Friday, 2 February 2018

Defending Disney - Part 3: Walt the Anti-Nazi Propagandist

[<- Index]
[<- Part 2: Walt, the Supposed Nazi]

Looking at the actual evidence makes it nothing short of madness to claim Walt Disney was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. As we have seen, the pro-argument consists of assuming a meeting with a German filmmaker (who herself was actually taken in by Hitler) was maliciously motivated rather than just being a meeting between filmmakers (and which Walt later disavowed), and a dubious claim from Disney's enemy of him attending open German American Bund meetings that is corroborated by nothing else. Such underwhelming evidence hardly even requires counter-evidence since it is all based on rumor and fallacious extrapolation anyway. However it truly becomes ridiculous once you start looking into Walt Disney's actual contributions to the war effort. The most famous anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon Disney made is no doubt Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), which I covered in the previous section. There are several more cartoons that mock Hitler and the Nazi's. I'll go over some of the more well interesting ones, for a list of many others (but not nearly complete) there's a list over on Wikipedia.

As mentioned earlier, Education for Death (1943) is an animated short based on Gregory Ziemer's book of the same name, based on his experiences as an educator in Germany. It shows a young boy named Hans who from birth is being indoctrinated into worshiping Adolf Hitler with all his compassion and sentimentality stomped out so he can grow up as a good soldier and die trampling on the rights of others. It starts with children being indoctrinated with a fairy tale in which Adolf Hitler is shown as a knight scaring away the witch (democracy) so he can save the princess (Germany). However in the version we see on the screen Hitler is portrayed as a raving lunatic who reflexively keeps saluting himself and briefly grows devil horns while doing so. German officials in the short are invariably portrayed as an extension of the oppressive government who don't care about the well-being of Hans or his family outside of the boy's utility as a soldier for the war machine.

The New Spirit (1942) shows a radio program instructing Donald Duck on how and why to do his taxes to help America win the war against the Axis forces. Yes, it's a cartoon about Donald Duck doing his taxes, then it explains why they are necessary to fight against the aggressor. "Taxes to beat the Axis" and variations being a recurring phrase. The film was requested by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. to cast the tax increase for the war effort in a positive light and ensure they were paid timely, which it succeeded in doing as income taxes were more prompt in 1942.
This film received a sequel in The Spirit of '43 (1943), which is, yes, another cartoon about the necessity of Donald Duck doing his taxes for the fight against Hitler and Hirohito (much of the animation was reused from the previous short however). This particular film is also noteworthy for containing what looks like a prototype for Scrooge McDuck.

Six other Donald Duck cartoons were created where he served in the army during World War II. However some of these (Donald Gets Drafted (1942)) show a more anti-military sentiment because one of the writers, Carl Barks (best known for his extensive comic run of Donald Duck), was a pacifist against America being involved in the war (It also reveals Donald's full name is Donald Fauntleroy Duck). The last one, Commando Duck (1944), actually features Donald Duck engaging in military action against the Japanese.

Walt Disney was heavily involved with creating confidential military training films for the United States government, which as Disney historian Jim Korkis notes required the highest security clearance and previous or current sympathy with the Nazis or Adolf Hitler would have likely disqualified him to do so instantly. The importance of Disney's contribution to the war effort is probably best demonstrated by his studio being the only one in Hollywood to have the U.S. Army deploy troops to protect it. Clearly the United States government, while they were actively at war with Nazis, didn't think Walt Disney was a Nazi.

The opening cartoon of Stop That Tank! (1942), a training film on the use of anti-tank rifles, a ridiculous laughing stock caricature of Adolf Hitler is shot literally to hell after pathetically whining how oppressed he is by a peaceful village he is in the process of attacking. He then continues his whining until it annoys the devil. The rest of the film demonstrates the use of an Anti-Tank Rifle.



After Walt Disney had read Alexander P. de Seversky's 1942 book Victory Through Air Power, he felt that its message was important enough that he personally financed its production into a documentary feature film to catch the attention of both government officials and the public in general. Among those convinced by Seversky's theories after seeing the film were Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.



Personally I find it rather difficult to entertain the belief that Walt Disney was a Nazi or a fan of Hitler when he wasn't just continuously producing cartoons mocking him, but also producing training films and promoting strategies to defeat him. According to Neal Gabler, the Treasury Department credited Walt Disney with helping to sell more than $50 million worth of saving bonds (however I found no alternate sources to back this up).

"Even before the U.S. entry into the war, Disney was doing war bond work for the National Film Board of Canada."
- War and American Popular Culture - Kalman Goldstein (edited by M. Paul Holsinger) p.327

The most baffling part of the previous Paste Magazine article follows when the author attempts to use Walt Disney's anti-Nazi propaganda films as somehow not anti-Nazi enough since they didn't explicitly address antisemitism enough for the author's sensibilities. Somehow the fact that the wolf in Three Little Pigs (1933) disguised himself as a Jewish stereotype is enough to reduce Walt's many contributions to the war effort, explicitly to stop the Nazis from trampling on other people's rights, to nothing. Evidently producing 68 hours of educational war films, as well as many films to promote war bonds, propaganda films to vilify the Nazis and their allies (Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), Education for Death - The Making of a Nazi (1943), Reason and Emotion (1943) and Commando Duck (1944)) and a feature film Walt himself sponsored (Victory Through Air Power (1943)) all to promote winning a war against the Nazis doesn't matter because an old cartoon had an offensive stereotype.

However even that was not the extend of it. In early 1941, before the United States had even entered World War II, Walt Disney became an ambassador of a goodwill tour under Nelson Rockefeller through South America as part of the Good Neighbor policy in an effort to counter Latin American ties with Nazi Germany. The end results were the package films Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944) (with one segment Blame It On the Samba being conceived but only later used in Melody Time (1948)). Film historian Alfred Charles Richard Jr. notes in Censorship and Hollywood's Hispanic (1993) that Saludos "did more to cement a community of interest between peoples of the Americas in a few months than the State Department had in fifty years".

