Walt Disney: Dr. Duck And Mr. Mouse - Great And Terrible

Walt Disney is the man who created the magical dream world. It was Walt Disney who turned animation into true art. His heroes have become legends, and Mickey Mouse takes the first place among them. Why exactly the image of a mouse appeared in Disney's head? Perhaps, in this way, the director tried to get rid of the muzophobia (fear of mice), which he suffered from childhood? There were always a lot of mice in the studio garage, where he first worked.

Walter Elias Disney (1901-1966), American filmmaker, producer, animator, creator of the Disneyland amusement park, directed 111 films during his busy life and produced 576 more films. Outstanding services of Disney in the field of cinematography are marked by 26 Oscar statuettes (in this list, he still holds the world record).

Diagnostic guess

Recurrent (recurring) depressive disorder. Obsessive compulsions (obsessive-compulsive disorder) and zoophobia.

SUCCESSFUL DEBUT

Walt Disney was born in Chicago in a poor family with many children. Disney's dad beat him so badly that poor Walt thought he just couldn't be his real dad! After his "lessons," little Walt turned to Roy, his older brother, for consolation, who healed his wounds, both physical and mental. The mother also tried to console her son - she read him fairy tales. These fictional stories allowed Walt to hide for a while in an imaginary world and escape from the frightening reality. In such conditions, the fantasy of the future leader of animation developed.

In 1906, the family moved to a farm, first to Missouri, then to Kansas City. Walt had no one to befriend there. Instead of his peers, his friends became pets, which he loved to draw. In the future, Walt will transfer some of the images from childhood to the big screen - the pig Porker, on which he loved to ride as a kid, will serve as the prototype for the Foolish Man from Three Little Pigs. According to Disney, after finishing the sketch of Foolish, he "practically sobbed with nostalgia."

Soon, Walt developed a completely recognizable original style that amazed family and friends. The fact is that not just a young and talented artist was formed from Disney, he became an excellent caricaturist. The father constantly punished his son for drawing, and perhaps Disney would never have taken his hobby seriously if not for a lucky break. Since childhood, Walt was distinguished by a cheerful character, and therefore in Marceline many neighbors knew and loved him. One of these neighbors gave Disney 25 cents for a child to draw his horse. The bargain sale of a portrait of a mare prompted Walt to think of becoming an artist.

UPS AND DOWNS

In 1923, Disney moved to Los Angeles, where, with his brother Roy, he created The Walt Disney Company in Hollywood as a small animation studio. In March 1924, Walt presented his first stunt film, Alice's Day at Sea, inspired by the characters from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

The famous Mickey Mouse mouse, drawn by the animator Ab Iwerks, was originally called Mortimer, but soon he received a name that is now well known all over the world. Mickey Mouse opened the road to success for the director.

In 1929, Disney began work on the series "Naive Symphonies", and by 1938 he had directed over 70 episodes, including "Dance of the Skeletons", "The Ugly Duckling" and "Three Little Pigs". Many of his famous characters appear in these films, including the drake Donald Duck.

On December 21, 1937, the full-length animated film by Disney "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was first shown on the screens of America. Snow White was a huge hit for Disney: popularity, $ 8 million in revenue, and rave reviews in the professional press.

Walt Disney has always been a real volcano spewing amazing ideas. He could not only one thing - counting money, as he always spent more than he earned. “I don't make films just to make money. I earn money to make films,”emphasized Walt.

His entire creative life was a series of financial catastrophes and ups that lasted three decades. Disasters were inextricably linked to his emotionality and contributed to the "nervous breakdowns" to which he was exposed. Excessive alcohol consumption and "crazy smoking" also affected. Disney's first episodes of mental illness began at the age of 20. At the age of 29, after another failure in filmmaking, Walt took a large dose of sleeping pills in a state of depression. The suicide attempt, fortunately, failed.

