The story starts in Flushing Meadow in September of ’39. Eddie is there, with cameras rolling, when they sink the time capsule. The seventeen-year-old gives a stunning portrayal of himself at thirteen. The camera catches the dream of Progress in his eye as the model future unfolds at the fair. Through the time-honored device of time compression, Disney has the first news of total war flash over the fair’s loudspeakers. Eddie has his first moment of doubt, his first confrontation with the other sphere.
“Who’ll be around to open the capsule?” he asks his dad. An ashen Sammy Hinds is too terrified to answer. Then a nose peaks out from around the pavilion corner, and the unmistakable ears. The twentieth century’s spokesman for kindness appears.
“Your children will,” the mouse assures him. Mickey takes Eddie by the hand and the two of them disappear. The cameras stop, and Disney explains that this entire segment will be colored in later, by artists at drafting tables in distant studios. He briefly blocks the segment in: Mickey lifts the boy straight up from New York until the contours of the coastline smooth away. Mouse and man sit in a magical aerie in the stratosphere, watching the map change colors below. Mickey explains the necessity of the moral war, how many will die, how most of what is beautiful will be forever lost, but how we must and ought to throw our strength into the fray and clear away the rotting parts of the ancient and corrupted world.
Explaining the interpolated scenes, Disney delineates the dark edge between political science and fairy tale. “The special effects will knock the viewers out.” The living, shifting atlas, from above, will be like nothing ever seen before. But Eddie has to take his word for it. To shoot these scenes, they put him on an empty sound stage in front of a neutral scrim. Tom Ishi, off-camera, reads the rough draft of Mickey’s lines for the boy to act against. Eddie must respond in character: “Oh, I see. I’ve never thought of it that way before.”
These scenes are extremely difficult. Hobson has to deliver a thousand looks of astonishment, gazing at the empty sound stage as if it were filled with wonder. “It will be,” Disney promises. It will be. When Mickey rushes him on a rainbow back into the black-and-white belly of his family, nobody, to Eddie’s amazement, even suspects he was away.
After the sweet burst of success in filming the scenes from ’39 to Pearl, the next black-and-white sessions seem dismally forced and strained. The Hobson family goes wooden, and nobody knows why. Then, during especially wretched multiple takes of the scene where older brother Art tells of his enlistment, walking out of the apartment vowing to “teach those fanatical Japs to keep their hands off,” the entire camera crew breaks out laughing. The problem dawns on them. The segment director, Ralph Sato, Disney’s right-hand man, fixes everything. “Try not to worry about our feelings,” he tells the embarrassed cast. “We are as American as the rest of you Germans.” Lydon performs his bit with flying colors and is gone.
Next comes the pivotal Drugstore scene. The set crew creates a brilliant replica of a soda fountain and druggist’s, down to the last magazine rack and candy bar. They populate it with extras including two nisei and a beautiful, young, since-forgotten ingenue whose career will end with this film. Sato tells Eddie there’s no script for this one. “Just go over to the right side of the magazine rack and browse the photo weeklies.”
Eddie does, and discovers the poison image planted there. In shock, he forgets the cameras, forgets entirely where he is, and breaks down like a child for a family that cannot be kept from loss. His face flashes hot and bitter at the shopgirl’s attempted consolation. He tenses himself to charge off the set, to run out of the project altogether.
“Believe, son,” yells Disney from off-camera. “Only believe.”
“Keep rolling,” Sato yells at the reticent cameramen who want to turn away in shame from this hot grief they capture. “Don’t you dare stop. This is what we are after.”
After the take, Hobson pushes his way through restraining hands and locks himself in his trailer, refusing all entreaties to come out. Shooting stops for three days. When Eddie at last emerges, emaciated, he storms Disney’s office. “Is the magazine for real? Is it really Artie? My brother?” Disney says nothing. The mouse must speak for him.
Back on the empty stage, Eddie, in front of a curtain, pretends revelation. The mouse meets the grieving boy outside the soda shop, tears in his own mammalian eyes. He takes Eddie to a vantage point from which they see how even the sacrificed life, seemingly wasted, contributes in mysterious ways we cannot understand. The magazine photo of the meaningless tragedy at Brownsville becomes an inspiration and rallying point for countless American pilots. Mickey shows how big brother Artie’s death trickles outward and, by putting boys on their cautionary mettle, saves lives.
