WALT DISNEY, NATURE FILMS, and AMERICAN UNDERSTANDINGS of NATURE in the TWENTIETH CENTURY a Thesis Submitted to T
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THE EDUTAINER: WALT DISNEY, NATURE FILMS, AND AMERICAN UNDERSTANDINGS OF NATURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS by Travis Brandon Roy July 2015 Examining Committee Members: Andrew C. Isenberg, Department of History Peter Lavelle, Department of History ABSTRACT Throughout mu ch of the twentieth century Walt Disney wielded considerable influenceA in merican cul ture. By identifying and commercially exploiting a strain of environmental thought that sentimentalized and romanticized nature, Walt Disney influenced the attitudes of millions of Americans concerning how they conceptualized environmental issues. The Walt Disney Company’s nature documentaries and their popularity as both entertainment as well as educational material helped disseminate the virtues of conservation withinA the merican mindset. The Disney interpretation of conservatiosn cla hed w ith other post-war environmental understandings of the ethic, as did the company’s cons istently inacc urate representations of nature on film. Disney’s particular strain of environmentalism, based on an Edenic appreciation for nature, the belief that to co nserve land it must be developed, and practice of moralizing to humans through anth ropomorphized depictions of animal behavior, st ood out in contrast to other existing post-war environmental mindsets during the controversy surrounded the proposed construction of a vacation resort in Mineral King, California, following Disney’s death. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................... i CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2. EARLY YEARS ............................................................................................................8 3. TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES ......................................................................................15 4. DISNEY AS EDUCATOR ..........................................................................................28 5. MINERAL KING ........................................................................................................33 6. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................40 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..............................................................................................................46 ii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On the bank of a man-made rivera stood W lt Disney, flanked by a pair of an imatronic beavers. It was the grand unveiling of a new section of Disneyland in Anaheia m, C lifornia, intended to promote and honor the Walt Disney Company’s latest successful forays into nature documentaries known as True-Life Adventures. Though Frontierlan d had been a part of the theme park since it opened in 1955, the public’s enthus iastic response to the True-Life series prompted the Walt Disney Company to expand Frontierland’s train ride to include what the company dubbed Nature’s Wonderland. Tourists could now ride a tinyt train hrough a fake desert, complete with a robotic bobcat perched atop a phony cactus (pulled directly from a scene in the Disney documentary The Living Desert) as well as a tiny river and forest, replete with artificially constructed bears, a nd, of course, t he beaver stars of the documentary Beaver Valley. Before a crowd of photographers on a sunny June day in 1960, Walt Disney stood with his three grandchildren, each of whom sported a jaunty Wild West cowboy hat as, instead of cutting a ceremonial ribbon, they chopped at a carefully positioned branch with tiny, adorable hatchets.1 Upon being forced out of his first animation studio by a f ormer partner,Walt Disney, w ith hi s brother Roy, created i n 1928 what would become the most successful 1Richard West, “Mechanical Animals, Visitors Frolic in Disney’s New Nature’s Wonderland,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1960; Jerry Hulse, “Dream Realized - Disneyland Opens: $17,500,000 World of Fantasy Dedicated to Children and Hope,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1955. 1 animation studio in the history of the world.2 From the onset of Walt Disney’s career, the theme of nature absolutely permeated his work. Initially the cartoon shorts produced by the Walt Disney Company featured barnyard animals in agricultural settings. Black and white horses, cows, and pigs with decidedly similar countenances stretched and collapsed as they wobbled across the screen in parody of any kind of actual movement by either human or animal. This unrealistic technique was in keeping with the work of many of Walt Disney’s peers, and as such his early cartoons were largely deemed unremarkable by contemporaries.3 In time, the Walt Disney Company would demonstrate a tremendous degree of creativity combined with business acumen that would set it far apart from the rest of the animating world. Aside from creating memorable and exceptionally popular characters such as Mickey Mouse, the studio also ventured into creating animated cartoons that strove to appear realistic. This was an artistic decision drastically at odds with not just the work of other studios, but with the public’s expectations of what cartoons could be. The cartoons of the Disney Company have always been denigrated and viewed as faddish fluff by some, but many Americans feel that the Walt Disney studio’s realistic depictions of nature have elevated cartoons into art.4 While the Walt Disney Company does not hold the distinction of being the first studio to release a full length animated feature, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven 2 Richard Holliss and Brian Sibley, The Disney Studio Story (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988), 14-16. Holliss and Sibley name 1928 as the year of the studio’s founding as that is when Walt and Roy Disney struck out on their own to create independent cartoons. The Walt Disney Company’s website claims the studio’s founding was in 1923, when the brothers were still working for Charles Mintz, who later deprived them of their intellectual property. http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/about-disney/disney- history. Accessed June 19, 2015. 3 Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life (New York: Abbeville Press, 1981), 30-31. 4 Leonard Maltin, The Disney Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 12-13. 2 Dwarves did prove to be the first full length animated film that was hugely popular with the American masses. From practically the first frame, Snow White demonstrated what would become the defining feature of the Disney Company’s obsession with nature; that is, a sentimentalized depiction of nature as a romantic, idealistic Eden populated with anthropomorphized fauna. Furthermore, the film made liberal use of the pathetic fallacy. When Snow White smiled, the birds sang. When she was in danger, the skies went black and poured rain. In many ways, this film proved to set the tone of how Disney would present nature to its viewers from that moment on. Partly as a result of the Walt Disney Company’s influence, many Americans in the mid-twentieth century nurtured romantic and sentimental attitudes towards a nature from which they were increasingly physically removed and dissociated. These Americans came to conceptualize nature in a manner that closely mirrored the Disney Company’s artistic approach, as they were influenced all of their lives by Disney’s interpretation of nature both when being entertained as well as when being educated. Walt Disney’s role in educating the American public about nature, animal behavior, and the importance of conservation is obscured in modern memory in part because he himself was conflicted about his authority to do so. A high school dropout, Walt Disney was slow in embracing the fact that his voice was loudest in the mid-twentieth century when it came to the issue of conservation, and his position gave him the ability to educate audiences about nature by the millions.5 The catch, of course, is that the nature about which he educated the public was a simplified, packaged, easily consumable fantasy. Disney sought to instill his moral 5 On Disney not completing high school, see Robert De Roos, “The Magic Worlds of Walt Disney,” National Geographic 124, no. 2 (August, 1963), 178. 3 values into his audience through motion pictures, and this moral education was more easily communicated when it was padded with tales of loveable forest creatures behaving in a manner that felt relatable to humans. Conservative, post-war values were popular in America and were reflected in the popularity of all things Disney. Furthermore, Walt Disney’s definition of conservation was one that centered on outdoor recreation and land development, and it did not necessarily reflect how conservation would come to be defined by those raised under the scope of his influence. This conservation ethos paired with a fantastic portrayal of nature, presented to Americans in theaters, homes, and schools in the mid-twentieth century as authentic fact, can help explain the sentimental, romantic strain of thought running through twentieth-century environmentalism. There is no shortage of books written about Disney the man and Disney the company.6 The deluge of works written on these subjects in turn run the gamut in terms of opinion. Seemingly, most biographies of note about Walt Disney were celebratory fanfare until Richard Schickel published