Welcome to Disney World.

 At the moment, Walt Disney is, in a phrase that my fifth-form English teacher would have used to illustrate redundancy, "extremely ubiquitous". SBS is doing the 2024 How Disney Built America six-parter, itself one of the US History Channel's How... serieses. Meanwhile, what was Fox Studios, with the old R.A.C. Sydney Showground lettering still on the gates, now has a sign reading "Disney" and buses roll down the streets covered with the campaign celebrating the release of the studio's new Elio. 

It occurs to me that my relation with Disney is now longer than any I've had with people I've actually known. Even before I found the Disney films, I homed in on their comic books - clean lines and distinctive characters. My formative years were punctuated with excursions to Sydney movie palaces doing Disney cartoon features double billed with Tarzan movies. When decades later l caught a beautiful new subtitled print of Tarzan's New York Adventure in a Paris art cinema, I remember being brought down by the realisation that I'd finally worked through all Johnny Weissmuller's jungle exploits. There were no more. I didn't exhaust Disney anywhere nearly so easily. Eventually, I would find myself seeking out Captain Eo at Anaheim and again at Euro Disney - that incidentally a whole lot less welcoming than  Futurescope, their competitor in the innovative projection systems market I was documenting. 

There was always something to relish in Disney titles, even when they were playing in TV-era near empty theatre sessions - the product reinvigorarted by CinemaScope for Toot Whisle Plunk Boom and Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood ("an outlaw for an inlaw"), The Aristocats' jam sessions crashing through successive ceilings or automation manufacturing the stampede for The Lion King - even the great effects work in live action like Blackbeard's Ghost. I will admit to being relieved when they stopped warbling Alan Menken's Broadway melodies but Robin Williams' genie and Josh Gad's  Frozen ice man warming his feet by the fire were still to come. After in-house Buena Vista Distribution released films for grown-ups and The Disney Channel appeared, the company went on to gulp down competitors Lucas Film, Marvel and Pixar,  

    Jason Gaignard

How Disney Built America goes for re-enactments, with unfamiliar-face performers Jason Gaignard (Witnesses) & Derek Kealy (Six Days in August) as yin & yang Disney brothers, Kealy's Roy forever stuck uneasily with the enabler role, cautioning against the cost of  Gaignard/Walt's ambitions. The series goes back to their Kansas City childhood but stops short of Euro Disney, their twenty-first-century triumphs and the current disputed policy of reviving the classic animations as live-action features. Personally, I thoroughly enjoy the Tim Burton Dumbo.

How Disney Built America is not the TV's first attempt to document Disney - include a 1988 PBS American Experience Ep., Jean Pierre Ibouts' 2001 Walt: the Man Behind the Myth, Samuel Doux' 2006 Il etait une fois ... Walt Disney /Once Upon a Time Walt Disney, along with the company's forays into self-portrait TV production, peaking with the fifties Mickey Mouse Club and its beaming Uncle Walt. In fact, Walt Disney must be in there, with Adolf Hitler and Jesus Christ, as the figure to feature in the most documentaries ever. Despite all these, I find that the more you know about him, the less clear our impression becomes.

The studio head who took a day off to take Haley Mills on the Disneyland rides, when she arrived to do Pollyanna, also, I'm told, hounded a bored staff animator out of the industry for drawing the genitals on Chip and Dale in one frame (a twenty-fifth of a second). Disney, the voice of Mickey Mouse, attacked Art Babbit, the creator of Goofy, as a communist when Babbit led a 'forties company strike for better conditions and recognition. The man who Dali saluted as America's greatest surrealist was also abused by the high art community for debasing popular taste worldwide.

The basic narrative is pretty clear. After a Kansas City childhood, where early morning paper runs left the young Disney brothers dozing in classes and getting poor academic results, Walt volunteered for WW1, becoming an underage army driver, decorating the side of his ambulance and doing cartoons for Service papers. Back home with early animators Presman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio, he worked on the Laugh-O Grams series, and here How Disney Built America throws us a curve when one of their scholar commentators (who they field rather than survivors or family) describes their development of a universally lovable cartoon animal. No, it's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit! 