Even with guiding synopsis, Eddie finds this scene the most difficult in the movie’s production. In loss and suffering, he must conjure up from imagination alone what the studio animators will add only months later. He must see the mouse, and his face must radiate full understanding. Somehow the boy does it, hallucinating his reconciliation with the meaningless accident, inventing acceptance from the shoals of sorrow.
The hope of screen enlistment sees him through. They shoot the draft-board scene next, Eddie camping out in bedroll on his eighteenth birthday, waiting to make his private petition. But in the Disney version, he is too tall. He receives the crippling news of assignment to a noncombatant’s role. Stern Sato keeps his cameras turning. Eddie goes to purgatory, hell; Aircraft Training School, Amarillo. Sweet Mickey comes like Virgil to steady him in his darkest hour.
“You see,” says the rodent, wise beyond his species, “your every action furthers a thousand others. Take that carburetor you cleaned this morning. It doesn’t seem like much, but . . .” And the two of them are off, following the elaborate chain reaction put into motion by Eddie’s simple act of good faith. Eddie sees, under Mickey’s tutelage, the force his contribution accumulates. “If it weren’t for that one clean carburetor, then that one plane . . . and if not for that one plane, then this one raid . . . and if not this one raid, then this campaign . . .” And campaign to theater to war. And war, as Hobson has already learned in the first color segment, is the only way to a clean world of mutual goodwill. No such thing as the single vote, the single defection. Persuasion cascades, tipping the scale.
Eddie returns to black and white, awakened and purified. When the defection, the loss of faith, finally does come, it’s from an unexpected quarter. Ralph Sato, the film’s director of the real-world, black-and-white segments, one morning arrives at Disney’s office and lets himself in. He surprises Disney in the act of talking into a black metal bullhorn attached to a mechanical dictaphone. He hears just a fragment.
We shall not cease from exploration . . .
Disney snaps the machine off and slides it out of sight. He asks Sato the question. Sato, who has succeeded in capturing the boy’s urgency beyond any expectation, cannot quite say what causes his nonspecific malaise. Is he sick? Disney recalls the opening of that great Capra script he has, through friendship, been allowed to see. No, worse, comes the answer out of the cosmos. Discouraged. Disney has a brainstorm about casting: Colonel Jimmy Stewart, now flying his twentieth mission over Germany, is perfect for the homebound George Bailey of Bedford Falls. He must tell Capra.
Sato, still inarticulate, stumbles over to an old Baldwin upright sitting in the corner of Disney’s remarkably unremarkable workroom. He strokes a few keys aimlessly, launching into a “Turkey in the Straw” faintly reminiscent of Charles Ives. But the tune soon crumbles into malicious and dissonant burlesque. He starts again with a Glenn Miller favorite, but in a few bars it becomes, despite Sato’s best intentions, a send-up of the “Marines’ Hymn.” Ralph breaks down and sobs silently. He puts his head against the music stand and says, softly, “Outside, Walt. What’s happening to us outside?” Disney touches the man’s shoulder, giving no consolation. Sato springs back up on the bench, launches into an animated, perfect Shirley Temple imp
ression. The Good Ship Lollipop: “While bonbons play, on the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.”
Disney recognizes the danger at once. The man suffers from the late stages of the Stockholm Syndrome, where long-held hostages fall in love with their jailers. The entire infrastructure of the project, the culmination of Disney’s life work, is in imminent peril of disintegration. For the creator of modern animation, the father of separate-cel technique, the man who has built his life on challenging reality, knows that if Sato breaks down, a ripple of domino defections will tear World World apart. “Easy, Ralph,” he says gently. He says they are doing everything in their power to remedy the spreading evil Outside. Their fable must be their weapon. Any more direct opposition risks making things worse.
