'Walt Disney': The Genius, The Empire Builder, The Vindictive Jerk

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Walt Disney was nothing if not a grand overreacher: He didn’t just start out wanting to make cartoons — he wanted to make the most realistic cartoons ever. He didn’t just want to create an amusement park — he wanted to create a magical world in which the public could live out its fantasies. He didn’t want to just marshal a staff of the most creative people in the entertainment industry—he wanted to control their labor with an iron fist and… well, that’s where Uncle Walt got problematic, and interesting.

Spread over two nights and a total of four hours, Walt Disney is a PBS American Experience entry that has a lot of time to let some viewers get reintroduced to the Disney they grew up with, and introduce new generations to that iron fist wrapped in Mickey Mouse’s white glove.

The production, directed by producer Sarah Colt, lays out the chronology clearly and energetically: Disney, son of a failed Missouri businessman, becomes fascinated with early-20th-century animation. A passable cartoonist but a great idea man, he invents Mickey Mouse, starts his own company on the back of his rodent superstar, and commences empire-building. By the 1930s and ‘40s, he was wracking up hits with Snow White and Pinocchio, traumatizing a generation of baby-boomers by letting Bambi’s mother get shot and killed, and suffering his a life-altering set-back when, during the production of Dumbo in 1940, most of his animation department — overworked and underpaid — went on strike.

RELATED: HOW ‘BAMBI’ TRAUMATIZED A GENERATION

One of the themes of Walt Disney is that the smooth, paternal operator Disney presented himself as being was mostly the man he wished-upon-a-star he was. What he really was, was a relentless businessman, one who felt his employees owed him gratitude, and when they rose up, he began to tap into deeper darknesses in his personality. This manifested itself as an angry paranoia: Disney convinced himself, with no real proof, that these men (and they were by far mostly men) — who wanted nothing more than to draw cute animals and put food on the table for their families — were manipulated by Communists, their demands contributing to Disney’s pile of debt.

Drawing upon interviews with perceptive on-camera commentators such as Disney animator-producer Don Hahn and biographer Neal Gabler, Walt Disney becomes the story of a man whose creative inspirations were drawn from a youth spent with a distant, unimaginative father who moved Walt to become the exact opposite: He wanted to be the endlessly inventive, readily accessible, soft-voiced kindly-uncle type who hosted TV shows like The Wonderful World of Disney.

Depending on your interest in Disneyland and Disney World, the lengthy sections about the creation and buildings of these vastly successful, and controversial, money-making theme parks will either fascinate or bore you. (As someone who spent a fair amount of time as a father at Disneyworld, the idyllic footage here of happy 1960s families cavorting through Frontierland and riding in spinning tea cups is tempered by memories of long lines in the hot sun and an aggressively friendly Donald Duck-costumed employee scaring my little daughter to tears.)

Walt Disney is even-handed in the best sense. It grants Disney his genius for creating vivid characters that became part of pop culture; for coming up with the concept of an impeccably clean, family-friendly amusement-park at exactly time when carnivals were on their way out; for romanticizing a historical figure such as Davey Crockett so vividly that he became, for a brief period, a figure as popular as Elvis Presley and the Beatles.

But the production doesn’t shy away from addressing his control-freak vindictiveness, the commercial flops that frequently found him in financial straits, and his gradual slide into the creation of TV shows and movies that were sweet, mediocre junk (I love Hayley Mills, but have you or your kids tried sitting through the original, 1961 Parent Trap lately?).

In short, this Walt Disney has something for everyone, Disney-lovers and -haters alike. It’s the only biography of Disney most people will ever need.

American Experience: Walt Disney airs on PBS Monday and Tuesday nights; check your local listings.