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The new Mary Poppins stage musical is playing in Manhattan at the New Amsterdam Theatre, the former home of the legendary Ziegfeld Follies. The interior of the theater, beautifully restored by the Walt Disney Company, is a miracle of Art Nouveau splendor: my only regret when I saw Mary Poppins there was that I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the theater itself as I did when I saw The Lion King musical there a decade ago. In the theater’s lobby and elsewhere, Disney has placed photographs of various performers who appeared at the New Amsterdam in the Ziegfeld days, from W. C. Fields to Louise Brooks. But what most impresses me about the lobby are the relief sculptures along the walls, illustrating scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and Wagner’s cycle of operas, The Ring of the Nibelung. In short, at the New Amsterdam one finds the juxtaposition of high art and popular art, which is the theme of this week’s column.

Every year the Beat conducts a year-end survey at her blog and asks what the biggest story of that year was: I responded that for 2006 it was the considerable number of museum and gallery exhibitions devoted to comic and cartoon art. I’ve written extensively about the shows at the Jewish and Newark Museums and the Library of Congress. Here’s yet another one that I just learned about: “Il etait une fois,” translated as “Once upon a Time–Walt Disney: The Sources of Inspiration for the Disney Studios” which opened at the Grand Palais in Paris on September 16 of last year and just closed on January 15. The show reopens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (or, if you prefer, the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Montreal) on March 8 and runs there until June 24.

I doubt that I’ll be able to get up to Montreal to see it, and, as yet, there has been no announcement that the exhibition will travel to the United States. But an English language version of the show’s catalogue will be published by Prestel Publishing on February 28, and there are articles on the Internet that provide glimpses of the exhibit, such as the one at “Mice Age”.

The fact that this Disney exhibition appeared at one of Paris’s leading museums but not in the United States seems to underline the old maxim that comics and cartoon art are taken more seriously in France than in America. But maybe France isn’t quite the enlightened paradise it may seem to comics aficionados from afar. I see that in the “Animated Views” interview with the show’s curator, Bruno Girveau, writer Ben Simon points out that “Bruno has fought long and hard to stage the show, coming up against the highbrow French art critics who were initially horrified to hear that, in the place which usually hangs works by Poussin and Chardin on the walls, he planned to excerpt Mickey Mouse clips!” Girveau contends that most of the critics liked the show once they saw it, but that those who didn’t like it could not get past their loathing of the contemporary Walt Disney Company to recognize the achievements of its founder: “So it’s difficult for them to forget all that ideology and see Disney as an artist.”

In an article inspired by his viewing of the Grand Palais exhibition, Jonathan Jones, a writer for the British newspaper The Guardian, maintained that “to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers” (Hey, wait a minute: I love hamburgers) and that “Hating Disney has become a cliche.” Jones asserts that “beneath the all-American facade, Walt Disney had a terrible secret: he was a true artist.”

Moreover, Jones points out, as with any significant creative artist, one can find and follow personal themes that run through the body of his or her work. “You only have to watch a few Disney films, widely separated across the decades of his career, to recognize the consistent obsessions that can only have been the product of one man’s mind.”

In his extraordinary new biography, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American imagination (which I wrote about in last week’s column), Neal Gabler contends that Walt Disney had relatively little to do with the films, animated or not, that his studio made after Bambi (1942) until Mary Poppins (1964). It does appear that Disney did not devote anywhere near the degree of hands-on attention to those films that he did to the classics of the 1930s and early 1940s. But isn’t the real test of his involvement the degree to which the postwar films reflect his personal themes and concerns? When I heard Gabler speak about his book at the Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center last December 5, he cautioned the audience that “as much as you might love” Disney’s 1950s animated films Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), Disney himself has little to do with them. Has anyone done a serious critical analysis comparing the thematic content of the 1950s animated features to Disney’s earlier animated features? This is something that’s missing from Gabler’s book. Don’t most Disney aficionados sense, as I do, that the 1950s animated films reflect the same consistent artistic sensibility as the features from Snow White (1937) through Bambi, and that Walt Disney, even if he did not actually direct or write any of them, was the auteur of them all (to use the term from film criticism)? (I will concede that the 1960s animated features produced during the last years of Walt Disney’s life demonstrate increasingly less of his own sensibility.)