We hear about Producer Charles Mintz using their contract to make off with the character, leaving Oswald to be jostled by Krazy Kat and Scrappy in the obscurity of Winkler-Mintz Toons. Disney's obsession with Copyright Protection, dating from this, is only hinted though it got as far as the Sony Bono amendment, where Mickey Mouse was protected from the provisions of public domain by US Congress 

The Disneys started again, taking only their Winkler animator associate, Ub Iwerks. It was Ub who created Mickey Mouse, tracing the outlines off pocket change. Getting credit on the Mickey newspaper strip wasn't enough recognition and the dissatisfied cartoonist set up with Pat Powers, who had taken over the once mighty Felix the Cat franchise, doing Iwerks shorts there - the Willy Woppers, Flip the Frogs and the rest. That didn't work out either and back at Disney after the Reluctant Dragon, Ub would head up their effects work, and notably those for The Birds. Add animations for the Times Square Jumbotron. Incidentally, that's not a made-up moniker, like Parkyakarcus or Ishkabible. He was Norwegian and we'll see the family name again in the eighties, lettered across the Simulated Park Ride Theatre chain his son set up. 

 The Disneys launch Mickey just as sound comes in ("I think we should go see the Jazz Singer again") and, in an early example of what all biographers applaud as his thinking big, Disney sold his car to bankroll a repeat pioneer sonorisation of Steamboat Mickey. One of the current series' best moments is the glimpse of the staff manning slide whistles and xylophones in time to a picture projected on a bed sheet. We see them develop Donald's Iago to counter Mickey's bland Othello. Bluey take a hint!

There is more ambition when Walt gambles on an exclusive contract to use improved Technicolor and develops the multiplane process, replacing bench animation in achieving depth. Pioneering Xeroxing of cells and computerisatiom would follow. The series is not all that hot on film history. They do come up with a better copy of Oswald's debut in Trolley Trouble but cut it short and show the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiere as a wide-screen presentation more than a decade before the process actually arrived..

 Photographed in Multiplane Technicolor!

Snow White was key, a giant financial gamble, making the first feature-length, full-colour cartoon film. Just when money was running short, Walt is shown discovering shoddy Mickey dolls offered on a street stall and taking up merchandising, making a bare few thousand in his first year at the point where Snow White was draining the company finaces, still going back into production for multiplane sequences. Equally opportunistic Kay Kamen (Paul Chiusolo in the series) throws his savings on the Disney office table and regales them with the prospect of tie-in sales (lunch boxes, cereal packets) becoming a major revenue stream. Going global, they would later even open a big Disney Store on the Champs-Élysées. Disney becomes the world's leading spin-off merchant and Snow White is represented as the then biggest earning film, (until Gone With the Wind showed up? Birth of a Nation?) the substantial budget more than recovered. 

The French Once Upon a Time Walt Disney is good on WW2 with Walt wandering lost in his studio, commandeered for the military. This was a period of poor incomes on the new cartoon features and an unsuccessful return to a mix of live action and animation, like the Alice films which had been used in the twenties to try to establish the Disney Los Angeles base. (Not discouraged, Disney finally cracked this with the success of Mary Poppins) There are a few dodgy choices in there. I'd nominate the heart-shaped iris closing round the cherub's naked bottom in Fantasia as the cinema's most kitschy moment.

However, rather than fade away, Walt seized the moment. Backed by an extraordinary film-making organisation and an already fabulous library of In-House Product, he made a deal with ABC, the number three in the new U.S. TV networks and generated the broadcaster's first big hit, The Mickey Mouse Club ("Who's the leader of the club that's best for you and me?") This slotted in nicely with the company's now largely forgotten documentary True Life Adventures and British frozen asset bankrolled live-action movies.  I have an agreeable memory of Richard Todd as Rob Roy. 

Once again, Walt ignored accepted wisdom, filmed his Fess Parker Davy Crocket movies on the scale of Theatrical Features and kicked off a bonanza in selling 'Coonskin caps. However, what would have satisfied most ambitions became a launch pad for an even more impressive gamble, bankrolling his family-friendly theme Park at Anaheim outside Los Angeles. 

