The Art of Walt Disney: Book Review
Starting with and old model Mickey Mouse striding confidently across the front of this new edition of Christopher Finch’s “The Art of Walt Disney” it is enough for any Disney fan to get excited before the first page is turned. Filled with loads of gorgeous pictures and artwork from nearly 100 years of Disney history, as we take a look at some of Walt’s sketches from the trenches of the First World War right the way up to the more recent work such as Tangled. The book does not only look at the animated films but also the live action features and a trip to the theme parks with focus on the “Imagineers” who create the rides and attractions that Walt spent his later years focusing on.
In terms of writing you seem to get a lightning quick tour of Disneys life right the way through until he looses the rights to “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” in 1927. Within a handful of pages he has quit his paperbound, joined the army and then set up his own cartoon studio. This of course is of no real loss to the overall book, as a reader I suspect you would be more interested in “The Art of Walt Disney”- as the title promises – rather than the ins and outs of his life. There are, after all, any number of books that deal with Walt Disney as a man.
Christopher Finch peppers the paragraphs with interesting facts that encourage more reading; this coupled with the lavish artwork and photographs make this book a Disney fans dream. The photographs do not all stay close to the wholesome picture that the Disney company project of Uncle Walt. In one still a youthful Walt can be seen pistol-whipping a man (or at least, acting out the action) for a film he was working on. Its nice to see a Disney endorsed product occasionally straying from its glossy image, even if it is only for the odd fact here or the occasional photograph there.
Anyone with more than a passing affection for Walt Disney won’t be surprised to learn that this book is not filled with his own sketches. Walt Disney after all was a businessman with a keen eye for talented artists, and it is generally the work of those artists that fills this book, from storyboard panels and model sheets right the way through to layout drawings and posters, the author has taken care in selecting the right images to guide us through the story of the Walt Disney empire. It is nice to see behind the scenes photographs of the multiplane cameras or promo images of the early studio employees joining Carl Stalling gathered around a piano in song. We not only see images from the animation process but also images from Disney’s movie and theme park creations dreamed up by the Imagineers.
The book parallels Walt’s obsessions clearly. In the early days Disney wanted to take the medium of animation to levels never before seen, later he wished to do the same for live action movies and finally the theme parks that bear his name. This version of the book continues through to look briefly at life without Walt before taking a comprehensive look at the Disney corporation’s saving grace – Pixar. The images that fill the Pixar section are just as carefully selected as the images in the rest of the book. In fact where the old fashioned Mickey graces the front cover, the back cover features Woody from Toy Story with Luxo Jnrs Ball, another character that represents a runaway success in a nice bit of design symmetry that symbolises Disney’s ever evolving image.
This book is full of reasons why it has remained in print for nearly 40 years showing the growth of the Walt Disney name from the schoolboy sketches of nearly 100 years ago to the all encompassing entertainment and media empire it is today. This edition shows the best of the brand that– like the book – all started with a mouse.
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