Jones also argues that people do not look beyond the conventional stereotypical view of Disney’s work to give him credit for its true complexity of mood and vision. Jones points to the first “Silly Symphony” cartoon, Skeleton Dance (1929) “is American, deeply so, in the vein of Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe–a jazz-age honk of American gothic that brilliantly uses black and white silhouettes to create an archetypal midnight churchyard where the skeletons get out of their graves and dance.” Jones insightfully observes that “When Tim Burton does this sort of thing [as in The Nightmare before Christmas (1993) for the Disney studio, I presume], it’s hailed as a gothic subversion of the homeliness of Disney, but Disney subverted himself first.” And, illustrating his thesis that Disney’s personal obsessions, themes, and imagery persist through his oeuvre, Jones then notes that “When later he came to make Fantasia, the skeleton dance was echoed in the march of the mops carrying their buckets of water until Mickey chops, chops, chops them up.”

The thesis of the “Once upon a Time” show is that in creating his great animated films, Walt Disney and his collaborators drew upon artistic influences from outside the animation medium. The Grand Palais’ website states that “Popular culture and highbrow culture typically ignore one another and the links between them have seldom been explored. Walt Disney’s feature-length animated films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, until The Jungle Book in 1967, are striking examples of reciprocal influence of these two cultures.” Note that the “Once upon a Time” show treats all the animated features the Disney studio produced during Walt Disney’s lifetimes as works of Walt Disney the auteur.

According to the Grand Palais’ website “In 1935, Disney spent several weeks in Europe. . . . and took back to California as many illustrated books as he could, to build up a stock of images meant to inspire the Studios’ productions. . . .Original editions of the works of the illustrator J.J. Granville figured prominently, along with drawings by Gustave Doré and German artists such as Ludwig Richter Moritz von Schwind and Heinrich Kley. The English were represented by editions of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Peter Pan and Wendy by James M. Barrie, illustrated by Arthur Rackham or John Tenniel.”

Likewise the exhibit finds links between live action films of the 1920s and 1930s and Walt Disney’s animated features. The website states that “German expressionist cinema had a more profound impact on Disney’s first long features: the influence of Friedrich Murnau’s Faust (1926) is omnipresent in several sequences of Fantasia,” notably the Night on Bald Mountain sequence. It seems that the Faust film too has a sequence in which a devil figure towers over a city while demons rise towards him. Over the last several years each time I’ve gone to see a rare screening of F. W. Murnau’s Faust at a New York revival theater, it’s been sold out. When Tower Records held its going out of business sale last year, the DVD of Murnau’s Faust was on my want list, but other bargain hunters had already snapped it up. Now that I know Murnau’s Faust was an influence on Fantasia (1940), I am even more intent on finally seeing it.

Neither illustration nor film were widely considered to be serious art back in the 1930s and 1940s. But film is certainly considered an artform today, and illustration has increasing been gaining cultural respectability (see “Comics in Context” #132), and it does Walt Disney and his collaborators credit that they recognized their artistic importance well over a half century ago.

Disney and his artists were also studying works that were then unquestionably in the realm of fine art. Like Gabler, “Once upon a Time” devotes considerable attention to Destino, Walt Disney’s 1940s collaboration with Surrealist artist Salvador Dali, which was finally completed in 2003 and will be released on DVD this year. According to the Grand Palais website, “Sleeping Beauty‘s castle was a cross between the illuminations of the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, drawings by Viollet-le-Duc and the extravagant castles of Louis II of Bavaria. Forests took their inspiration from 15th-century Chinese painting, Japanese prints or American or English forests. Bird’s-eye views drew on the work of the American regionalist painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. The influence of Gaspard Friedrich and Arnold Böcklin’s landscapes can be seen in Fantasia, and that of the Flemish and Italian primitives in the décors for Sleeping Beauty.” The exhibition even proposes that the “general silhouette” of the Wicked Queen from Snow White “seems to be derived from the column statue at the entrance to Naumberg Cathedral in Germany.” Not having visited the exhibit or read the catalogue, I cannot judge whether some of these resemblances between Disney’s animated films and works of fine art may be coincidental, but where there is this much artistic smoke, there must be fire.