Disney had studied Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens and figured that he could provide an alternative to the perceived-seedy U.S. Carnivals of the day - think of the ones shown in movies like the Victor Fleming Hula, the Tod Browning Freaks or three of State Fair and a couple of Nightmare Alley. Walt wanted his park to be like walking into one of the company's movies. We see Roy saying that they were betting the farm in an area where the company had no experience.  Turned out workmen were still adding final touches the night before an opening, which was to be a live TV spectacular.

Ah, but there's more. Finding the Anaheim location surrounded by businesses and hotels that offended his quality control standards, Walt bought up a Florida swamp and converted it to the world's largest leisure destination, the EPCOT Center, offering in-built facilities spread around a people mover that engaged with his lifelong fascination with railroads. Even his 1988 death did not decelerate the project, with Roy taking over to ensure it was a monument to his brother's tenacity and vision...

Forty years later, we get Elio. The story centres on an orphaned army brat voiced by Jonas Kibreab, making a nice break from all those Disney princesses getting reunions in the house product. Living on a military launch base, he is in the care of his soldier aunt (re-voiced by Zoe Saldaña in Studio second thoughts). Substitute parenting has got in the way of her ambition to be an astronaut. The space-mad boy lead is all attitude. Wearing his kitchen drainer hat, he lies on the desert sand, where he's scratched a message urging aliens to collect him. In the manner of these, his walkie-talkie message gets amplified by the base radio disks and sent into space, in the wake of their explorer satellite. Sure enough, there is a light in the sky. Winning moment of his delighted "Oh boy, my first probe!"

Like Buck Rogers and Starman, Elio finds himself the one who has to defend Earth from Alien Invasion, despite finally fessing up that he's just a kid, to the freaky ambassadors from other planets.  They make a nice example of Pixar's no talking animals approach, with some great voice actors from series TV - Shirley Henderson, Jameela Jamil not to mention intimidating Brad (Everybody Loves Raymond)  Garret's war lord.

 Really, Elio is a striking demonstration of how durable the Snow White format has proved. Even dying couldn't remove the Disney stamp. The endearing young protagonist again finds themself in a hostile adult environment but, aided by eccentrics and winning critters, wins through, after a spectacular animation set piece, and ends endorsing family values. Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella were to be expected but Enchanted was a nice update there. Elio includes yet another scary transformation. (evil stepmother to hag, boys to donkeys, the sorcerer's apprentice brooms)  but now we have taken on board Terminator. with the film's most striking concept, the Elio replica substitute, a great mix of appealing and scary. 

Well, Elio scored Pixar's worst-ever opening weekend. Confusion reigns. Commentators are saying the suits weren't happy with a project that won't become a franchise, while Toy Story is already up to number five. Others object that the film should be recognised as a break with all that dulling sequels repetition. Fingers are being pointed at a public unwilling to accept the originality that formula cartoon releases lack and at feeble promotion, bringing the film out opposite heavyweight competition in the same market. Enthusiastic focus groups had indicated they still wouldn't pay to see it in a theatre and management executed a retooling to remove original director Adrian (Coco) Molina's "queer coded" diversity content. Little Elio was originally an environmentalist with an interest in fashion, which can still be glimpsed in the character's peculiar outfit (that did puzzle me). Political correctness does linger, making the one blonde kid in base school the bully but that character's only there briefly. This is, after all, the studio that left "New lamps for old" out of Aladdin so that Princess Yasmin wouldn't look ditzy. However, support of weirdos round the world with their ham radios, is genuinely cheerworthy, a better call out for inclusivity. Put them alongside the geek prophets of  Close Encounters or Moonfall. 

I'm not the target audience for Elio but it brightened my day.  If I was twelve, I'd be telling all my mates how great it was. I wait for developments and wonder whether the fuss will get Molina's original cut off the shelf. Don't expect another Flow. We only need one of those. Paul Grimault, the Wang Brothers, UPA, Raoul Servais, and Zagreb have come and gone but the Disney aesthetic is still with us. Ponder that one.

Barie Pattison