Youtube.com: Saludos Amigos (1943) Trailer


So again, the belief that Walt Disney was a Nazi or a Nazi supporter hinges on him meeting German film maker Leni Riefenstahl (who was in fact a Nazi sympathizer, but not classified as an actual Nazi or convicted of war crimes) once but the fact that he went on to denounce her later on (and was hesitant while he was meeting her in the first place), only to then go on to become the propaganda arm for the American anti-Nazi sentiment, a proponent of new methods to defeat the Nazis and an international ambassador to pry away foreign support from the Nazis is soundly ignored.

Notes

Apologies if this section is rather disjointed and less in-depth than I'd like it to be. I might expand on it later but I was not interested enough in outdated military training films (Behold, Four Methods of Flush Riveting (1942), an almost 10-minute cartoon on riveting techniques) to sit through the majority of the films Walt Disney produced during World War II.
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Thursday, 4 January 2018

Defending Disney - Part 2: Walt, the Supposed Nazi

[<- Index]
[<- Part 1: A Sampling of Recent Accusations]

The two most substantive pieces of evidence to support the idea of Walt's supposed Nazism (in general, not just from the sources in the previous section) are a claim by animator Art Babbitt that he saw Walt Disney and his lawyer Gunther Lessing at a meeting of the German American Bund (an American pro-Nazi organization) which Babbitt himself attended out of curiosity in the late 1930's, and that German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl visited the Walt Disney Studios on December 8, 1938 when she was in America to promote her movie Olympia (1938), having to do with the 1936 Summer Olympics which had been held in Berlin.

"While the Fuehrer brags and lies and rants and raves,
we heil! Heil! and work into our graves."

Walt Being Seen at a German American Bund Meeting


The thing with the claim of Walt attending Bund meetings is that it simply isn't sufficiently substantiated to accept that it even happened. The only evidence for it comes from a claim by Art Babbitt, which in this instance is a questionable source to say the least. Art Babbitt was one of Disney's top animators who nevertheless became his bitter enemy over union disagreements (to the point where there would have been an actual fistfight between the two in the studio parking lot had they not been restrained). The result was that these two men held a life-long grudge against each other and either one would gladly have taking the other down. As such a claim like this should really be taken with a grain of salt.

Even in the late thirties Walt Disney had already established himself and was a well-known celebrity. How odd is it then that the only source who saw Walt and conveniently his lawyer at these meetings was a person who both hated him and who would gain (if only vengeance) from having Walt's reputation tarnished? So while I in no way wish to sully Art Babbitt's name instead, it seems much more likely that in this case Babbitt was either mistaken or simply lied. Without any counter-statement from Walt himself, if he even did attend those meetings, it is also impossible to determine his motives for attending. It is speculated that if he did attend these meetings, it would more likely be to facilitate the distribution of Disney movies in Germany rather than any admiration for Adolf Hitler. Disney historian Jim Korkis further notes that there was no indication of him attending such meetings in his office appointment book.
Ron Miller, Mel Milton, Gunther Lessing, Harry Tytle
Lessing's retirement party (1964) (source) (1)

The issue is even further complicated by speculation that Gunther Lessing, Walt Disney's lawyer who he supposedly attended these meetings with, was himself Jewish as suggested by Disney animator Ward Kimball in a 1986 interview with Michael Barrier. Which, if true, would not only raise even more doubts about their attendance of Bund meetings, but would also further complicate attempts to accuse Walt of being antisemitic.

The previously mentioned article from Paste Magazine that brought up these claims links the Babbitt quote to Peter Fotis Kapnistos' Hitler's Doubles. A quick glance at the source reveals that this book (or at the very least this Disney-specific chapter) is just another amalgamation of more speculation and wild conspiracy theories. It includes a claim that Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), an anti-Nazi propaganda cartoon sponsored by the US government which mocks Nazi Germany by reducing it to a hellish-yet-ridiculous slapstick comedy, actually is about Donald Duck as a "good-natured trusty Nazi" (p.253) (rather than an impoverished worker drone going insane from having to work 48 hours a day) and him waking up from losing his mind in Hitler's factory to hug the Statue of Liberty is actually subliminal messaging of a loyal Nazi being committed to America. Most telling of all is that this book actually proposes the possibility that Walt Disney was really the alter ego of Adolf Hitler himself! (2) That's an impressive double life to say the least and just another example of how eager conspiracy theories surrounding the man are concocted.

Since Hitler's Doubles was first released in 2015, it is impossible for it to be the original source however. Neal Gabler's 2006 biography of Walt Disney (which is even quote-mined in Kapnistos' book, conveniently reprinting the accusations but not the refutations that followed them) already mentioned the Art Babbitt quote and concluded Walt's attendance at Bund meetings was unlikely because at the time he was both too busy with his studio (this was when he had gained increased prominence with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which prompted him to make even better feature films to maintain his status as the number one in animation while he was also overseeing construction of the new Burbank studio) as well as his reputation for being politically uninterested at that time.

"[...] Art Babbitt in later years claimed to have actually seen Walt and Gunter Lessing at Bund Meetings of Nazi sympathizers that Babbitt himself had attended out of curiosity; that was highly unlikely, not only because Walt had little enough time for his family, much less political meetings, but because he had no real political leanings at the time."
- Walt Disney: The Biography - Neal Gabler p. 448

The source (or at least one of) for the claim of Disney's German American Bund attendances are pages 119-120 of the infamous Hollywood's Dark Prince (1993) by Marc Eliot, after an interview of Babbitt by Eliot in 1990. While Marc Eliot jumps to ridiculous conclusions (3) and is eager to speculate on Disney's nefarious motivations, I see no reason to believe his quotation of Arthur Babbitt is inaccurate. However even Eliot admits that if these meetings happened, they were more likely inspired by Disney's desire to distribute his movies to Nazi-occupied countries where they were banned. Furthermore as Babbitt was helping Eliot paint the negative picture of Walt Disney that he so desired for his book, Eliot doesn't question whether Babbitt's recollection is accurate or not.