“Once upon a Time” appears to be arguing that if Disney and his artists studied so much artwork in other mediums, then their animated films must also be works of art. That doesn’t necessarily follow, but it does demonstrate that Disney and his collaborators had a more sophisticated appreciation of art than they have generally been given credit for, and that they had genuine artistic ambitions of their own.

Reviewers of Gabler’s book have been amazed at his reminders of the high cultural esteem in which Walt Disney was held in his most creative period, the 1930s and early 1940s. Gabler recounts that Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein “wrote that he was sometimes frightened watching Disney’s films–‘frightened because of some absolute perfection in what he does’ and because Disney seemed to know “˜all the most secret strands of human thought, images, ideas, feelings.’ Later, among other notables, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, novelist Aldous Huxley, and composer Igor Stravinsky would also visit [Disney and his studio]” (Gabler p. 204). Gabler notes that critic Gilbert Seldes, the champion of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, wrote in Esquire in 1937 about that year’s Mickey Mouse cartoon The Band Concert “that none of “˜dozens of works produced in America at the same time in all the other arts can stand comparison with this one'” (p. 195). Gabler also quotes New York Times film critic Frank Nugent writing in 1937 that Snow White “is a classic, as important cinematically as The Birth of a Nation or the birth of Mickey Mouse” (p. 273). In 1943 Disney was even made a trustee of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (MoMA did a wonderful Pixar retrospective recently, so why don’t they host “Once upon a Time” in New York?)

This is indeed astounding: it seems that in the 1930s much of the cultural establishment was perfectly willing to recognize animation as art. In this chorus of praise for Disney, there is no sign of the prejudice that cartoon art is junk for kids that has been prevalent throughout my lifetime. Gabler chronicles how critics turned against Disney in the 1940s, and argues that Disney’s films had indeed suffered in quality. On the television program Theater Talk, shown in New York early January 13, Gabler theorized that the critics condescendingly considered Disney a latter-day “folk artist” and turned against him when he showed he had conscious artistic ambitions, as in Fantasia. I don’t know that either of these explanations is sufficient. Just why the cultural establishment turned so radically against Disney’s animated films in the 1940s and 1950s, and even animation in general (with exceptions such as the early UPA shorts, which were perceived as having what we might now call an indie sensibility) puzzles me. It also makes me wonder about the current new artistic respectability of the comics medium. Is this new attitude here to stay, or will a backlash eventually set in here, too?

The greatest lesson I took from Gabler’s book is that Walt Disney, from the late 1920s into the early 1940s, thought and acted as a genuine artist, even if he did not use the term. “‘I can’t get into a rut or let my boys get into ruts,’ he would tell a reporter. “˜If we quit growing mentally and artistically, we will begin to die’. . . .Asked by one storyman if Walt felt they were taking full advantage of the cartoon medium, he riposted, “˜This is not the cartoon medium. It should not be limited to cartoons. We have worlds to conquer here. . . .We’ve got more in this medium than making people laugh” (p 300).
With Fantasia (which was originally called The Concert Feature at the studio), Gabler declares, “This time he was explicitly bidding to join forces with high art and pry the cartoon from its origins in popular culture, where he felt it was doomed to be crude and juvenile. Walt would never have called himself an artist–he was too skeptical of culture and too plainspoken for that–but he did want to make art, if only because that was the natural evolution for him, and The Concert Feature was, he thought, certifiably art” (pgs. 300-301).

