Evil uncle Walt (Disney)

By DAVID THOMSON

Say "2001" and we think of Stanley Kubrick's panorama of the future. But Kubrick's cold, serene enigma now feels further away than it did in 1968.

So if you look to 2001 for some clue to how we live now, recall that 100 years ago, come December 5, a baby was born in Chicago with the plain name of Walter. He would later become the cute and amiable Walt.

Now it's easy, straight away, to suppose that Walt Disney has been a good and happy thing for this world and its amusement. But on the other hand, there are those who deplore his works and his influence. Does it all come down to what we expect of children?

Walter Elias Disney was born poor, the son of a drifter and a failure. There are portrayals of Walt that say he drew to escape unhappiness. Others say the fiercely ambitious kid was exploiting his skill as a quick-sketch artist.

He never finished high school. He joined the Ambulance Corps as a teenager (just like Hemingway), but arrived in France too late to see combat. He returned and went to Kansas City, where he met another kid named Ub Iwerks, a Dutchman and a better draftsman.

Together they tried to make animated movies - a sequence of gradually advanced drawings to imitate life - but they went bust. With Walt's older brother, Roy, they then went to Los Angeles with a bit more than $50 and a lot of hope.

It was in 1995, nearly 30 years after Walt's death, that the Disney Corporation paid $19 billion to buy Capitol Cities/ABC, forming one of the most powerful blocs in the entertainment world (they also own Miramax, among many other concerns).

As such, Disney has had ultimate responsibility for films as diverse as Pretty Woman and The English Patient, as well as the steady stream of animated features.

It also presides over the empire of toys and merchandising derived from its shows, over Disneyland in southern California, Disney World in Florida, and Euro Disney outside Paris. The modern notion of synergy in entertainment - of movies that are the hub to a wheel of subsidiary businesses - began with Disney.

But reports on the business pages have suggested that the wheel may have turned full circle. Disney's latest quarterly profits are down 82 per cent. A succession of would-be blockbusters has proved disappointing. Michael Eisner, the flamboyant chief executive, has been savagely criticised.

Visitor numbers to Disneyland and World have fallen off sharply since September 11. And Merrill Lynch recently lowered its estimates for Disney's 2002 operating income from $4.1bn to $2.9bn - although that's still some operating income, testimony to the giant, pervasive conglomerate Disney has become. Even in a bad year, Disney remains the cultural equivalent of a superpower.

It's easy to tell the heroic story. Not many found Walt a likeable man, but no one doubted his determination. His rousing calls for team effort - which meant unpaid overtime for his gang of brilliant animators - ensured he got everything right, or at least better than his rivals could manage.

In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, there was a crowd of animation houses in movies. That Disney now seems synonymous with animation is a testament to Walt's pursuit of excellence, to the unyielding aggression of his marketing, and to popular taste.

Walt triumphed thanks to the creation of adorable characters such as Mickey Mouse, to meticulous animation, and to a true genius for seeing how sound and music helped to bring these strange animals to life (just consider how his anthropomorphism has compromised real animals).

In the process, Disney established a mainstream, inoffensive line of animation. Early Disney shorts were often vulgar, raunchy and pitched at adults. But as Mickey became a household figure, and as children warmed to him, so Disney saw the business wisdom in not alarming parents.

Hence the early stress on technical achievement and bowdlerised or sweetened material, and the gradual focusing on a young audience encouraged to believe that everything would end happily.

By 1937, Disney's technical advances were so great that he dared to make the first feature-length animated movie, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (in Technicolor). That success changed the medium. It was also a great show, winning a special Oscar for innovation (seven miniature statuettes), with the smoothest, loveliest animation yet achieved.

It is nowhere near the Gothic original as told by the Brothers Grimm. There are still children who read that story, in hauntingly illustrated versions. In 1997 there was actually a live-action movie, Snow White: A Tale of Terror (with Sigourney Weaver as the stepmother), the sort of picture some tender parents might deem unfit for impressionable children.

Disney was working the safe side of the street, aware of all those children who had difficulty reading, and operating in a country that did not have a strong literary tradition. You could argue that Disney, as a whole, has done too little to help the nation catch up. Moreover, the strength of Disney commercially has eliminated a lot of the more inventive strains of animation - the abstract, painterly style of John Hubley and the UPA studio in the 1950s, and even the exuberant, anarchic violence of Tom and Jerry.

Still, there's no doubting the potency of Disney in the late 30s and early 40s. Snow White was followed by Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi - extraordinary works.

But by then, the Disney grin had cracked. In 1941 there was a strike by Disney animators, increasingly aware of the gap between Walt's success and their exhaustion. The mood at the studio was never the same again.

By the end of the war he had lost faith in the cartoon itself. He pursued live-action films (such as Treasure Island and documentaries (The Living Desert). He put more time and energy into developing his television show and cultivating the idea of Disneyland (which opened in 1955).

After his death in 1966, the movie side of the business was in tatters, despite the success of Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book. The latter is typical of late Disney - a travesty of Kipling's great story, a movie sustained by star-actor voices and a succession of songs. The love of animation for its own sake was gone.

It wasn't until 1984 that things changed. Walt's son-in-law, Ron Miller, was replaced as chairman by Michael Eisner from Paramount. In turn, Eisner hired another Paramount man, Jeffrey Katzenberg, to reinvigorate the animation programme. Eisner has been the modern business genius at Disney.

Disney is now an entertainment megalith, likely to make any kind of movie, not just the animated features that have changed so little since the 50s.

It's a matter of taste, but it seems to me that the recent hits - The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast - are vulgarised versions of stories that might move children to the depth of their being. "Brainwashing" is an unkind word but Disney is a corporate empire that would cheerfully do away with the irritant of dissidence or alternatives.

This plight may feel greater in America, where Disney has become as central to childhood experience as television, junk food and disposable nappies. This is a culture in which most children spend little time reading or playing games of their own invention.

Of course, you can argue that film and television in general are more to blame for that than Walt Disney in particular. And surely, educational erosion and parental dismay are all part of the problem.

But I think it is underestimated - except, possibly, by the enemies of American "cultural imperialism" - how far Disney has mastered and narrowed that territory called the child's imagination.

In the 1942 Preston Sturges movie, Sullivan's Travels, the title character is a top Hollywood director who begins to question his life and work, and sets out to find the "real" America. But his high-mindedness backfires and he is imprisoned with a Southern chain gang.

Sullivan begins to see how harsh reality can be for some of his fellows. He goes to a prison film show and finds himself laughing, with relief, along with the other brutalised guys. The film is a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

It's a good lesson. We all need entertainment sometimes, and that is all Hollywood has ever offered. But is Sturges' parable sound? Or a recipe for the best way to treat prisoners?

Give a thought, in this anniversary year, as to whether Walt is our genial uncle, or the 20th century's most effective cultural dictator - the man who trained our kids to be consumers.

- INDEPENDENT