NOT ONLY CARTOONS

For those who are not afraid of panic rooms, today there are five amusement parks in the world with the name Disney in the name. The oldest of them opened in 1955 near Los Angeles. The largest was born in 1971 in Florida. In 1983, a park in Tokyo opened for the first time outside the United States, followed in 1992 by Paris, and the newest was Disneyland in Hong Kong.

Biographers suggest that Disney had symptoms of manic-depressive psychosis. Periods of superproductive creativity were replaced by severe depressions, a state of excitement - "nervous exhaustion". Walt usually worked long and productively, and then had to take extended leave to recover from the onset of the collapse. Disney experienced eight depressive episodes caused by such a feverish existence, when he was either elevated to the very top of fame, where he received another Oscar, then thrown to the very bottom, where he had to struggle with financial difficulties. Almost every new Disney project brought the company to the brink of bankruptcy. Walt overpowered the situation, put everything on the future picture and in the end won. However, then he began to drink again, complained of heart pains and loss of strength, cried for no reason.

DIRECT AUTOCRAT

Disney's success is rooted in willpower, frantic courage and tenacity. He did not give up, even when defeat seemed inevitable. Walt is also known for not recognizing the merits of his closest associates - the true filmmakers of his studio. He paid the employees the minimum wage, and when they went on strike in May 1941, he showed himself far from the best side. On the first day of the strike, the picketers did not even allow Disney to enter his movie factory.

After this strike, he developed an obsession with washing his hands all the time: he carefully scraped his palms and fingers several times an hour. A nervous tic appeared on the face, which biographers explain by "a fanatical striving for perfection." A convinced anti-communist, he collaborated with the FBI for many years, and even on his own initiative wrote denunciations to the bureau about his colleagues in Hollywood. And after the war, he actively helped the Commission on Anti-American Activities to identify hidden communists in the world of cinema. Disney was one of the founders of the Union of Filmmakers Fighting for the Purity of American Ideals, a right-wing organization whose main task was to expel "communists, radicals and morons" from Hollywood.

In everyday life, Disney seemed to be an absolutely impractical person. He didn’t know how to make coffee and fry eggs. He ate wherever and what was needed. He could not wash and iron, and therefore spent insane money on clothes, buying new shirts instead of dirty shirts. He absolutely did not know how to rest and be distracted from work, which also contributed to the emergence of depressive states. Walt either started drinking to get away from his own problems, or played all day with a miniature model of the railway in the yard of his own house.

DREAMLAND

In the second half of the 40s, Walt Disney was captured by the idea of creating an amusement park. This idea was prompted by him taking walks with his daughters, when he was forced to spend hours in boredom, watching Diana and Sharon, having fun at the zoo or on the children's attractions. “We believed in our idea of a family park where parents and children can have fun together,” he says. Disney, who did not have a single normal toy in childhood, managed to create a real fairyland, not only on the screen, but in reality!

Until the age of 54, until Disney made a deal with a television company and opened his world famous Disneyland, he constantly played with fire, being on the verge of financial ruin. When Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt finally became a “real” millionaire, although many thought he had become rich long before that, winning Oscars for 20 years in a row. But his sudden wealth was the result of commerce and had nothing to do with creative success in the field of cinematography, since all the monetary awards and profits from the box office he invested in the creation of new and more sophisticated film works.

A daily bottle of whiskey and three packs of cigarettes resulted in premature death. On December 15, 1966, Disney died of lung cancer in Los Angeles. After that, the company that bears his name made the strategic decision to abandon the display of cigarettes in its films.

Psychologists have proven that fantasy is the beginning of all creativity. Disney's fantasy and imagination took him to the pristine world of childhood. Having created Mickey Mouse, Donald, Pinocchio and other heroes, he merged so much with his characters that he unconsciously endowed many of them with personality traits. This humanization of the characters made them more realistic for the audience. Mickey Mouse was Disney's second self. Both were cocky, impudent, mischievous, kind to old people and polite to all women. A comparative psychological analysis shows that Mickey Mouse embodied the best character traits of Disney: determination, modesty, self-control. The base traits of Disney were embodied by Donald Duck: gloomy, fickle, emotional, uncontrollable, angry.