This reminds me of Jules Feiffer’s contention that in the 1940s cartoonists working in comics, even Will Eisner, did not think of themselves as artists or of their work as art. At “The Golden Age of Comics,” a panel discussion held at the Jewish Museum last November 2, Feiffer explained that comics artists back then considered it pretentious and somehow unmanly to think of themselves as creating art. But the best of these cartoonists did indeed create art of enduring aesthetic worth, and examples of Golden Age artwork were hanging in the Museum as part of the exhibition “Superheroes: Good and Evil in American Comics.” Similarly, in the 1930s and 1940s Walt Disney may not have used the word “art” but that was what he was intent on creating through his animated films.

As Gabler repeatedly shows, Walt Disney could be dictatorial, even tyrannical, and actually frightened his employees. In my experiences in the comics industry I’ve witnessed examples of how authoritarian bosses can wreck the morale of the creative end of a company. But another major point that Gabler makes about Walt Disney is how, in the 1930s and early 1940s, the studio’s most imaginative and innovative period, Disney more than compensated for his flawed people skills through impressing his co-workers as a visionary leader, even a “muse” according to Gabler (p. 242). “Despite the occasional griping and resentment that Walt was overbearing, mercurial, ungrateful, and impossible to please, all of which he was, no one at the studio doubted the overriding importance of his contribution” (p. 207). For one thing, “he was a superb storyteller, and Walt himself seemed to think it was his primary attribute” (p. 207). He was a master of gags and plot structure, and moreover, he had “the uncanny ability to inhabit the character and enter the situation” (p. 209). At story meetings Walt Disney would spontaneously perform the characters, and “everyone at the studio marveled ar his acting” (p. 209). Co-workers “cited Walt as an inspiration, setting standards, expecting perfection, drumming up enthusiasm, buoying spirits” (p. 210). “Finally, and perhaps most important,” Gabler concludes, “there was Walt’s ability not just to supervise but to coordinate the entire studio apparatus” to create a work of art along the lines he envisioned (p. 210-211). “Almost everyone at the studio admired how Walt, in either conducting then or flitting among them, forged them into a unit. . . .Among his employees, the sum total of all these attributes evoked unbounded admiration for the young man who possessed them” (p. 211).

Gabler asserts that “By the mid-1930s the Disney studio operated like a cult, with a messianic figure inspiring a group of devoted, sometimes frenzied acolytes” (p. 212). This strikes me as too harsh an appraisal. I’m more kindly disposed, having glimpsed–and felt–in my own experience some of this sort of creative fervor that a community of young artists and writers can generate.

What Gabler reveals about Walt Disney persuades me that Disney was a genuine creative genius. Yes, the word “genius” is too often applied to people who do not truly measure up in the strict definition of that term. But after reading Gabler’s book, I now believe that Disney was the real thing: a true genius, and most of his co-workers of the 1930s, consciously or unconsciously, seem to have recognized it.

The Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones refers to the Mary Poppins movie as “this magical, and totally unAmerican child’s-eye vision of London as one of the films on which he lavished most attention, a film he was obsessed with making for 20 years, and turned into his final testament. If you want to know the real Walt Disney, watch Mary Poppins.” Gabler believes that Disney saw himself in the character of George Banks, the workaholic executive who rediscovers the child within himself. In last week’s column I delved further into this idea. Gabler recounts how as he grew older and his studio grew larger, Walt Disney increasingly became a corporate executive rather than a creative visionary. But towards the end of his life, Disney found renewed energy and inspiration in working on Mary Poppins. Gabler quotes Karen Dotrice, who played one of the children, as describing Disney as being “like a big kid” (p. 598). The parody court martial of Mr. Banks by the bank executives turns out to be an exorcism of the repressed, stodgy, corporate side of his personality. Banks’s old self dies, and a new self is born, who, appropriately, initially acts like a giddy “big kid” and returns home to “go fly a kite” with his family. Last week I wrote that this reminded me of the section of Gabler’s biography in which he describes Disney’s own midlife crisis: his disillusionment with animation and filmmaking following the studio strike and the financial failures of ambitious films like Fantasia. Disney discovered a new enthusiasm for trains big and small, and Gabler significantly refers to “the kind of delayed childhood he was now enjoying” (p. 475).