Walt Meeting Leni Riefenstahl


We once again turn to the Paste Magazine article. This time its source for Leni Riefenstahl's visit is the introduction of a 2011 New York Times article about Lars von Trier announcing himself to be a Nazi which for some reasons draws a comparison to the meeting of Walt Disney and Leni Riefenstahl, which the Paste Magazine author then reworded for his own article. Unlike Paste Magazine, The New York Times article at least had the decency to mention Walt turned down a showing of Riefenstahl's movie due to his apprehensions of playing host to her in the first place. Neither article mentions Walt later did disavow the visit, claiming ignorance of who she was (I haven't found whether this was feigned ignorance to her as a person or actual ignorance as to her political leanings). Instead the articles cite Steven Bach's biography "Leni" where she praises Walt hosting her as not having been taken in by Jew smear campaigns, which is hardly relevant to Walt's feelings or intentions regarding the meeting. Paste Magazine, with the benefit of 80 years worth of hindsight vs Walt Disney's pre-World War II political naïvité, just calls the visit "inexcusable".

Olympia (1938)
Leni Riefenstahl did visit the Walt Disney Studios on December 8, 1938 according to Gabler through an invitation from mutual acquaintance Jay Stowitts, who wrote Walt that Riefenstahl was interested in meeting who she considered "the greatest personage in American films". Of course the truth is that the visit is not at all a barometer for Walt Disney's own political leanings or which dictatorial regime he was supposedly involved with. Leni Riefenstahl was an influential and innovative filmmaker who receives worldwide acclaim even today, despite the now obvious fact that she had lent her talents to further the ambitions of an undeniably evil man with for example her Nazi propaganda movie Triumph of the Will (1935). Walt Disney had just enhanced his own status as a filmmaker with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and wanted to remain at the top of his field by making even more and better animated feature films. Thus Walt's interest in meeting her (publicly at his studio even. According to Gabler, Walt's desk diary indicated they watched a sweatbox session of a Fantasia sequence) would be much more likely fueled by her reputation as a film director rather than any sort of conspiratorial association with Adolf Hitler. Walt Disney was known for meeting artists of any kind at his studio and it seems much more likely he just didn't much care about Riefenstahl's politics because he was interested in the artist.

"Leni Riefenstahl did visit the Disney studio, I gather, but so did Sergei Eisenstein, and no one has ever suggested that Walt was a Communist."

So the most substantive fact that even remotely links Walt Disney to Adolf Hitler is nothing more malicious than two celebrated filmmakers having once met each other publicly. Everything beyond that is conspiracy theory based on unwarranted conclusions fueled with guilt by association.



Der Fuehrer's Face: Nazi Donald Duck reading Mein Kampf


Twitter often doesn't require a lot of 'evidence' to get the rumor mill running. Occasionally someone just posts the following picture of Donald Duck apparently reading Mein Kampf, or a similar scene in which Donald is dressed in a Nazi uniform, to prove Walt Disney had pro-Nazi leanings.
Der Fuehrer's Face (1943)
Originally titled: Donald Duck in Nutzi Land
The context that is removed, and that anyone evidently hardly bothers to find out, is that this is a still image from the aforementioned Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), an explicitly anti-Nazi propaganda film and scathing satire of Nazi Germany meant to help sell savings bonds for the war effort.

The short depicts Donald Duck as a factory worker in Nazi Germany (or Nutzi Land), where his clothes are made from paper and his breakfast consists of 'Scent of Bacon and Eggs', a piece of wooden bread so hard he has to cut it with a saw and water dipped with a single coffee bean (a luxury considering he attempts to keep it secret). His breakfast is interrupted by a copy of Mein Kampf being bayoneted in front of him. He is then escorted to the factory where it is his glorious privilege to work 48 hours a day into insanity making shells for the war. The task is being made even more annoying by random picture frames of Adolf Hitler being put in front of him, which he has to salute every time or risk getting a bayonet up his tail. Meanwhile the overly optimistic soundtrack consists of lyrics superficially praising Hitler while the feigned optimism often breaks and reveals the singer's desire to get out of there, even dreaming of one of their artillery shells blowing Hitler to hell. The plentiful use of 'HEIL!' is also mocked by equating it to blowing a raspberry in Hitler's face (back then it was considered an extremely obscene gesture rather than merely crude). After Donald has a complete breakdown it is revealed he was merely having a nightmare and he wakes up in his bed in the United States of America, being glad he's a citizen. The short ends with a caricature of Adolf Hitler getting a tomato in his face, as he has in the promotional posters.



So essentially whenever someone tries to assert Disney's Nazi allegiances by asking if they need to show you the Donald-Duck-is-a-Nazi cartoon, the appropriate response is to ask them if they themselves have actually watched it (it's not too hard to find on YouTube). However we're not done with World War II. Walt Disney Productions had a much larger contribution to the war effort than just a single anti-Hitler propaganda cartoon, which I'll cover in the next section.


To sum this part up: Walt Disney is considered a Nazi sympathizer because of a rumor spread by an enemy (and backed up by nobody else), him once having met another influential filmmaker who happened to be a Nazi sympathizer (but never having been convicted for war crimes or even as a Nazi herself) but later having denounced the meeting anyway, and his own anti-Nazi propaganda getting taken horribly out of context. There's no record of him promoting Nazism, no record of him subscribing to their ideas. The only statements he made on Adolf Hitler before the war at worst reveal him not taking the threat of Hitler's regime all that seriously yet (I'm also not sure why he should have, he was a filmmaker, not an army general), on which pinning him down is an extremely low and petty blow, especially coming from people judging him with the privilege of perfect hindsight. Furthermore the US military would have screened him during his time as their own anti-Nazi propagandist and evidently they didn't think he was a Nazi sympathizer either. So there simply isn't evidence to suggest he was a Nazi, a Nazi sympathizer or a fan of Adolf Hitler. 

