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And grow they did. Hands grew more skillful and inventions multiplied.* So Pluto fell off a cliff—what next? His ears whirled around like propellers, his front legs spread like wings, and back he roared to safety. In Disney's hands the laws of physics turned to taffy. Shadows walked away from bodies. Men got so angry they split in two. Trains ate cookies. Autos flirted. People stretched like rubber bands. But it became harder and harder to outwit the public. Disney gags got downright erudite. In one cartoon Donald Duck might walk over the edge of a cliff and fall down. In the next he would walk off the cliff and keep right on walking—on air. In the next he would keep walking, suddenly notice where he was—and then fall. In the next, he would run back to safety without falling, or fall and catch the edge of the cliff with an arm that was suddenly 30 feet long.
A Hit, a Flop. Three Little Pigs (1933) and The Country Cousin (1936), a technical masterpiece in the new Technicolor, proved that Disney was ready at last for the task he had set himself: to make a full-length cartoon feature. It had long been his heart's desire, but by this time it was a business necessity; cartoon costs had risen so high that it was no longer possible to make a profit with shorts. So he borrowed $1,500,000 and made Snow White. Released in 1937, it was one of the biggest hits that Hollywood had produced since The Birth of a Nation. It grossed $9,000,000 on its first release (it has since earned $5,000,000 more), produced seven top tunes, won eight (one for each dwarf and one for the picture) of Disney's 22 Academy Awards, sold more than $10 million worth of merchandise. It also made Dopey, the seventh dwarf, the darling of millions,* and Disney himself more than ever the darling of the intellectuals. Harvard and Yale awarded him degrees. People called him "the poet of the new American Humanism," and drew Chaplinesque morals about Mickey as "the symbol of common humanity in its struggle against the forces of evil."
To these siren songs, Walt lent half an ear. Encouraged by Leopold Stokowski and Deems Taylor, he made the biggest boner of his career: Fantasia. Its basic idea, to illustrate music with pictures, was depressing enough to anyone who loves either form of art. Its declared intention to bring "culture" to the "masses" turned out to be silly: it had nothing to do with culture, and the "masses" would have nothing to do with it. Fantasia has never earned back what it cost. Worse yet, though Walt learned a lesson from Fantasia, he learned the wrong one: mistaking for culture what Stokowski and Taylor had offered him, he decided that culture was not for him.