Mr. Banks seizes the day and finds his own “delayed childhood.” But despite what New York Times critic Edward Rothstein says (Nov. 20, 2006), he doesn’t remain in emotional childhood, though the movie does not underscore this point. While flying the kite with his family, Mr. Banks encounters other bank executives who are also flying kites. (Mr. Banks’ psychological regeneration appears to have spread to his whole community.) They inform him that Mr. Dawes, Sr.. the ancient personification of the heartless world of the bank, has died, but though Mr. Banks immediately expresses regret, the other executives, including Mr. Dawes Sr.’s own son, aren’t at all unhappy about it. Mr. Dawes, Sr. died happy, as a result of laughing convulsively (and levitating, like Mary Poppins’ Uncle Albert) over the bad joke Mr. Banks told him (also from the Uncle Albert scene). Unlikely as it seems, the bank executives seem to think that Mr. Dawes, Sr.’s cheerful demise outweighs Mr. Banks’ alleged responsibility for the panic, and so they offer Mr. Banks a new, higher position at the bank, which he gratefully accepts.

So Mr. Banks hasn’t ditched the responsibilities of adulthood, making a living and supporting his family, after all. Following the Joseph Campbell monomyth, Mr. Banks has undergone symbolic death (of his old workaholic, emotionally inhibited self) and rebirth (as a man more in touch with his emotions, a better husband and father, and even a more successful banker). It makes a certain sense that psychological rebirth would entail a brief return to symbolic childhood (flying the kite) before resuming the role of adult.

Watching the movie again in December, I had not remembered the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. and was amazed by the insertion of this dark note (even if the executives make light of it) into the film’s concluding festive mood. (A more noticeable disturbance of the general festivity comes with Mary Poppins’ acknowledgment that she has been utterly forgotten by their children in their joy at reconnecting with their redeemed father and mother. If Mr. Banks has regained his job and family, Mary Poppins has lost hers, for the moment, anyway. Suddenly I see Mary Poppins flying off at the end of the movie as an image similar to that of the door closing upon John Wayne at the end of The Searchers [1956]: each is a protagonist whose success in reuniting a family results in his or her own exclusion from it.) In effect Mr. Banks has inadvertently murdered Mr. Dawes, Sr. by telling him that killer joke. (Comedians do talk about “killing” the audience by making them laugh, an idiom that presumably helped inspire Monty Python’s “killer joke” sketch.) Here’s the mythic motif of the new ruler rising to power by slaying the old, only flimsily disguised. The new generation (well, middle-aged), represented by Mr. Banks, has seized power from the declining older generation, represented by Mr. Dawes, Sr.. But it’s significant that Mr. Banks did not intentionally seize power: he was not motivated by greed or ambition, but merited success by discovering his true self. Moreover, whether or not Disney and his collaborators intended it, Mr. Banks “slays” the old tyrant, thereby symbolically overcoming death, not by brute force but by a work of popular art, however humble, that embodies the spirit of comedy: a simple joke.

On one level, the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. could have represented for Disney his triumph over the bankers who for so long had controlled his fate and prevented him from doing the work he wanted. On another level, the death of Mr. Dawes, Sr. could represent the “death” of the side of Walt Disney that accepted corporate thinking but was also cruel and insensitive to his subordinates. Whether any of this was conscious on Disney’s part is a mystery.