[Part 3: Walt, the Anti-Nazi Propagandist ->]

Notes

1. The FactFile video shows this picture while talking about Walt Disney and Gunther Lessing supposedly attending these German American Bund meetings, which might intentionally or not implant the idea it is a picture from one of these meetings. However the source indicates it was taken at Gunther Lessing's retirement party in 1964, which is consistent with Lessing's advanced age in the picture.
2. Someone really needs to combine this theory with Marc Eliot's Hollywood's Dark Prince because that would make Adolf Hitler an illegitimate Spanish boy named José Guirao who was also a decades-long domestic spy for J. Edgar Hoover.
3. [See also Note 2] Chapter 11: The Mojacar Connection of Marc Eliot's Hollywood's Dark Prince speculates that because Walt Disney has no birth certificate, but an earlier birth certificate on December 30, 1891 exists with his name (actually the birth certificate of Raymond Arnold Disney), that there was a cover-up and Walt Disney was actually a Spanish man named José Guirao born 11 years before his actual birth to a Spanish couple in Mojacar, but the evidence for this has been destroyed (or planted for a cover-up on top of a cover-up) by Walt Disney Studio secret agents. Then in the notes section Eliot explains his source for all this is from a trip to Mojacar, Spain where he talked to some of the locals.
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Defending Disney - Part 1: A Sampling of Recent Accusations

Before we go onto the debunking, let's first take a look at why a debunking is needed. There's always a couple of conspiracy theories surrounding any given popular topic so a popular historical figure like Walt Disney should be no exception. However it's the sheer prevalence of the "Walt Disney was a Nazi and raging racist" claims that I feel makes adding an extra voice to the counterargument a worthwhile effort. So here's the part where I point fingers.

"He sees no more than the party wants him to.
He says nothing but what the party wants him to say,
and he does nothing but what the party wants him to do.
And so he marches on with his millions of comrades
trampling on the rights of others."

The above is a screen and quote from Education for Death (1943), in our time probably the second most famous of Disney's anti-Nazi cartoons after Der Fuehrer's Face (1943) about a boy that throughout his life is being indoctrinated by the hateful ideology of the Nazis to persecute others and eventually march to his own death in Adolf Hitler's war machine. The short was inspired by Gregory Ziemer's book of the same name, which he wrote to highlight how the youth of Germany were being indoctrinated after he escaped Germany before World War II.
I will cover Walt Disney's many contributions to helping the fight against the Nazis in a later section, but I think it's valuable to have some snippets from Walt's actual output during World War II in between Internet accusations that he was "by all accounts" a Nazi. Doing a Twitter search for "Disney Nazi" or something similar reveals at a daily basis a startling amount of people who either spread or are utterly convinced by these rumors. The question also regularly pops up on sites such as Yahoo Answers, as documented by Cartoon Brew's Amid Amidi in his post Why Kids Today Think Disney was a Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist, who says Walt Disney's supposed hatred of Jews and Blacks is "one of the most vile mistruths tossed around about the old man". However it were primarily the videos and articles that follow which gave me the impetus to actually look into the history of Walt Disney.

One article responsible for a recent flare-up in rumor-mill accusations against Walt Disney is Paste Magazine's Walt the Quasi-Nazi: The Fascist History of Disney is Still Influencing American Life by Ryan Beitler. As the title's "Quasi-Nazi" would suggest, it is filled with soft-rejections of accusations, namely the fact that Walt Disney once met with German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and the rumor by Art Babbitt that Walt was seen at a German American Bund meeting, while somehow still attempting to smear Walt with them. The author admits that there is no actual evidence for calling Walt Disney a Nazi, but then proceeds regardless of that admittance, refuses to actually look at the claims critically and still take them at face value, which seems like a transparent attempt to nevertheless instill that image into the readers' minds (effective, as Twitter's response to the article suggests). His personal accusations then follow in how Walt's anti-Nazi propaganda somehow wasn't anti-Nazi enough for the author's tastes, because the 2 cartoons he looked at didn't cover antisemitism while there was a Jewish "swindler" (really just the Big Bad Wolf disguised as a peddler) in Three Little Pigs (1933).
In the end he skips over all that and instead focuses his attention on Walt Disney's unfulfilled ideas for EPCOT (which never came to fruition during Walt's life and after his death got converted to Walt Disney World) and then judges Walt based on that. While practices at this Disney World can certainly raise some ethical questions (as one of the articles which Beitler sources does), the author instead uses it as another cheap method of throwing the words "Nazi" and "fascism" around, thus turning a more nuanced question over American corporate overreach into kneejerk outrage because your kids are watching propaganda from a fascist! In short: Quasi-Nazi accusations for clickbait.

I'm personally not particularly interested in the goings on regarding Disney World (I have never been there but I assume it is much easier to escape Disney World than it was Nazi-occupied Europe). It is however a rather famous quote that "fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power" (misattributed to Mussolini), so this article seems to have it backwards anyway to attribute Disney with introducing fascism into corporatism. I will however rip into the Nazi accusations that this article helped spread since its main points have been echoing around the sensationalist press for a while. 

A 2017 Grunge video (1,440,275 views) entitled Respected Historical Figures Who Were Actually Terrible People has a bizarre section on Walt Disney. In Neal Gabler's Disney biography The Triumph of American Imagination (2006), plenty of time is spent debunking the myths of Walt's supposed racism and antisemitism with plenty of examples to back Gabler up, followed by elaboration for why Walt is mistakenly assumed to be these horrible things. However Gabler is gracious enough to admit Walt was racially insensitive just like the rest of his generation and also lists a couple examples of insensitive words Walt has been heard using. Grunge threw away everything positive but picked those two negative examples and declared Walt racist anyway and pretended Gabler's book was some sort of exposure. Then the video states Walt had issues with women by bringing up a letter Walt Disney wrote dismissing a female applicant. Unfortunately they should have actually read the entire letter and been more careful with cropping as it is advice rather than rejection and even their own video shows the letter is signed by a woman named Mary Cleave rather than Walt Disney.