Sato listens to the explanation, shaking. He tickles the ivories again, slower now, in the melodious minor, something bluesy and wistful, Gershwin, music to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge and into the fiery South Pacific by. Calm descends on his frantic face. Sato’s eyebrows arch slightly. His eyes examine a scene some several thousand miles away. The corners of his mouth flicker up and down, like the ticker on a brisk, mixed day on Wall Street. The tune underneath his fingers grows increasingly strange: Bird Parker jumps around in there, and Copeland, and W. C. Handy, and snippets of Protestant hymnody and patriotic marches by William Billings. He migrates to the black keys, a parody of Oriental pentatonic, before returning back home to Ives, and Tin Pan Alley.
Finally, Sato stops playing and closes the keyboard lid. He looks up at Disney, who is about to fall through the floor. All trace of anxiety, the desperation of too many headlines, washes clean from the man. He looks straight at Disney, his black Asian eyes wet with Lethean waters. He opens his mouth. “I see.” Emphasis on the I. Disney, trying to appear wise, motions him to go on. “I see now. What the fuss is all about.” He stands and walks around the room. He stops to pick up bric-a-brac—a book, an afghan, a plaster statue of Goofy that a six-year-old sent to Disney. He holds these junk items as if he cannot make out their purpose, as if they are the last commodities on earth.
He walks as if he had just learned how that morning. He arrives back where Disney is standing. He stretches out both arms and grabs Disney by the shoulders, either affectionately or to keep himself from falling. “Walt.” Sato shakes his mentor. “Walt.” His first familiarity with the boss beyond Disney-san. Sato smiles and shakes his head. He laughs the worldly, incredulous, liberated, but exhausted laugh of a returning exile who never thought he would touch foot on home soil again. “Walt. Walt, oh Walt, oh Walt.” By the look of things, the fellow has come back from the dead, from abject pragmatism, with tidings of how all manner of things will be well. But the next words out of Sato’s mouth make Disney’s blood stop in its capillaries. “Walt, my boy, you lied to us.” Sato, the image of one who has gone beyond good and bad will to arrive at the islands of indifference, smiles at the word lie, as if to say, But of course, you couldn’t have known.
“What do you mean, Ralph? What did I lie about?” Disney’s conscience is clear. He still, at this minute, believes not only in the internal consistency and purity but also in the absolute urgency of World World, of You Are the War.
Sato smiles at him beatifically, forgiving. “You said it was either the concentration camps or this. But there’s a third place. Another way out.” He paces again, returning to the vengeful disappointment we are all born into. “We could have been out in late ’42.”
“How, Ralph?”
Sato walks to the window without slackening his pace. He looks one direction, clear to the mountains of Colorado. He looks the other, and sees the rolling, older hills of Pennsylvania. Everything is there, written small on the set, to be gathered up in one sweep of the rolling cameras. He gestures to Disney to look at what they have made with their blank slate. “Walt, we are trying to rescue a world that is currently burning forty thousand casualties every day. You can’t beat those kind of numbers except with numbers. We are trying to cure an entire planet, the only inhabitable place anyone has ever seen, one that has gone completely, out-the-window, stark, raving insane. And with what? The story of a snot-nosed kid whose brother is killed. Wishful thinking. Toy trains!”
With the easy grace of those born into a country not their own, Sato glides back to the piano where Disney still stands frozen. In one smooth motion, he removes the watch from his wrist. Disney thinks for a moment that Sato means to fasten the timepiece around his fist and use it as a brass knuckle. Instead, Sato places the instrument face up on the piano keys, Mickey’s hands still waving imperceptibly in the winds of time. The action is unmistakable: Ralph has turned in his ears. He says nothing further, just spins on the ball of his foot and heads toward the door. It’s a heroic gesture, otherworldly. The timing is not lost on the great producer. Disney has the first, frightened, but hopeful flickerings of suspicion that he might really have overlooked all the possibilities: how does Sato expect to make it out that door and keep going, past the military guard, past the Congress, past the political system that strands them here, past the protectors of national security? Is there another way out of this camp without being rounded up and boxcarred immediately into the other? Disney has to ask, at least. “Where you headed, Ralph?”
