Kansas City, 1923. Walt Disney has quit his day job, started up an animation studio despite having only spent a few months at art school, and made a short called Alice in Cartoonland. By the time it’s finished, Laugh-O-Grams Inc has gone bankrupt. This is Disney’s first real failure, but does it stop the working-class boy from Chicago pursuing his dream of a cinematic art form that has yet to exist? Does it, hell. He buys a first-class ticket to Los Angeles, demonstrating the kind of unshakable belief that only exists in American Dream narratives. He grabs the attention of a cartoon distributor called Margaret Winkler. She commissions 12 Alice shorts at $1,500 per episode. So it’s a woman, indeed the only woman in the business, who gives young Walt his break.
There are many satisfying stories like this in Walt Disney (Saturday, BBC2), a two-part documentary of the classic, uncontroversial, or you might say Disneyfied, kind. In the first episode, the focus is less on the pesky matters of two world wars, the Great Depression and those endlessly debated accusations of antisemitism, racism, and cultural imperialism, and more on Disney’s legendary vision and drive. This is uncomfortable but it’s such a good story, and the animation is so beautiful, I was completely swept up in it. Afterwards I felt a bit icky and emotionally manipulated. Not unlike the effect of watching a Disney movie.
The early animations, drawings, and archival footage, some only recently released from the Disney vaults, are wonderful. The Oswald cartoons feature Disney’s first character, a scrappy rabbit who along with most of his animators is soon poached by a distributor. Does Disney give up? Of course not. He comes up with a creature who is basically Oswald with round ears. He wants to call his mouse Mortimer but his wife suggests Mickey. Then Disney does something truly revolutionary. “We’ll make them over with sound!” he blurts out in a meeting. Within months Mickey, voiced by Disney himself, has become Hollywood’s latest A-lister.
We get Walt the artist, Walt the extrovert, Walt the ruthless taskmaster, Walt the obsessive chain smoker, and Walt the depressive who in 1931 has “one hell of a breakdown”. Obviously he comes back fighting with Silly Symphonies, an extraordinary collection of avant-garde films featuring dancing skeletons and trees playing harps. Then in 1934 Disney invites his team to a hallowed meeting where he acts out an entire one-man show of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He knows he can make people laugh. Now he wants to make them cry.
And cry they do – as, no doubt, do the people who work for him. The details of the four-year production of Snow White are extraordinary, and excruciating. Animators work 14-hour days. Ink and paint artists, most of whom are low-paid women, begin to lose their sight. With 24 frames required to create a second of film, it takes an entire day to do a single close-up of Snow White. By the end, more than 200,000 separate drawings exist. No wonder the world’s first feature-length animation was first known as “Disney’s folly”.
Does it all work out in the end? Of course it does. This is the original Disney fairytale! The critics are bowled over. Motion picture history is made. The boy from Chicago who dreamed of being an artist becomes the president of one of the most powerful entertainment companies on the planet. And the world gets landed with the idea that a princess needs a Prince Charming in order to live happily ever after. Light and shade: it’s the nature of great art.
The world conjured up in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Netflix) is less neat and tidy but almost as unreal. A BBC America and Netflix co-adaptation of Douglas Adams’ cult novels, Samuel Barnett’s goofy, CBeebies-esque Gently, who follows fate instead of clues, had me yearning for Sherlock. No one wants a detective whose style is more Mickey Mouse than Marlowe.
Lots happens in the overstuffed opening episodes, all of it seemingly interconnected and none of it making sense. We get an assassin with special powers, lots of inept cops, a band of skinhead vampires, a woman tied to a bed, some black-ops guys, the FBI, CIA, a kitten and a corgi. Elijah Wood is just right as Todd Brozman, the reluctant, good-natured and – now that I think about it – hobbity sidekick who happens upon the murder of a millionaire in the hotel where he works and is drawn into a nightmare of violence, espionage, and Gently japes. Other than that, as is often the case in Disney movies, the animals steal the show.