There was also a relatively recent video (25,951 views) by the YouTube channel 'FactFile' who made his video on Walt Disney in the wake of The Walt Disney Company cuttings ties with YouTube Let's Player PewDiePie. In general it presents the same basic arguments as usual however it gets the facts very wrong (such as claiming German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl traveled to Hollywood in 1938 to get a job.(1)) and plays even more loosely with rationalizations of context-less clips from old cartoons. Somehow they think the fact that Meryl Streep at the National Board of Review in 2014 gave a speech chastising Walt Disney is the final confirmation they needed that he was in fact this horrible person. As if Meryl Streep of all people is the final authority on Disney history (the fact that she quoted Ward Kimball (2), only to be debunked by Ward Kimball's official biographer should tell you something). At least they admitted Der Fuehrer's Face was anti-Nazi propaganda. Needless to say, clickbait exposures that feature distorted facts about Walt Disney seem to have become an industry on itself, and rarely is anyone outside of animation historians actually brave enough to contradict the narrative by looking at history in context.

"Let me remind you, Disney, before you get on your fucking
high horse with your white powdered wig that Walt Disney
was a notorious racist and antisemite, okay." [Link](5:37) 
Speaking of the 2017 PewDiePie controversy and Felix Kjellberg subsequently being dropped from Disney's Maker Studios network, in its wake several videos of people defending him popped up, some of which also tried to turn the situation around by calling hypocrisy on The Walt Disney Company by claiming they had no leg to stand on considering Walt Disney's own supposed Nazism, racism and antisemitism. Personally I think the following are less egregious since they were off-hand comments rather than videos or articles that actively had to distort facts, but I'm including them just to show how ingrained these myths are (also I only found out they made these comments because I like or at least watch some of these people, so this is more about me pointing out how widespread these myths are rather than me doing some big J'Accuse over it). One of the biggest channels to defend Felix with (at the time of writing) well over 5 million channel subscribers and 6,042,899 views on the video in question came from comedy channel h3h3Productions, in which Ethan Klein understandably jumped into the debate to defend his friend but then dropped in the jab at Walt Disney personally anyway, proclaiming him to be an actual notorious racist and antisemite, unlike Felix. 'Notorious' only because it's a myth that just won't die, of course.

"Disney taking a stand on antisemitism? Have you heard of
Walt Disney? This fucker used Zyklon B at his baby shower."
[Link] (4:12) (3)
There was a particularly cringe-worthy quote (see the caption on the left) from a video (95,775 views) by YouTube reviewer and commentator RazorFist. His presentation style is one that combines high verbosity with hyperbole so he's obviously not making a serious specific claim of Walt Disney's usage of Zyklon B at baby showers but the misguided belief of Walt's antisemitism is definitely there (with a context-less frame from Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face for emphasis). It is also something of a recurring pattern for RazorFist to mention anything to do with Disney by implying Nazi ties, such as referring to Mickey Mouse as Mickey Mensch (dressed as a Nazi) in his Cuphead review. The irony is that both these gentlemen are defending a person falsely accused by the sensationalist rumor mill of racism and antisemitism by falsely accusing someone else of racism and antisemitism based on the same sensationalist rumor mill. 

There was also an older video (297,592 views) by HBomberguy, mostly known for comedic response videos, where in response to fellow YouTuber Jordan Owen being distraught over having a bad encounter with one of his childhood heroes and comparing it to having Walt Disney calling you an asshole, he counters "Now personally if Walt Disney, noted racist and fan of Hitler, called me an asshole, I would think of that as a compliment".

Finally I also remembered a joke by stand-up comedian Bill Burr about Walt Disney's supposed racism from one of his shows (to which I currently don't have access), after which I found this episode of the Monday Morning Podcast where he speculates on Disney's antisemitism (also a rather weird bit about Walt having stolen the concept of an amusement park, which is kind of like stealing the concept of a store. Walt didn't set out to make the first ever amusement park, he just wanted to create the best one possible).

Finally, a small sampling I took December 1, 2017

 As you can see, people believe this stuff. Others should know better since they actually spent time researching Walt Disney to make their articles and videos, but for whatever reason they would rather publish the salacious rumors for clickbait. Next I will dive into the claims of Disney's supposed Nazism, particularly his supposed attendance of German American Bund meetings, his meeting with Leni Riefenstahl and the cartoon that shows Donald Duck dressed as a Nazi.

Notes

1. I have found no sources listed for the FactFile video but the claim that Leni Riefenstahl was touring Hollywood for work, along with the set of cartoons that are referenced in both, seems to show they used an April 2005 The Straight Dope article Was Walt Disney a fascist? as its source, which itself uses Marc Eliot's Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince as a source with only mild scrutiny regarding its factuality. Hollywood's Dark Prince is something of a joke among animation historians and received sharp criticism from Walt Disney's widow Lilian Bounds Disney and eldest daughter Diane Disney Miller. Ward Kimball's official historian Amid Amini of Cartoon Brew called it "Marc Eliot's notorious hack job", Didier Ghez says it's "full of mistakes, guesses, intentional lies and non-intentional ignorances" and Disney biography The Animated Man author and cartoon historian Michael Barrier referred to it as "unparalleled for sheer awfulness" and "the worst Disney biography ever" (among other colorful descriptions). While Disney historians might have an understandable bias against works that harshly criticize Walt, having tracked down the book myself I can indeed confirm it isn't a reliable source when even applying mild skepticism. It is a highly speculative piece with an unabashedly conspiratorial and negative slant based on questionable evidence at best (an entire chapter where Eliot asserts Walt Disney was actually born 11 years earlier in Spain as José Guirao is sourced as him having talked to two guys in Mojàcar and him mistaking Raymond Arnold Disney's birth certificate as Walt's. He then asserts the evidence for this was either destroyed or planted by Walt Disney Studio secret agents).
2. Ward Kimball (March 4, 1914 - July 8, 2002): One of Disney's famous Nine Old Men. Known for animating, among others, Jiminy Cricket, Bacchus, the Dumbo crows, Lucifer, Jaq, Gus, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter.
3. I apologize to RazorFist for a picture that is kind of at an unfortunate facial expression but every other one I took was either blurry or worse.
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Defending Disney - Introduction and Index

