Word: schickel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DISNEY VERSION, by Richard Schickel. Within a carefully prepared social, cultural and artistic context, Cinema Critic Schickel sees the late creator of Mickey Mouse and Disneyland as embodying the best and worst traits of the hard-charging entrepreneur...
...Schickel admits that he was interested in Disney not only as an individual but also as "a type that I have known and conducted a sort of love-hate relationship with since I was a child." The author's ambivalence cost him the cooperation of Disney and, after his death, of his associates. But this has not kept Schickel from presenting his subject in a firm social, cultural and artistic context. Schickel has high regard for the primitive, graphic quality of the early Mickey Mouse cartoons and for full-length, animated features such as Pinocchio, which, he thinks...
...harshest criticism of Disney is that the entertainment machine he set in motion "was designed to shatter the two most valuable things about childhood-its secrets and its silences-thus forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams." That is probably an exaggeration, suggesting that, like Disney himself, Schickel romanticizes the. good old days, and sentimentalizes the nature of childhood as well. Schickel argues that Disney could not have been an artist because his simplified view of reality narrowed rather than expanded consciousness. Yet time and again he somehow feels the need to hold Disney up as an artist-only...
...Disney was far more than a Br'er Babbitt who made it big cracker-barreling the virtues of hard work and good clean fun. He was, as Schickel generously illustrates, a masterful organizer, bold technological innovator and a zealous, often ruthless go-getter in the idealized American tradition. He had a compulsion to order, cleanse and control in ever-expanding circles. Disneyland, once described as "the world's biggest toy lor the world's biggest boy," consumed most of his interest in the last years of his life. When it came to technical matters...
None of this, however, spoils the book's validity. Schickel himself puts it best: "Our environment, our sensibilities, the very quality of both our waking and sleeping hours, are all formed largely by people with no more artistic conscience or intelligence than a cumquat. If the happy few do not study them at least as seriously as they study Andy Warhol, then they will lose their grip on the American reality...