Word: disneyized
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...grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., began learning his art from his father, a theatrical scene painter. He edited the high school paper and drew cartoons for it as well. After working as a reporter for the Bridgeport Post, he went to Hollywood in 1935 as an animator at Walt Disney Studios...
...point at which the flow reversed and Disney's iconography began affecting high art can be identified almost to the frame: it happened when, in Fantasia, Mickey Mouse clambered up on the (real) podium and shook hands with the (real) conductor Leopold Stokowski. High and low art collapsed into one another. It was inevitably Mickey who made Stokowski more of a star by the handshake, not the other way round. The gesture made Pop art possible and, after a gestation of nearly 20 years, it duly arrived in a flurry of mice: Roy Lichtenstein is said to have happened...
What this fitful leakage across the culture gap meant was set forth by Richard Schickel in The Disney Version (1968), a book that is still the best dissection of Disney. "It is the business of art to expand consciousness, while it is the business of mass communication to reduce it. At best this swiftly consummated reduction is to a series of archetypes; at worst it is to a series of simplistic stereotypes." Disney's use of fine-art images usually came down to stereotype, for it worried him not to have things clear-cut. He understood business...
Since the '50s-since Bambi in 1942, some would say-the reduction has gone even further, acting on Disney's earlier work in a steady process of self-cannibalization that increases to the extent that the early Disney is seen as high art. The animals get cuter and more anthropomorphic, the forest glade more compulsively spotless, the characters blander; and having deprived Mickey of his rattishness, Donald Duck of his foul and treacherous temper, the Disney studio had no qualms about ruining Alice in Wonderland or Kipling's Jungle Book for the kids as well. Yet within...
...specific works are less important than the atmosphere Disney created. Art, or some kinds of it (visionary, surrealist, erotic), has the power to expand the limits of fantasy. Disney could not push those too far without ceasing to be Mr. Clean, the celluloid geneticist who ingeniously bred the anus and genitals out of the animal kingdom, the trusted entertainer whose mandate was to give children the dreams adults like them to have. And so his achievement became a large shift in the limits of unreality, which is not by any means the same thing as art. The shows and puppetry...