It is certainly true that the Walt Disney the world knows, just like Mickey Mouse himself, was a wholesome character played by a fallible man named Walter Elias Disney. As such it is understandable that there is a certain appeal to pulling back the curtain and revealing the man behind the character. However the problem is that some people take fallibility behind a wholesome facade as evidence that there is something far more dark and sinister going on. Sometimes people make poor decisions. Sometimes people are wrong. That doesn't automatically align them in a conspiratorial plot with some of the most evil people in recorded history to wipe an entire ethnic group from the face of the Earth. Yet salacious rumors around Walt Disney keep popping up and keep being spread around, as especially in the Internet age it seems rumors are believed not on credibility but by virtue of them being salacious.


Defending Walt Disney

One of the notorious Rules of the Internet (some versions of them at least) states that "The more beautiful and pure a thing is - the more satisfying it is to corrupt it". In that context what could be more satisfying than claiming the man who (in part (1)) gave us Mickey Mouse was also a noted racist, a Nazi and a supporter of one of the most evil men who ever lived? The reality is of course that these are unsubstantiated claims born from weak evidence at best that often go into outright absurdity. Walt Disney was not a Nazi, a Nazi supporter or a fan of Adolf Hitler (the reverse might be true however, as evidenced by Hitler's private movie collection) and his supposed racism doesn't extend beyond the spirit of racial ignorance of his generation, in several cases he could even be argued to be downright progressive for his time. That unfortunately never stopped overeager conspiracy theorists and sensationalist bloggers, especially those judging history with the benefit of hindsight from a society that has progressed for over 60 years (or just because they take throwaway Family Guy jokes too seriously) from reading too much into overproduced animated fairy tale movies and the man responsible for them.

Index



Introduction

I am personally a lifelong fan of Walt Disney Studios movies, yet its founder's history was always somewhat elusive to me. However given I have long been aware that the worst criticisms of Disney movies come from people who apparently have never seen them, I decided to look into the worst rumors regarding Walt Disney himself and spent several months studying up on his history. Unsurprisingly, I found the worst rumors surrounding Walt Disney come from people who apparently have never looked into him. Instead of the raging racist sexist Nazi-sympathizer, I found a fairly regular man with big dreams who generally meant well and whose only hints of racism was an unfortunate product of the time he lived in (and which he himself struggled to progress out of). He was by absolutely no means a perfect man, but to see him as the monster the Internet tries to spin him into requires a severely distorted view.

However it is not merely my intention to refute these claims because I'm a fan of the work Walt Disney inspired. In an era when white supremacists are rallying in the streets chanting racist and antisemitic slogans while covered in swastikas and other Nazi symbology, I think it is dangerous and downright stupid to assert an American icon who dominated so many people's childhoods such as Walt Disney, a man who worked tirelessly to help defeat the Nazis no less, was one of them.

I am under no illusion I will succeed where many an animation historian or even personal acquaintance of Walt has failed in killing these myths. However I do wish to provide a place I can point to whenever I encounter these blatant falsehoods. As such I intend to be as thorough and as correct as I can possible be. Therefore this is going to be a rather long multi-part piece and I will attempt to use only the most credible of sources (these would be those animation historians, interviewers and personal acquaintances of Walt), preferably ones I can cross reference with each other. There will be errors (for me this is merely a side-project of a few months after all) and it goes without saying interpretations will be colored by my own biases. What I will do is attempt to refute claims that are blatantly absurd and provide context for claims that have been ripped out of such.

What accusations you will see will fall mostly under the following categories:
- Conspiracy theories based on weak evidence, sometimes no evidence at all.
- Ignoring any of Walt's positive aspects and instead highlighting what are usually minor exceptions.
- Harshly judging a man who lived a century ago for not being a 2015-era progressive man.

Furthermore the accusations never leave any room to consider Walt's development as a person. The majority of examples to accuse Walt with (if they are valid at all) are of events that happened in the 1920's and 30's when Walt Disney lived and thus progressed as a person until 1966. The 1920's and 1930's being a time when Walt was still a young man with more heart than education being shaped by the struggles of keeping his studio afloat against outside interests, including his own distributors.

First I will be looking at some of the contemporary accusations that are thrown Walt's way.

Notes

1. There are several accounts to the exact origins of Mickey Mouse as Walt Disney was known to exaggerate personal anecdotes for entertainment value (a shared company sentiment that for example gave us a historically inaccurate Pocahontas (1995) movie. They were telling a legend, not the history). However Mickey's overall design is largely owed to animator Ub Iwerks and the name 'Mickey' came from Walt Disney's wife Lilian Bounds, as Disney himself intended to name him Mortimer Mouse. In 1938 Mickey was redesigned into his best-known form by Fred Moore.