Sato glides around in the doorway. He looks at Disney with compassionate eyes, eyes that have looked at something beyond human retribution. He gazes at the author of The Führer’s Face, the inventor and principal executor of the World World breakout, and spells out his departure from the good-intentions pavement company. “We belong out there, Walt. Nothing can be fixed, except from inside.” Strange to say, he still wears that transcendent smile, as if the conflagration out there were not only livable but more remarkable, more newsworthy, luckier, than anyone supposes. “It is wonderful, out there, Walt. Something remarkable is about to happen. We’ve got to go meet it. Tell them, if anyone asks, that I’ve gone for a Burton.”
Ralph disappears, leaving the project forever. Gone for a Burton: Disney recognizes the slang. It started a couple of years back in the RAF, then gradually caught on in all the British services, and has by now crept into all branches of Allied fighting men. A Burton, a beer, a brew. Gone for a drink. Gone into the drink. Deep-sixed; six-packed. Gone to see a man about a dog. Departed, DOA, deceased.
Of course, Disney realizes. He decodes the message without any help from the code-cracking staffs over at Signal Corps or Bletchley Park. There is another way out for any of the male staff, if they want it. Perhaps he is guilty for not encouraging this option, pushing it with the dwarves. Enlistment: the draft board’s offer of freedom.
Weeks later, Disney traces Sato’s path through official channels. He has joined the 442nd, the national nisei outfit. By this point, the 442nd is one of the most heavily decorated units in the war and among the highest in per capita casualties. The former prisoners of war compile a magnificent record for combat performance and bravery. At one especially hard-fought battle in Europe, an astonished German prisoner of war asks where all the Japanese had come from. “Didn’t you know they were on our side?” says an American lieutenant. “Or do you believe all that stuff Goebbels tells you?”
But Sato joins at a tricky time for the nisei battalions. The war in Europe is sure to end in a few months. People begin to ask what to do with the 442nd after V-E day. Send them against the Japanese? The American High Command is uncomfortable with the idea. Jokes abound about how to tell who is on which side. Funny; that was never an issue when the American Germans were shipped to Europe.
Sato’s departure hits Disney hard. Disney is sure he will be killed in the world’s catastrophe, or worse. The man walked through the door wanting it. If Ralph cannot find it with the 442nd in active combat, he will run into it somewhere Stateside, in some fluke accident in the American Theater. And the resulting blood will be on Disney’s hands. Worse, Sato’s departure puts a new tint on the project. Far from springing themselves and providing a springboard for imagination’s triumph
over brutality, Disney and the High-Ho ten thousand may have, in constructing World World and shooting the rushes for You Are the War, flown from all responsibility and left the global cancer to fester.
All this happens just before the final and most difficult hurdle. Young Hobson has not yet come face to face with his biggest test, his real scrape with contemporary history. All that Disney has to preserve the teenager’s crucial faith is a handful of Fairy Dust. He has no choice: the mouse must take the boy to see the future.
15
All Little Eddie could do was stand, clutch the phone, and wait, as family life had trained him, for the punchline. No punchline came, meaning it was the hospital at the other end. Mom was downstairs in an instant, buzzing him with that unfailing sense of things going wrong she had developed through years of conditioning.
“Who is it? What do they want?” As answer, Eddie rolled the receiver off his shoulder into her waiting hands. He went into the living room, powered down the TV tube, and tried to think. But he could not think. He could either listen to the rest of the call, or he could concentrate on not listening. Both prevented his concentrating on anything else. He chose the first, piecing back the unheard conversant on the other end through Ailene’s cues. The hospital assured Ailene that Pop was indeed a sick fellow. Point one for the obvious, thought Eddie, toughing it out. The diagnosis, however, was still outstanding. More tests were required. Weren’t they always? The problem, the health professional patiently explained, was that the testee had flown, leaving no forwarding address.
“No,” Ailene assured the fellow. “We haven’t heard from him since . . .” The thought jerked the eavesdropping son: Since Artie, earlier that week. No evidence to the contrary, he assumed the most comforting solution to Dad’s disappearance: Artie had allowed Pop to break the rules and come home with him for the night. Eddie imagined the two boys plotting the secret abduction, relieved.
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