-written book, lively and engaging, fair and balanced, and very readable. The descriptions of the creation of some of the films, most particularly 'Snow White', are incredibly detailed, and it's made me want to go back and revisit some of those films. And go to Disneyland!