(2 of 3)
In The Three Little Pigs (1933), Disney foreshadowed the work of his full-length films. Crisp in color, jaunty in jingly music (Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?), the movie was also a significant departure in its simply stated moral theme. In Snow White, Disney and his staff met the challenge of creating believable characters. Each of the seven dwarfs, from sober-sided Doc to dim-bulb Dopey, had a distinct personality. In Cinderella, a handful of Disney creations nearly stole the show: the bloodthirsty but fatuous cat Lucifer, and the nimble mice, Jaq and Gus-Gus. Millions of children the world over grew up convinced that Disney wrote as well as drew such tales as The Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. And there are grown men and women today who, recalling Fantasia, cannot hear the Dance of the Hours without visualizing the delicate prancing of Disney hippos and elephants, or The Sorcerer's Apprentice without seeing Mickey Mouse trying to dam the flood wrought by a many-splintered broom, or A Night on Bald Mountain without shuddering at Disney's crackling thunderbolts and the satanic wingspread darkening a tumultuous sky.
Disney always maintained that he made films not for children but for "honest adults." He was pleased when the enormously successful Disneyland was dubbed "Disney's Golden Cornfield," and said defiantly, "We're selling corn. And I like corn." Though most of his later "real-life" nature movies—The Living Desert, Beaver Valley, Water Birds—were imaginative documentary films, some critics protested that he spoiled them with gimmicks. And though historical pictures like Davey Crockett were also big hits, Disney was again criticized for sugar-coating his history.
The basic concern of the critics was always that Walt Disney refused to see life in the raw, to accept the end of innocence. He came from the Midwes—born in Chicago, reared there and in Missouri—and stubbornly adhered to the idea that wickedness was no subject for entertainment. In his work, children and animals were naturally good; nature, at least in his animated films, was not so red in tooth and claw as it was cuddly in fur and paw.
In the literature ostensibly created for children—Huck Finn, Grimm's fairy tales—fantasy was mixed with social satire and cruelty beyond the comprehension of innocent minds. Mark Twain and Grimm succeeded by stressing the differences between the child's and the adult's world. Disney perhaps would have been incapable of tackling such subjects without diminishing in some measure—as he did with Mary Poppins—their hard bite of inner reality. He stressed the sameness of the two worlds, ignored or abolished the differences, reconciled the generations. If at times the results were mawkish, Disney scarcely gave it a thought. He saw his own role as the fantasist animating the warm dreams that men and children refuse to let die.