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Pearls into Marbles. Most exciting of Disney's new developments, however, are the nature films, for with them he has opened up a new world of intense experiences and possibilities. In them, as in few films of recent years, there is the sense that the camera can take an onlooker into the interior of a vital event—indeed, into the pulse of life-process itself. Thus far, Disney seems afraid to trust the strength of his material: he primps it with cute comment and dabs at it with flashy, cosmetical touches of music. But no matter how hard he tries, he cannot quite make Mother Nature look like what he thinks the public wants: a Hollywood glamour girl. "Disney has a perverse way," sighs one observer, "of finding glorious pearls and then using them for marbles."
The fact is, however, that he does find the pearls; and, all things considered, he plays a pretty good game of marbles. He plays it like a healthy boy—knuckles down and fire away!—and trust to luck for a hit or a miss. He has no mind or time for the niggling refinements of taste. There is too much to be seen and done, too many wonderful things in the world that might be made into movies; and away he rushes, with his intellectual pockets full of toads and baby bunnies and thousand-leggers, and plunges eagerly into every new thicket of ideas he comes across. Often enough he emerges, in radiant triumph, bearing the esthetic equivalent of a rusty beer can or an old suspender. They are treasures to Walt, and somehow his wonder and delight in the things he discovers make them treasures to millions who know how dearly come by are such things as wonder and delight. Besides, there is always the chance that, when he comes bursting out of the next bush, face all scratched and lumberjacket full of stickers, he may be clutching in his hand some truly precious thing: perhaps, who knows, as precious as—a mouse?
*Once, during the production of Fantasia, Walt sat through a screening of the centaur sequence set to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. When it was over he turned to one of his assistants and said earnestly: "Gee! This'll make Beethoven."
*"Those madmen over at Disney's" became a Hollywood byword. One Disney animator, for instance, was found lying flat on his back on the sidewalk in a pouring rain. As a policeman dragged him off to the station house, the fellow protested that he had been "studying lightning."
*In France, one observer tried to account for Dopey's popularity by explaining that he resembled so many French Premiers.