REINCARNATION AS CARTOON CHARACTERS

Well before his exploitation as that nine-year-old newspaper delivery boy in Kansas City Walt Disney’s revision of reality began during his earliest childhood when his family worked a farm in Marceline, Missouri. All those barnyard animals with whom Disney became familiar – if not actually friendly – reappeared twenty-odd years later revised into the cavorting capricious clowns of his pioneering animated endeavors – anthropomorphized horses, cows, pigs, hens, ducks, et al.

Walt’s imagination was drenched with nostalgia and memories of his own past. His boyhood in Marceline, Missouri, was the foundation of many of his cartoons, feature films and theme park attractions. Throughout his career, Walt continually gathered up the events of his life and creatively rearranged them into imaginative new experiences for the world to enjoy.[1]

One creature in particular materialized again and again in later major animated films, actually “starring” or making important “cameo” appearances in The Old Mill, Bambi, Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, The Sleeping Beauty and The Sword in the Stone: an owl character at last in this latter film anointed with a name – “Archimedes”. Why?

As a farmboy Disney had captured an owl. The five-year-old lad became frightened at the bird’s frantic attempts to escape. He threw it on the ground and stomped it to death. Overwhelmed with remorse he prepared a grave and gave the creature a small funeral. Still a quarter century later and for the rest of his life afterward the adult artist attempted to revise this traumatic moment in his youthful reality by resurrecting the owl repeatedly on film and furnishing for it the wizened cantankerous personality which his boyhood self must have projected onto the original animal.

Not to mention Mickey Mouse!

There emerged at the end of the 1920s a little figure of still crude yet potentially enchanting proportions: Mortimer Mouse, or as Walt’s new wife Lillian nicknamed him, “Mickey”.

I contend that in any earlier century Mickey’s incarnation – if it happened at all – would surely have been as a handpuppet or perhaps a marionette. He is probably the first truly American puppet character, appropriately generated out of the intercourse between a folkish free enterprise and the nation’s abiding fascination for technological tinkering.

Certainly a far cry from the internationally ubiquitous scabrous Mister Punch (a.k.a. Pulcinella or Polichinelle or Petrushka or Kasperle etc.) of earlier centuries Mickey is an amalgam of traits peculiarly “American” and appropriately “democratic”: affable, average, commonsensical, romantic, a “good guy”, one of the “white hats”, Jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none, a darling of the masses as inventive as Edison, as daring as Lindberg, as friendly as Will Rogers and as corny as Kansas.

Most folks stigmatize mice as verminous rodents – repulsive and dangerous, a dire indication that the dwelling if not the whole neighborhood is in decline. Wherever they set foot they leave a trail of “germs” don’t they? And excrement. But Walt Disney said he “befriended” one encouraging it to play across his drawing board during those early years when he himself actually did animate his cartoons. What an un-flinching revision of reality to evoke a “Mickey Mouse” out of the conventional wisdom regarding these vermin!

How versatile and refined is Mickey Mouse, who can play the piano, ride a horse, conduct a band, fly an airplane, build a house and do other constructive things with equal proficiency…[2]

And so it was that Walt Disney was perpetually revising reality and inviting us to join him in these other realms where, yes, occasional horrible incidents undeniably do occur but they are quickly dispelled by the fairytale “happily ever after” ending.

---

[1] Williams, Pat, and Denny, Jim: How to Be Like Walt, Health Communications, Inc., Deerfield Beach, FL, 2004, p. 64.

[2] Playwright William Kozlenko, The New Theater Magazine, as quoted in Maltin, Leonard: The Disney Films, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1973, p. 7.