The Mary Poppins stage musical handles the Banks/bank subplot very differently: there is no Mr. Dawes, Sr. and therefore no implication that Mr. Banks is an unwitting murderer. The revision suggests that Julian Fellowes, who write the stage version’s book, may also be aware of the parallels between Walt Disney and Mr. Banks. Rothstein describes Fellowes’ version thus: Mr. Banks “ends up learning. . . that it is far better to approve loans for a kind factory builder who boasts of having no collateral other than his workers, than for a selfish oaf who simply plans to make money. Eventually everyone is convinced by Mary Poppins that anything is possible if you let it, nothing is ever set in stone, and that everyone should have fun and do good works. They join forces in a paean to this narcissistic cartoon of liberalism.” How about that last line? Rothstein succeeds in sounding like Stephen Colbert on one of his rants, except that Rothstein means it. What happens in the stage version is that Mr. Banks turns down a loan to a financial manipulator who has no goal greater than increasing his own wealth, and instead approves a loan to a visionary entrepreneur who intends to build a business that will benefit his workers as well as himself. In other words, the man who gets the loan is like the young Walt Disney himself, a man of vision who values and rewards his workers. In approving this loan, Mr. Banks demonstrates to the audience that he has a heart and thus the potential for redemption. But Mr. Banks is taking a gamble with this entrepreneur, and In the stage version, it is because the bank’s hierarchy disapproves of this decision that Mr. Banks’ job is in jeopardy. But at the show’s end it is revealed that the gamble paid off, and the visionary entrepreneur proved to be wildly successful. Now the bank’s promotion of Mr. Banks makes more sense. Doesn’t the entrepreneur’s success mirror the ultimate financial success of Walt Disney himself? Isn’t the attitude that Mr. Banks takes towards the loan in the stage musical just the sort of attitude that Walt Disney would have wished the banks would have taken towards him in the 1940s?

Walt Disney did not remain stuck in his “delayed childhood” either. His passion for trains unexpectedly led him in a new creative direction. He wanted to build train tracks at his studio, then he wanted to build a small village that the train could travel around, and, ultimately, he conceived of Disneyland, a creation that rivals his animated features in importance. So that’s why that old-fashioned train chugs around Disneyland’s perimeter; this explains the monorail as well.

In Disney’s Mary Poppins, both the movie and the stage version, flight becomes a symbol of transcendence, of rising above the rut in which one finds himself and achieving a new freedom. When Mr. Dawes, Sr. learns to laugh, he levitates. Liberated from the self-imposed structures of his old self, Mr. Banks flies a kite. As for Bert and Mary Poppins, they don;t have to achieve liberation; they already have it. Bert and his fellow chimney sweeps in the movie are propelled out of the chimneys like rockets. In one of the high points of the stage musical, Bert, played by Gavin Lee from the original London production, dances up the side of the proscenium, and then upside down along the top. (It’s true! And without the trickery employed by Fred Astaire when he danced on the ceiling in the 1951 movie Royal Wedding. This is really happening!)

Now there’s one of the advantages of sitting up in the balcony of the New Amsterdam. Broadway prices have skyrocketed over the last several years: and now a normally priced orchestra seat can cost $110 and “premium” seats can cost twice or even four times as much! Thankfully, the New Amsterdam holds a very large number of seats, and so the balcony seats can be had for reasonable, and even surprisingly inexpensive, prices. So, sitting up towards the top of the theater, I had a really good view of Bert’s dance up, across, and back down the proscenium. But there was an even bigger surprise in store.

At the end of the first act of the Mary Poppins musical at the New Amsterdam, she rises above the stage in flight, holding onto her umbrella, in the iconic image from Mary Shepard’s original illustrations from P. L. Travers’ book and from the end of the movie. Well, I wondered, why did they choose to use what I would have thought would be the climactic special effect of the show only halfway through? They must have something more spectacular in mind for the finale.

And so they did. At the very end Mary Poppins again rises into the air, holding her umbrella. But this time she ascends outward over the audience, and to everyone’s amazement, rises higher and higher, and passed directly in front of the balcony, virtually right in front on my own seat, and little more than arm’s length away from me, and continued to ascend until she made her exit, somewhere at the very top of the theater! Now that is an unforgettable coup de theatre! (And I am almost as amazed by the fact that Ashley Brown, the actress playing Mary Poppins, somehow managed to get back on stage mere moments later for the curtain calls!)

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
“1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” my yearlong lecture series at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in Manhattan, finally comes to an end on Monday evening, January 22, with Neil Gaiman’s first work in comics, Violent Cases, illustrated by Dave McKean. (It was actually published in 1987, but I figure they must have been working on it in 1986.) MoCCA and I are discussing possibilities for other lectures–either one-shots or series–that I could do there in the future. But for now, this is the last of my monthly MoCCA talks, so if you’re in the area, please stop by. (It’s free!)

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson