WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

THE NINE DISNEY ANIMATED MASTERPIECES clearly expresses my immense admiration for Walt Disney’s unique achievements: not just the films themselves but the establishment and definition of an entirely new artform, the art of animation. The initial blogs are devoted to “preliminaries”. These include not only the definition of “masterpiece” and how these films qualify as such but also how they continue to influence contemporary filmmakers. Early influences that shaped Walt Disney’s “reality revision” will be explored as well as his career-long development of technologies to immerse audiences more thoroughly into the fantastic realms he conjured through animation. Expanding upon the information in these preliminaries, subsequent blogs will examine individually each of the nine animated features under consideration: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty. I will delve into “microscopic” detail about each and offer in-depth information about the original story sources, their elaborate development by the Disney studio artists, their overall design, the collaborative contributions of many great artists – animators, composers, graphic artists, actors, et al., the cultural and historic milieu surrounding their production, the technical advancements of each, their themes, shot-by-shot details of the animation, their critical and popular reception and an evaluation of each as an individual artwork. Then I will sum up these assessments and explain how and why connoisseurs of high culture have neglected Walt Disney’s sublime artistry and continue to do so to this very day.