Links & References

Bibliography:
- Didier Ghez - Disney's Grand Tour (2014)

Questionable sources, but consulted for these articles:

Online sources:
- Army.mil: [Walt Disney Goes to War] (2009) The United States Army
- Archive.org: [Walt Disney Studios]
- Blackpast.org: [Basket, James (1904-1948)]
- Cartoonresearch.com: [Animation Anecdotes #231] [Debunking The Myths: Crusader Rabbit and Walt Disney]
- Cobbles.com: [Gunther R. Lessing - SIMPP Chairman] (Excerpt from Hollywood Renegades by J.A. Aberdeen (2000))
- Disneybooks.blogspot.com: [This just in from Jim Korkis]
- Disneyhistoryinstitute.com: [In Defense of Walt] [Journal of a Disney Historian - The Salad Bowl Edition]
- Floydnormancom.squarespace.com: [Sophie's Poor Choice]

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Wednesday, 15 November 2017

Split the Ice Apart - Frozen

I already talked quite a bit about Disney's Frozen (2013) in my Response to Stefan Molyneux's The Truth About Frozen but I feel this movie deserves some more elaboration outside the context of weird YouTube pseulosophers (if that's not a word, I'm claiming it) over-analyzing things they clearly don't understand just to ruin it for their daughters. As such, here are some of my thoughts on Disney's Frozen, primarily I'd like to dig into the cliche of True Love's Kiss around which the final act is centered.

There will be spoilers for Frozen (and some for older Disney animated movies).

Split The Ice Apart
Disney's Frozen

The story is about two sisters: princesses Anna and Elsa of Arendelle, the latter of whom was born with ice powers. After accidentally blasting her sister with ice, Elsa gets isolated until she learns how to properly control her powers and Anna's memories of Elsa's powers are wiped. Unfortunately Elsa's isolation and anxiety only causes her growing powers to become even more uncontrollable as she grows up. Then during her coronation as Queen of Arendelle, in front of her entire kingdom, she loses control and in her panic she accidentally freezes the entire kingdom, after which she exiles herself. Anna then takes it upon herself to go into the mountains to find her sister, repair the relationship that was broken for 13 years and find a way to unfreeze their kingdom.

First of all, I love the movie. I don't think it quite deserves its spot as the highest-grossing animated film of all time but I still think it's a great movie (although number 2 on the highest-grossing list is Minions so at least Frozen prevented worse). My main issues are that Anna, although a very fun character, lacks the appeal to make her iconic on the level of a Disney Princess as well as a number of questionable story decisions that were likely the result of having to rewrite the movie without Elsa in the villain role. There's also the trolls and especially Olaf that feel like they were added primarily to sell toys to kids (only for it to be the Elsa dolls that were consistently sold out). While it is certainly a good movie, I don't think it quite reaches the level of quality of the princess movies preceding it.


True Love's Kiss, The Cliche That Wasn't One

During the final act an accidental ice blast to Anna's heart is causing her to slowly freeze to death from the inside. Advice from the wise troll leader Pabbie reveals that an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart. Immediately another troll jumps in and assumes that it must be a true love's kiss, causing Kristoff to storm Anna back to Arendelle so she can get a kiss from Prince Hans. Ultimately Hans proves to be a deceptive manipulator who sees this situation as an opportunity to claim Arendelle for himself by letting Anna die and then ordering the execution of the 'traitor' Queen Elsa. The real act of true love then comes in the form of Anna sacrificing herself to protect her sister Elsa from Hans' sword. 
-"But only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart." -"A true love's kiss perhaps?"
My problem with this entire scenario is that it feels incredibly forced and tries to subvert a cliche that isn't a cliche at all, at least not in the Disney Animated Canon. It's one thing to play on audience expectations, but the fact that they obviously twist Pabbie's words to force a scenario that the movie prior to this moment has already beaten down as Anna being incredibly naive just makes it a mess. Furthermore the trolls were just a minute ago trying to get their Kristoff hitched with a girl who was already engaged, evidently just for the sake of him getting hitched, but suddenly they start having overly romantic notions about true love? Why doesn't Pabbie interject to clarify his own advice anyway? He's right there! (To be fair Anna's condition suddenly worsens significantly while they're talking so urgency became a factor, but still)

It is the expectation that the troll's assumption is also the audience's assumption that, I feel, dates the movie horribly. It's an overly transparent attempt at subverting and thus falls flat. The thing with the True Love's Kiss cliche is ... that it really hasn't been a thing in ages at all. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a princess under a sleeping curse is awoken when the prince she's in love with finally finds her and kisses her. However even there the curse specifies that it is Love's First Kiss, not True Love's Kiss, which is already a significantly lower barrier. A similar situation happens 21 years later in Sleeping Beauty (1959), where it is indeed specified that the kiss must be true love's kiss. And then ... what? In just a few years time we've had several Disney properties, such as Once Upon a Time (2011), Maleficent (2014) and Frozen (2013), struggling at subverting the cliche when the subversion itself is now a better represented cliche.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
Let's run down the traditional Disney Princess movies where, according to expectation, the cliche could show up. At the start of the Disney Renaissance with The Little Mermaid (1989) the concept of a true love's kiss is already being more subtly subverted. Ariel requiring a true love's kiss from prince Eric is explicitly an unreasonable demand from the sea witch Ursula, with which she intends to trap Ariel as leverage over King Triton. In the end that kiss never happens. The Beast's curse in Beauty and the Beast (1991) is lifted because he and Belle simply got to know each other and fell in love; no kissing required (my personal interpretation is that by accepting his own death, he had truly set Belle free and thus proved he understood how to love. Also for your accusations of Stockholm syndrome, please go [here]). 
Princess and the Frog (2009) once again plays around with it, in that prince Naveen just requires a kiss from a princess as an unreasonable constraint by Doctor Facilier. When he kisses Tiana early in the movie, ostensibly his true love by the end of it, instead she is turned into a frog for not meeting the requirements. Then in Tangled/Rapunzel (2010) there is once again no magic kissing, instead the solution comes from residual healing magic still inside Rapunzel healing Flynn's wounds through her tears (okay that sounds weird out of context).
Cinderella (1950), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), Mulan (1998) had no curses requiring kisses. In the periphery of these movies (the unofficial Disney Princesses), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Lion King (1994), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997) or Tarzan (1999) didn't have magic true love's kisses either.

