A real Walt Disney

From children who are learning to speak, to elderly people, there are few who do not know Disney, whether it is Disney fans or not. As the founder of disney kingdom, Walt Disney has been known as a filmmaker, director, and entrepreneur, he is happy, passionate, and seems to have inexhaustible inspiration until his death from lung cancer in late 1966. Reading the book "Animated Life: Disney Biography", our original impression of Walt will change more or less, although it is not subversive, but there are many things that surprise us in the book.

On the cover of the book, Walt's smiling thinker-like face seems to remind the reader that this is not a book for pastime. Not really, but the book is very readable. The author of the book, Michael Barrier, is the founder of Happy World, the first serious anime magazine in the United States, and the author of a series of influential works such as Hollywood Cartoons: The Golden Age of American Cartoons and Comic Strips: The Miracle of American Comics Masterpieces, and as an authoritative scholar of animated films, comics and comic strips, his research on Walt Disney is comprehensive and remarkable. He has been studying Walt and Disney since 1969, interviewing a large number of Disney-related people over the decades, possessing a lot of first-hand material about Disney, and watching live-action films and dozens of TV shows that Walt produced during his lifetime. There are many reproductions of Walter's dialogues with others in the book, and they are also supported by original materials. There are plenty of annotations in the book, which may seem like a challenge to reading, but fans of Disney movies and parks should be able to adapt naturally to this style of writing, and it is these exhaustive annotations that highlight the value of the work and allow us to see the efforts the author put into writing the book.

"Animated Life: Disney Biography", by Michael Barrier, translated by Yang Yang and Dong Yanan, Zhejiang People's Publishing House, February 2019, first edition, 99.00 yuan

Michael Barrieuer, beginning with Walter's childhood, describes in detail how he went from carefree farm boy, starving artist, and wall-hitting young businessman to self-taught filmmaker, master animator, and king of entertainment. The book comprehensively sorts out the production process of a series of representative works such as "Alice's Wonderland", "Crazy Airplane", "Steamship Bill", "Three Little Pigs", "Snow White", "Treasure Island", "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", "Sleeping Beauty" and so on. Matching Walt's triumphant satisfaction, the pressure he was under was unimaginable to outsiders. As an innovating artist and entrepreneur, Walt never stops exploring from animated films to live-action films to documentaries and theme parks. It was his lifelong dream to spawn a new art form, a new film concept, and a new way of life.

As dream engineers, Walt and his Disney have proven to have had a tremendous impact on the way visual images are represented since the 20th century. Disney's animations were all box office leaders, and Disney was the pioneer of almost all new animation technologies at the time. Huate pays attention to cultivating comprehensive artistic talents who meet the development needs of the company and are good at multiple artistic fields, and has trained more than 1,000 well-known artists in creative practice. Perhaps Walt himself may not have expected that Disney would continue to expand its territory with his dreams and characteristics, and decades after his death, it will grow into a diversified multinational enterprise and entertainment empire with six brands including Disney, Pixar, Marvel, ABC, ESPN and Lucasfilm, as well as a number of businesses including film, television, consumer goods, interactive media, theme parks and resorts. The organic combination of art and business has unleashed more potential than you can imagine.

In 2001, Disney CEO Michael Eisner said of Walt: "I always strive to be a bridge that passes on the fruits of Walt's production and creation to the next person who shares the same philosophy... We are a naïve company, let's be naïve forever. "Always naïve and always with dreams, it is Walt's lifelong dream pursuit and concept adherence, and it has also become the corporate soul and development direction of Disney Company." Walt has never been more than a symbol of Disney and the global animation trend it leads, and he has been there since the founding of Disney to today.

It is certain that without the art of animation pioneered by Walter, the art history of the 20th century would have been eclipsed. It is precisely because Walt has a huge influence after his death and death that his name has been continuously mentioned by posterity, and his "dreams" and "vision" have been continuously praised by the world. This has led to many studies that blur Walter as a symbol, or interpret his work and life in a partial way, forcibly simplifying the complexity of his behavior and personality, and his image has become increasingly unreal. Michael Barrieux is obviously unwilling to let Walter "be trapped in the thorn forest made by others", and strives to complete the shaping of "people" through the restoration of Walt's real life and career development, through the excavation of historical details, to show the world a passionate artist, a strong "coordinator", and a business helmsman who has devoted himself to his career with a passion for his lover.

Page after page, the fragments in "Animated Life" are like frames of Disney animation, making Walt's image come alive. He is a strange, quick-witted, harsh freak, fickle and persistent, perfect and childish, cute and respectable and arbitrary, but he can be called a true person who is faithful to his heart. (Mao Zhihui)