So that puts the grand total of straight-up True Love's Kiss movies at ... two, if we're being generous. The last movie of which, and the only one that really qualifies at all, having been released well over 50 years ago. This is like "The Butler Did It" of modern fairy tales: It's only a cliche because people mistake it for being more prevalent than it really is. Disney movies have been subverting the cliche for 30 years and have done it way more subtly and effectively than Frozen did. Reverting all that and attempting to forcefully subvert a cliche that was barely relevant in the first place dates the story and makes it awkward to take seriously.


Queen Elsa, Unwilling Villain

During the early stages of the movie's production it was always the intention to make Elsa the actual villain of the movie. That changed when the crew started to really feel for her and realized that up until her transformation into the Snow Queen, she hadn't done anything wrong. Rewrites to accommodate Good Elsa is probably why certain plot elements from the second half feel so messy, but I feel the changes to Elsa herself do make her into a more compelling character than she would likely otherwise be. Throughout the entire movie there's still an undercurrent of the intention to make her a villain, but the fact that she then doesn't end up as one is actually touching.

The name 'Elsa' does not sound villainous like how 'Maleficent' sounds like a synonym for- or a misspelling of 'malevolent' (which is also why it was stupid to base an entire movie on how Maleficent wasn't just a tragic villain, but an actual hero who just had a really bad day that one time). Still, Elsa's name has a certain synesthetic sharpness to it (See The Bouba/Kiki Effect). This already differentiates her from the other Disney princesses, most of whom have names with more rolling r or l sounds. Consider the most similar name among the princesses: Ella, Cinderella's birth name in the live action adaption. 'Ella' rolls. 'Elsa' feels like there's a sudden stop in the middle. As such her name alone already makes her sound somewhat harsh.

The first 30 minutes of the movie leading up to Let It Go sets up the perfect environment for Elsa to eventually snap and put her into an anti-villainous role. Let It Go itself is the breaking point where she finally lets go of her good girl persona and embraces pure selfishness. However it is quickly revealed that the song was just Elsa lying to herself in a moment of ecstatic relief that she finally got to express herself through her powers. She wasn't actually descending into villainy at all. Despite having all the mental baggage to justify it, Elsa never crosses the line. The only time she ever comes close to crossing the line is in self defense against people who are actively attempting to kill her.

In the end it is what makes Elsa so engaging: it would be perfectly understandable for her to have gone evil, but her strong moral center prevents her from crossing that barrier. She is one of the most powerful heroes Disney has ever created, yet she evokes sympathy by also visibly suffering from anxiety and depression over what her powers have put her through and what they could potentially do to others. In that sense you could say she's an even more emotionally-charged version of the Genie from Aladdin, who despite his phenomenal, cosmic powers only wanted to be free (itty-bitty living space).

It also makes Elsa a foil for Rapunzel. Both characters have incredible powers, but they differ in that Rapunzel has beneficial healing magic that requires effort to bring out while Elsa has (until she learns control) destructive ice powers that she's unable to restrain. They were both locked away and have significant anxieties regarding their powers, but Rapunzel was taught to be scared of people who would abuse her gift by an abusive adoptive mother while Elsa is afraid to hurt her loving family. In personality Rapunzel is outgoing while Elsa is restrained, which translates into Rapunzel wanting to escape her tower but being afraid to go while Elsa voluntarily exiles herself into her ice palace. Both characters are primarily imprisoned by their anxieties and insecurities. Frozen and Tangled are thus exercises in how a character archetype (the classic Disney Princess) would grow if you add a specific power into their development.


Crossover Theories

Movies in the Disney Animated Canon tend to have very little overlap between each other. Still many of the movies have cameos or references that can reasonably link some of them together, although often just as a joke (there being a Beast toy in the Sultan's collection probably doesn't mean Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are related). For example, there's a scene in The Hunchback of Notre Dame where Belle is visible in a shot of Paris. Since both movies are set in France, there's the possibility that Belle and her father lived in Paris until they had to flee Frollo burning Paris in his search for Esmeralda, ending up in the little town near Beast's castle.
Belle in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)
Possible the most obvious example of crossovers happens in the episode Hercules and the Arabian Night of Disney's Hercules: The Animated Series (1998). Jafar, having been defeated and killed in The Return of Jafar (1994), ends up in the Underworld and meets up with Hades. First they make a bet that they can get rid of their rival's arch enemy, which they both fail to do. Ultimately they devise a plan where they attempt to get rid of their respective hero problems by setting Hercules up to fight Aladdin, revealing that at least the adult section of the Hercules (1997) movie takes place long after Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996) has already concluded.

For Frozen there's a fan theory that it is linked with both Tangled (2010) and The Little Mermaid (1989). Linked with Tangled because Rapunzel and Flynn Rider have an actual cameo when the gates are opened near the start of the movie and with The Little Mermaid because the ship Ariel investigates at the start of her movie might be the sunken ship of the king and queen of Arendelle. Arendelle is Norwegian-inspired while Eric's castle would be on the shores of Disney's equivalent of Denmark, so there's definitely some geographic proximity to back that argument (I've also heard an extension where it is theorized the king and queen survived the sinking and ended up becoming Tarzan's parents, but that sounds a bit too far out there).

Top: Frozen (2013)
Bottom: The Little Mermaid (1989)
So if we're to link it all up, Rapunzel and Elsa would be roughly the same age, with Rapunzel likely being older depending on how long after her eighteenth birthday she and Flynn got married. Tangled would take place first with the Rapunzel's marriage (which Anna and Elsa's parents were allegedly on their way to) being the indirect cause of Elsa's parents being lost at sea, setting up the events of Frozen three years later. Then an indeterminate amount of time later the royal family's sunken ship gets looted by an inquisitive mermaid at the start of The Little Mermaid.

I mean it's not exactly some great insight since it's just a fan theory but it is kind of cool I can watch three of my favorite Disney Princess movies as sort of a pseudo-trilogy. I would call it Disney's Scandinavia Trilogy except Tangled's Corona being in either Germany or Poland might make that a bit of a geographic stretch.

WE WILL NOT SPEAK OF THIS
HELP ME
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